Idolising Children?

It has been a while. A lot has happened. I haven’t stopped writing.
A book is due out in September. I blog at http://www.geekdad.com
And, I’ve begun writing shorter stuff again. Even done a few spoken word gigs.
Which has lead to this collaboration with Darren Solomon from Science for Girls. It is an awesome album.

In B Flat

It has been getting twittered a lot - so I thought I should post the words. (These are probably slightly different, I tweaked it after the recording…for performance purposes)

Information
By Daniel Donahoo (2009)
she unplugs the device
no bigger than her thumb
from the computer and it smells electric.

“My life’s work,” she says. But, it isn’t her life’s work.

You see, we store information like an Escher painting.
It shouldn’t all fit in there. But, it does.
And every day we manage to fit more and more into smaller and smaller spaces until one day
she says,
we will be able to fit all the information the world has
everything that everyone knows and believes and dreams
into nothing.

All the words and pictures, the voices and videos,
the ideas and the daydreams,
the games
the past and the future.
It will all be there. Stored and filed.
Tagged with relevant keywords.

Our hard drives will be thin air.

They will make nanobots look like elephants.
And elephants will be in there too. Tagged. Accessible with search terms
like ivory and mammoth,
like largest land dwelling mammal

We will process away at nothing and understand everything.
We will think of the word and the information will slip in, not through our ears or eyes –
but straight thorough our skin. Information will breathe in and out of us.

Our knowing will permeate as deep as it does wide.
Our work here is to learn

so much,

to be so full of knowing,
that all there is left to do is unlearn.

Humanity must get to a point where we let go.
Leave the useless ideas and the spent ideologies in the recycle bin.
like an adolescent brain shedding neurons.
like a snake slithering from its old skin.
like an old man who has come to understand so well the point where reality meets the intangible that he is able to decide which breath will be his last. And, he will enjoy that breath more than any other he has taken his entire life.

And, her life’s work is more than four meg flash drive.

My life’s work, she says, is the impact that this has.

This is not about what I produce. This is about what others receive.

Ah. It has been a big week. Aren’t they all. Anyway, as a consequence, less words this week. Less articles. Less blog posts. Less GeekDad.

But, there is a backlog of Whispers at Bedtime. And, there have been books, and a Christmas Tree put up. Boys are writing Christmas lists and Santa is going to have his work cut out with “Agents” Lego.

This week’s Whispers at Bedtime gives props to my favourite song writer of all time Anthony Atkinson. I understand he is now also a primary school teacher. Lucky kids!

Anyway, I pull out the guitar after bedtime stories and sing a few songs. Anthony’s work is high in my repertoire. The boys favourite song at the moment is “ecstatic” and gradually they have asked questions about all the lyrics. I’ve done my best to explain. But, how do you explain the concept of “ego” to a five year old? You can see a youtube clip of The Mabels (Anthony’s old band) playing the tune at the Bridge Mall Inn  in Ballarat on youtube. I showed my boys. Surely that is another aspect of the internets we hasn’t thought off. I can take my children back into the pubs of my misspent youth through youtube. They loved it!

Song: Ecstatic from “Scenes from a Midday Movie”, The Mabels (circa. 2003)

Tags: anthonyatkinson, ecstatic, the mabels, songs

Today’s Whispers at Bedtime was inspired by reviewing some old home video footage. My little boy was being asked far too many questions, but giving each one due thought.

More Whispers at Bedtime here

Tags: comic, children, pets, whispers at bedtime

I really enjoy reading domestic father (Blake) and I’ve been meaning to write about his series of post that use his skeptical approach to the impact of TV viewing on young children. I’d like to do this because TV is a focus of a chapter in the book that my wife has written (and which I’ve thrown bits and pieces into). It is due in mid-2009 and clearly you’ll get more information in coming months.

It all starts here with a post questioning whether TV is a positive or negative influence on children’s lives. Blake admits that he and his wife did limit TV in their daughters early years, not because of a wealth of research, but simply through their own personal experience. He writes:

I enjoy it when skeptics get intuitive. I think there is room in an evidenced-based approach to allow decisions to begin to be made by posing and questioning through the lived experience. And, in this case, that is clearly what has happened. As the following posts then explored the research in a very nice way.

Television and Infants is a fabulous blog post. It systematically asks the questions we all pose, and looks throughly at the evidence available to cut through the marketing hype and recognise that TV is having an impact on the development of our children, especially in the early years, and in ways that we can recognise, but still do not fully understand.

I recommend all parents and parents-to-be read it. But, I also recommend that parents then don’t suddenly beat themselves up if their children have watch a large amount of TV before they were 5.

Which, is where the next question comes in that Blake hasn’t addressed - yet: When should my child start watching television and when should they watch?

This is where our new book will come in, exploring the research behind not just how much TV is enough, but what children should watch and more importantly, how they should watch it and how you should watch it with them.

If we are toi raise good critical thinkers we need to teach them how to watch TV and engage with new media technologies in the same way we teach them to read books. We need to give them the vocabulary, the processes and teach them rules about how to be a good media consumer - how to challenge where the information comes from, teach them to ask who made this program, what are they telling me, why do they want to tell me that, are they trying to sell me something?

This is what we need to think about and consider as parents - and in doing so we need to accept there is not a single solution. There is no one book, one way, one TV show that can provide us with the answers. All our children are uniquer and require us to critically engage with their own development, and travel the journey of mistakes and successes with them.

Tags: children, capacity, tv, early years

You know the drill. When bedtime becomes a battle of wills.

More Whispers at Bedtime here.

Tags: comic, bedtime, children