Editor, the Times & Transcript,

As a taxpayer, I would like to thank Moncton city council for showing the prudence and good sense to build a stone firehall in such a practical location.

The new firehall has immediate access to the highway, and is only seconds away from Mountain Road, both hospitals, north Moncton, downtown and the university. Certainly this makes more sense than locating where emergency responders would have to fight traffic every time they received a call.

And the new firehall will stand the test of time. I am so happy that City hall did not use vinyl siding. Vinyl may be cheap, but it looks cheap, especially on a public building, and after ten years would look faded and dilapidated. Brick is better than vinyl, of course, but it is not much cheaper than stone, and not as durable.

Stone is a material that demonstrates that we have a commitment to our city, that we expect it to last more than ten years, more than a hundred years, that we want to build not merely for function but also for aesthetics.

And stone is a material that demonstrates sound economic sense. It demonstrates that we are not willing to sacrifice the future to save a few dollars today. It demonstrates that we want, and get, value for our money.

As a taxpayer I want to invest in a city that is worth living in and a pleasure to visit. I want to be proud of our public buildings, not ashamed to see them on television because of the message they'll send. I want them to be around for centuries, not demolished every dozen years.

The constant caterwauling about the cost of public infrastructure is damaging to our city. New Brunswick has been poor for many years. We finally have the chance to invest in ourselves, to build a lasting future, and a few skinflints want to do everything on the cheap.

Well, you get what you pay for. If you want low low taxes, take a hike down the road and live in a city that can barely even afford water and sewage plants. If you want to live in a city to be proud of, stay here, and pay your investment in the future like the rest of us.

Responding to Clark Aldrich.

I have often written, the best place to learn about forestry is in a forest, the best place to learn about law is in a courtroom.

This is no doubt influenced by my own childhood, as I spent what added up to months in summer camps.

What I learned there has nothing to do with tests or academics. But I learned to sail a boat, paddle a canoe, build a fire, find food in the wilderness, sing (badly) at a campfire, and so much more.

I also learned attitudes of self-reliance and independence, camaraderie, ceremony, attentiveness, and appreciation for wild spaces. I would not be the person I am without that experience.

I wonder, why can't childhood be a series of adventures - two months at a camp, a month in a courtroom, two months traveling with police officers, three weeks at the fire station, and more?

What I want most of out an education, I think, is to spark a dream in a child's eye, a dream born out of authentic experience in a real world, and nurtured with the best care and support a society can provide.

Just testing, because Gary couldn't make it work in Blogger...

Copy the 'Embed this video' code from the TED page. In Blogger, switch to 'Edit HTML', paste in the TED code, then insert </embed> immediately before </object> at the end of the code. Pretty sloppy code from TED; I have to assume it's deliberate.

Copying Emma Duke-Williams's idea - here's Jane Hart's Slideshow of the Day list of the top 25 technologies - and where they fit (or not) in my own world:

• Firefox - It's my major workhorse. Don't use Flock.
• Delicious - I think I added a bookmark there once. I use my own system for bookmarks (which I then send out as a newsletter). And other people's unannotated del.icio.us links leave me cold.
• Google Reader - It's also a major workhorse, though I am slowly improving my own aggregator so it can take over from Google.
• Gmail - only as a backup. GMail resolutely won't let me use my own emai laddress , which is a deal-breaker for me. My own identity is - most importantly - mine. (I still remember having my downes@netscape.net email address unceremoniously dumped when AOL bought Netscape, and I swore I'd never allow that to happen again).
• Skype - I use it once in a while. It's certainly more reliable than other voice and video communication tools I've used.
• Google calendar - I use this quite a bit, which is a new thing for me. Not so much Google Calendar, but the idea of using any calendaring tool at all (I used to simply remember all my appointments, but I'm getting old...)
• Google Docs - I use it a little, but not a lot.
• iGoogle - I never use it. I have no use for it.
• Slideshare - I upload all my slideshows to Slideshare and find it really hand when I encounter a slide show embedded in a blog post (I will almost always view at least some of theslides).
• Flickr - I have a pro account and have uploaded, I don't know, around 10,000 photos.
• Voicethread - I have no use for it.
• WordPress - I don't use it, because I have my own blogging software that I wrote myself (that nobody else uses, but I'm OK with that).
• Audacity - I record all of my talks with Audacity. I'm also using it to digitize my vinyl albums.
• YouTube - I use Google Video to upload videos, because I started there, and I prefer the presentation there. I watch a lot of YouTube, though.
• Jing - I don't use it because I can't have screen captures recorded in Flash. I convinced NRC to purchase Camtasia for me. I also use Adobe Premiere Elements quite a bit.
• PBWiki - I have my own wiki installed on my website, and don't need to use PBWiki. It's an instance of UseMod Wiki, which I've customized to work with my own login system.
• PollDaddy - I have just installed Limesurvey on my website, and though I haven't used it yet, expect to employ it for some work this fall. For various reasons I am not willing to use a hosted polling solution.
• Nvu - Again, since I have my own system I have no need for this one.
• Yugama - haven't used this at all. Looks promising, though.
• Ustream - I've done a few trial broadcasts, but haven't had an occasion to use it,
• Ning -I agree with Emma: "I really don’t like Ning." The whole idea of a network on a single website is wrong.
• Freemind - I'm not a mind-mapping person, because I have found that mind-maps are (mostly) logically analagous to indented lists (which I can create just fine with a tab key). A nice free-hand drawing tool that straightened my lines and rounded my circles would be nice, but I haven't found anything yet.
• eXe - I will be testing this for a project, but I am not really a learning design person.
• Moodle - Not really. Sometimes I have an installation running (not at the moment, though). I'm not really an LMS person.
• Twitter - I send status updates from my facebook account, but I don't use it otherwise. If you want to tweet me, send an email.

I do find it interesting that the email clients have dropped off the list (except for GMail, which I won't even use for forwarding because of the volume of spam).

But more to the point, I find that I use my own system in place of many of the things in the list. Having my own website, and even more so, my own software, gives me tremendous flexibility, but at the cost of being a bit out of the mainstream.

That said, I don't trust the online services. I've had too many bad experiences - they all end up behaving like the phone company or the power company when they get large enough. Case in point. I would like to think that we will develop a more distributed network of personally managed online services.

That may be like tilting for windmills, I know. But I think the future will be different from the past...

Willingham's video is titled, "Learning Styles Don't Exist". I repeat the phrase in one of my summaries, and a Willingham defender comes back, "but he never says learning styles don't exist!"

Willingham says, "Good teaching is good teaching, and teachers don’t need to adjust their teaching to individual students’ learning styles." You suggest that listeners are taking this statement out of context. But it's the last line in the video, summing up, and follows the sentence, "What I've said about that theory (visual, auditory and kinesthetic) goes for the others too."

You complain, "Mr. Downes charges me [and others] with having closed the case on learning styles." In your other post, immediately after citing Willingham, "...teachers don’t need to adjust their teaching to individual students’ learning styles," you conclude, "Sounds good to me."

It's very annoying to see people say one thing, and almost in the same breath see it being denied as ever having been said. It's blatant dissemblance, and treats the reader as though he or she is unable to read.

Responding to Dave Pollard, who writes,

From now on, every time I am tempted to watch a "spectator sport", or a mass media information or entertainment production, I am going to stop myself and ask: What could I be doing instead that is more collaborative, and more participative, and take myself off the sidelines and out of the chair and into action, doing something, cooperatively, with others.

Um. No.

Two short stories.

1. I was in Memphis about a month ago. The Redbirds (local triple-A baseball team) were playing in their nice new downtown stadium. I went three nights in a row.

It was perfection. I had a seat on the first base side, even with home plate, about 6 rows in. The games proceeded at their pace, the crowd came in and cheered and chatted, the vendors sold me some hot nuts and a beer or Coke, and I simply appreciated the act, the art, of the sort. Watching Stansberry stroke a double down the left field line is a thing of beauty.

2. It's late at night. I'm listening to the Blue Jays game on the radio. They're playing in Detroit and there's a rain delay. The announcers come on, they update the other scores around the rest of the league, talk a bit about the current game, and then engage in a conversation on the game itself, some proposed rule changes, whether they should be undertaken, who they would favour, that sort of thing. Arcania.

And at the end of the conversation, a good ten of fifteen minutes later, they wrapped up, and the announcer said, "I hope you enjoyed that." And I realized, I had enjoyed that, not because of the topic, necessarily, but because it was simply high quality conversation - two knowledgable people having a friendly discussion about something that interested them.

So I don't think *my* enjoyment of sports, at least, has anything to do with the expertise or the affinity (and certainly very little to do with the competition).

I think, for me, sport is like art. I appreciate the beauty, the artistry, the spectacle, the grace. And whether this is expressed in the game itself, the setting, or the coverage, it's all the same to me - and actually, the totality of this is what really brings it together.

When I am sitting on a perfect summer evening watching a game and that little voice says, "What could I be doing instead that is more collaborative, and more participative," I have learned to say, "nothing."

Because, you know, it (life, and all that) is not about being "more collaborative, and more participative." It's about those moments of beauty, when the lead-off hitter strokes a double down the left field line, the runner scores from first in a cloud of dust, and this event, unknown to all of us in the second inning, will be what decides the issue in a 1-0 game.

The spectator is what makes any of this worth doing at all.

Not seeing that is, in an important way, not to see.

Responding to Larry Sanger, who has allowed himself to be dragged into the ridiculous "Is Google Making Us Stupid, threatening the end of civilization" debate.

I would say that civilization, if it is threatened, is rather more threatened by television (which has robbed an entire generation of the capacity to think critically, at least according to Al Gore (_The Assault on Reason_)) and by shallow, yellow journalism (a certain amount of which, sadly, manifests itself on the Britannica Blog).

That said, even the basic observations which are apparently agreed upon by all sides in this ridiculous debate fly against any semblance of reality, as the slightest observation would show clearly.

> * Our attention span is naturally shortened if we spend our time hopping from item to item online.

First of all, the statement is counterfactual. Some people spend some of their time hopping from item to item online. Many people - including most academics - continue to read lengthier works, whether or not they are online. I can think of any number of book-length items I have posted in my newsletter. I read them, and from what I can judge, others read them as well.

Moreover, our online time is not simply spent reading items on the web. A significant amount of time is spent playing games or otherwise interacting. Think of the hours spent by people building things in Second Life, or forming clans in World or Warcraft. My own introduction to the online world was to spend twelve hours at a time studying code, so I could learn how to build online dungeons. Millions of people, as can be easily seen by the creativity exercised on the web, spend hours upon hours in deep, concentrated thought on a single item.

And second, even granted the antecedent, the consequent does not follow. The presumption here is that the only way we could have a long attention span is if our attention is guided in some way, as in a lengthy novel or other work. However, a person can demonstrate a lengthy attention span even when flitting from one thing to the next. I did that this afternoon, in fact, working my way through a series of issues related to Sunbird calendaring with Thunderbird on Ubuntu. I went through dozens of divverent sites, following a concentrated chain of reasoning that existed nowhere in print, but only in my head, as I deduced the solution to my problem one clue at a time. This is very typical of web reasoning; I have documented the process in some of my writing (for example, 'Setting Up Sunbird'). In short, we can develop our capacity for concentrated thought through mosaics as well as with chains - and I daresay the skill that results from the former is a strengthened version of the latter, hardly weaker.

> * Many of us report that we’re more easily distracted now. (I admit it, but I’m not proud of it and I think I can improve.)

One wonders, more distracted than what?

Let us imagine, say, a person from the 50s. Do you think this person could concentrate on his or he work on the computer, with email in the background, occasional instant messages, a mobile phone, and the TV playing in the background (showing the Olympics, naturally, which jumps from thing to thing - as I am watching right now as I type) and my wife commenting on the action.

I daresay, not.

The suggestion that we are 'more easily distracted' flies in the face of observation. The most causal look at out environment makes it clear that we are deluged with distractions. And yet we are able to maintain our focus through that - you to type your missive, I to type my reply (and later on I'll go read some William Gibson while listening to the ball game).

We do more things, sure. But to say we are 'more easily distracted' is most assuredly false.

> * A lot of what is “happening” occurs online, not in professionally published books, journals, or magazines.

I'll grant you that.

But that's a good thing, especially considering the detritus that passes for 'quality' in books, journals and magazines.

> * There is far more out there that we want to read than we possibly can read.

This has always been the case, from some time after the Middle Ages on.

> So we tend to skim and read superficially, not thoughtfully.

There is no evidence of this. Indeed, the emergence of 'fisking' suggests a phenomenon quite the opposite. It was rare in the lump-publishing world to see a point-by-point refutation of an argument. In the online world, this is common. And the whole phenomenon of 'fact checking your ass' was an almost unknown talent in pre-internet days, an era when writers and politicians routinely got away with howlers.

What people need to recognize is that we've learned, in the electronic age, to process content - and especially textual content - at different speeds. We skim when we're searching - here we are looking for keywords, patterns, telling points, whatever. When we hit something important we slow down, and take in the content. When we hit the point where we want to engage, we take the content apart, considering it line by line, point by point.

Probably at no time in history have so many people been closely analyzing so much text. This will only increase as our skills at it increase (remember - we're coming from a pre-literate age, compared to what we can do today).

> * The classics have no constituency online.

False.

> Tolstoy isn’t in the blog ranking.

Google: "Results 1 - 10 of about 7,020,000 for tolstoy." I'll leave calculating the Google page rank for the various pages as an exercise for the reader.

> Dickens doesn’t appear atop digg.com.

False. Google again: "Results 1 - 10 of about 1,330 from digg.com for dickens."

> Newton and Leibniz aren’t going to be Slashdotted.

False. Google again: " Results 1 - 10 of about 1,780 from slashdot.org for newton." and " Results 1 - 10 of about 68 from slashdot.org for leibniz" (there's another 10 results for 'Leibnitz').

Did you even check these statements before making them?

Dickens, Tolstoy, Newton and Leibniz will all continue to have a constituency, precisely because they are classics (and, arguably, they are considered classics *because* they have a constituency). The suggestion that they don't show up in Technorati or Digg (aside from being false) is irrelevant. They show up in their own way, because they are a different type of work. And - ultimately - they all *will* show up, even in the blog rankings, as we can see from the 'Pepys Dairy' blog that was popular for a while, or the just-started 'Orwell Prize'.

My feeling is that the emergence of the internet (and the web) has come at just the right moment in history, because we could probably not have endured another generation raised in a state of semi-hypnosis glued to their televisions. The United States has raised a generation of children that believes a large number of things that are known to be false. Their media - the much vaunted 'voice of authority' has systematically misled them on matters of science and religion, history and politics.

Larry, I have less and less patience for a small self-appointed set of critics who are apparently darlings of the publisher set but who have no good grasp of the sort of thinking and learning that is taking place online and where it is leading us. It is an arena in which matter of fact and reason appear to have no place, where the sole currency is self-promotion, a dross best achieved by writing what the publishers want to hear. Such places are best avoided by those who pursue truth and reason, rather than mere self-aggrandizement.

Responding to Tom Young.

When I visited Saint John a year or two ago I was staying down near the convention centre and the mall downtown. I walked along the public path around the inner harbour, and it was very nice.

Then I decided I wanted to see the waterfront out on the Bay of Fundy itself, not just on the river. I walked all through Saint John looking for that waterfront, but all I saw was run-down housing and industries. The main part of Saint John is completely blocked from the sea!

If you were to design a coastal city, you couldn't do it worse. How do you take the city's most prime real estate, that should be a pleasure to live in, and completely block it from the sea?

It reminded me of the day before, when I went to see the Reversing Falls. The falls were there all right - but somebody had built a big factory (it looked like a power plant) right on top of them!

You see - the problem isn't just this one project, and it isn't just this one bit of harbourfront. It's that Saint John has been so badly treated by industry over the years - including, especially, Irving, which routinely gets breaks from the City government.

Now there's nothing left for people. Every last bit of real estate is taken by companies, like Irving, that seem to have a lock on city council.

Before I moved to New Brunswick 8 years ago I thought Saint John would be a nice place to live. But now I realize that we have more ocean front here in Moncton than they do in Saint John.

I think we should have a campaign here, targeted toward the poor people in Saint John who can't ever see the sea behind the factory fences:

NIH - "No Irvings Here"

Not strictly true, of course, as our laughingstock of a newspaper proves to us every day. But at least we use the best and most scenic land in our city for parks and recreation, not Irving offices.

And at least it looks like our Council - realizing that it must serve the interests of the city population and the other businesses in the city - has managed to learn not to cave every time an Irving asks them for a handout.

Our Councils (Moncton, Riverview, Dieppe) - despite the loud wails of protest from the Irving newspaper - spend money on parks, nice roads, bicycle paths, bridges, schools, swimming pools, and the rest. Come here to Moncton and you see a modern city with clean streets and buildings in good repair.

In Saint John, where the Irvings hold such sway, exactly the opposite is the case. After giving huge breaks to the Irvings, and browbeaten into keeping taxes low for the rest, the city of Saint John looks like it could not afford a dog-catcher, much less a public infrastructure program.

In your column you ask us to imagine that some other company was thinking of that land. Well it wouldn't happen! You can't set up shop in Saint John unless you're partnering with Irving - because if you aren't, you won't get any breaks from Council. And if you partner with Irving you understand that Irving is the top dog. Any breaks you get, you get through Irving. Period.

Tom, I am not opposed to industry and commerce, and I would normally support the efforts of a large company to locate in the city. But the Irvings have used an essential monopoly on commerce in the city - and media in the city - to create a system that enriches themselves while impoverishing everyone else.

We have managed very well in Moncton without the presence of Irving head offices or Irving refineries (especially once we finally got rid of that polluted eyesore the Irvings left on our riverfront). We have a diverse commercial and industrial base, with city government taking into account the needs of all citizens, not a privileged few.

The problem isn't the presence of industry and commerce - it's the special deals the Irvings manage to get as a result of their comfy relationship with government and stranglehold over media, a special relationship that favour them but drives out all other industry (all other competition!) in the city.

John Larkin links to Bill Kerr along with an article in the Guardian, Kids need the adventure of risky play and an article in the Mail online, How children lost the right to roam in four generations.

The premise is that children today have lost their right to roam, and that this sort of protective attitude is harming them.

Maybe. I ranged far and wide as a child: below is a map of the places I visited on my bicycle between the ages 10-14:

After I was 14, I got a part time job in Ottawa, and my attention was focused on the city. Between the ages of 14 and 16 I wandered in and out of the city pretty much at will, and my range included the entire city. At 16 I got a motocycle, which gave me a range of about 300 miles in diameter. I also traveled to Britain with a school group (which I ditched once we hit London, giving me that entire city to roam).