Meet(up) & Greet

This morning my classmate Megan and I met up to educate and enlighten one another on our assigned digital literacy tools. Megan expanded my understanding of a nifty little group site called Meetup.

An example of one such meetup

Meetup is a type of social networking site designed to help groups of people with the same interests, well, meet up. On the site you can search for local groups by interest (such as Bollywood, board games, or bicycling), join the group, see when the next meetup is, and go if you wish. Or you can create your own group. It turns online networking into face-to-face connections; you join the group online, and meet up with them physically, which is interesting considering a lot of social networking sites aren't geared towards that physical aspect.

Personally, doing this kind of thing and going to a meetup would be way out of my comfort zone, but if I'm ever feeling particularly brave, I may give it a try. It seems like it would be valuable if you had just moved into an area and wanted to find and interact with a group of people with similar interests, or if you wanted to learn something new it would help you find people who could help you in a more informal group setting. Or you could go just to make new friends and have fun.

FOR YOUR JOURNAL: New (And TOTALLY Cool) Software Update Available NOW!

I keep a journal, and while it's a wonderful source of personal reference, sometimes it can be hard to find what I'm looking for. I've wondered in the past if there isn't some way journals and other handwritten manuscripts could be transferred to computers and converted to searchable text without going through and manually typing each word.

Turns out, there is.

An Adventure in Digital Illiteracy

My Headache in a Cardboard Box

Today I realized just how computer ignorant I really am.

Answer: Very. EXTREMELY, even.

What follows is the story of my quest to solve an essential computer problem and the insights and knowledge gained thereby, which may be of use to any as computer illiterate as myself. Please--enjoy. 

To Petrarch

Dear Sir:

I, like you, am a writer. You wrote hundreds of letters, both to contemporaries and to those in the past; you sought out and copied ancient records for the benefit of those who would come after you.

I have felt recently that I have generated a great deal of writing; I write a personal record, which I have kept since I was ten years of age; I write letters to my brother in his military endeavors and to my best friend who is on a religious mission, and soon I will be writing to my sister as she departs on a mission of her own. I write down lists, thoughts, impressions, quotes, things to do--everything. I wonder if you, like I, ever got the malady known as writer's cramp because of time spent holding a pen, or ever looked down to find ink-smeared hands. I imagine you did.

So why write? What drives me to scribble down words concerning nearly every aspect of my life?

I want to remember.

Because frankly, my friend, as I'm sure you have discovered, what is not written down, we forget.

Great ideas, even entire cultures have been lost to us, because we have no written record of them. To leave a record grants a kind of immortality; our ideas and thoughts can be read and shared by those who come long after we are gone, and we can read the writings of those who have come before us. To remember them and remember what we have experienced ourselves in the past makes us better able to shape our futures and realize our potential because we remember the knowledge we have gained and build upon it. Surely you, credited as the father of Renaissance humanism, can see that.

That, sir, is why I write to you now, and why I will continue to write.

Written from the great library of BYU in Utah, in the month of September, the year of our Lord the 2010th.

A Pause In Prevention of Cranial Explosion

There's a great line in the movie Ever After, when Prince Henry says (in a British-sounding accent, oddly, even though the story is set in France):

"I used to think that if I cared about anything, I'd have to care about everything, and I'd go stark raving MAD."

I'm beginning to see what he was talking about.

This digital civilization class I'm taking challenges me every single day to break free from my perceptions of how I think about learning. The class is structured to put us in charge of our own learning experience; we have more leeway as far as what we choose to research, and the methods of sharing what we learn are somewhat unconventional, involving multiple technological tools. I feel like I'm standing on the shore of this vast ocean of information that I possibly could use, whereas before, in other classes, I only had a little glass of the water from the fountain of knowledge to absorb. And it has been a bit difficult for me not to think in terms of the little glass even as I'm confronted with the ocean. That's the part when I feel like I'm going crazy because I think I have to go through ALL this information, and there's just too much.

Time for a paradigm shift, Ariel.

Today in class we talked about how the Renaissance humanists revered language, recognizing that unlocking its secrets releases new and powerful modes of expression. Well, I'm learning a new language in my quest to become digitally literate, and I'm sure that doing so will bring immeasurable benefit in the technological world we live in now. I just need the courage to let go of my old perceptions and dive in.

Um, Actually, Sir Thomas, There IS Something More...

While reading an excerpt of Thomas More's Utopia concerning the Utopians' love of learning, I came across this line:
"When we had given them [the Utopians] some hints of the learning and discipline of the Greeks (of whom alone we instructed them, for we knew there was nothing among the Romans, except their historians and poets, that they would much esteem), it was strange to see with what avidity they set about learning that language."

Nothing among the Romans? Well, I think Monty Python may have some perspective on that.



Well, okay, that may not have been exactly what Sir Thomas was referring to, but STILL.

In all seriousness, Petrarch, the father of Humanism, devoted a great deal of time to studying and copying Roman classics; he, to his great sorrow, was unable to learn Greek, and this led to "modern tendencies to overemphasize the Roman classics at the expense of the Greek classics" (Petrarch's Books). So, to be fair, there are valuable things to learn from both.

This makes me think of the formation of the literary canon; what does it constitute? A number of texts have generally been omitted from the so-called "canon" by societal and other factors like the one mentioned above. What valuable perspectives are we missing out on because of our own limited point of view? Can we, like Petrarch, see "the whole span of history as one great divine epic" (Petrarch's Books) and be willing to explore our literary history from different, less traditional aspects?

"The Big YELLOW One Is the SUN!"

If you will indulge me... I just couldn't resist. Watch until about 1:16.

(Ah, the mullet--gotta love early 90's fashion.)

Breakin' some new ground there, Copernicus.

Well, he was, actually. Copernicus, that is. Centuries ago, according to the Ptolemaic system, Earth would've been the center of that little kid's model of the solar system.

"The big BLUE one is the EARTH!"

That just doesn't have the same ring to it, in terms of orbits or phonetics. :)

And sure, Copernicus was the first to seriously entertain the idea that the earth revolved around the sun, rather than the other way around, but it seems like Galileo caught a lot of the heat for it, especially from the Church. And so I began to wonder: Why is that?

Well, according to The Gradual Acceptance of the Copernican Theory of the Universe, by Dorothy Stimson, A.M., the scriptural arguments against Galileo and his upholding of the Copernican view all revolve around the idea that the earth stood still; for example (quote):

• David in Psalm 89: God has founded the earth and it shall not be moved.
• Joshua bade the sun stand still--which would not be notable were it not already at rest.

Gee, and it's not like he promoted an idea that changed the entire center of the universe as they knew it. You do something like that, and people tend to get a little uneasy. It made me think of the ongoing controversy between religion and science and how people tend to want to make them mutually exclusive. But frankly, you don't have to do that. By expanding our understanding of both science and religion, we often find that ideas of both can be integrated without compromising the integrity of either. You'd be hard-pressed to find a Christian nowadays that doesn't believe the sun is the center of the solar system. Often, it all works out.

"The one in the MIDDLE is the one that they call the SUN!"

"We KNOW!" :)