Wordless Wednesday
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 01/28/2009 - 09:33
25 things about me...tagged
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 01/27/2009 - 18:55Over on Facebook, there is a meme going around, “25 things about me...tagged” in which you write twenty-five random things about yourself, and then tag twenty-five other people to do the same things. The instructions from Facebook say”
Once you've been tagged you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.
(To do this, go to "notes" under the tabs on your profile page, paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) Then click publish.
Well, as you might expect, I’m doing it a little bit differently. I’m writing this as a blog post. My blog is set up to automatically create a note, so it will be up on my blog, show up on Facebook and then I’ll tag people.
Thus, without any further ado, here are twenty-five random things about me.
- I had a significant speech impediment as a child and studied speech pathology in college.
- I had a great fifth grade teacher who encouraged me to write. Everyone had to memorize a poem, and I memorized “Sea Fever” by John Masefield because I loved going to the sea so much myself.
- I had a newspaper route and worked as a caddy as a kid.
- I was a cub scout and then boy scout.
- I was in photography club in junior high school.
- I worked in A-V and the library in high school. I still have a coffee cup that I got one year when we did inventory in the library.
- I played the saxophone in high school. I played mostly the Bari Sax and played in the wind ensemble, the marching band and the jazz band.
- I also played the bagpipes, and even went to bagpipe camp one summer.
- I came in fifth in nation in first year Latin vocabulary when I went to a Junior Classical League convention.
- I had an Amateur Radio License.
- I was known for wearing sandals year round in college. Now, thirty years later, people say, “Oh yeah, I remember you. You’re the guy that wore sandals all winter.”
- I dressed in drag for a Rocky Horror Picture Show.
- I shaved my head to be the character of Pozzo in the play Waiting for Godot in college.
- I’ve been tear gassed at an anti-nuclear demonstration.
- I was into Dungeons and Dragons in college and with a few friends from that circle we competed in collegiate archery tournaments.
- I moved to New York City after college to become a writer. I had some poems published in various school literary journals and have written one unpublished novel.
- I started programming computers when I was about ten, going to the office and working on a PDP-8 with 4K of memory. I first connected to the Internet via UUCP on Unix machines at Bell Laboratories I was a consultant in 1982.
- I spent eight months hitchhiking around the United States and then Europe a few years after college.
- The uncle of a friend of mine is a Trappist monk and we went down to talk with the monks. I seriously considered becoming a monk and had a great time jogging twelve miles with the abbot as we discussed theology.
- I used to reverse commute for New York City to work in New Jersey. I would take the train followed by 8 mile bike ride.
- I’ve jumped out of a plane four times. Each time, the parachute worked.
- I lived on a boat in the Hudson River for about four years after college. It was great in the summer time, sitting on the back of the boat. But during the winter, I would huddle down with a bottle of scotch and a Russian novel under the covers waiting for Spring.
- I’ve seen three total solar eclipses. Great fun. Try to go see one if you ever get a chance.
- Kim and I have had two former Presidential candidates over to our house, not at the same time.
- Every summer I folk dance with my family at the family stage at Falcon Ridge.
Why Blog? Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 01/26/2009 - 15:34Last week, in a discussion about how to make sure that students are using the Internet in a safe and appropriate, the idea that everything one the web was put there with an agenda was brought up. The idea was that by helping children understand the agenda of the writer, the children could make better choices on what to do with the information posted.
I’m known in that group as a blogger, and it felt like people were wondering about my agenda in writing what I do online. I’ve often written about why people blog, but I thought it would be good to take another view at this, in the context of the agenda’s of the writers.
I glance at the tweets my friends are writing and at the top of the list is someone talking about the Cavs being undefeated at home so far this year. Yes, the person who wrote that had some agenda in writing it. It isn’t the same sort of grand agenda that people think about when they talk about making sure children understand the agenda of the writers of websites they visit, but it is part of the continuum.
Over on Facebook, a person writes about her frustrations of having to fix things breaking at home while money is tight during a recession. Again, there is an agenda there, but it is much different than the agenda of other sites.
Is there a good way to organize and think about these agendas? It seems like Abraham Maslow may provide some useful insights from his famous paper, A Theory of Human Motivation. We all have a hierarchy of needs, and what motivates us in what we write online is perhaps no different than what motivates us in other aspects of our lives.
The most primitive needs are physiological. We need food and shelter. Some people write for money, and some of that may simply be to put bread on the table, or simply to have a table that bread can be put upon. Amongst blogs, there are plenty of Make Money Online blogs. While they may be seeking money for other reasons as well, it seems like they fit in this category.
When you go to most online news sites, they are part of organizations that are trying to make money, via advertising to pay their staff. Again, this gets to those primitive needs of money for food and shelter, and also, perhaps, for a little bit more.
Any site that depends on advertising to make money is going to be concerned with visitors. They will want to give visitors what they want, entertainment, having their views reinforced, etc. They may claim to be ‘objective’, because that might be another quality that visitors are looking for, but it is about meeting basic physiological needs.
The next level up is safety needs. We all need to feel safe. In political blogs, we often find people talking about safety. How do we remain safe from terrorists? How do we remain safe from people that would do away with our rights for their own benefit? We send messages about accidents on Facebook and Twitter, perhaps, in part, to let other people know of dangers so that they can remain safe.
Beyond our needs of safety, we have social needs. All this talk about social media seems to point to our social needs. We need friendship and a sense of self worth. We get that by having friends follow us on social media and by letting them know what we are up to. In exchange, they let us know what we are up to.
Above this, in Maslow’s hierarchy, we find aesthetic needs. I visit some wonderful artblogs that seem to deal with this.
So, how does this relate to blogging as well as appropriate uses of the Internet? It seems like people worry about kids that disregard safety needs in search of friendship. I don’t think this is something specific to the Internet, and we need to help people, both parents and children understand the relationships between friendship and safety.
And why do I blog? Well, it would be nice to make a buck here and there, and I do hope that some of my writing helps me land good jobs from time to time. However, I also recognize that being outspoken can be a hindrance in meeting physiological and sometimes even safety needs.
I would like to think that my blogging serves some sort of good, some higher goal. For me, much of it is about getting people more involved in their communities and addressing problems of government that thwart that.
In the end, however, perhaps I don’t have a great clear reason why I blog. Perhaps many of us don’t. Nonetheless, I’d love to hear other bloggers thoughts about why they blog and how it relates to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Bills before the Government Administrations and Elections Committee
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/25/2009 - 23:20Yesterday, I wrote a blog post looking at some of the bills that the Education Committee of the Connecticut General Assembly is considering this year. Today, I went with Kim to a meeting of political activists and thought I should look to see what bills the Government Administrations and Elections (GAE) Committee is considering.
Before I go to far into this, I want to note a few things. Kim works for Common Cause as a senior organizer and as such is a paid lobbyist on their behalf. Common Cause “remains committed to honest, open and accountable government, as well as encouraging citizen participation in democracy.” As such, they have a keen interest in many of the bills before the GAE.
I, too, have a keen interest in encouraging citizen participation and I suspect that in many cases my views are likely to be similar to those of Kim and of Common Cause, but I want to make it clear that these are my personal views.
With that in mind, let’s look at some of the bills and my thoughts about whether or not they encourage citizen participation.
Education Bills before the Connecticut General Assembly
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/24/2009 - 22:05As the 2009 Session of the Connecticut General Assembly proceeds, there are now nearly fifty education bills proposed in the Senate and nearly one hundred such bills proposed in the House. While only a small number of bills ever see the light of day, I thought it might be interesting to look at some of these bills.
I have broken bills into my views about appropriate sections and added my commentary on the bills. I’ve only gotten through about three quarters of the Senate bills, and this has gotten to be very long. However, I hope this is interesting and will get others to think about bills before their state legislatures.
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