October 2007 Archives

The write-in campaign of James Leous and Robert Hendrickson have produced three short, funny YouTube advertisements that highlight some of the differences between their positions and those of the State College Vision slate of candidates. I blogged last week about my concerns that the State College Vision campaign has been blinded by the business interests of local developers.

This week I thought I would highlight these YouTube ads to try to give a sense of some of the concerns of the Leous and Hendrickson campaign.

A Negative Vision
The first ad is designed to emphasize the lack of a vision articulated by the State College Vision campaign. This campaign was born out of a vociferous community movement to block the renovation of the local high school, but has not set forth a positive agenda now that the renovation project has been abandoned.

Investing in children, not local business interests
This second ad highlights the commitment Leous and Hendrickson have to investing in the sort of innovative technological that will offer students in our district critical skills for success in a rapidly changing academic and professional world.

The Democratic Process
This final ad is designed to highlight the rather puzzling objection on the part of many on the State College Vision side that the election is basically over and that the Democratic Party's support for the Leous and Hendrickson write-in campaign amounts to an unwillingness to listen to the will of the people. However, of course, many independents were not permitted to participate in the primary election. Also, a number of people who supported the Vision slate of candidates because they opposed the High School rennovation may have changed their minds in the face of:

1. revelations about the business interests that funded the campaign and
   
2. the Visions campaign's failure to articulate a positive vision of how to preserve and strengthen the excellent tradition of education the current Board has worked so hard to establish and maintain.

The upcoming School Board election in State College seems to mark an important turning point for our schools. As someone with two young daughters who will enter the district in the next three or four years, I was very disturbed to read the following article from Voices of Central PA.

Although many people were clearly upset about the idea of renovating the High School, it seems that we have lost sight of the important question of who can best ensure that our schools continue to achieve excellence. It is more than a little concerning that local developers contributed so much money to the State High Vision slate of candidates.

Happily, it is still possible to counteract the influence of these developers because Jim Leous, my neighbor and colleague at Penn State, and Robert Hendrickson, who has served on the Board during a period in which the district established a strong record of excellence, are running as write-in candidates.

Nat Jackson and David Yanofsky have taken it upon themselves to reactivate the Penn State Atheist, Agnostic Association that was started two years ago by Richard Jeffery, a former philosophy major here at Penn State. Two years ago, the group focused largely on debating people with views different from theirs, including Gary Cattell, known as the Willard preacher. The goal then was to open up a dialogue about religion and belief.

Nat and David have something similar in mind as they reactivate the group, though dialogue is only one dimension of the group's mission. They seem also committed to the idea that the best argument against the notion that atheism and agnosticism are nihilistic positions that annihilate the values on which good deeds are done is to work with other religious organizations and charities to be a force for positive change in the local community.

I am very happy to see that they and the group are receiving substantive and fair coverage in the student newspaper, the Daily Collegian. It is disturbing, however, to hear that Nat and David have been threatened with physical violence as they held their sign that reads "Non-believers Unite in Disbelief" by students claiming to be Christians. The irony of such threats does not lessen their repugnance.

My experience as the faculty adviser of the Atheist, Agnostic Association is that the students involved in the group are responsible, thoughtful and dedicated people who embody one of the most important dimensions of life at the university: the willingness to investigate tenaciously and evaluate critically one's own core beliefs and the beliefs of others.

The quotation from Nat that concludes today's piece in the Daily Collegian bears repeating here: "People say 'what meaning can life have if there is no God?' But I believe that this one life is all we have. There is no permanence and that makes it more meaningful."

I received my new iPod Touch the other day and have had a few days to play with it. On the whole, I would say that it is very close to being one of the best handheld devices I have ever owned. At this point, however, there are significant drawbacks that are extremely frustrating. Let me mention a few issues:

• There is no ability to add events to the calendar. This is particularly galling because the iPhone has this functionality and someone at Apple decided to disable it on the iPoT. I can't think of a rationale for this, and it is extremely frustrating, particularly because of a second point:
• There is no support of Cisco's VPN software which is required to get on the wireless network at Penn State, where I teach. So, I have a beautiful new device with a calendar and WiFi capability, but I cannot get access to WiFi on campus where I spend much of my time, and I can't add calendar events locally on the device without WiFi access.
• To add to the calendar woes, even if I have WiFi access, Google Calendar as optimized for the iPhone does not yet work with the iPoT. (I can't help but hope this is just a matter of time.)
• There is no ability to access descriptions of podcasts on the iPoT (or the iPhone). I find this ridiculous. It is as if they designed the device without having a human use it in real life.

OK, having unloaded some of that frustration, I should mention that I have never owned a handheld device with the beauty and functionality of the iPoT's interface. The pinching, the flicking, etc. makes browsing the internet (when I have access) a real joy. I have even taken to reading Slate and the NYTimes on it as my preferred mode of interacting with these sites at home.

This interface and the device itself has enormous potential for teaching and learning. It would give students an easy way to edit, add and comment on blog posts from anywhere on campus (if the VPN issue is addressed). It allows for the viewing of enhanced podcasts, which look beautiful on the relatively large screen. My blog sites (The Long Road, CpL ePortfolio, my First-Year Seminar and my 20th Century Philosophy course) look wonderful on the machine and I anticipate that with MovableType 4.0, if you are to believe the boys at ETS Talk, my blogs and those of my students will be yet more accessible on the iPhone and iPot.

In all, I very much want to love this machine, but I can't until some of the basic flaws are addressed. My hope is that they all can be handled via firmware or even software upgrades in the very near future.