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The Novel as a Tool for Survival - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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The Novel as a Tool for Survival - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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The Chronicle Review

David Cutler for The Chronicle Review

- André Breton

There is something "primitive" in the great issues that have traditionally concerned writers, Lionel Trilling submitted in "The Meaning of a Literary Idea." Questions about the nature of thought and man "match easily in the literary mind with the most primitive human relationships. Love, parenthood, incest, patricide: These are what the great ideas suggest in literature, these are the means by which they express themselves." Completing the thought, Trilling went on to write, "Ideas, if they are large enough and of a certain kind, are not only not hostile to the creative process, as some think, but are virtually inevitable to it. Intellectual power and emotional power go together."

Fully committed to the modernist charter with its complex splicing of aesthetic and historical forces, Trilling also felt the presence of something elemental, something not easily definable or communicable. This feeling probably contributed to the Freudian drift of his later work and almost certainly prompted his own fictional sorties. More broadly, the primitive underpinning of literature also attests to the unavoidable tension between an individual's need to survive and express himself and the equally powerful need to establish communities that enable, as well as discourage, self-expression.

Without getting bogged down in evolutionary theory, we can infer that the Darwinian struggle to procreate - because it requires some semblance of security - leads to communities that help human beings sustain themselves. Rules of conduct are established that inevitably repress some of those primitive desires, which subsequently appear in literature. Thus the institutions that define civilization also reflect the tensions in our own nature. For just as no society can survive if it allows the darker facets of our nature to surface, no society can truly function if it disowns the human impulses that helped establish it. By imposing order, we compensate for the impulse to create disorder. Fascism, then, is an orderly society governed by those who secretly yearn for disorder; democracy is a disorderly society governed by those who explicitly believe in order. All this is to say that the tension between individual freedom and the society that seeks to protect that freedom is embedded in the moral and legal restraints that, in effect, repress the energies that originally ushered them into existence.

What does this have to do with literature? Quite a lot. Fiction, speaking very generally, is about the individual in society, about the expectations and conflicts that color a life when an obdurate reality stands in the way of one's self-image or desires. Novels don't have to be overtly political, but they do, in one guise or another, reflect the civilization that helped shape them, and, as Orwell liked to say, "Inequality [is] the price of civilization." The invisible centerpiece of every great novel is the protagonist's rebellion or coming to terms with his or her place in the scheme of things.

Novels, of course, communicate a lot more in carrying out their design, but what seems to me beyond dispute is that literature, when undertaken seriously, is a celebration not of life but of awareness, an awareness of the human condition, which is both communal and individual and inevitably strikes a balance, palpable or barely perceptible, between the two. Each of us, then, is a fulcrum where the private and the public meet, where inner and other-directed yearnings sometimes clash. Literature gets written because of this, and what we understand and love in it, as Erich Auerbach wrote, "is a human existence, a possibility of 'modification' within ourselves."

Such modification originally came in the form of catharsis, a building up and purging of emotion, but was eventually, as Greek tragedy gave way to lyric poetry, and poetry to prose, reduced to pleasure and edification. The Romantic poets raised the stakes, opening a direct passage from the subjective to the transcendent, but it was only when novelists deliberately began imbuing fiction with personal, moral, and psychological significance that the individual - independent from but molded by society - came to possess an aesthetic identity. And once that occurred, the foundation of literature subtly and permanently shifted.

Literature is where we go to identify ourselves, where we shake off outmoded attitudes and beliefs.

By informing how we live and how we might live, the novel became the vehicle of our discontent. It allowed our suffering and suggested we had cause to suffer, and, if I may reach a bit, helped us survive. In its own formative way, literature is an adaptive tool that keeps pace with the small and gradual gestations of the human mind. Although a great novel can be a loose, baggy monster or as spare as a lama's bedroom, its literary status rests on an ability to imagine the lives of men and women in light of the societal conditions that animate them. If it works, if it's serious, the narrative - whatever form it takes - edges ineluctably toward a realism in which individual destiny has meaning (even when it's represented to have none).

Literature, then, does not consist of everything that gets written or published, but is special by reason of the circumstances that produced it, which include the history that led up to it and the history of the person who conceived it. Fixed in time but set free by imagination, it charts our changing relationship to the issues that intrigue us: "Whence and whither, birth and death, fate, free will, and immortality," which Trilling believed "were never far from systematic thought." Literature is where we go to identify ourselves, where we shake off outmoded attitudes and beliefs, where we pause to evaluate our progress.

The only mandate here is one of exploration. Writers have an obligation to interrogate reality, to make sure that our relation to the world is or is not what it appears to be. This sounds rather grand but can be accomplished in a number of ways: through layered Shakespearean rhetoric, nuanced Chekhovian observation, lengthy Proustian ruminations, collagist Joycean soliloquies, or minimalist Carveresque touches. What it boils down to is an intelligent appraisal of the nature of things, including our humanity, which, if we're honest, contains a good dose of ignorance. What are we or the universe doing here? What is the meaning of existence? In this capacity, literature is, at bottom, a wondering, an attempt to get to the bottom of things, or, at least, a faithful, if oblique, portrayal of how things are. That's why writers at peace with themselves or who just want to cobble together readable books aren't going to offer "a possibility of 'modification' within ourselves."

Does this mean that every writer has to effect a change in every reader? Not at all. Nor must every writer, as Cyril Connolly urged, produce a masterpiece. Nonetheless, critics should know which books make the grade and which don't. This needs saying every so often because too many books are given a free pass by readers and reviewers alike. Although Edmund Wilson was griping about the number of fawning reviews 80 years ago, imagine his amazement at a literary culture in which the canon has been toppled, where poets of no particular lyric skill are laureates in the making, and where the distinction between genre and literary has all but disappeared.

But as hard as Wilson was on most books, he was a waffler compared with his ex-friend Nabokov. While Wilson famously scorned the mystery and detective tale, Nabokov ripped into any writer whose prose didn't measure up to his stringent demands. Middlebrow fiction with intellectual pretensions especially enraged him. He termed such books poshlust, a play on the Russian poshlost, meaning trivial, banal, vulgar, and mediocre. Like Orwell, Nabokov didn't mind the obviously cheap or superficial (Superman, for example, was OK), but he despaired of those best-selling "stirring, profound and beautiful" novels that get "poshlustily reviewed" and which reinforce and disseminate "the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive." In short, he preferred to sit down with Ross Thomas rather than Thomas Mann, whom he unfairly called "this ponderous conventionalist, this tower of triteness."

What irritated Nabokov was less the product than its critical reception. Too many novels, he thought, were sham that went unrecognized, a facile mimicry of aesthetic and intellectual values that fooled us into thinking we were reading something important. Although Nabokov could be spectacularly intolerant of some very capable writers, he had a point: One shouldn't confuse the good with the great or pretend that competence is anything more than that. Because what's at stake is not only how we regard the novel; it's the regard we have for ourselves and the predicament we find ourselves in.

What that predicament is depends in no small part on who you are and how much significance you allot to those large ideas that Trilling discerned in literature. If words such as "beauty," "meaning," and "morality" seem extraneous or irrelevant, if the prospect of your death and the death of others doesn't overtrouble you, if the phrasing of a sentence or the parsing of a thought doesn't interest you, then it's a good bet that many poems and novels aren't going to end up in your mental attic. Terry Eagleton, who bravely wrote a book titled The Meaning of Life, naturally considers the meaning of death: "To live in an awareness of our mortality is to live with realism, irony, truthfulness, and a chastening sense of our finitude and fragility. In this respect at least, to keep faith with what is most animal about us is to live authentically." Sounds like a pretty fair definition of the novel to me.

Nonetheless, it's foolish to think that the human condition troubles everyone or that everyone loves or admires great writing. More-immediate concerns perturb us: the blatant inequities found in many societies, the nasty disruptions that rattle our personal lives, the malapropisms of news anchors. That said, one must also acknowledge those readers who open a book because they, like Eagleton, believe that there is something beyond our troubles and our blessings - and it isn't God and it isn't Art. To put it in the starkest terms possible: There's something both very wrong and very right with just being alive, a feeling that weighs not only on philosophers but also on anyone who looks around and thinks. And it doesn't need a writer or a philosopher to bring it home. "The world is a hellish place," Tom Waits said, "and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering."

The truth is that a mind at peace is not going to create a masterpiece of literature.

"We tell stories in order to live," Joan Didion wrote. Maybe so; we certainly can't seem to hold back from telling them. The truest story ever told is the one about the generation that passeth away and the generation that cometh. The most imaginative one is about God and eternal life. The rest are just details. But Lord, what those details amount to. Now, one can approach them in Wodehousian fashion: "What a queer thing life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean." Or one can be Proustian in confronting them or Jamesian or Lawrentian or Faulknerian or Dostoyevskian, et cetera, so long as intelligence and awareness are driven by dramatic sensitivity and vibrant use of language; by that conflation of intellect and emotion.

The point is - to repeat - an interrogation of life, one's own and others'. The interrogation can be dilatory, amusing, nuanced, philosophical, or earnest; it can address love, war, family life, friendship, society, or solitude. It can be driven by fear, loneliness, hatred, despair, ambition, self-loathing, or ennui. It can even be a feeling we don't recognize or wish to admit to: "The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone," Camus wrote in The Fall. "What does it matter, after all, if by humiliating one's mind one succeeds in dominating every one? I discovered in myself sweet dreams of oppression." Whatever the case, literature stems from an existential dissatisfaction with life itself, with that infernal irresolution of observation and meaning, of knowing and truth. And the truth is that a mind at peace is not going to create a masterpiece of literature; it simply won't feel the need to.

Needless to say, there is more than one kind of literature, but aside from some flagrant and temporary omissions from the canon ( Moby-Dick and The Great Gatsby were denied entry for decades), we pretty much know a great book when we see it, even if we disagree about its merits. We also, I believe, know which books strive for greatness and which strive for something less. The choice of many writers to tell stories from a cloistered fictive cranny or send their characters into elaborate fantastical realms is as valid as any earnest attempt to write another Brothers Karamazov. The question is: Should their works be judged alongside Dostoyevsky's?

Literature's borders have always been porous, but it's only recently that those borders are being rubbed away. In a piece in The New York Review of Books, Tim Parks makes the point that "for better or worse, almost all distinction between the way different kinds of novels are presented has largely disappeared."

Newspapers review Dan Brown, Alice Munro, J.K. Rowling, and Orhan Pamuk with equal solemnity, attention being driven by the sense that the writer is winning prizes or moving copies or being pushed as the book of the season by a major publisher, not by a lucid curiosity for whatever may be written between the covers. At the same time serious publishing houses have discovered the trick of packaging genre fiction as if it was great literature; one thinks of the prestigious Italian publisher Adelphi, reissuing all seventy-five of Simenon's Maigret novels in very much the same format and with the same $25 price tag as their editions of Thomas Bernhard, Sándor Márai, or Nabokov.

For Parks, the state of things comes down to this: Book sales drive critical reception, not the other way around, and at the same time, many so-called literary successes are, in fact, not selling as well as one might think. He also professes not to worry about "the blurring of lines between literary and genre fiction." This I find more troublesome, not because genre fiction is necessarily slighter but because "literariness" itself is now being touted as a genre in both the academy and the general press.

Literary work is not a genre. You can't have bad literary writing in the way that you can have bad mysteries or bad science fiction, because then it wouldn't be literary. Although any definition of literature will be inconclusive, it doesn't mean that literature as a category doesn't exist. At some point in our history, language in the form of poems and stories was harnessed to explain the world to the self and the self to the world. After that, literature could not in good conscience be seen as arbitrary but rather as something that answers a basic human need: It's part of the civilizing process, it helps us to thrive. Literature may not exactly be indispensable, but, in retrospect, it does seem inevitable.

Like music, drawing, or sculpture, literature makes life more manageable; but unlike the other arts, it speaks to us in the way we speak to one another; it's the self-conscious repository of consciousness. And though many minor novels, poems, plays, and essays also serve a purpose by distracting and entertaining us, we shouldn't mistake pleasure for meaningful achievement. It's simply a matter of making distinctions. The house of books has many rooms, and not all are showcases of wit, wisdom, and nuance. There are very smart writers who don't write canonical works, and there are literary writers who may state the obvious, sometimes infelicitously.

But behind all memorable work is a presiding literary intelligence, an intelligence that makes Shakespeare and Milton, Chekhov and Kafka, for all their manifest differences, worth studying. It's what raises their voices above others. As much as serious writers want to attract an audience, they also want to be original. So they dutifully acquaint themselves with tradition, the better to carve out their own unique place in it; and it's that elusive combination of learning, intelligence, purpose, imagination, phrasing, and rhythm that enables them to do so. What such writers read informs their work, just as the books we read inform our response to that work.

It's almost no use to peruse certain poems and novels without at least some knowledge of the tradition from which they emerged. To do less is to ignore the reason they exist in the first place. They exist because artists are selfishly intent on creating something that doesn't look or sound like anything else. Readers, too, are selfish in the sense that we respond to books because they reflect or confirm our own understanding of experience. And because, ultimately, each of us experiences alone, reading a poem or novel is part of the solitude that is ourselves; and solitude, as Philip Larkin observed, is essentially selfish. That's why I know better than you, and you know better than me. Nonetheless, one of us might be wrong.

Arthur Krystal's new book, This Thing We Call Literature, is out this month from Oxford University Press.

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The Chronicle Review - André Breton There is something "primitive" in the great issues that have traditionally concerned writers, Lionel Trilling submitted in "The Meaning of a Literary Idea." Questions about the nature of thought and man "match easily in the literary mind with the most primitive human relationships.

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These are women we wish to be, women we are, women we admire, women we fear. These are the fictional women we're obsessed with.

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Student Goal Setting in Elementary School

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Student Goal Setting in Elementary School

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We have such an awesome opportunity to empower students to set goals and celebrate with them when they reach their goals. Most students don't reflect on their own learning naturally. It's not an innate skill that students have when they come to school. Actually, most adults don't have that skill either. It's something that needs to be taught.

This past week, we've done quite a bit of work in our year-long journey of setting goals in second grade.

First, as I've mentioned in previous posts, I've been implementing Whole Brain Teaching. One of the components is a Super Improver Team. Here's our wall:

Each student has a star and for making improvements, they receive a sticker. When their star has 10 stickers they move up to the next level (blue - learner). They keep going. For every 10 stickers, they move up the levels.

The introduction of the Super Improver Team led to a discussion about how to make improvements and goals setting. What kinds of improvements could students make? What would "count" to get a sticker?

So we started talking about SMART goals. We started with the concept of setting "specific" goals and made this anchor chart of the concept of SPECIFIC. We looked at the word specific in a Frayer Model and looked at some examples and non-examples. That aspect is the most powerful part of the anchor chart. I didn't make it very "pretty", but students got the idea of what they word specific means.

Take a look at more SMART Goal Setting Resources in this blog post.

For our first goal, I decided to focus on behavior. It is a bit more tangible than an academic goal, and students are still learning how to "be" in our classroom, so it's the perfect opportunity to change a few things before they become a habit.

I gave students some ideas on good behavior goals. Basically, I wrote down all the things that have been annoying me, behavior-wise, for the past week. I listed them in a positive light, i.e.: what a student could do, not what they can't do.

I gave students an opportunity to look over the goals with their table groups. Each student chose one goal to work on for the next week.

I put the "Improvements" in page protector sleeves so that I can use them when I conference with a student. I can circle three or four and say something like, "I notice that you could really use some improvement on these. Which one would you like to choose to work on?" That way, there's choice within structure. I can guide what a student chooses, but the student still has choice.

I did add a couple more at the end (on the copy you see above), that aren't necessarily annoying behaviors, but improvements that my quieter students could make. You know, those kids who just sit there, but aren't disruptive!

After students determined what they wanted to work on, I had them write it down. I'm sure there's research on this somewhere, but I've heard that writing down a goal means that you're more likely to accomplish it.

In addition to the more complicated Goal Setting and Data Portfolios I have, I came up with this simple goal setting form that I can tape down to a student's desk and that we can collect over the course of the year.

We set to work writing down our behavior goals. Here are a few student examples.

You can see that some students need a bit of work on choosing ONE goal. I also realized after we did this activity, that the "I will . . . " part of the goal setting form, doesn't always lend itself well to behavior goals, since most behavior goals are an action in and of themselves. They don't always require an additional action statement that tells how you're going to accomplish the goal.

I changed up my form a bit to have a variety of options, including learning and behavior goals and a couple of different formats. Would you like a copy? Click this link SMART Goal Setting Forms or the picture below. Take a look at more SMART Goal Setting Resources in this blog post.

The final part of goal setting that is very important, especially for children is the celebration! Children need to know that there's something waiting for them when they accomplish their goal. Some people have an intrinsic motivator to set and accomplish goals. I'm one of them. But, most people don't. The celebration is a great motivator.

As a class, we brainstormed a variety of celebrations, both big and small. Most celebrations were for our class goals, but a few of these could be for individual goals, too. The idea was to get students excited about accomplishing their goals.

SMART Goal setting isn't just for individuals. I use to all the time to set class goals. We set behavior goals on our ScoreBoard (more positive than negative points), percentage goals on our computerized math program, number goals on how many stars we got for doing homework, etc.

There are a myriad of possibilities for whole group goal setting. Figure out what you want your class to do and set a goal on it.

I've done a few other blog posts on Goal Setting, if you're interested in more information:

Do you set goals in your classroom, either individual or whole class? I'd love to hear how you help students see that their actions are important and make a difference in their lives.

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Student Goal Setting in Elementary School

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We have such an awesome opportunity to empower students to set goals and celebrate with them when they reach their goals. Most students don't reflect on their own learning naturally. It's not an innate skill that students have when they come to school. Actually, most adults don't have that skill either.

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Documenting Through the Lens of Curation: Amplifying Information & Making It More Accessible | Langwitches Blog

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Documenting Through the Lens of Curation: Amplifying Information & Making It More Accessible | Langwitches Blog

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The #amplifiEDU Twitter chat from September 30th, was documented through the lens of a Twitter Newbie through a screencast of the chat- Becoming More Connected, commentated and individual components of the chat.

On October 14th, the 3rd #ampliefiEDU Twitter Chat was held with the topic of Documenting FOR Learning.

Amplifying learning sometimes means looking at information, filtering, evaluating that information and re-mixing that information, possibly through a different medium, to make that information more visible and accessible to a larger audience. Different people, documenting through their own lens of CURATION can tell the story of that information from different perspectives.

Using different documentation techniques, we can make thinking, learning and perspectives around the topic of documentation FOR learning visible.

Twitter Storify Archive (by choosing to archive the Twitter Chat, also filtering non-pertinent information), we are curating and amplifying the chat, making it available for future use, amplifying the audience asynchronously, beyond the ones who were present at the actual time of the chat)

Sprouting new Ideas by Melina Seifert (Melina shares a bilingual post (English & Spanish) and further amplifying her learning by making it accessible to non-English speakers)

Curating People by Andrea Hernandez (Andrea creates and infographic and uses the time invested in creating that infographic as part of her learning and thinking process versus seeing the infographic image file as an end product)

Below you will see an infographic as I shifted through all responses to the 6 main questions posed during the chat and grouped them visually together for a better, more organized overview of participants' responses

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Documenting Through the Lens of Curation: Amplifying Information & Making It More Accessible

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The #amplifiEDU Twitter chat from September 30th, was documented through the lens of a Twitter Newbie through a screencast of the chat- Becoming More Connected, commentated and individual components of the chat. On October 14th, the 3rd #ampliefiEDU Twitter Chat was held with the topic of Documenting FOR Learning.

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Give Heart Maps a Rest! Try Writing Territory Maps | TWO WRITING TEACHERS

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Give Heart Maps a Rest! Try Writing Territory Maps | TWO WRITING TEACHERS

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Give Heart Maps a Rest! Try Writing Territory Maps

"Imagine you are a stick of gum on someone's shoe. Write about a day in your life."

When I was a student, this was a typical writing assignment. We were given "creative" prompts and assigned what to write. Truth be told, I liked it, because 1) I enjoyed writing stories and 2) I didn't know any differently about how writers come up with topics in the real world. Thankfully, we now know better about how to help writers choose personally meaningful topics. At the start of the year, many teachers turn to the heart map to help students mine their lives for topics that are important to them. The heart map is a wonderful tool, but when it is done year after year, teachers worry that students might lose their enthusiasm for this technique. One alternative is writing territory maps.

Writing territories, a phrase coined by Nancie Atwell, describe the areas in your life that you want to write about. It can include people, places, events, passions, hobbies, worries, dreams, milestones, and other subjects that are close to your heart. They can be a list in your notebook or they can take on a more visual display. Many summers ago, at the Long Island Writing Project (LIWP) Summer Institute, I learned about writing territory maps. The idea is to think of a place or a concept that has special meaning for you and make that place into a map. Your writing territories become part of the map. I still remember one teacher made her writing territory map an amusement park, including a ride called "The Marriage Free-Fall." Other maps teachers created included cruise ships, gardens, a baseball diamond and a stage. This summer, I co-facilitated the LIWP Summer Institute and the participants once again created writing territory maps.

This year, I want to try writing territory maps with my third graders. Here is how I envision it going:

1. I will show students my writer's notebook and explain how there are some topics that I write about often, usually my children and being a teacher. I will explain that writers often write what is closest to their hearts and these topics can be thought of as their writing territories. Showing them a graphic organizer I developed for writing territories, I will model how I filled mine out and then give them an opportunity to write their own writing territories.

2. Later in the day, I plan to read Goin' Someplace Special by Patricia McKissack, to the students. Before reading the book, I would ask students to take a few minutes to free write about a special place in their lives. Students could predict what the "someplace special" is in the book as they think about their own favorite place.

3. The next day, I would share the book My Map Book by Sara Fanelli, where she shows maps of nontypical things, like a map of her dog, a map of her tummy, and a map of her heart. At this point, I would show students how I can take my favorite place and my writing territories and combine them into a map!

4. I would share with my students how the library is my all-time favorite place. I plan to model how I incorporated my writing territories into a map of the library.

6. After modeling my writing territory map, I would invite students to talk with their writing partners, sharing their territory list and their free write about their special place. Students could discuss how they plan on combining their lists into a map of their special place.

7. Students will get a sheet of white paper and use art materials to create their own writing territory map. When students are finished, the territory maps could be shared and celebrated. Perhaps they could be hung in the classroom and a photograph of the map can be placed in the student's notebook. An option could certainly be to staple the map right into the writer's notebook.

After reading Digital Reading: What's Essential in Grades 3-8 by Franki Sibberson and William Bass II, I am on the lookout for ways to purposefully integrate technology. To bring writing territory maps into the digital age, Thinglink can be used to make the territory maps interactive. I created a writing territory map specific to finding topics to write about for this blog, Two Writing Teachers. Many of the topics I came up with have been explored on this site already and it is helpful to see what has been written before. Here is my interactive map for ideas for this blog:

If students have a digital version of their territory maps with links to sites that will help them get started with their writing, I think this could be a useful upgrade to the paper map. What other visual representations do you use to help students select ideas for personally meaningful writing?

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Give Heart Maps a Rest! Try Writing Territory Maps

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"Imagine you are a stick of gum on someone's shoe. Write about a day in your life." When I was a student, this was a typical writing assignment. We were given "creative" prompts and assigned what to write.

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The Secret Book Society by Cathlin Shahriary | Nerdy Book Club

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The Secret Book Society by Cathlin Shahriary | Nerdy Book Club

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The Secret Book Society by Cathlin Shahriary

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It started as a spark, a sudden burst of inspiration that struck me over the summer. It was probably due to the insane amount of books I had consumed while being stuck off of my feet recovering from surgery or the pain meds, but nevertheless the idea struck me - I should start a book club....

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Old writer on the block: A question of copyright

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Old writer on the block: A question of copyright

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In 1980, I was given the task of investigating a giant scam that was being played out against the New South Wales Government. I was middle management, and the take would have been $200,000, which was a lot of money back then, ~12 times my annual salary, as near as I can recall. It was a fraud, as I showed, but I had so much fun tracking it down, that my joy of discovery showed through in my report, which one of my colleagues dubbed The Acid Drops. In fact, my dissection and skewering was so savage that, even though it was all true, it was placed under seal, never to be released, though six months ago, I released it anyhow, under the 30-year rule.

Well, Black Mac Rides Again!

This blog entry is about how somebody (1) failed to observe due courtesy and legal requirements in using copyright material, without permission (or (2), as a poor alternative, attribution), and then when I tracked her down, (3) failed to offer an acceptable admission of guilt and an unqualified apology. Those are three errors that I am, by this public exposure, ensuring that she and her museum will think twice about making again.

The offensiveness was compounded by the fact that the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum, the organisation in whose name she published my work, had claimed copyright in my work. It was not helped by the museum failing to admit this was totally unacceptable. Here is the proof, gathered before they could erase the evidence:

It did not help when people at the museum suggested that I ought to be satisfied that they took my material down when I objected - even though they only took it down because I warned them of the serious consequences if they did not. At every stage, the museum's representatives have been one or more of truculent, offensive, impertinent and stupid.

Plagiarism is unethical and immoral. I work very hard to make taking the credit for my work a bad choice. That is the case, even when the taking is more a matter of incompetence, which is how I regard the way the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum took over my work and craft, without permission - and has since failed to offer a proper apology or offer any compensation.

Their pathetic excuse is that they would void their insurance cover by admitting any liability. I rather suspect that they voided the cover when they admitted they had insurance, but I have told them repeatedly that if they undertake to provide the written apology I require, I will undertake not to sue them. I am busy, I have better things to do than sue people who behave like idiots, but I need to publicise what they have done.

This entry isn't so much about their offence: it is mainly about what it is like to have your work plagiarised, how plagiarists, whether clumsy amateurs or slick thieves, can be caught out, and some robust methods of making them regret their actions.

First, a bit of background on my policy of sharing:

I am a volunteer myself, and I contribute to a newsletter for that organisation, but what I submit for them is original, based on my own work and in my own words. My work is intellectually honest.

I am very kind to museums, as the example on the right will show. It is from the "Making Tracks" installation at the Michigan State University Museum, and two weeks ago, I had acknowledgement of my efforts to find a good copy of this pic for them. Look at the bottom left to see my name.

In the past two months, I have provided Gallipoli images to meet a request from a commemorative committee, images of Hakea fruits opening to help somebody resurrecting an old pamphlet and I have written several magazine articles, all for free. I like to help people and show all courtesy to those who are courteous enough to me.

This week, I took time from a heavy writing schedule and prosecuting this battle, to prepare two quizzes on Valentine's Day to share on school librarians' lists in Australia and the US. I like to be helpful and to be seen as an ornament to my profession.

Note: I am not a librarian, but as a social climber, I like hanging out with them. My profession these days is writing useful educational stuff. I educate young people, librarians, teachers - and I teach memorable lessons to amateur museums whose staff and officials do the wrong thing. People only have to ask, and I will help out.

Note inserted in April: I'm such a nice bloke, I'm giving away Many Voices for free. This is a 1.4 million word, 20 meg PDF file of copyright-free original resource material in Australian history. I have claimed a compilation copyright in this, mainly so I can state that the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum is expressly forbidden to use it. Anybody else has open slather. As you can see, I'm generous, but I don't allow others to "generously" help themselves.

While I lay traps for plagiarists, I found the problem file while I was writing a pro bono article for a school librarians' journal on the risks you take as a writer. In passing, I had referred in that article to how Harry the Camel shot his master, John Horrocks, and I wondered if an explanation was needed. I used my friend Google, and found a well laid-out and clearly well-researched piece.

Reassured that the matter was adequately covered, I was about to move on, when something about the style caught my eye. I looked again and it dawned on me that it was familiar - in fact, those were my words!

And on the home page, I saw this:

My text, copyright to them? Not on my watch! Mind you, it was a bit changed from what I had published in 2007. Maybe the lady just thought she was a better writer, but I know enough about frauds (see here and here) and hoaxes to have my doubts.

I am sure that if she had known my past history of rogue-catching, she would have acted differently, because I hunt them down.

I am fairly sure she wandered into the minefield, completely, blissfully unaware, ignorant of the law of copyright, but as Latin speakers say, Ignorantia juris non excusat, while others say the same thing when they observe that "ignorance of the law is no excuse". Friends have urged me to sue them, but that would probably break them, and I only want them to sit up and pay attention.

(This is why it was very silly of them to tell me they were insured. As you will see, it's an open-and-shut case, and I believe their insurance company would move to settle, ASAP, to avoid ballooning costs. I would prefer to get the museum's Trust in the witless box and see them cross-examined, but it will never happen. I'm a nice person, but I have my off days.)

Time, then, for a bit of background on my policy of NOT sharing:

I have three main problems with people who misappropriate my work:

Type 1. The people who send me an airy email like this one that I will "I am writing a book about Australian humour, and I found one of your précis:
Crooked Mick stories on the internet. I won't be able to pay you, but as you put it on the web for free, I'm sure you won't mind if I use it."

There was no please, no offer of credit, and it got a robust negative from me. I told the writer that I am a professional writer, my fee was $300 plus GST, paid up-front, and if I caught him using it without paying, I would seek to have the edition pulped, and I cc'ed it to his publishers (who have in the past been my publishers). He was just an idiot.

Type 2. The people who take one of my carefully crafted and meticulously planned web pages, and put it on their site as their own work. These people are out-and-out thieves. And idiots.

I have a number of school-oriented web pages that have drawn more than half a million hits, several that are over the million mark and one that is somewhere past 4 million. All are freely available as educational tools. I share stuff.

The last of these gets stolen, every so often, by high school teachers in the US. People are granted explicit permission to store the page locally for their own use, and I even offer a PDF version that they can print off to give the text to their students in compact form. I do not allow people to post copies on the web, because they can point to my page instead.

Still, some of them do grab my page, cut out the paragraphs that mention me, and when they do they get burned. So how do they get caught? Simple: there are watermarks on my work and I will explain those later.
I don't waste time asking them to take it down, I take them down instead. I find their school, then I get the email addresses of eight or ten senior staff in the school, plus a couple of senior people somewhere further up in their school system, and I send them all the URLs for the offending page and my page, asking that they order the thief to take the page down and go in for re-training. I make it clear that I have the skills and the will to make a lot of fuss, but will settle for a touch of honesty.

Type 3. The present case. My prose was used without my permission by a no doubt well-meaning but foolish amateur. She was foolish because:

* She thought she could get away with it;

* She picked the wrong target (me); and

* When caught, she tried to babble her way out of it, rather than just admitting her guilt.

She claims now (through her trust president) that she found my text online and thought it was acceptable to use it. I had assumed she had copied it from my book, Australia's Pioneers, Heroes & Fools, but I accept that it is quite possible she found it in an email I sent on January 28, 2006, to the Oz Teachers email list. That email drew on the manuscript of the book in question, which I was then writing, and I was sharing ideas for new curricular content that was a bit more interesting than the same-old, same-old. I encouraged my professional colleagues to use stuff like that, but I gave nobody permission to seize my words and claim copyright on them.

She was remarkably slow to come up with the alternative source, and while I was waiting, I created the graphic below.

The image shows two sets of text, with the common material high-lighted. There are 196 words in my text. All but 12 of those words appear in the second block. That's about 94%, which cannot be a coincidence - and the pattern continues throughout the 1500-odd words of "their" article.

One reason I suspect now that she used the email is that I revise quite a lot, and I can see several places where her text is closer to the email. I can't be bothered looking in detail: the simple fact remains that it was my text, my work, her museum claimed the copyright in it, and there is a lack of regret.

The people at the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum, however, seem to think that if they can prove the words were filched from my email, they are safe. They aren't. My words, wherever they appear, with or without that c in a circle thing or any claim to copyright, are still mine.

This is my way of fixing that lack of regret. I gave the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum plenty of time to get their house in order, but they failed to do so. So be it upon their own heads. This is where they get to regret it, nolens volens. (By the way my occasional bursts of legal Latin are mainly to frighten their "legal advisor", who appears to be a suburban solicitor whose main business is conveyancing.)

So was it plagiarism? I challenge readers: would you believe that what the museum published could have been independently written by anybody else? Not a chance! Those were my words in almost all of the second passage. Same words, same order. As a friend at the Australian Society of Authors commented when I posted the comparison on Facebook, "game, set and match!".

As I have said, I am very generous about sharing ideas and material, provided people ask my permission and give me an appropriate acknowledgement. These people at the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum had never contacted me, even though I have a large public profile and an unusual name which makes me easy to track down - and if they are to be believed, the source was an email I sent, so they would have had my email address.

I came across the unauthorised use of my work by chance, and was rather annoyed to find that the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum site had no contact email on their web site. Then I found an email address for their shop and emailed them to ask for a contact email to deal with the problem. I noted further that, while containing my copyright material, the home page had a blanket copyright claim: in short, they were claiming copyright in my work!

The response came from their secretary, Margaret Phillips, who replied:

Remember this? They weren't unaware, just brain-dead.

Notice that I redacted her name when I prepared this image. Up until just before I posted this, I had hoped to name nobody at the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum, and not even to name the museum itself. That, however, was conditional upon them showing due contrition, across the museum, but I'll get to that later. Suffice it to say that Margaret Phillips was responsible for my copyright text being disseminated, without permission, without credit, and under the blanket copyright claim of the museum.

I gave her details of the piece, and suggested that as they clearly had a rogue in their midst, they should check the other items under the resources tab, very carefully. I thought a couple of others looked suspicious, and one could have been mine. I made it clear that I required prompt action, and that any failure to deal honestly with me would lead to the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum being held up to the public gaze.

I got this grudging admission:

Note that (1) she could not even spell my name; (2) I would never call a rank amateur like this an historian ( I win prizes for writing history, but I would never claim that title); and (3) impugn means to attack or assail. Accusing somebody of launching an attack when all they are doing is defending their intellectual property is a bit like the old style copper, who said "the defendant head-butted my boots, yer Honour".

She also missed the point that the greatest offence was not to ask for permission. In their responses, the museum people have consistently dodged that issue.

Now look at the last paragraph above, where she says she has often told the story of Horrocks. If that is so, then why did she need to follow my text, almost verbatim? And where did she get the idea that this was about references? And where did she find the hide to say that she "wrote" it ("I sometimes write a historical article...") ? I will come back to what students will find of interest later.

She then offered an apology of sorts, surrounded by lame excuses.

God help any prominent individuals who are lumbered by one of "her" speeches, but back to her plea:

In other words, she had buried the evidence, and hoped I would go away. As I said, she picked the wrong target. As an educator, I felt the need to educate both her, but more importantly, the rest of the museum staff and volunteers. I want them to be more careful next time!

So I told her my two requirements, though I (and only I) knew that only the first was non-negotiable:

1. That she arrange for a letter admitting guilt, and apologising for the misappropriation of my work, to be signed by the entire museum trust, to be sent to me; and

2. That she compensate me for the time I had wasted, tracking her down and making her comply. At that point, I said, the bill was $500 and rising.

My intention, after giving her a financial scare, was to let her off the payment, but the apology was, and is, an absolute requirement. There was to be no hiding.

I told her that if she failed to do these two things, I would post this blog, and as you can see by this appearing, she and her museum failed to deliver on the one key requirement. She and they had the chance to act professionally, but they did not. Instead, I got her bland personal semi-apology, hedged around by vague denials and "can't recalls".

I believe I only got the admission that she had "written" it because I had made it clear that metadata in the PDF file indicated that somebody with her first name had created it. Once you are caught, it's time to be honest.

... what students may find of interest ...
I think I can tell her what students will think, because these days, young people are taught to respect intellectual property. As I warned her, I have now shared this widely, recommending that it be used in school units on plagiarism, where the low tricks pulled at the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum will be considered.

In spite of having the comparison image (I mean the image above), she won't admit the truth. Nor has the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum's Trust commented in any way, shape or form, even though the Trust president, was cc'ed on my later emails.

Their only response was to take the whole of the resources section down briefly and remove my piece. That is, of course, something I advised them to do, because there were several other dodgy pieces there, and I think it confirms that they knew what would happen if they didn't. Yet while they found time to vet the rest and put the other pieces back up, they could not find the time to answer me.

I would happily have granted the museum permission to use my text, had they asked, but she took it without permission, and having been caught red-handed, the "author" tried to fob me off with disingenuous flim-flam.

The position now

After repeated questioning, I finally extracted from Arthur Jeeves, the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum trust president, an admission of the source (but no admission of guilt). It was, he said, something she had found in the archives of the old Oz Teachers list. As soon as I had that admission, I went to my personal email archive, and found the text she had used, posted by me for my fellow professionals to read. Now if she truly found the text there, she would have had my email address, so why did she fail to ask permission?

I told her, and the president of the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum's trust that I would settle for a written apology, signed by all members of the Trust, admitting and regretting the plagiarism. My terms were quite clear: satisfy my requirements, or be exposed. It seems that they have chosen public exposure.

My last warning
Some 40 hours before the deadline I had set, 3 pm on February 5, I realised they had not asked for my mailing address, and were unlikely to deliver the written and signed apology in time. I noted that Jeeves had cc'ed his response to an Adelaide solicitor, without mentioning his status or involvement.

So in case they were planning some sort of clever-clogs legal trickery, I pointed out that any harm would be on their heads, because they had failed to meet my simple, low-cost and entirely reasonable requirement. I repeatedly reminded them that I would happily remove this, if, and only if, they met my requirements for an admission of guilt and a signed apology.

This is what I said:

Here is the position:

* There is no rule of "finders keepers" on the internet.

* If the source was a teachers' email list as you claim (and it could be so), Ms Phillips had my email address.

* She failed to ask for permission to use my text.

* Worse than that, she wrote this to me in an email:
"The article was something I put together for our small number of members as an interesting historically tale. I didn't think to reference it at the time, because our newsletters are just, that a newsletter. I sometimes write a historical article, as an interest piece."

She did NOT "put together" the article, she misappropriated it, lock, stock and barrel. She did not WRITE anything, she lifted it. Also, she, and you, seem to have assumed this was about "referencing", presumably meaning attribution, but that was secondary. The first step is always to ask permission.

There is a saying to the effect that "it's easier to apologise afterwards than to ask permission". In this case, asking was easy, but she didn't, and nobody has offered anything I would call an apology. Waffle set about with self-justification simply doesn't cut the mustard as an apology.

Your position is, to put it bluntly, unwinnable. You either admit to the breach of my copyright and moral rights, without reservation, without qualification, with due contrition, in appropriate language - and undertake to educate your staff better - or I educate you. When I am done, you will need to be more careful to do the right thing, both in asking permission, and also in apologising promptly and well when you are caught. I can say this with some confidence, because any Google search will reveal that you have been caught before, and warned about the rights authors have, so the next writer you poach from will be able to wheel you straight into court. Apologising appropriately is much easier for you.

I thought, Mr Jeeves, that once you entered into the matter, along with your solicitor friend, there might be some common sense. While it will be tight, it's not too late for you to save matters, but you will need to use a courier, and you will need to confirm your intentions by requesting my full and correct street address: what appears on the internet is intended to mislead.

I will be doing some consultancy work tomorrow morning. It's another pro bono job (as I mentioned, I am generous with my time and skills to those who ask), but I will be back at my desk and online, just after noon, Sydney time.

I am a genuine admirer of museums in general and Charles Sturt in particular, and it will irk me to have to treat your museum harshly, but I really cannot let you get away with a grudging, sulky, muttered sorry. If you can't do better than that, I owe it to other writers to make sure that you are really sorry.

Now I out them, not out of revenge, but to make an example of them - as my mate at the Australian Society of Authors said on the phone,
There was no answer, and there was no apology. pour encourager les autres. My purpose in asking for the letter and the payment was to make them consider their actions (though as I said, I had no plan to collect the cash). I knew it would give them a fright, but they needed a harsh lesson.

I also made it clear that the publication of this blog was the only other civilised alternative open to me, because I had no wish to bankrupt a bunch of amateurs who have settled like cockroaches on a good cause. People in the game who have looked at this have said "Go on, sue them, you'll make a mint, and they'll have to pick up your costs!"
I like museums, I don't want to send one bust. I really believed that they would toe the line. They didn't, so they are now publicly shamed, but now I want to offer some guidance to other victims of other poachers, on the fine art of catching scavengers.

This is what I do with my heavy-traffic web pages: I have a nonsense phrase that appears nowhere else on the web, and that is tucked away on the high traffic pages, either in small print and the same colour as the background, or in the metadata, or both. Numpties who pinch stuff aren't very bright, and so they miss the watermark, and get caught.

By the way, there is a watermark at the very end of this blog entry: see if you can find it.

That trick didn't work here, because the text was copied from a book (or maybe an email), and I just chanced on it. Well, that happens, when writers revisit old areas of interest.

2. Use the available computing/ net tools.
There are quite a few, so I will just describe what I used this time.

Here is a really good one that I knew but hadn't thought to use until Murray Storm, a former student reminded me of it: looking at the metadata in a PDF. When you are hunting down people like this, you need to keep copies, so you can run checks when they try to bury the evidence. I just opened my copy of the pirated file, clicked on View - Properties, and got this image, seen on the right. Thanks, Murray!

So we know that the creator was "Margaret", and when the PDF was created.

Another way to get this is to open the PDF file in Notepad, when you get a long jumble that includes this: I have highlighted the salient bits.

I think using View - Properties is easier!

Next up, always take screen shots. In Windows systems, the Ctrl-PrtScn key combination places a screen image on the clipboard: open any graphics program, start a new screen-sized image and paste in the image with Ctrl-V. Then save the whole view before you trim it as necessary.

This is your only defence against people who may try to say "We didn't say that," and change what is visible.

Save the PDFs, save the web pages, save anything that might be evidence.

3. Use any available email address to get in.

In the past, I have often broken through the secrecy barriers that hide the email addresses of Big Cheeses. Once, I was being lied to by Virgin Airlines after they cancelled a flight I had booked and paid for. Later, they claimed they had refunded the money when they hadn't, and I could not get past Virgin's call centre.

I got the name of the CEO, found some email addresses for PR people, deduced their method of creating email addresses, and sent him a rather corrosive email, which I cc'ed to the PR people, so he knew his underlings knew he was being put on the spot.

Basically, I explained that they were about to find themselves in a nasty PR mess, and I wanted the money NOW.

The Boss Monkey replied "You didn't have to be so bloody rude, and the money is on its way".

I replied "Yes, I bloody did. You weren't coughing up - until I turned up the heat."

I have recently used a version of that to penetrate a large bank's hierarchy. I got my money there as well.

The museum website provided no email link, except on their shop page, so I sent an email there and got a reply from the secretary, Margaret Phillips, who pretended to know nothing until I told her I had the metadata evidence. Then she played innocent, but it was too late.

At about this time, a friend got to Whois before I did, and found me the name of the site owner and his email address, so I included him in the next email I sent to the secretary as a CC, and he VERY promptly fired back, saying he was merely a contractor and was NOT responsible. He seems to have removed his email address from the domain registration now. Can't think why!

He also cc'ed the Trust President, Arthur Jeeves, so I could now include him as a CC in the subsequent emails. I think Jeeves is a decent man, but out of his depth on this matter: he certainly has an honorable track record. Given that he involved a solicitor, he should have been better advised.

A few cunning checks have failed to reveal the names or contact details for any other Trust members, but those two have been sent my emails and the first graphic in this entry. That should have been enough.

The annoying thing with this whole issue is that as I have said, I am very generous with my intellectual property, in the name of informing the wider public, and that appears to be their aim as well. The museum in question claims to be an amateur one, and if they had asked me for permission, I would have said "go for it, but give me a credit if you can, please", and that would have been that.

Instead, some clown decided to take my work without permission, taking the credit for my research

Charles Sturt was a Good Bloke, in my eyes, an honest man, a decent man, and a museum celebrating him is one I would treat as a worthy cause. Now it has become necessary to seize the whole gang of them by the scruff of the neck, and rub their noses in the mess they made. Not out of malice, you understand, but to make sure they try just a little bit harder next time.

Somebody got kudos for "writing" such a carefully researched piece. Now that person is exposed as what they are: I will leave you to name it. Well, that was somebody else's choice, not mine.

Post script
I have spent far longer on this analysis and discussion than I did on chasing the people who took my work. That's OK: as I said several times, I do a lot of pro bono work, and delivering ethics training to the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum is time well spent. They definitely needed it.

Next admiral, please, M. Voltaire!

Incidentally, if people don't know the story of Harry the camel, I suggest they jump to this link to get the context.
The background, the story of Horrocks and Harry, is here.

I have had somebody try to post a silly comment, accusing me of bullying the clowns at the museum. Standing up for your rights is often called bullying by the bullies who are trying to take those rights away. I assume the poster is a puppet for the Charles Sturt Memorial Museum, because "Mark Mc" joined blogger this month, has no profile and no posts. (He says abusively that he isn't associated with them, which makes me even more certain that he is.)

The basic rule here is that anonymous commentators with no track record have no privileges, and somebody using a pseudonym is effectively anonymous. Such a person does not get to scribble all over my work.

Why don't the museum people just admit that they took my work without permission, and failed to admit their offence?

Charles Sturt Memorial Museum, I'll bet you don't steal this one!

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In 1980, I was given the task of investigating a giant scam that was being played out against the New South Wales Government. I was middle management, and the take would have been $200,000, which was a lot of money back then, ~12 times my annual salary, as near as I can recall.

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Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The long summer holidays have given me space and time to explore new and favoured apps for iPhoneography. The images created on my relatively old, ancient really, iPhone 4s, often make me happier than what I produce with my FujiFilm X100T or expensive Nikon lenses attached to a D800 and D700 DSLR. Certainly, the process of editing, while sitting cross legged at the beach or on the trail, is fun, engaging and therapeutic. It still amazes, especially when travelling overseas, that an image can be online in minutes, shared with friends, colleagues and followers. It is, to quote the novelist above, 'magic'.

The smartphone has such a brief history but feels like it has been in our pockets for much longer. You may have read an interesting post at the Flickr blog recently that published data about camera ownership in 2013-14 . The Apple iPhone features prominently and is the second most popular 'camera brand', behind Canon. The iPhone 6 is not yet ranked but one would imagine that it may assist Apple to become the number one camera brand in the next year or two, as measured by Flickr data anyway.

The pace of development and change is fierce. A little over two years ago I blogged about my favourite photography apps and interestingly enough only Snapseed remains in my main iPhone photography folder along with the Flickr app. Gary Poulton, commenting at that post, put me on to EyeEm, which quickly replaced Instagram in my workflow. NB You should check out Gary's inspirational images at EyeEm.

Some new apps

What apps are you currently using? Of course, the app or camera for that matter do not make the image, you do. It is interesting to think about Ansel Adams' quip re: 'the first 10 000 photographs are your worst' in the context of having a smartphone. Many more people are clocking up 10 000 shots much more quickly. I notice even the most casual users of Facebook have better images than just a few years ago (even without selfie sticks). This is particularly true of teenagers.

There are so many apps available and they are so simple to use that it is hardly surprising the standard is improving. I have tried literally hundreds of photography apps in the last few years and it is definitely the case they are tools evolving rapidly and offer increasingly more sophisticated options. The entrepreneurs selling these apps have such slick presentation, in their video marketing and websites, that the competition keeps innovation positively bubbling. You can see below that I have many folders on my iPhone but stack my current apps on the home screen in a photography folder. Some of these apps have impressed me but I am yet to give them a proper work out. Others I have used very many times.

On first trying Wood Camera it really suited me and suspect it will become a favoured app in coming weeks and months. It is intuitive and has a suite of options for subtle edits. I am tempted to use it live rather than just to edit my photos from the camera roll. Anyone else tried it?

Other new apps I am trying out add text to your images. Over and PicLab HD are both sound choices if you need this kind of tool.

I really like Afterlight and Faded. I already forgive the creators for all those in-app purchases that tempt users to part with their cash. Even if you buy them all, it is still relatively inexpensive.

I am a sucker for those (many) apps that create paintings. These are not for everyone but as someone who loves the idea of drawing and painting but lacks the skills, these are fun apps. Waterlogue is one to try out if you like this kind of thing.

Shift - Photo filters designed by you from Pixite Apps on Vimeo.

I am very keen to tryEarly experiments have not worked out but give me some time. Have a look:

My workflow

As you can see from my screenshots above, I have tried out many apps and most have been superseded or have fallen out of favour through lacking variety or lacking the functionality to make subtle variations.

The following workflow is the most common one I have used in recent months. All my images are uploaded to Snapseed for basic editing. It is such a great tool and when I am in a hurry to get an image published, I can just stick with this app. Often, the second port of call has been Distressed fx where Cheryl Tarrant's original textures form the backbone of this brilliant app. You really must explore Cheryl's delightful work at Flickr.

I then send the edited images to EyeEm where they are automatically uploaded to Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. I do not always use the filters at EyeEm but some of them are old favourites.

Here's a few recent examples of this workflow.

I would never apologise for photographing rocks. Rocks can be very beautiful. But, yes, people have asked why I don't put people into my pictures of the natural scene. I respond, "There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer." That usually doesn't go over at all. Ansel Adams

Storage, Sharing and Display

My Flickr iPhoneography album and Eyeem stream, along with Facebook and Twitter are the main places I share or store images. I have only just found iCloud Photo Library (Beta) if you have iOS 8.1 or higher and am currently uploading almost 3000 images (apparently Photo Stream will disappear this year) as Aperture is terminated by Apple.

The range of photographic styles possible with an iPhone and a few good apps is gobsmacking. Street photography (craftily using the earbud button as a shutter release), landscapes, seascapes, nature, animals, selfies, family snaps, advertising, foodie shots or macros, the possibilities are endless. I am still amazed at how epic some images can be with a simple phone (and in the this case immediately below a wide-angled Olloclip lens).

The future

My photography is pretty average. There are so many phenomenally brilliant images posted every minute that one cannot be under any illusions about the quality of what one posts. However, I truly love photography and very little makes me happier, or more in the moment, than when shooting or editing an image. Maybe you feel the same about your photography, or writing, or blogging? if so, this video may prove to be a source of inspiration, especially but not just for younger people.

Enjoy!

Featured image: creative commons licensed (BY-NC-SA) flickr photo by Darcy Moore: http://flickr.com/photos/darcymoore/16079754830

What apps do you recommend?

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Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The long summer holidays have given me space and time to explore new and favoured apps for iPhoneography .

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Mr. Bliss: Tolkien’s Little-Known Children’s Book for His Own Kids, Lovingly Handwritten and Illustrated by the Author Himself | Brain Pickings

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Mr. Bliss: Tolkien’s Little-Known Children’s Book for His Own Kids, Lovingly Handwritten and Illustrated by the Author Himself | Brain Pickings

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J.R.R. Tolkien firmly believed that there is no such thing as writing "for children" and yet, unbeknownst to most, he joined the ranks of famous authors of literature for grown-ups who wrote little-known children's books - including Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein - and actually penned a book specifically for kids. He wrote Mr. Bliss (public library) for his own two children when they were small - much like the fairy tales E.E. Cummings wrote for his only daughter, Sylvia Plath's verses for her kids, and the controversial story Faulkner penned for the daughter of the woman he'd later marry. Though it is unclear precisely when Tolkien created Mr. Bliss, the tale was inspired by his first car, which he purchased in 1932. It was published posthumously exactly fifty years later. Tolkien went on to use two of the character names from the book, Gaffer Gamgee and Boffin, in The Lord of the Rings.

The book, affectionately handwritten and illustrated by Tolkien himself - who, also unbeknownst to many, was a dedicated artist - tells the story of Mr. Bliss, a lovable eccentric known for his exceptionally tall hats and his "girabbits," the giraffe-headed, rabbit-bodied creatures that live in his backyard. One day, Mr. Bliss decides to buy his very first motor car (and to my personal delight, as someone strongly partial to yellow, he proclaims to the salesman that he wants it to be "bright yellow, inside and out.") But his first drive en route to a friend's house soon turns into a Rube Goldberg machine of disaster as he collides with nearly everything imaginable, then gets kidnapped by three bears.

The ending, of course, is equal parts joyful and quirky.

As far as lesser-known children's books by famous authors of "adult" literature go, Mr. Bliss is a winner. Complement it with Tolkien's gorgeous art, then revisit some more fairly obscure children's books by Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, Aldous Huxley, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Anne Sexton, T. S. Eliot, and John Updike.

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Mr. Bliss: Tolkien's Little-Known Children's Book for His Own Kids, Lovingly Handwritten and Illustrated by the Author Himself

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J.R.R. Tolkien firmly believed that there is no such thing as writing "for children" and yet, unbeknownst to most, he joined the ranks of famous authors of literature for grown-ups who wrote little-known children's books - including Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, James Joyce, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein - and actually penned a book specifically for kids.

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Books on T-shirts | Up to 40,000 words | Litographs

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Books on T-shirts | Up to 40,000 words | Litographs

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Each of our super soft t-shirts is hand pressed with the words of one of your favorite books.

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How to teach all students to think critically

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How to teach all students to think critically

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All first year students at the University of Technology Sydney could soon be required to take a compulsory maths course in an attempt to give them some numerical thinking skills.

The new course would be an elective next year and mandatory in 2016 with the university's deputy vice-chancellor for education and students Shirley Alexander saying the aim is to give students some maths "critical thinking" skills.

This is a worthwhile goal, but what about critical thinking in general?

Most tertiary institutions have listed among their graduate attributes the ability to think critically. This seems a desirable outcome, but what exactly does it mean to think critically and how do you get students to do it?

The problem is that critical thinking is the Cheshire Cat of educational curricula - it is hinted at in all disciplines but appears fully formed in none. As soon as you push to see it in focus, it slips away.

If you ask curriculum designers exactly how critical thinking skills are developed, the answers are often vague and unhelpful for those wanting to teach it.

This is partly because of a lack of clarity about the term itself and because there are some who believe that critical thinking cannot be taught in isolation, that it can only be developed in a discipline context - after all, you have think critically about something.

So what should any mandatory first year course in critical thinking look like? There is no single answer to that, but let me suggest a structure with four key areas:

I will then explain that these four areas are bound together by a common language of thinking and a set of critical thinking values.

1. Argumentation

The most powerful framework for learning to think well in a manner that is transferable across contexts is argumentation.

Arguing, as opposed to simply disagreeing, is the process of intellectual engagement with an issue and an opponent with the intention of developing a position justified by rational analysis and inference.

Arguments have premises, those things that we take to be true for the purposes of the argument, and conclusions or end points that are arrived at by inferring from the premises.

Understanding this structure allows us to analyse the strength of an argument by assessing the likelihood that the premises are true or by examining how the conclusion follows from them.

Arguments in which the conclusion follows logically from the premises are said to be valid. Valid arguments with true premises are called sound. The definitions of invalid and unsound follow.

This gives us a language with which to frame our position and the basic structure of why it seems justified.

2. Logic

Logic is fundamental to rationality. It is difficult to see how you could value critical thinking without also embracing logic.

People generally speak of formal logic - basically the logic of deduction - and informal logic - also called induction.

Deduction is most of what goes on in mathematics or Suduko puzzles and induction is usually about generalising or analogising and is integral to the processes of science.

Using logic in a flawed way leads to the committing of the fallacies of reasoning, which famously contain such logical errors as circular reasoning, the false cause fallacy or appeal to popular opinion. Learning about this cognitive landscape is central to the development of effective thinking.

3. Psychology

The messy business of our psychology - how our minds actuality work - is another necessary component of a solid critical thinking course.

One of the great insights of psychology over the past few decades is the realisation that thinking is not so much something we do, as something that happens to us. We are not as in control of our decision-making as we think we are.

We are masses of cognitive biases as much as we are rational beings. This does not mean we are flawed, it just means we don't think in the nice, linear way that educators often like to think we do.

It is a mistake to think of our minds as just running decision-making algorithms - we are much more complicated and idiosyncratic than this.

How we arrive at conclusions, form beliefs and process information is very organic and idiosyncratic. We are not just clinical truth-seeking reasoning machines.

Our thinking is also about our prior beliefs, our values, our biases and our desires.

4. The nature of science

It is useful to equip students with some understanding of the general tools of evaluating information that have become ubiquitous in our society. Two that come to mind are the nature of science and statistics.

Learning about what the differences are between hypotheses, theories and laws, for example, can help people understand why science has credibility without having to teach them what a molecule is, or about Newton's laws of motion.

Understanding some basic statistics also goes a long way to making students feel more empowered to tackle difficult or complex issues. It's not about mastering the content, but about understanding the process.

The language of thinking

Embedded within all of this is the language of our thinking. The cognitive skills - such as inferring, analysing, evaluating, justifying, categorising and decoding - are all the things that we do with knowledge.

If we can talk to students using these terms, with a full understanding of what they mean and how they are used, then teaching thinking becomes like teaching a physical process such as a sport, in which each element can be identified, polished, refined and optimised.

Flickr/Airman Magazine, CC BY-NC

In much the same way that a javelin coach can freeze a video and talk to an athlete about their foot positioning or centre of balance, a teacher of critical thinking can use the language of cognition to interrogate a student's thinking in high resolution.

All of these potential aspects of a critical thinking course can be taught outside any discipline context. General knowledge, topical issues and media provide a mountain of grist for the cognitive mill.

General concepts of argumentation and logic are readily transferable between contexts once students are taught to recognise the deeper structures inherent in these fields and to apply them across a variety of situations.

Values

It's worth understanding too that a good critical thinking education is also an education in values.

Not all values are ethical in nature. In thinking well we value precision, coherence, simplicity of expression, logical structure, clarity, perseverance, honesty in representation and any number of like qualities. If schools are to teach values, why not teach the values of effective thinking?

So, let's not assume that students will learn to think critically just by learning the methodology of their subjects. Sure it will help, but it's not an explicit treatment of thinking and is therefore less transferable.

A course that targets effective thinking need not detract from other subjects - in fact it should enhance performance across the board.

But ideally, such a course should not be needed if teachers of all subjects focused on the thinking of their students as well as the content they have to cover.

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How to teach all students to think critically

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
All first year students at the University of Technology Sydney could soon be required to take a compulsory maths course in an attempt to give them some numerical thinking skills. The new course would be an elective next year and mandatory in 2016 with the university's deputy vice-chancellor for education and students Shirley Alexander saying the aim is to give students some maths "critical thinking" skills.

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These 50 Apps Will Track Everything. And We Mean Everything

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These 50 Apps Will Track Everything. And We Mean Everything

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These 50 Apps Will Track Everything. And We Mean Everything

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When we say these apps let you track anything, we're not kidding. If you can think of it, your phone can track it.

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Literature and Latte - Scrivener Writing Software | Mac OS X | Windows

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Literature and Latte - Scrivener Writing Software | Mac OS X | Windows

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See the forest or the trees

Whether you plan or plunge, Scrivener works your way: hammer out every last detail before typing a word, or carve out a draft and restructure later. Or mix your methods and do a bit of both. In Scrivener, everything you write is integrated into an easy-to-use project outline. So working with an overview of your manuscript is only ever a click away, and turning Chapter Four into Chapter One is as simple as drag and drop.
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Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds, used every day by best-selling novelists, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, academics, lawyers, journalists, translators and more. Scrivener won't tell you how to write-it simply provides everything you need to start writing and keep writing.

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Personality Matters More Than Intelligence at School | The New Republic

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Personality Matters More Than Intelligence at School | The New Republic

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According to a new review of the link between personality and academic achievement, personality is a better way to predict success at school than intelligence as it's usually measured, by traditional standardized tests. Arthur Poropat, of Griffith University in Australia, compared measurements of what psychologists call the "big five" personality traits - openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism - to academic scores, and found that the students who were rated higher in openness and conscientiousness tended to receive better grades.

"In practical terms, the amount of effort students are prepared to put in, and where that effort is focused, is at least as important as whether the students are smart," Poropat said in the release accompanying the paper, which was published in Learning and Individual Differences. "And a student with the most helpful personality will score a full grade higher than an average student in this regard."

More on the findings, from the release:

In Dr. Poropat's research, a student's assessment of their own personality is as useful for predicting university success as intelligence rankings. However, when people who know the student well provide the personality rating, it is nearly four times more accurate for predicting grades.

It makes intuitive sense that both conscientiousness and openness would result in higher grades; it doesn't really matter how smart you are if you can't manage to turn your homework in on time, for one. And another word for openness is curiosity, another obviously necessary factor in learning. Still, it's an interesting way to think about academic achievement for anyone who grew up believing they did well in school simply because they were "smart."

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Personality Matters More Than Intelligence at School

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
According to a new review of the link between personality and academic achievement, personality is a better way to predict success at school than intelligence as it's usually measured, by traditional standardized tests. Arthur Poropat, of Griffith University in Australia, compared measurements of what psychologists call the "big five" personality traits - openness, conscientiousness...