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On Unraveling the World and Letting the Queue Clear

We spend our lives creating, and waiting in, queues.  We do our best to manage the dead time in line and when we are responsible for the movement of any queue, we oftentimes become impatient with a process that more slowly unravels than the speed in which it tightened.

Sometimes there’s nothing to be done except to stand back and let the queue take on a life of its own and allow it to expire when the momentum of the movement is exhausted.

There are three kinds of basic queues that capture our daily lives: Physical, Virtual and Ethereal. Let’s examine them in kind.

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Education as an Abstraction: Teaching with Real Things

When teaching becomes an abstraction and not something real, the learning doesn’t stick in the student very well.  Imagination must first be grounded in a hard reality.

As we move closer into living in a 24/7 virtual world, it is important for all of us to keep in mind that learning is best fostered using real things, in real-time, in the same, real, room with each other getting real.  That is important in all human interactions, not just the classroom.  We’re always trying to learn from each other and doing it with real objects is a powerful experience that binds.

When you’re teaching about a flower — is it better to show a computer image of a flower, or hand out a flower printed on a piece of paper, or is it best to share a real flower plucked from a garden in your alive hand?

A real flower authentically engages every bodily sense and creates a sensation in the mind.

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Finding Reality at Easy Street Records

A thin man — maybe it was a woman (honestly was hard to tell in my tired state) was looking through one of the several bins of used records in front of Easy Street Records in West Seattle. I was walking to a friend’s apartment to take a short nap and my wife and I thought we saw our friend walk into the store.

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Justin Sandercoe Teaches The Blues

Justin Sandercoe will teach you how to play The Blues on your guitar for free online.

Continue reading → Justin Sandercoe Teaches The Blues

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Death on the Tethered Vine: Breaking the Virtual Bond

In yesterday’s article, we discussed how the internet can bind old friendships.  Today, we’ll examine why meeting virtual friends in person often leads to disaster and misconception.

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The Two Decade Virtual Touch

When we consider the depth of the internet, we often foment shallow thoughts of the world compressing time and space as we become more distant from each other.  We reach for tethers and tendrils and often come up with an empty grasp.

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The Newspaper is Dead: Long Live the News!

The newsprint newspaper is DEAD!  Let it die!  Bury it.  Let the bugs and worms eat the decaying pulp and let’s move on with our lives and getting the news quick, fast, and deadly on the internet.  As an online author and itinerant publisher, it is delicious to watch the traditional media bandwagon crumble under the weight of their new irrelevancy.  They have their worry beads in hand and their self-flagellation in process and they aren’t waiting to sound their own public death knell on your front stoop and in your mailbox:

Continue reading → The Newspaper is Dead: Long Live the News!