Teach your children well
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 06/03/2008 - 09:40“I hate you,” she shouted as she stormed out of the room and slammed the door. Shaken and hurt, I sat quietly. I will give her some time to calm down, and then go to her, let her know that I love her, even if I do things that I think are the best for her and she disagrees, even if she behaves in an inappropriate way. I can help her with that another time.
Does this sound familiar? I suspect that anyone with a teenager at home must have experienced something like this. The teenage years are difficult, not only because of the raging hormones, but also because of the need for teenagers to separate themselves from their parents and authority figures, to establish their own identity, authority, sense of self worth, and find ways to express it.
As much as I hate the phrase, “The Internet has changed everything”, there is a hint of truth about it for teenagers. At home, at night, they can shout and slam virtual doors online. They can call the administration of their school douchebags. They can create MySpace parody pages of their school administrators.
Of course, this presents another problem. These outbursts, which in previous years might have been confined to the family room, are now available for everyone to see, including the douchebags at the central office.
It is reasonable to believe that the school administrators may also be shaken and hurt by these outbursts. Since they are acting “In Loco Parentis” at the schools and since they should be much better trained in dealing with the traumas and dramas of teenagers, you would expect them to handle the situation even better than I have in my house.
Yet school administrators are also human. They err. They fail. Since their parental relationships are based upon a job, instead of deep familial love of the children, they may act in ways that are more focused on defending their reputations and their jobs than on being good educators.
It seems as if this provides a useful framework for understanding what went on with Avery Doninger and the school administration at Lewis Mills High School in Burlington, CT. Avery wrote a blog post at home one evening after a dispute with the school administration about a concert she was helping organize. She referred to the ‘douchebags’ at the central office. Some of the administrators’ feelings were hurt and they lashed back at Avery. The case is currently in the courts. Yet Avery’s case is not the only one of its kind.
From the Student Press Law Center, I’ve learned of the case of Justin Layshock. At his grandmother’s house one evening, Justin created a parody profile of his high school principal, Eric Trosch, intimating that the principal was a drunk and a drug user. Mr. Trosch responded in a manner more like Paula Schwartz and Karissa Niehoff from Lewis Mills High School and focused on his reputation rather than his responsibilities as an educator.
In a rather bizarre move, the school district blamed the ACLU for the “damaged reputation because of the publicity the lawsuit elicited”. So, yet again, we see a school administration more concerned about reputation than pedagogical interests.
In a preliminary ruling on the Layshock case, a judge wrote, “They [the school administration] may not like something students say on their home computers and post on the Internet, but it’s for the parents to decide what, if any, discipline is appropriate.”
Yet a bigger question remains for me. What happens when parents show their children love and stand up for the children when they express themselves poorly, but legally? What happens when children learn that what they say matters and that freedom of speech needs to be protected?
Avery will be spending a year working Americorps. In a subsequent article about Justin Layshock’s case, we learn that Justin spent last summer volunteering at an orphanage in Africa.
In can be very difficult for parents and educators to act in love and in the best educational interests of their children when the children criticize them. I must admit, I don’t always do it right myself. But, by managing ones hurt and focusing on helping the child become more effective in speaking up clearly and strongly, we will create a new generation of leaders, like Avery and Justin and our country, and our world will be better off for it.
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Bronchitis
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/02/2008 - 23:44My lungs ache, they burn from the coughing.
The pressure in my head grows, it feels like it will explode.
The sinus infection has expanded to include bronchitis.
Who will deliver me from my distress?
At the pharmacy, I struggle to find enough money for my medicine.
At home, sleep evades me as I wait for the drugs to take effect.
The weariness of my bones seeps into my soul.
Overload
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/02/2008 - 14:01I had a fairly productive morning. I worked on several websites and wrote some good code. Yet there are so many other things going on today as well. The Games for Change 5th Annual Festival gets underway today. I went a few years ago, but just don’t have time.
Tomorrow, the State Elections Enforcement Commission is holding a press conference about the Citizens' Election Program for 2008 General Election at the Capital. I would love to get to that, but I don’t think I’ll have time. At the end of the week, the 2008 National Conference for Media Reform will begin and I’ll have to miss that as well.
I have lots to do, many blog posts to write, websites to work on, as well as simply keeping things together at home, and I have very little energy. I have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon and besides getting my regular prescriptions renewed, we’ll see if something can be done to get past my headaches and congestion.
More later.
Wandering through BlogExplosion, MyBlogLog, and EntreCard
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/01/2008 - 09:54Perhaps the Internet hasn’t really changed things all that much from when I was in high school over thirty years ago. Back then, the thing to do was to go down to Spring Street to hang out and see friends. There were two competing hangouts, Colonial Pizza and Pizza House. Each one attracted specific cliques. There were also places to just hang out on the street and events at the college hang out at.
Instead of hanging out with a specific clique, I would wander from one group to the next. I always felt like a bit of an outsider, an interloper, but was usually accepted, even though I might not have been told all the inner secrets of the cliques I visited.
College was much the same as I would drift from one gathering to another on the weekends. I probably came a bit closer to finding groups that I identified with, yet the pattern was the same. I found myself enjoying the works of Hermann Hesse with themes of the solitary wanderer, and one of my best friends from college often compared our relationship to that of Siddhartha and Govinda.
Some of the discussions of the past week have brought me back to these thoughts as they relate to the Internet, another recurring theme for me. The announcements of the lists of credentialed bloggers for the Democratic National Convention have riled many of my friends. It seems to many of them that felt they were rejected because they were in a clique different than the clique selected to cover the convention. As the wanderer in the group, I suggest that people try to step away from their cliques.
How many people do you know that read just DailyKos, or local progressive political blogs? How many people do you know that read just the right wing equivalents? What about the Mommy bloggers who only read other Mommy blogs? The members of Tribe.net? Salon.com? The search engine optimization folks and the make money quick online folks? The pet bloggers?
It seems like the different cliques from high school and college years ago have replicated themselves in the blogosphere.
Now, if you are a Mommy blogger or a pet blogger whose goal is simply to talk about how your little one is doing and you are happy that your friends and relatives are hearing the stories, then this post is not for you. You have found your place and it is a very good place.
Yet if you are a political blogger or a marketing blogger, I want to toss this out as a challenge to you. What are you doing to expand the circle of people listening to what you have to say?
Part of the power of the Internet is that it enables more of a discussion. How much are you reading what others have written? How are you incorporating this into your own writing? When you use tools like
BlogExplosion is set up nicely for expanding connections. You are randomly taken to different sites and have to stay at the site for at least thirty seconds to receive your credit. While your there, you might as well read the blog post, and maybe interact a little bit with the site. I like visiting sites on BlogExplosion that have EntreCard and MyBlogLog. It provides a double or triple win as I drop my EntreCard and show up in the recent readers list.
When I use MyBlogLog to explore the blogosphere, I normally follow the links of recent readers. It matches my style of wandering and often seems to put me in touch with people that wander in similar ways. I’ve learned a lot from these new friends. Sometimes, I will visit people who have added me as a friend in an effort to keep the friendships active and alive. Other times I may search for people who have been tagged as interested in a specific topic if I want to spend time within a specific set of communities.
My use of EntreCard is similar. Typically, I click on the advertisements from one blog to the next, until I finally reach a blog that I’ve already read. Sometimes I start off from the people that have recently dropped cards on me. I try to visit as many of these people as possible. I also try to visit those who have dropped the most cards on me. Sometimes, I go to the advertising section and check to see that I’ve dropped cards on the most popular. However, if I’ve followed the chains of advertisements, I usually catch these sites anyway. I like to make sure that I visit the site of whomever is advertising on my blog as well.
I’ve gathered lots of EntreCard credits and am just starting to use them for advertising. So far, I haven’t had a lot of luck with my ads. Should I advertise on the hugely popular and hence very expensive sites? Should I advertise on the less popular and less expensive sites? Should I advertise on new sites? I’ll explore different strategies.
The problem with all of these ways of visiting other sites is that it takes time. Do I take time away from Second Life? Do I spend more time in Blogexplosion or EntreCard? How do I balance the time visiting other blogs with writing for my own blog? I try to get at least one post up every day.
Even the blog posts that I write follow the wandering approach. The serious niche bloggers tell me that I have to pick a niche and write just about that niche. Yet being the wanderer that I am, one day I’ll write about politics, another day about Second Life, and then group psychology, technology, marketing, law, family stuff, or anything else that strikes my fancy. It’s not great for building community, but hopefully some of the posts build can build bridges. Perhaps it is part of my own hobo code or other marks to point fellow wanderers in helpful directions.
Well, I guess that’s my comments for this morning. Now, it is time to set off and wander a little bit more.
Twittering the Democratic Rules Committee
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/31/2008 - 10:38The predicted storm has not yet hit today in Woodbridge, CT, but we are hunkering down, and planning on following the Democratic National Rules Committee on social media. Friends are at the meeting and sending messages via Twitter. Others are using Qik to stream videos and uploading pictures to Flickr. It provides a great opportunity to talk a little bit about these new media and why I tend to think blogging may be passé.
Some of this grows out of a discussion on the Blogs United list about the Democratic National Convention credentialing process. Four years ago, I was a blogger at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. It was a frustrating time. There was this desire to live blog the event. “The crowd of delegates are really eating up Barack Obama’s keynote speech…” There was also a desire to write longer, thoughtful posts about what was going on, such as a recounting of a discussion of a veteran that had volunteered to help at the convention because of his deep respect for Sen. Kerry. These are different blogging experiences that perhaps call for different tools.
One of the tools that has emerged since the 2004 Democratic National Convention is the Microblogging rage. Twitter is the most popular, but people also use Pownce, Jaiku, BrightKite and plenty of other services.
Before I go much further with that, I should mention another trend that has emerged since 2004 which is closely linked with Microblogging, and that is life streams, or friend feeds; I’m not sure a standard term for this has emerged. A lot of different sites provide aggregated life streams and some people use feeds to make their microblogs a life stream. So, the lines get blurry.
There are two different aspects of life streams or friend feeds. First, many of us are on many different services. As well as our blogs and microblogs, we are using Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, ma.gnolia, ClipMarks, LastFM, Yelp, and many other services. Numerous tools are emerging to aggregate information from all of these services. The two most popular right now seem to be FriendFeed and LifeStream, however other sites also provide this service as part of their greater offerings and I like to use MyBlogLog for this.
The second aspect of life streams and friend feeds is that we like to see not only the aggregation of all of the stuff we’ve been doing on various services, but we also like to see the feeds of all of our friends intermingled with what we are doing. Most of the services provide this as an option, often as the default.
So, with that, if you want to get your message out, you need to start playing with Microblogs and life streams. Ideally, use something like TwitterFeed to get pointers to your blog posts showing up in Twitter. You need to get all your feeds aggregated in sites like FriendFeed, LifeStream and MyBlogLog. Ideally, the DNCC will use some of these tools as well.
So, what is going on with the Democratic Rules Committee meeting? Andy Carvin did some live streaming of the protest outside using QIK. I sure hope that there are plenty of social media people at the Democratic National Convention using QIK and ustream to send live videos from the convention. I thought it was great seeing Andy’s live, on the street interview with protestors. Andy also was sending messages back and forth with other friends there and posting links to pictures from the protest.
Several other friends are there, and I suspect there are others there that I would like to follow that I haven’t seen. This gets to another site related to Twitter that I really like, Hashtags. If you follow Hashtags on Twitter, their program will follow you and will index any post that begins with a hash mark (#). So, when I was at Computers, Freedom and Privacy, 2008, I posted twitters with #cfp08. I used #cfp08 in the title of my blog posts so they would get picked up by hashtags as well. You can see the messages about #cfp08 here. Unfortunately, this isn’t widely used yet, but it should be. However, it would be great to see messages about the rules committee at something like #dncrules and convention messages posted at #dncc2008
Yeah, there are plenty of new ways of getting the message out. Microblogging, like Twitter and friend feeds are an important new way of getting the message out. I hope people reading this think about how Twitter can work with their blogging and that the DNCC finds ways of dealing with Twitter, FriendFeed, Qik, and other new ways of getting the message out.
