Mortality and the Web

Strange thing… I had a colleague where I work, a friend. We didn’t hang out or anything like that. It was more professional, but at the same time, he knew how to reach people and bring out their good side. He believed in my work, he supported what I did. He opened good doors for me, and he was there when I needed. A friend. This friend was diagnosed this past semester with a form of cancer. After a few months in the hospital, a transplant, and some complications, he passed away…

What called my attention, and made things more “real,” was that he (and later his wife) maintained regular updates on a web site (CarePages). This commercial site was created exactly with this intention: to keep family and friends up-to-date with the development of someone’s health conditions. My friend and his wife have been very consistent in documenting the progress of the situation.

With the age of social networking sites, this site fits very well. After you register on the site, and add yourself as a friend of the person, you start receiving email messages every time a new entry is posted. Then you just need to go to the person’s page to check the entry. So far, so good; other websites and blogs do the same. What has been strange for me is that once you add yourself and start following the posts and people’s replies to them, you become part of the community (not anything new for a social networking site). You celebrate the victories with everybody, and with everybody you feel the pain of the losses. I didn’t know my friend’s wife, but as she kept his story alive through her words, we felt like we too were part of the story. It is almost like following chapters of a book, or a soap opera on TV. The difference is that you know those people on the other side are real. You know the main “character.” The events are happening in real time. You can’t cheat and read somewhere online the synopsis of the next episode. You follow the story as it happens; you live it as it happens. You are fighting along the characters… You become a character of someone’s story.

Keeping track of the development of some news events is a common practice. Keeping track of the developments of someone we know is not strange either. But following my friend’s updates on this site gave me a different feeling. Although I could not do much for his recovery, I felt like an active participant, and that my presence, even as an extra, has been important for his story.

Once I read that by reading a book, a tale, the story of the characters is passed down and through that we keep them alive; we make them immortals. Maybe that was the feeling I’ve had. Maybe the characters of this story are now immortals. But, by being a member of this community, doesn’t it make me a character too?… How much of it is still real?… The web now is making me question our own mortality…

Back on my own road

Have you ever been in a situation in which you gave yourself so much to others, that you put your personal goals and needs on the back burner, that you ended up losing the path that you so carefully chose and built for yourself? That has happened to me. I hear many people saying that I am a good person. A person who is intelligent, nice, polite, and always thinking about others. Well, it did reach a point that I strayed away from my original path for others. Life gave me many experiences that I had not initially planned, or even wanted, but I've learned so much with each one of them. The question that keeps haunting me is how to go back to the main road, to my path, and leave all of those who need my assistance or support?

It’s interesting. I said those who “need” my assistance or support. How do I know they need me? Maybe they don’t and I am the one who keeps this illusion that others need me. Maybe I want to be needed. Perhaps this gives me some excuse not to follow the path I chose. Helping others became my excuse not to help myself or complete those tasks that I, and only I, must complete.

I am an instructor. Throughout the years, I had to learn that after classes are finished, after the end of the semester, my job is over for a particular group of students. During the semester, there is too so much I can do. At the same time, I want to be there for each person until I see the “aha!” moment, until I see a smile. The same thing happens in my personal life as well. I want to be there for others, even when others are capable of solving their problems by themselves. This eagerness to help others has been consuming a lot of me, and my personal goals are still at the same distance from when I last saw them…

It is time to help myself. It is time to go back to that road that brought me here in the first place. The question actually is not how to get there, but how to stay there. This post is just a motivating piece for me. I helped so many. Now, I am ready to help myself. I am not saying no to others'. I’m just saying: not now; this is my time. I deserve it; I need it. As others say: I am a good person. It’s now time for me to be good to me too…

Windows Live Writer and Blogger

This is my first attempt using Windows Live Writer. I’m checking its connection with my blog at Blogger. For now, I assume it works well with Windows Live Spaces (why wouldn’t?), but I’ll test this later. So, right now I’m just typing some text to see what will happen.

I'm back!

After two years of silence, I am back to my blog. Not that I have a lot to say, but I needed at least to give a sign of life. I'll think about more things to say, but for now it's enough to say that I'm still building my universe...

Cyclical history

I was reading an article in BusinessWeek about trends that lead companies and the marketing in our contemporary society. The article is called "Scientific management is past its peaks." The author, Roger L. Martin, comments that current trends rely on highly developed statistical analysis and complex softwares that strongly influence the process of decision making. Martin points out that this over reliance on scientific analysis may have reached its developmental limit. That is, where else can this method go? If the computer performs all the analyses, it might-as-well make the decisions and carry them through as well. Why do we need managers and decision makers? Statistics can tell whether we need the brand new cell phone with all the works (and of course, advertisements will compel us and make us buy the phone). Well, I don't need a camera on my phone, so why should I buy one with such feature? This is exactly the point that Martin wants to make: different people have different needs and different uses for products. What we need to do is to understand more these people and their needs, and be a little less concerned on the numbers about them. Martin sees a come back of qualitative analysis.

Two things came to my mind as I read the article. First, it reminded me that history is cyclical. If we simply think in terms of historical periods, we can see that certain characteristics from a previous period, disregarded in the present period, return in the next period. For example, the Middle Ages were marked by a strong religiosity and spirituality. The Renascence valued the exactitude of scientific methods. The Baroque period saw an increase in religiosity. Maybe the scientific hype of the 20th century is reaching a point in which the person has to be reconsidered.

This leads me to the second aspect that came to my mind. I am involved in the field of education, and although it is taught that we need to consider the wide diversity of students, and provide them with appropriate resources for their learning and development, what is found in most studies is exactly what Martin mentioned in his article: statistics leading the decisions. The students may be diverse, but for the purposes of allocation of needed resources, they are just numbers. Standardized tests only reinforce this trend. I am not generalizing and stating that all that is done in education is number crunching; great qualitative studies provide the complement knowledge that the quantitative approach alone cannot provide. So, on the same lines as Martin's claims, I too would see education moving to a more humanistic arena. However, since the field of education is normally a little behind other fields in terms of methodological and ideological development, the scientific approach may not have reached its peak yet, but as I said, history is cyclical, and the wheel of fortune is always turning.

Medieval tech support

The technology might have changed, but the technical support is timeless...

Tech Support

Contributions of technology to my career

I've been thinking about how technology can contribute to my role as instructor and researcher, and the ideas keep coming and going. What makes such question somewhat difficult is the fact that technology is around us in our everyday lives, and this includes the classroom. It is in a way like conducting an ethnography, in which a participant observation has to be performed, and an objective eye used on the familiar tools that I, and many more, employ in our daily work.

Due to the well established written culture in our academic milieu, word processing tools of all sorts are not only helpful but essential. These tools include the traditional word processors; however, any other form of digital print is also fair game. For example, the internet in general provides immense resource of information, and most of it in written format. Although the format itself is well established, it is the exchange and editing of the information what makes the technological tools so important to my area. Simple email messages help connect ideas. Web sites present relevant (and irrelevant) information that can be used for complementing, contrasting, inciting, or simply entertaining thoughts. Web 2.0 is giving the reader the opportunity to participate in what he or she reads online. Blogs, for example, have been used as an interactive tool in classes, in which students not only comment and debate particular topics, but also help each other in their learning. On the instructor side, such digital tools have given the educators possibilities to organize and present materials in more efficient ways, and in ways that approximate to current trends among the new net generation. The increase connectivity seen in both students and teachers (as well as among researchers) has blurred the boundaries between the classroom and the "outside world," transforming both sites into an integrated learning environment. This raise a question, though: as an extension, does the classroom becomes part of the "integrated entertaining environment" that was part of the outside world? Since the same technology is used for both work and entertainment, how do we separate them? Do we want to separate them?

On a different note, the integration of pictures, videos, and words has created a new format for information to be presented, represented and manipulated. Multimedia is breaking the solid walls of the printing culture, and academia is giving in to this inevitable format. Presentations make use of multimedia, web sites, podcasts, video casts, even virtual office hours are possible. Academic journals are on-line and available to eager researchers and readers in general, saving trips to the local library in the middle of the night. I personally think that the embrace of multimedia could be a more emphasized in academia. Although we make use of different technologies, we still need to write a document that will be printed (even if only digitally). In other words, to inform our audience about the advances of knowledge we are proposing, we still resort to plain words (with some charts, tables, and eventual pictures).

As of now, I'm already using many tools to improve my classroom presentations, to contact colleagues and students, and to help with my own learning. I still need to explore more the Web 2.0 to create my network of contacts, and to carry more collaborative projects, but I believe I am on the right track for these endeavors. Here is my blog, a small contribution toward my connectivity to the world.