top of page

Quotes

All of our artificial apps and intelligent machines will need ethical programming. Whose ethics shall we use?

Big Ideas, Issue #18

If we want a world in which AI teachers don’t completely replace humans, then we need a new goal when it comes to progress. We need to decide that human imperfection is preferable to machine precision. And we need to possess the wisdom to know the difference.

Big Ideas, Issue #19

When we use AI instructors, won’t we be crossing a dangerous line, losing the organic presence of a teacher that defines our humanity? Yes, we will. But will we be able to tell?

Big Ideas, Issue #19

The human condition: We look for evidence that supports the belief systems we already have in place using perceptual myopia as a means of limiting our input.

Big Ideas, Issue #16

What's the problem with fake news? We're wired to believe it.

Big Ideas, Issue #16

Science will never be able to explain the existence of existence.

Writings, presentations

The future is just getting started.

4Four Big Ideas for the Future

Let's help the future get moving by telling stories that are inspiring, thoughtful and worthy of our imaginations.

As strange as it may sound I don’t want life to be any less fragile or brief than it is. That's what makes it so special.

Real Being blog, about life before and after pulmonary fibrosis, 7/15

Beware of pain you get used to.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

I link, therefore I am.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

Wisdom is turning hindsight into foresight.

Keynotes

Social media in a nutshell: From mass media to mass wedia, or From mass media to mass me-dia; or From mass media to mass my-idea. They all work.

Keynotes

Social media in a nutshell: From mass media to mass wedia, or From mass media to mass me-dia; or From mass media to mass my-idea. They all work.

Keynotes

Romanticizing the inevitable makes the future tolerable.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

To be fully literate we must be able to write well whatever we read; we must be able to produce whatever we consume. This means being able to write new media.

Keynotes

Everything created by us contains our bias.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

I know only one thing about the technologies that await us in the future: We will find ways to tell stories with them.

Digital Stories in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity

Having too much information is no better than having too little since neither allows us to act more responsibly.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

In the face of theological uncertainty, here is what I believe: God is at least as large as all of us, plays no favorites, and wishes no part of creation any harm.

Techwit, Waiting for Religion 2.0

Rock 'n roll began with Sisyphus.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

The future is a very individual thing, lasting only as long as you do.

Keynotes

Our imagination always outpaces our technology. The gap between the two is the distance the creative spark must jump in order to ignite our forward momentum.

Keynotes

The only thing worse than having 500 channels of television is having only one.

Keynotes

Will it be two lives or one for our children? Will we continue to order them to unplug while at school, or will we invite them to bring their tools of learning into the classroom so that we can help them integrate their two lives into one healthy approach to living?

Digital Stories in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity

We have the tools to create any kind of society, and educational system, that we want. The question now is, What do we want?

Digital Stories in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity

Imagine the following as a mission statement for a school or district: Students will study the personal, social, and environmental impacts of every technology and media application they use in school. Seems obvious when I say it aloud. But good luck finding a school that has adopted anything close to it.

Digital Stories in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity

Before you suspect conspiracy, don't rule out incompetence.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle, first heard from Dick Meeker

The human condition in the digital age: we are new, we are old. E-mail, wikis, and YouTube are new. But they are just the latest efforts to build community, tell stories, connect interpersonally. Very old desires.

Digital Stories in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity

The real challenge for each of us is to balance the connections and the disconnections offered in digital community and to develop a personal ethical core that can guide us in areas of experience that are in many ways unfamiliar.

Digital Stories in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity

Art is the 4th R. Because of the emergence of multimedia technology, the 3Rs are becoming the 4Rs: Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic,and aRt. Thanks to the struggle to use multimedia effectively, the language of art is taking center stage.

Digital Stories in the Classroom: New Media Pathways to Literacy, Learning and Creativity

The tecosystem (TEE-ko-system): the secondary ecosystem consisting of people, technology and connectivity. The ecosystem fails slowly, but the tecosystem can come crashing down in seconds.

Keynotes

The science of teaching is knowing a number of different methodologies. The art is knowing when to use which.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

When surrounded by jerks I just remind myself that it could be worse -- I could be one of them.

Keynotes, wisdom passed on to me by my father

If we don't use the technology to make art, the technology will make art out of us.

Robots Reflect- What our machines think of us (from New Muse radio show)

The desire to be more than ourselves has always been with us. In the old days, we stuck a lever under a rock in order to lift something that couldn't be lifted directly by human effort. Today we plug our levers into a wall socket.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

Nostalgia is the irrational longing for limitations.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

There's a fine line between being a visionary and a village idiot.

TechWit- "Three crazy ideas about Alaska's technology future"

The most elusive substance in the universe is nothing.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

Technology is anything you notice. The rest is just intelligent furniture.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

Whatever you believe, that's who you are.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

Story- solving a very new problem (information overload) with an ancient solution.

Keynote, 2015

The goal: to use technology effectively, creatively, wisely... and funly.

My mantra since, 1995

All technology is an amplifier...and what happens when you give a bad guitar player a bigger amplifier? Ouch!

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

We consider people who walk rather than drive to the corner store good users of automobile technology because they know when not to use it. Unfortunately, this is not a perspective we bring to using computers in our schools.

Keynotes

If you don't love to learn, then please, do the students of the world a favor: don't teach.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

Mass Meatia (MEAT-tee-uh): Thought for food.

Keynotes

We are compelled to use technology because without us it seems useless- no sense letting all that negative entropy go to waste. But when it breaks we discover who really owns whom.

Keynotes

On Word Processing: Editable words, edible worlds: You eat what you are.

Keynotes

Three variations of the Catch 77 of the technological age: 1) We do, because we can; 2) Because we can, we must; 3) Yes! Whether we need to or not.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

Holism vs. reductionism: The sum of the parts vs. some of the parts.

Taming the Beast

What does the phrase "the seasons of man" mean to a woman living at the equator?

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

Machines don't evolve--dreams do.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

All cultures require their young to serve apprenticeship in the ways of the machine. Schools for tools, as it were.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

The inherent insidious message in all this multimedia hoopla is what Weizenbaum called the pig principal: If something is good, more of it must be better.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

You win some, and you lose some, but you dress for every game.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age, first heard from Mike Birch

Consider this: It used to be that if you actually knew how to do something at the end of a four-year degree, that was a bonus. This has reversed. In the new economy you need to be competent, and having a degree has become the bonus.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

When we limit the big picture to functional considerations only, we open the way for robots to replace us.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

Let's brand BYOD: On/Off. On when we need students' devices for learning, off when we need to talk and do other things that might be distracted by devices that are left on. BYOD: On/off. Healthy, balanced, possible.

21st Century Fluencies

Whatever deity runs spaceship earth is at least as large as all of us, plays no favorites, and wishes no part of creation any harm...praise be to networking for it makes us all one!

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

Life is school house earth. Class is always in session and the only way to get a passing grade is to die without regret.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

We'd die without our filters, don't you think? After all, what's makeup, or a fancy haircut, or an inflated sense of self-importance? They're all filters...don't you think?

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

The only thing scarier than being overwhelmed by information is putting our minds into the hands of someone we don't really know to do our thinking for us. But in an age of information overload, it happens all the time.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

The past and future agree on one central idea: both expect us to accept the present without questioning it.

Keynote

One of McLuhan's often told quips: A man walks into an antique shop and says, "so, what's new?"

Marshall McLuhan, heard in his classroom

My car will last a decade. My hammer, a lifetime. But my computer lives on borrowed time from the day I purchase. This is the bargain we make with Bill Gates: give me more power, and I will discard something that is still quite useful.

Keynotes

Someday our machines will show the same impatience with us that we show with them.

Robots Reflect- What our machines think of us (from New Muse radio show)

In the future we will be able to do virtually anything but nothing really.

Mark Whitman, friend, musician, baker by profession

From atop the moral high road, people appear a bit blurry. Up too close they also appear blurry, but you feel their heat.

Keynotes

We are drops of reason in oceans of emotions.

Theology professor, Father David Belyea, perhaps quoting William James?

Go with the flow vs. know before you go.

Keynotes

Technology is something we want to pass through, like a good interface, so we can get back to the business of forgetting about it.

Keynotes

Agreement is in the ear of the beholder: - Muddite: Go digital! - Luddite: Go ditch it all! - Muddite: Exactly!

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

Suppose there existed a Science and Technology Administration (STA), which, like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), was charged with assessing the possible impacts of a technology before it was released into mainstream society. Suppose you were a member of the STA. What questions would you ask about a technology as you sought to understand its potential impacts?

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

Technology is a measurement of distance between two cultural reference points.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

In an age of digital magic, "seeing is believing" has been obsolesced. Much of the digital age flies in underneath our radar, achieving a kind of super stealth because we suspect nothing and even if we did we are too busy to investigate. Digital trickery mocks us if we are trusting, dares us to be vigilant, and then laughs when we fail to catch it in the act.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

Technology is so much more than itself. It is an arena, a lens, a totem etched with legends which each story teller tells differently, a high resolution mirror reflecting our blurry, vibrating cultural personality, and so much more. But it is never just itself.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

Coffee and anxiety, the lifeblood of commerce, pump through my body and urge me forward.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

There's what you say and what you mean. What you say is what we hear. What you mean is what we really have to listen for -- the meta-meaning...

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

According to my research, fully 82% of relationships that lasted more than 20 years (in which respondents said they were still happy and still loved their partner) cited friendship as the number one factor contributing to their longevity. The other 18% cited things like separate vacations, sharing the same computer platform, and the fact that it never occurred to them to be unhappy.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

Networkers have a unique perspective and a special duty to help because we, more than others, understand that hurting or helping one point in a network hurts or helps the whole network.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

Possible slogan for a distance education program: "Do distance ed. That way you don't have to live here!!!

overheard at a meeting

We are all two people when it comes to technology: the philosopher and philosophee, loving technology in the immediate while decrying it in the abstract. Our technology splits us right down the middle, creates two people, and then pits one against the other to such an extreme it seems like a design flaw in nature. The art of living gracefully in the technological era requires balancing and reconciling these two.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

There's where's your mind vs. where's your behind and sometimes the two just don't align!. Then

Then What?

Maybe some day we will all consider ourselves citizens of cyberia first and will choose our governments second. Maybe we will choose them the way we choose any professional organization to belong to. Maybe we will commit to them for a certain period of time and then, depending on their track record, either renew our citizenship or go elsewhere. We are all connected and something's gotta' give!

Then What?

Most people don't read McLuhan, they quote McLuhan.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

The conscious experience of technology is often negative, so we try to forget it's here. We are happiest when we pass through our machines, like a child playing an arcade game, or a painter who is unaware of a separation of hand and brush, eye and canvas.

Keynotes

The information inundation we demand sometimes acts as a floodlight, illuminating everything all at once and making it impossible to hide anything, whether or not anyone is looking for it. Where the floodlight is aimed depends, of course, on who controls it.

Keynotes

Picasso said art is a lie through which we see the truth. Robert Frost said that poetry played a small but vital part in life, like a carburetor. McLuhan said that it was the artist's job to act like an early warning system, a beacon in the night piercing the fog of uncertainty and reporting back about what lies ahead.

Robots Reflect- What our machines think of us (from New Muse radio show)

Some of our technology will be programmed for kindness, but others will have an attitude, showing the same impatience with us that we now show with it.

Robots Reflect- What our machines think of us (from New Muse radio show)

Don't let their shiny, detached exteriors fool you. Even robots will need mythology to differentiate themselves from the outsiders among them. Like us, their complexity will exceed their ability to understand who they are and they too will turn to mythology to avoid chaos.

Robots Reflect- What our machines think of us (from New Muse radio show)

Computers are like Latin. We assume that Latin is all but extinct except as the language of scientific classification and the Catholic mass. Yet, it is everywhere, lurking just below the surface, like the word computer itself, and like computers themselves, which are everywhere, whether we see them or not, embedded in the things we use every day and don't think to think about, forming a subconscious layer of culture...just like Latin.

Robots Reflect- What our machines think of us (from New Muse

Time may be money but they differ in one important respect: you can always make more money, but you can't make more time.

Taming the Beast- Choice and Control in the Electronic Jungle

I may own my claw hammer, stereo and mountain bike for the rest of my life. With any kind of luck my car will last a decade. But my computer lives on borrowed time from the day I purchase. This is the bargain we make with Bill Gates: give me more power, and I will discard something that is still quite useful.

Keynotes

Someday our machines will show the same impatience with us that we show with them.

Robots Reflect- What our machines think of us (from New Muse radio show)

In the future we will be able to do virtually anything but nothing really.

Mark Whitman, friend, musician, baker by profession

From atop the moral high road, people appear a bit blurry. Up too close they also appear blurry, but you feel their heat.

Keynotes

etworkers have a unique perspective and a special duty to help because we, more than others, understand that hurting or helping one point in a network hurts or helps the whole network.

Then What? Everyone's Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age

Metaphors- where would we be without them? They help us romance the unavoidable, making the future manageable. What's a meta for?

Real Being blog, about life before and after pulmonary fibrosis

The ratio of things we don’t notice to those we do is about a gazillion to one. (Multi-tasking is largely an illusion.)

Real Being blog, about life before and after pulmonary fibrosis

Please reload

bottom of page