Teaching naked

Students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. Why bore them with what they already have.
The purpose of presence is engagement; talk with them, discuss, debate, provoke. Construct lnowlegde together rather than throwing it at them.

Reported by Jeffrey Young, A dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, challenges colleagues to "teach naked"—by which he means, sans machines.

The article cites a survey consisting of 211 students conducted at the University of Central Lancashire and published in April in the British Educational Research Journal.
59% of students reported at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods.

Students in the survey gave low marks not just to PowerPoint, but to all kinds of computer-assisted classroom activities.
"The least boring teaching methods were found to be seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions."
To summarise, tech-free classrooms are more engaging.

Despite millions of dollars in investment in hightech; teaching and learning is about engagement. Bells and whistles might gain attention, but they are not a substitute for teaching.
So stop using the slide-display program of power-point as a crutch rather than as a creative tool.

Personally, I happen to like ppt...and dont want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, or teach naked...
I dont have control over resources and do have the constraints of large class sizes, (usually well in excess of 150 at a time) and this does impact on debates and discussions. There are a few things that the large class size does better, the mexican wave comes to mind. And there are some advantages to a hightech environment, it just needs using better.
Think big screen, big environment, but also think engagement...

Here's resources I recommend if you are going to use ppt and the tech available, and want to do it better:
Animoto. (2009) The end of slideshows. Retrieved May 17 2009 from http://animoto.com/
Brown, G., and Godin, S. (2009). Seth Godin’s Presentation hierachy. Retrieved May 17 2009 from http://www.slideshare.net/GeoffBrown3231/seth-godins-presentation-hierarchy
Kaptarev, A. (2006). Death by bullet point and how to avoid it. Retrieved 17 May 2009 from http://lifehacker.com/software/presentations/stop-death-by-powerpoint-323554.php
Kawasaki, G. (2006). The art of the start. Retrieved May 17 2009 from http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/06/the_art_of_the_.html
Palmer, Parker J. (2007). The Courage to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Reynold, G (n.d). PresentationZen blog

(Thats the nuts and bolts, philosophizing on ed is another issue for another day)

Assessment matters

Delightful prompt from today's higher ed on how studying the humanities contribute and how such contribution might be measured.
Are we there yet?

I have had the joy for many years of being involved with students in teaching them less about content and more about processes; how to communicate, what's involved in thinking critically, what is knowledge... However, I note somewhat wryly that come assessment time, I lose their attention somewhat to the courses that seem heavy in knowledge acquisition; ones full of minutiae specific details of right or wrong answers.
And am also reminded of a non-joyous moment of almost getting a years paid leave to study a subject dear to my heart, text counselling, but failed to win over a panel member because his paradigm was entrenched in better or worse, right or wrong rather than in how it is shaped and being used or shaping and using those involved.

Here's the problem, as put forward by Michael Bérubé; How to measure the unmeasurable.
What does this research do, what footprint will it leave?

My own study is really about greater awareness doesn't have the pulling and pushing power that even an ethics committee would respect. They want to know that what is undertaken will change the world in anticipated, good, ways. But whose idea of good is not examined.

Michael Bérubé describes my angst of being involved in uncovering pluralist ways of being; how to develop and maintain pluralist societies that include people who are not pluralists.
He doesn't have an answer though., being a pluralist has its own ways of being :)
So, instead, a commitment to lifelong learning and suppleness of mind.

I cant see that one getting through a Board of studies as a written objective.
And as he says, we do not know how to measure such things.
Maybe that's also why I lost students at assessment times?

We cannot prove it, we cannot show it...
We humanists suffer from the conviction that the unexamined life is not worth living.

And there is the conundrum, how to assess it.

This reminds me also of Annmarie's excellent article on the gold standard in health of the double-blind placebo. While the argument espoused wasn't enough to win me that specific study grant it was still enough to persuade me that rather than proving, research can be about improving...tinkering with adaptability ... knowing things better.

Mol, A. (2006). Proving or improving: On health care research as a form of self-reflection. Qual Health Research, 16, 405-414.

risk aversion and mobile phones

New technology - the threat to our information

View more presentations from normanlamont.

Funny little slideshare from Norman Lamont on the inherent risks of mobile phones to business, worth of a lol
http://www.slideshare.net/normanlamont/new-technology-the-threat-to-our-information

whose in your pocket; whats on your mobile phone?

Vodafone adverts have had us folding our lovers into tight little packages to fit in our pockets...
telecom similarly, had us with our best friends everywhere, together...

Stefana Broadbent studying SMS describes this medium as the intimate channel.
A sphere in which our attachments to friends and family are managed through 'Grooming' messages - thank you, endearments... - that keep relationships alive.
Her (2006) research shows over 50% of grooming communications happen through SMS.
In her (2009) tedtalk, she describes it as a medium for democratising intimacy.

However has ubiquity altered use? My bank now reminds me of visa accounts due, my uni library lets me know when books are available...might the range of services coming through your SMS have broadened, but is it still predominantly intimate? What do you keep?

Whats kept or deleted involves choices.
I need more memory for such things :)
I look at mine, it's full of the trivial details of everyday life: I'm free for coffee, I'm 5 mins away, Doing O'K?, yes the majority of messages sustain relationships.
And then i look at what i save: well wishes, love u's, reminders I'm cared for.

A pocket full of affirmations.

Truth and transparency; Knowledge construction in a hyperlinked world

Truth and transparency in a knowledge era is well illustrated by David Weinberger in a presentation at the Personal democracy forum 2009, here he demonstrates an ecology of knowledge, where Knowledge is produced in links and has an opening commodity rather than as Facts where the binary of solid indisputable information as a discussion closer, its this or that.

Weinberger presents a coherent argument challenging the common but wrong question of trying to dispute if the internet adds or detracts. A question also thrown at value of wikipedia and google searches as students (and others) find information to substantiate claims made. And I take from this the same faultiness in similar questions posed of other social networking devices including the cell phone and texting; the wrong questions asked in: 'Is it good or bad?' What the balance? Does it open us up or close us down? Who is right or wrong? Weinberger categorically states that such questions are not important, no matter if it opens us up a little or alot, it doesnt matter...what we need is a space that works with diversity, with difference rather than one that works with individual truths. We have to work to make a space for constructive difference.
Its a clear argument, for difference is always with us. How then do we manage the awareness and relevance of this difference. I suspect it is poorly, for we tend to get enmeshed in the binary again of is it good or bad as if universal truth was where we were at. But the world has moved.

Knowledge and facts are as Weinberger names them "loose edged and messy" and we become increasingly conscious of this as we manage information in the making, not just the information that's decided as being valid, peer reviewed etc. Now our knowledge is available to us with links, we have the diverse views but I suggest we now need the tools with which to make our own minds up. I suspect we might need to reconstruct knowledge- just as Weinberger is doing, and move out of our positioning of binaries of good or bad. My next concern is about how might we learn more about the importance of difference, of context, of social justice.
Weinberger presents well that in the whole of human history, knowledge and facts remain disputed, that our ability to settle on anything comes with a history of contention and so we might as well get used to it. He likens this to triangulating and more, a multisubjectivity; where transparency is the new objectivity. He has more on this written on his Joho the blog blogsite, transparency is the new objectivity.
To paraphrase David Weinberger:

Knowledge in a hyperlinked world then becomes something to unsettle, something to consider in context...something to discuss in conversation, to debate, to exist in chaos, and unsettled argument is a better approximation of reality than a paper based world could ever give us.

But I'm still left unsettled, when and where do we learn of respect, of valuing context and the differences in others such that wisdom is not an imposition on others.

This has broadened my appreciation for connectivism and connective knowledge approaches to teaching and learning (ref Siemens and Downes), there is need to understand not only how knowledge is constructed, but also in the connections; beyond the capacity of current communication technologies that make such linking and awareness of divergent views possible, there is also a need to consider how valuing and respect for difference are managed.
Following this prompt to my thinking, i might just sign up for CCK09, but the current phd is going to restrict this to being a participant observer.

new media democratizing intimacy

Interesting concept from TEDGlobal speaker Stefana Broadbent http://blog.ted.com/2009/07/session_3_runni_1.php
I havent yet heard her, I guess it will be up in a few days, so these comments are just in response to the running notes.

these new methods of communication are helping us break out of old institutions and bringing us closer together than ever before. She's speaking with a backdrop of constantly refreshing, beautiful black and white portraits, always of two people seated together. She explains that in each picture is someone she interviewed and the person the communicate with most in the world, whether it be their significant other, parent, grandparent or sibling, along with the communication tools they use -- by and large, these are cell phones.
She says that although we may have many people on our Facebook friend lists (120 on average) and in our cell phone directories, we typically use these technologies to interact with a small core group of people. The typical cell phone user makes 80 percent of their calls to just four people, and the average Facebook user exchanges most of their messages with only five or six friends. So these technologies are not networking us with more people, but reinforcing our communication with our inner circle.

And I totally agree with her, but there's a rub...creating more or less intimacy...and then she takes it into more risky space with examples of cell phone use adding to intimacy particularly with regard to people who are at risk in terms of social justice, being time and / or resource poor. The examples of workers having to use phones to maintain family connections.
My own research is of a further example, the use of texting for accessing counselling as provided by Youthline, NZ. This provides a service by youth, for youth, in the medium young people select as their preferred choice. Reasons for that choice can be speculated upon- costs, privacy, ego protection, anonymity...its available, accessible, affordable... wherever and whenever (almost), one could say almost free, and easy.
The examples Stefana provides of workplaces are difficult to accept as there are concerns of safety, eg the busdriver with a cell phone maintaining contact- generally not going to win the argument when there is the issue of driving and safety. The broader argument of cellphone use being able to lift some of the alienation otherwise experienced by those who are socially disadvantaged by poverty, working shifts, two jobs etc, I can accept. But there is an implication that democracy at work is a right,however given that one's time is sold/bought/paid for, democracy doesnt feature largely in that kind of power dynamic or structured relationship.
So although it may provide greater access to one's loved ones, there are still times where this is going to be deemed inappropriate. And its (technology aided communications) still a bit of a bandaid on what i suspect may be hemorrhaging issues. The worklife balance isnt solved by being told heh whats the problem, you can ring, or text silently without employer knowing, your family or kids. And the issues of kids might be better addressed without the need to hide angst. meantime in the current world, its a better option than not having the ability to gain contact when and wherever.
Relating matters, and I'm glad to see the arguments broadened and some real discussion happening beyond the good or the bad of communication and computer mediated technologies. In what other ways do these shape us, how are we altered, whose interests are served, what's involved...bring on more discussion :)
(thanks to Frances Bell for bringing this tedtalk to my attention)

How long does a text message (sms message) last in NZ

This is the response to my question from Telecom:
Thank you for contacting Telecom.
We do not actually hold onto SMS messages once they have been delivered to the intended recipients. The only exception would be if there was an agreement put in place before hand at the request of the appropriate authorities.
No front line staff member has the ability to read of intercept text messages. Authorities such as the police have their own means and channels to use, when contacting Telecom with such enquiries. This is through a high level engagement with our call investigation centre.
If you have any further questions regarding Telecom products and services please visit our web site at http://www.telecom.co.nz

This is the response back from Vodafone:
Thank you for your website enquiry.
To view all the information that we currently have available, please visit http://www.vodafone.co.nz/about/company-information/ . Please note that if the information you require is not listed, it is likely that it is sensitive information which we are not able to supply to the public.
Kind regards
x
Customer Service Representative | Vodafone NZ | www.vodafone.co.nz/help

Not very helpful vodafone, I had already checked your site, I went back over it with a fine tooth comb, you never say, and I do not accept that this is sensitive information. This is material people have a right to know.

On the vodafone forum, after cut and pasting the not too helpful email, this is what I'm told:
SMS content is kept for 4 days or until delivered (if under 4 days)
If you want to keep content of SMS back them up with software
If providers in America wish to keep the content for 2 weeks that is there choice
John (forum administrator)

And then, a later addition:
after the content is gone vodafone only keep what is required for the IRD for tax purposes
John (forum administrator)

Thankyou John, I knew there had to be an answer to that somewhere, I'm not sure why IRD is is top of your reasons for keeping a message. I can understand that vodafone provide a service and if they wish to keep a record of said service, i can appreciate thats within their right. having said that, if they are supoened to hand over such by police for a criminal investigation i can understand that also.

Its nice to know.
I like knowing what's involved when part of my work involves sensitive material being texted.
Thankyou for your answers
:)

Writing in slices; telling stories

The thesis I am undertaking on change is multivocal and I experience as writer an unusual sense of chronology. Those involved are not often aware of the small or large things that have large or small import, and their recalled experience of the history involved seems to be one of associations rather than of any clear chronological path where this led to that.
My storytelling of change is therefore be told in slices.

Today I discovered Penguin books, We tell stories at http://wetellstories.co.uk/
John Buchan's 39 steps is retold with apologies, as 21 steps by C Cummings using google maps, the Haunted dolls house is converted to a series of stories told through blogs and social networking sites as Slice.

Even taking these steps, I'm aware of my own path from there to here,spanning a mere 90 mins that it is hard to trace....I'm pretty sure I was checking my emails and opened OlDaily by Stephen Downes, tripped over a link to quangos to help visualise complex data where within graphs on reality and there in the comments in one small section was a link to we tell stories. Change happens in happenstance ways...

happenstance |ˈhapənˌstans|
noun
coincidence : it was just happenstance that I happened to be there | an untoward happenstance for Trudy.
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: blend of happen and circumstance .

A wounded storyteller

Serendipitously, I had been reading Arthur Frank, the wounded storyteller and then experienced a whole weekend of storytellers recalling the journey that had led them to become volunteers at Youthline. In Marae style for holding a space open, a place to stand and to have voice, lead to heartfelt sharing about paths and trajectories, creation stories, restitution stories and chaos stories. Stories of healing and stories where scabs were lifted. These were not 'just so' stories, and they were not fairy stories. They were not technoscience political stories either. They were heartfelt.

I am feeling somewhat in awe.

awe |ô|
noun
a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder.

And while I recall Latour(2005) saying 'sociology begins in wonder" p.21
I am having very ansty feelings with ANT right now.

The coming together of fortuitous events makes it seem like it was meant to be, but ANT is not going to wear a bar of it for me to say it feels fated or that the thesis has its own trajectory and I am but a conduit, channeling.
Instead I am left with the nuts and the bolts and the very ordinary, identifying every actor along the path from woe to go. I would like to hold on to the mystery and the mystical, to sense the higher purpose, but with ANT I am left with a serendipitous coming together, intersections that are timely. I feel this sort of blows the magic away...and I'm not sure I like the magic gone from this part of my world.

text work as identity work; txt worx as identtt worx

Texting as a marker of identity?
Risks in saying young people are like this, do this... it negates the variations.
However, this didnt stop the latest Pew report from doing an analysis of online behaviours based on age. Generations online challenges some common assumptions, while creating others.
Look at this:
95% of teens communicate face to face (no idea what the other 5% do)
88% of teens use landline
67% talk to friends on cell phones
58% send text messages to friends
Please note these are USA stats, but so to is Sherry Turkle's research suggesting how damaging texting is for teenagers, and suggesting how detrimental this is to their emotional development.
Taking a Pew quiz on use of communication technologies had me typecast as a digital collaborator. Ok. I enjoy working with what affords me a means to communicate quickly, in a timely way, with whats at hand, for what it is good for. Doesn't mean its a fixed trait.Doesn't mean I have lost my ability to discern what its more or less good for. I'm actually now more concerned about what it means for me to be seen as a collaborator...didnt they get shot during WW2?

BTW there is an excellent article by Barbara Kramer and Pat Thompson on doctoral writing as text work and identity work. A sampler:
where the novice researcher enters what we call occupied territory – with all the immanent danger and quiet dread that this metaphor implies – including possible ambushes, barbed wire fences, unknown academics who patrol the boundaries of already occupied territories. It is difficult to write confidently in dangerous territory.

My own writing as identity work is evolving, the conventions of the academy restrict the creativity, you might say fortunately.
I'm not brave enough to write the first txt spk thesis
mmmmm
If it didnt have a word limit imposed i might have considered a bilingual one.
:)

change happens

When things change the results are sometimes unanticipated, sometimes expected.
Here's a humorous take on an actor-network

When you mix water and flour together you get glue?
...you add eggs and sugar...
...a particular context involving heat...
and you get cake.

Where did the glue go?

It's what makes the cake
stick to you
:)

writing 'slices of practice'

John Law's Aircraft Stories attempts a text 'writing in slices'.
The cover says it 'works to upset the binary of modernism where knowledge, subjects and objects as having centred and concrete essences and the postmodern notion that all is fragmented and centreless.' His writing in slices aims for 'fractional coherence'.

I am entertaining this as a thesis writing style.
Law has a tendency to write using metaphor (and to my mind a few too many at a time).
He refers to a mirror, shattered. But i dont think this 'reflects' the idea fully enough.
Putting it back together creates a fractured reflection of a reality, as if there were but one. Leaving it in shards doesn't work either.
He has chosen to present the object-aircraft by writing a text in slices. For me it invokes a 3D image, slicing through planes, where intersectional slices impact one on another, and where the topology is never fully understood from any one plane, nor from the surface.


The risk is writing in slices might just come across as a series of essays on a theme.
...pictures at an exhibition...or a succession of fairy tales in a chapter book.
What I am wanting to create is instead techno-social-political stories of both fact and fiction, where performances intersect...
Using the text as Donna Haraway suggests as a heuristic or topos for generating and then illustrating points. In this instance pointing to changes in a network being contingent and precarious, planned as well as unplanned, shaped and shaping, that performances in the network require coordination to establish any semblance of stability, and that at least in part each node is subject to an incredible choreography of making and shaping. And if i can pull it off, to demonstrate that performances as well as objects and subjects, are multiple.

Feels ambitious.

iwant one; latest, greatest, fastest, betterest

Here's apples latest advert to smooch its way through my emails, seems like now I can even find myself, its got a compass... but wait there's more- right there in the middle...

Introducing the iPhone that lets you do more than ever. And do it faster.*
Launch and switch between applications quickly. Render web pages in a fraction of the time. Shoot, edit and share video right on your phone. Make a call or play a song using just your voice. And discover many more features that make iPhone 3GS the best iPhone yet.
More new features
Landscape Keyboard
Rotate iPhone to use a larger keyboard in Mail, Messages, Notes and Safari.
Cut, Copy & Paste
Cut, copy and paste words and photos, even between applications.
Spotlight Search
Find what you're looking for across your iPhone, all from one place.
Compass
Find out what direction you're facing with a new digital compass.

- did you see it?
You can even make calls using just your voice.
ROFL

Multiple realities; Philosophising with Deleuze and Latour

Deleuze (1993) suggests origami as a model for the sciences of matter.

"Microperceptions or representatives of the world are those little folds that unravel in every direction, folds in folds, over folds, following folds… and these are minute, obscure, confused perceptions that make up our macroperceptions. " (p.86).

A humbling perceptual (re)alteration to my thinking occurs; Sherry Turkle's current views of texting are not so much wrong, as caught in a fold, and I in a different one. I might as well be in a different universe, our realities being worlds apart, our worlds being folded differently.

Subjectivity might then be understood as a topology of the folds.

Deleuze's concept of the fold not only allows me to think creatively about the production of subjectivity, but also about the possibilities for, and production of, ‘non-human’ forms of ‘subjectivity’.

An approach also seen within Latour's actor-network theory. In the ANT literature this is also to be taken as more than a perceptual consideration, it is the reality acted upon, and realities are multiple.

The mobile phone, the young person using it, myself as researcher, the counsellors providing a texting service, the ips providers... all facets of the same cloth, variable seen, variably made visible, variably acted on.

Ref
Deleuze, G. (1993). The fold: Liebniz and the baroque (T. Conley, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

An exercise in world making; ontological politics at play :)

bleeding txt

I'd been 'interviewing my texts' (txt messages) as you do when the research involves actor-network theory and it was as if it had bled itself all over the floor while i was absorbed in my textual analysis.
I had an inkling something was not quite right. I sense in myself a clinical detachment, where i could find interesting results but perhaps these were irrelevant to the participating txt.
See, what i missed, in giving voice, was the error of being a ventriloquist. It was still me doing the talking.
So what happens when you make it possible for teenage angst to speak?

I found this while avoiding the next wrong turn in data analysis, and while it's meant as a humorous take on ant, I think its more meaningful than than where i had been going. Here there is voice that matches discontent.


Thankyou to paulathekoala, for posting this on youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i25aGGrTJK8&feature=related
Developed as part of the Lancaster Summer Conference Morning Show sketch comedy routine, a spoof of Actor Network Theory, a predominant sociological approach in our department. Here is an interview with a pen.

I can now get back to focusing on the bleeding txt rather than the constituents of the blood...

An ANT like tweet

Historical tweets worth repeating, this one of Gutenberg following 'his' invention of the printing press reflecting some actor-network like black humour :)

feeding off uncertainties...lies, damn lies and statistics in a PhD

In this PhD the controversies continue to bubble up, ethical dilemma or research process? ANT considers it to be research process, something to feed off.
My data says one thing, the press release say another....guess its all about how to win friends and influence people, plausible promise meets 'tell me lies.'
I am telling myself not to play the sly one, to accept as latour exhorts:

"Always assume that people are right, even if you have to stretch the point a bit. A simple rule, my dear pupil, when you’re studying a project. You put yourself at the peak of enthusiasm, at the apex, the point where the thing is irresistible…never say it’s stupid. Say : If I were in their shoes, I’d have done the same thing."

(Latour, 1996, p. 36)
Meantime, I am all but doing pirouettes as a point is stretched.

Entice me with lies.

The capacity to consider change during, rather than before and after, is a challenge.
To compare before with after is, in contrast easy.
I've taken on a PhD researching change as it progresses, and sometimes it doesn't (the change that is). Sometimes things change and I barely notice as the small shifts have unrecognised impact.

Reading Clay Shirkey's blog on newspapers and thinking the unthinkable suggests some very ANT like insights on change. (I find it useful to see ant like analysis everwhere, it helps me convince myself I'm progressing my PhD)

It's never one thing that makes it all happen. The printing press did not of itself, change the world. An enormous amount of other work was also going on.
Shirky refers to Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. An analysis informed by ANT would suit her approach: “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?”
A similar question to my own- in using emergent technologies in a telephone counselling agency, how are those involved shaped and shaping?
Taking Callon's 1998 approach with ant, the printing press revolution can be identified by stages identified as Translation:
1. Problematizing: if reading is good, then being able to do this without needing to wait for others to read it to you must be better; how then to make this a possibility? Make the making of printed matter smaller, faster ...
2. Interessment: others need locking in to make this happen, there's a need for push and pull, a negotiation with others, and not just of human actors but also of technology.
3. Enrolment involves actors accepting positions to make such change occur
4. Mobilisation; an assemblage of the social that works; oil based ink, compatable with paper rather than parchment, and with the movable print molds from metal alloys rather than carved in wood or stone... People also need mobilising, there would be no value in a press without a growing literacy in the middle classes...

At this point it is really necessary to restate that neither Guttenberg- credited with the invention, nor the invention itself happened in isolation, there's a network at play within which they were situated. Further work was required to maintain the change, the expectations do not rise in and of themselves. What sustained the change was sometimes small; literally. The ability to make a book small enough to carry...

And here's where modern day change similarly could learn from a past.
In telephone counselling, the landline is no longer a prime means of communicating. Young people are using mobiles, cell phones. And in this there are other actors at play; the cost of a call is significantly higher than the cost of text. Having limited income, the young person then develops a way of relating that is text based, they get used to it, it becomes the first option and the preferred option. This is sustained even when the receiver pays the cost of the communication transaction.
At this point it gets really interesting, because the small changes, being mobile with a phone, having cheaper text than calls, create a revolutionary moment for the 'old' system; how to meet young people where they are at in the medium they they are choosing to use. And what does this do in terms of reshaping those involved?

The argument that Shirkey makes is that when old stuff gets broken down faster than new stuff can be put in its place lends itself to experimentation, and more than this, experimentation based on plausible promises if one reads Here comes everbody. However in this blogpost, he instead refers to the demand for lies. Its as if we know that we dont know where this is going, so promise me that its going to be good; entice me with lies as i know you also don't know where this might lead. However, agreements with stakeholders need to be firmed up...'this is a change in name only', 'its the same but different', 'its only a tool', if we dont like it we can go back to what was'....such lies minimize the anxieties involved, and allow for movement forward. Its as if they create a keel for plowing through uncharted waters. Dont rock my boat ...keep things on an even keel...
From Clay Shirky:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.
And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

A last lie; here's Frodo helping ailsa write a thesis :)