the reality tunnel

I was listening to Morning Edition today and heard a really interesting story about a man in Iraq meeting a friend from Texas via the Internet.  The Texan loves the Bush administration and thinks the war in Iraq was justified and a good thing.  The Iraqi man agrees that extremists in Iraq are responsible for the violence and other problems in the country, but feels the US isn’t helping by being in Iraq.  This is a crazy example of a cross-cultural dialog.  What I find difficult to understand is the Texan’s unwillingness to accept the Iraqi’s criticism of the US occupation, even though the Iraqi seems to have a better perspective.  It makes me want to be more careful at watching out for my own ridiculous belief at times.

So Oliver is trying to figure out what’s best for his kids, Stuse is working on an audio documentary about alternatives in education from the roadtrip of free schools and alternative schools she took in the spring, Ben is reading Teruvina’s copy of the Teenage Liberation Handbook, and Patrick’s friend Rich is working on a web portal designed to encourage science and engineering study for kids in Indiana, but seemingly lacking an underlying educational vision.  All of these things came up in the course of one weekend, which is a little crazy.  At least regarding Rich’s situation, I found this link on boingboing to the awesome Instructables website that shows a student in Ghana making his own headphones.  So, it seems like the science fair on the Internet with feedback model has some merit.  I think it speaks to one important idea - that kid-specific content and knowledge frameworks aren’t nearly as successful as kids finding an interface to real knowledge frameworks whether it’s the public library, Instructables, or Wikipedia.

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