The problem here – well, in addition to all of O’Reilly’s usual problems – is that he seems unaware, or pretends to be unaware, of the difference between an online community forum like Daily Kos and traditional corporate-owned pre-Internet media. Inviting users to participate in an interactive, Web 2.0 medium doesn’t make you automatically agree with everything they post to your site. If it did, there would be very little reason to do it.

O’Reilly even seems unaware of the comments left by people on his own site. Again, it’s possible that he just chooses not to be aware or he pretends not to be aware. But given O’Reilly’s demographic and the hate he peddles, it’s not hard to imagine that O’Reilly has more than a few viewers who would be willing to express views in a public forum that even O’Reilly wouldn’t want to be associated with.

I don’t consider comments on the O’Reilly site as coming from O’Reilly himself. It’s inappropriate for O’Reilly to use the comments on blogs or the postings of Kos diarists to compare progressive blogs to the Nazis and KKK.

The rebuttal to this lunacy was, of course, put best by Stephen Colbert:

Exactly. The Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis were both notorious for allowing people to express unpopular views in an open and free forum.

And that basically sums it up. If O’Reilly wants to make the argument that people who instigate hate are responsible for all of the comments and opinions of their followers, he’s free to do so. But then, we’ll all need to have a word with O’Reilly himself.

The Center on Education Policy released a disturbing new study this week, measuring the effects of No Child Left Behind:

The report finds that approximately 62% of school districts increased the amount of time spent in elementary schools on English language arts and or math, while 44% of districts cut time on science, social studies, art and music, physical education, lunch or recess.

Now, I’m pretty much appalled by all of the cutbacks, but I’ll leave the bulk of it to ScienceTeacher.com, SocialStudiesTeacher.com, and LunchTeacher.com. I’m ShakespeareTeacher.com, so I want to talk about arts education.

(And let’s make no mistake – the extra time being spent on ELA isn’t being spent on literature. It’s being spent on test prep, and more test prep.)

Arts education is absolutely essential for students preparing for the world that we’re currently living in. With the image continuing to gain dominance over the written word, people who can demonstrate artistic ability are highly marketable in today’s economy. From graphic designers to documentary filmmakers, those who can master today’s tools of communication are able to command a wider audience and expand their range of communication. In the connected world, this is real currency.

And even if all of that weren’t true, the arts teach us how to identify problems and solve them with creativity and discipline. Those skills help us in any endeavor.

I came across a website for an artist named Jen Stark, who creates sculptures from construction paper that won’t help anyone pass a reading test any time soon. But they bring beauty into the world, which is worth at least a link from my blog. Take a look at her work, and tell me she didn’t have to develop some pretty sophisticated math skills along the way.

Or take French artist Huber Duprat, who recruited caddis fly larvae, who typically create protective shells out of silk and their surrounding materials, and placed them in an environment of gold flakes and precious gems. The result is a combination of art and science that boggles the mind. Click the picture below to see the video.

Or take a look at the Universcale by Nikon, an application of the mathematics of scale to allow human comprehension of the natural universe, and tell me your appreciation of it isn’t primarily aesthetic.

I wonder what Leonardo DaVinci would have thought about eliminating arts education to teach math. What would Shakespeare have thought about eliminating arts education to teach literacy? What would Descartes say about eliminating science to teach math? What would Hemmingway think of eliminating social studies to teach literacy?

Reading and math are important skills. But even if an educational system were somehow able to acheive 100 percent literacy and numeracy, and nothing else, it would still be a failure.

I had a dream last night. It was the morning after the primaries for the 2008 presidential election, which in my dream were all held on the same day. I had gone to bed early and missed the results, so upon waking I checked online to see who had won.

Surprisingly, the Democratic nomination went to John Edwards, the charismatic Senator from North Carolina who campaigns primarily on the issue of poverty. He hadn’t been my first choice, but I was somewhat pleased to see him win the nomination anyway and I looked forward to the possibility of his winning the presidency.

Even more surprisingly however, the Republican nomination went to Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth-century American revivalist preacher, known primarily for his fire-and-brimstone sermons.

Turning on the television, I was dismayed to see that the media was entirely focused on the fact that both nominees had the same name. They had an expert on doing a statistical analysis of names of politicians to see what the odds of this happening were. I was frustrated, because I felt like the top story should have been that the Republicans nominated a Bible-thumping Puritan from the eighteenth century. Didn’t that concern anyone?

I went into the office – in my dream I worked in an office – and all of my co-workers in this office-type place were absolutely giddy with the coincidence of the two candidates having the same name. I noted that the Republican Jonathan Edwards was a dangerous religious zealot who would destroy all of the freedoms we currently enjoy, but – of course – nobody paid me any mind.

Even so, I woke up more amused than frustrated. And today, I learned that the debate tonight would feature questions being asked by voters via YouTube. So of course, that’s now the story far more than anything that was said during the debate. Can I dream ’em or what?

Anyway, the Question of the Week was suggested by Lee after reading that the ’92 Vice Presidential Debate was my favorite political debate ever. As always, free to answer the question, or just continue the conversation.

What was your favorite debate ever and why?

How long do you think it will be before science is able to develop a computer sophisticated enough to emulate the complexity of the human mind, and what would be the ramifications of such a computer?

Tomorrow is 7/7/07. Could this be your lucky day?

Perhaps you’ll get a new iPhone tomorrow. Or maybe someone will pay you to buy them one! I saw this article about people paying other people to stand in line for them, and it reminded me of our Shakespeare in the Park discussion from April.

I wonder – does it change the ethics of the situation if the product is not free? Is standing in line still “part of the experience” of getting an iPhone?

Not really up for spending the evening at the Internet Movie Database?

Why not curl up at home with the Internet Book Database?

I had wanted to post this clip from the Republican debate earlier, but didn’t want to ruin this week’s Headline Game. Giuliani was asked to respond to a harsh quote from a Catholic bishop about his stand on abortion. As he tried to answer, lightning began to play havoc with the sound system. The audience laughed as the candidates on either side of him, Romney and McCain, began to back away, and Guiliani made a joke about it.

Politics aside, it’s pretty funny. Check it out:

If you watch the rest of the clip, you can see Mike Huckabee’s defense of his earlier stance against evolution. He spins it hard, but then he ends with a quote that leaves little doubt about his position on the matter:

If anybody wants to believe that they are the descendants of a primate, they are certainly welcome to do it.

McCain and Giuliani seemed amused by that. We’ll see how it plays with the Republican base.

I gave a workshop today on incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into literacy instruction to improve student writing in the one-to-one classroom. A one-to-one classroom is one in which every student has a laptop with Internet access. That means that each learner has the ability to interact personally with a dynamic network of learners, both within the classroom and in the larger community.

This workshop was done in the shadow of a short-sighted article in the New York Times that dealt only with the problems of the one-to-one classroom, and none of the potential.

What these educators seem to be missing is that this is the world our students are living in right now. Case in point: FanFiction.net. This is a website where people can go and post original fan fiction. Thousands of our students are there right now, posting original stories, getting feedback from peers, and revising their work to make it more effective. Nobody’s asking them to do this; but there they are, using 21rst century tools to hone their writing skills. And if these are the skills we want students to learn in school, how can we not take advantage of every opportunity to bring the same tools into the classroom?

Anyway, I usually enjoy these workshops, but I was sick all day, so I was eager to come home, take some cold medicine, and go to sleep.

In my sleep, I had a dream that I was in France, around the turn of the nineteenth century. It was just after the Revolution, but before Napoleon was installed as Emperor. My guide was showing me around, and – in typical dream-like anachronistic fashion – he wanted me to see his radio. There was an earpiece and a microphone, both in the style of the period (if you can imagine what that would look like).

I put on the earpiece and heard a radio host talking about John Locke. I repeated the last line of what he said to indicate to my guide that I could hear what was being played, and suddenly the voice said “Is someone there?” I froze for a moment, unsure if he was talking to me, and the voice said “I think someone’s there. What’s your name?” “My name is Bill,” I said, into what I now realized was a microphone. The voice responded, “Welcome, Bill.”

My guide said that there were similar radios in homes all over the country and anyone could participate. I was impressed, but a little nervous about being put on the spot. “This is my first time doing this,” I stammered, and the voice said “Well, I’m glad you’re here. We no longer depend on the government and its puppets to provide our radio content. This is the radio of the people, and we can say anything we want.”

And that’s when I realized that this guy wasn’t the host of the radio show. He was another guy like me with a microphone. And if more people joined up, we could have an extended conversation, and that would be the show. This would truly be a new paradigm.

I woke up, still woozy from the cold medication, but I rushed to the computer to record my dream. My subconscious mind had conflated the changes in Europe during the Enlightenment with the current evolution of Internet technologies. During the Enlightenment, people started to perceive government less as an absolutist top-down sovereign who rules by divine right, and more as a function of citizens who can actually take part in shaping their own polity. Right now, a similar transformation is taking place in the way we think about the Internet – less as a one-way, top-down source of information, and more as an interactive community of which we all can be a part. Nice analysis, subconscious mind!

As we think about these new technologies, and how they might reshape education, if not society as a whole, we should remember that they are more than just fun new toys. They are a revolution.

So thanks to a link from the Showtime page on The Tudors, this blog got over 100 unique hits today, and the day is not even over yet. I think the previous record was around 30, and that was a day when I e-mailed all my friends and some of them e-mailed all of their friends.

And it occurs to me that I’ve been kind of hard on the media lately. Now that my readership has widened somewhat, I am concerned that some may have been disturbed by last week’s Question of the Week which involved my putting legitimate news sources alongside more questionable ones and asking my readers to rank them in order of reliability.

Please know that I meant no disrespect to Fox News. Or to CNN. Or to network television. Or to the New York Times editorial page. I’m simply raising questions.

The sources we have always been told we can trust may not be as reliable as we’d like them to be. But does this mark a decline in mainstream news reporting, or have these sources always been somewhat unreliable and it’s only through the more democratic medium of the Internet that we’re able to stay on top of it?

The reason I bring it up is that this study suggests that the shifts in the last twenty years have not resulted in a more informed electorate.

That surprised me, but maybe it shouldn’t have. Howard Dean turned himself from being a dead-end candidate into the front runner for the Democratic nomination in 2004 by raising money through a grassroots movement over the Internet. It was a groundbreaking use of the new medium. But then it was the traditional media who ruined him by playing that one clip, taken out of context, over and over. And it seems that the winners are the ones who know how to play the system. So the democratic process is still controlled by slick marketing experts. Perhaps nothing has changed since the days of Parson Weems.

Parson Weems, a supporter of Thomas Jefferson, wanted to emphasize strong values in young America. So he wrote a fictional story about the late George Washington to illustrate his point. Perhaps you’ve heard it – it involves a hatchet and a cherry tree.

Today’s version of the mythmaker, Karl Rove, has access to 24-hour information networks, both on cable and over the Internet. But so do we. Lies spread faster than they used to, but corrections are immediate. It’s harder to get away with things now, at least with those of us who are paying attention. In the days of Parson Weems, you couldn’t just go to Snopes.com to see if that cherry tree thing was true. And you certainly couldn’t just stumble upon some guy’s blog through a link from the Showtime website and get a rambling media literacy diatribe.

But it’s today, and you just did. Welcome! This blog is often about Shakespeare, but as you can tell, it’s about other things too. I hope you enjoy yourself while you’re here, and please feel free to leave a comment behind on any of the posts, either current or in the archives.

A bit of silliness to start the weekend…

Remember those text adventure games from the 1980’s, like Zork and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?

Well, Robin Johnson created Hamlet: The Text Adventure Game.

It’s pretty clever. I enjoyed playing it for a bit, then got frustrated and gave up. Just like Zork and The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy…

But if any of you are interested in playing this game collaboratively, I’d be curious to see where it goes. I got as far as Banquo. (Yeah, you start to wander into other plays.) Use the comments thread below to compare notes.

UPDATE: Never mind about playing collaboratively. There’s a hints page. So if you get stuck, you can go there and get as many hints as you need to finish the game. It’s worth checking out for the Shakespeare-related laughs integrated throughout the game. For example, Richard III will actually trade you his kingdom for a horse.