tender shots of solders coming back from Iraq

They are such tender photographs of service folks coming back from Iraq... photographer Suzanne Opton's shots:

http://www.photolucida.org/cm_winners.aspx?aID=d4d92aa2-69ff-4d92-bc73-8be784345b4a

The one of Claxton is perhaps the most telling. See for yourself.

How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School

I am very wild about the book I recommend How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School

This research sponsored by a number of agencies and brought together here in an action packed volume is not to be missed, created by National Research Council (U. S.) Committee on Learning Research and Educational Practice (Author), National Research Council (Corporate Author), John Bransford (Editor), Ann L. Brown (Editor), Rodney R. Cocking (Editor).

"Dr. John D. Bransford is the James W. Mifflin University Professor of Education and Psychology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Dr. Bransford is also Principal Investigator and Director of the LIFE Center, a recently funded National Science Foundation Sciences of Learning Center.


Bransford and his colleagues have won numerous awards. His Ph.D. dissertation won honorable mention in the national "Creative Talent Awards" Contest; several of his published articles (co-authored with colleagues) have won "article of the year" awards in the areas of science education, technology, design, and theories of transfer."1

Amanda Baggs, a 26 year old autistic woman, posted a video on YouTube.com that is so very impressive about how she learns and how she perceives the world - here's the link to the CNN article which has a link to the video: http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/02/22/autism.emails/index.html.


Her video, and the article on CNN.com help to clarify how some people perceive reality that differs from others. Outsiders can understand each other at a level that others must make efforts to understand, if they ever can.

Ms. Baggs' view on human rights, and what it means to be human is quite compelling.

1. http://www.mciu.org/gtosite/cwp/view.asp?a=816&Q=426464&PM=1>ositeNav=%7C9066%7C

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Who or what lives behind the Gates of Eden? What does it mean to be human?

What does it mean to be human, what is a unique object that could illustrate or frame what being human means?

Anything can symbolize what it means to be human because it is we ourselves who are the interpreters. Meaning itself is open to interpretation, symbols already are an abstraction. Considering symbols brings to mind the more abstract parts of being human.

Googling “What it means to be human” returned religious essays. The kinds of images which immediately came to my mind were religious imagery, and ideas around trust - from the most trusted - to enemies. Trust itself was the basis of Windows NT (and later) “trusted systems”, these are rings of related authentication and validation systems which trust each other to allow just the right access and levels of privacy permitted for use by the appropriate systems and persons.

Thinking about physical aspects of being human, first ‘fingers’ came to mind, and then ‘children’ came to mind. Children are our mirrors, and these as ideas are used in database propagation. Almost anything human can relate to the design of information systems. But what about things of a more abstract nature or the deeper things which make humans special, forgiveness, kindness, freedom, honor, beauty – and thinking itself? Or less pleasant or poisonous things? Doubt, insecurity, hatred, stupidly, cruelty? Do these relate to information systems?

Information systems are abstractions; which human experiences are naturally abstract that can be applied to information systems, whether they exist already or not? At some level of humanity abstract things are those that we are most interested in, and at a more practical level, it is the attribute that humans possess in abundance -- the ability to abstract applied with imagination. We have used systems to aide nearly every aspect of human endeavor, past, present and future; research, medicine, flight, extrapolation, supply chains, deliveries, living machines – finding and designing shelter. Information systems can provide for all these things and more, they are useful when they serve us. But for now computer information systems can not be human, and can not have human experience.

What information systems can do is assist humans to do things or communicate. They in themselves lack consciousness. While consciousness is a thing it is not a thing you can bring somewhere, other than it naturally resides in humans, and Kirlian photography aside, you can not take a picture of it, like you can a smile to express emotion.

So it is consciousness itself is the most interesting human thing that an information system could do, or at least mimic. Consciousness, thinking, acting like a human, and giving human like responses is very interesting. If meaning can be derived from experience, if information systems can give the appearance of human behavior, this could be the most creative because it is possible that anything which mirrors us could help us think about things in a new way, just like mirrors do.

Robots, androids, and sentient beings without emotions are fascinating to people and a frequent subject in science fiction. Isn’t our real question what would it be like to have perfect intellect, vast knowledge, wisdom and no emotions, in effect a machine like human or a human like machine? Is this our idea of the perfect machine, like the perfect human?

My questions: It is helpful to have a system trust you, because security is one of the basic human needs, would it do any good to have a system pray for you? What would a system which prays for you be? How would you know if it’s working? Would you gather merit as a result? Would you spontaneously forgive? Could information system take requests and as output pray for a person and as long as the person was aware of it, would it then have an effect? Is doing things easily Nirvana? Who or what lives behind the gates of Eden?

My choice of something that symbolizes what it means to be human is a modern Prayer Wheel filled with prayers in text form, stored as PDFs on CDs ready to plug in and pray.

Written for Dr. Cheryl Metoyer's IMT 510



Dr. Cheryl Metoyer's University of Washington's iSchool Website





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