... consisting of postings regarding my various pursuits: in software engineering, as an audiobook narrator, and in the field of education and educational technology. Besides these topics, as the title of the blog suggests, I reserve the right to veer off course in various constructive (or completely unconstructive) ways.
On a recent edition of one of my favorite techie-oriented podcasts, one of the participants in a round-table discussion offered the off-the-cuff guesstimate that the U.S. has evolved into a society in which 50% of the population is unable to perform any useful function, since they lack the requisite skills and knowledge-base to do so. While one could easily (and justifiably) quibble with the "50%" figure, the overall gist of the comment rings true to me: that our public (and even potentially most private) schools -- with their assembly-line classroom structures and their pathologically obsessive focus on preparing students to excel in completing one-size-fits-all fill-in-the-bubble tests -- turn out graduates who are, by and large, unprepared to fulfill a meaningful role in modern society. Accepting this as an essentially true assessment of the state of things, I come to a juncture in my life when the paths that I and my wife have followed (which rather substantially deviate from what most Americans would consider "normal") require of me a career change. Given that I have always been (and remain) one of those starry-eyed types, idealistically bent on maximizing my usefulness in the world, yet pragmatically allowing that I also need to continue to "make a decent living", I am embarking on my first serious job hunt within the IT realm since the mid-90s (almost twenty years ago!). Starting in early 2008, I began a deviation from my previous twenty-year career in software engineering, and delved into elementary school teaching in international schools in the Far East. These last few years devoted largely to educational endeavors have left me not-a-fan of classroom-based teaching of any kind. Forcing people to learn, en masse, in a "learning factory" (i.e., a traditional classroom) is a good way to all but guarantee that anything ostensibly learned will be quickly forgotten. I am convinced that by far the most effective learning is self-directed learning, whether it be that of a six month old baby beginning to teach herself to talk, or of a 78 year old man beginning to teach himself how to use an iPhone so that he can have video chats with his grandchildren. With all that said, I come back to the topic of my "job hunt". In the ideal world (and, being an idealist, I'm always on the hunt for the ideal world), I could bring all of my past experiences together --
-- to fill a role in what might broadly be call "the educational arm" of the IT industry. As part of my search, I'll be looking for small companies (either well established or new start-ups) that are taking on the challenge of providing tools or environments that assist people in self-directed learning endeavors. However, I'd also like to broaden the search, to include companies of different sizes in a potentially broad array of industries, who see a need to provide learning opportunities for any of their stakeholders (employees, customers, managers, etc.), and who might benefit from my help in doing it.
What am I doing right now, at this very moment?
I'm currently engaged in very focused self-education, reacquiring my skills in Java software design and development that have lain dormant for the better part of a decade. In the next few months I plan to turn out one or two web-based services and to make some contributions to the code-bases of at least one open-sourced Java-based project. Then, confident that my head is once again screwed on right with respect to the essentials of software engineering, I will seriously begin to look for professional engagements with organizations operating at the nexus of technology and learning.
This is still another reposting of an entry recently appearing on the Plum Tree Books page on Facebook. I know that all of the other artists who take part in the discussions on the Plum Tree Books page share with me a common bane. After putting in hours, days, weeks, years to create one of our artworks, we are then faced with the unevadable need to put in many more hours, days, weeks, (gasp, years?) to PROMOTE our work. And given that, for most of us, our promotional budgets are at or near zero, we have to get very creative in our use of the cost-free promotional tools available to us to get our work out there into the hands, eyes, ears of our audiences. Ultimately, it comes down to this: to succeed as an independent artist in this day and age, you must be just as creative and innovative in promoting your art as you were in creating that art in the first place. For many of us, this means we have to develop not just business-oriented skills, but also new artistic skills -- artistry that has little or nothing to do with our original artistic passions, but which must be honed solely in the service of promoting our foundational works. For me, this means (among other things) creating videos to promote my audiobooks: videos which could be thought of as advertisements, but which stand as works of art unto themselves. I’ve had to get adept at pulling together public domain or creative commons images, giving them a “Ken-Burns-like” pan and zoom treatment to heighten visual interest, sometimes adding a soundtrack that I compose and perform myself, and then marrying all of that together with my original work of art: an excerpt or entire track from one of my audiobooks. This body of promotional work has now become a YouTube channel in and of itself*. Here’s my latest offering (completed just a few hours ago!), a video created to promote my new audiobook, CLASSIC TALES OF HOPE AND COURAGE -- but hopefully it stands as a worthwhile work of art on its own -- THE WAR PRAYER by Mark Twain...
This is another reposting of an entry recently appearing on the Plum Tree Books page on Facebook. Join me for a moment in consideration of two wildly divergent literary genres: magical realism (in honor of the very-recently-deceased Gabriel García Márquez) and political science (in stark realization of this Second Guilded Age in which most of us find ourselves). Quite different, no? In fact, we could think of them as almost polar opposites: one sitting out on the extreme, fantastical edges of modern fiction, and the other found firmly and conservatively planted in the potentially drier (perhaps sleep-inducing?) regions of NONfiction. How does one person, one narrator, approach the creation of audiobooks based upon writings in these two opposing styles? Well, many don't even try. Either by their own choice or by typecasting imposed by others, they stick to a single area, like children's books or mystery/thrillers. But, for whatever reason, my personal constitution always seems to make me a sucker for a challenge. Rather than bloviate any further in print on this topic, I'll simply let you hear one example of my work from each genre, and let your ears and your sensibilities do their own "contrast and compare" of the two. The first is from the opening lines of one of my favorite audiobooks, which I completed early last year for the brilliant authors of magical-realism, Amy Krout-Horn and Gabriel Horn: their novel, TRANSCENDENCE.
And the second is an excerpt from a very important work of modern political science, one which focuses on the all-encompassingly-important topic of campaign finance reform (a topic that SHOULD *transcend* political ideologies): Lawrence Lessig’s, ONE WAY FORWARD.