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I was extremely fortunate to have been a part of the fantastic YYCPhotoBook 2009 project. It’s a community-based photography book project, featuring 32 different Calgary photographers ranging from amateurs to high-end professionals. The goal was to show the city from various perspectives, outside the traditional stereotypes and stock-photo views. From start to finish, the project took 4 months – including recruiting the photographers, sourcing photos, editing, designing, and releasing to print. Duncan Kinney did an absolutely amazing job in wrangling the project and pushing it forward, and Connor Turner did an equally fantastic job in putting the book design together.

I love the project for a few reasons. First, it’s a crowdsourced, grassroots community project. I described it at the first project meeting as being more of a community art project than a photography project. It brought together 32 photographers, with 32 different views, perspectives, and styles. The end result is an incredible, beautiful book of photography that is a wonderful representation of the city of Calgary and those who live here.

The other reason I love the project is that it is a non-profit endeavor, raising funds for the Brown Bagging It for Calgary’s Kids charity – a local charity that is devoted to providing healthy meals to underprivileged Calgary kids.

It was truly an honour to have been a part of this project. The photos in the book are amazing, the photographers are inspiring, and the book itself is gorgeous.

If you’d like a copy of the book (for the awesome page 12 photo *cough*, or to support Brown Bagging It for Calgary’s Kids) head over to the Blurb store to get yours now.

…a course is a fraudulent technology. It is put forward as a desirable structure for learning when in fact it is only a structure for allocating space, for convenient record-keeping, and for control of faculty time.

Neil Postman, Technopoly, 1993. pg 138

My copy of Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity was delivered in the mail today, thanks to the speedy Amazon.com shipping system. It’s got a fresh, blank Page 61 and I’m looking forward to having it filled up. I also picked up a copy of Technopoly. I decided to not go ahead and buy the other dozen books in my shopping cart in an effort to avoid credit-card-related domestic difficulties…

I’m working through Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman. I hadn’t read it before, and am seriously kicking myself for that. Some quick notes and quotes from the first couple of chapters. Keep in mind that this book was written in 1968, published in 1969, and reads as though it was crafted in 2008.

3 problems that require schools to remake themselves into training centers for subversion:

Communications Revolution or Media Change:

• “A lot of things have happened in this century, and most of them plug into walls.”
• “A change in an environment is rarely only additive or linear… What you have is a totally new environment requiring a whole new repertoire of survival strategies.”
• “When you plug something into a wall, someone is getting plugged into  you. Which means you need new patterns of defense, perception, understanding, evaluation. You need a new kind of education.”
• “As the number of messages increases, the amount of information carried decreases. We have more media to communicate fewer significant ideas.”

Change Revolution:

• “Change isn’t new – what’s new is the degree of change… Change changed.”
• “Change occurs so rapidly that each of us in the course of our lives has continuously to work out a set of values, beliefs, and patterns of behavior that are viable, or seem viable, to each of us personally. And just when we have identified a workable system, it turns out to be irrelevant because so much has changed while we were doing it.”
• “The trouble is that most teachers have the idea that they are in some other sort of business. Some believe, for example, that they are in the ‘information dissemination’ business.”
• “While (students) have to live with TV, film, the LP record, communication satellites, and the laser beam, their teachers are still talking as if the only medium on the scene is Gutenberg’s printing press.”
• “While (students) have to understand psychology and psychedelics, anthropology and anthropomorphism, birth control and biochemistry, their teachers are teaching ’subjects’ that mostly don’t exist anymore.”
• “While (students) need to find new roles for themselves as social, political, and religious organisms, their teachers are acting almost entirely as shills for corporate interests, shaping them up to be functionaries in one bureaucracy or another.”

Future Shock:

• “Future shock occurs when you are confronted by the fact that the world you were educated to believe in doesn’t exist.”
• “We just may not survive another generation of inadvertent entropy helpers.”

I’ll have lots more notes as I work through the book – not sure I’ll post everything here though, as I may just distill it down into more concise posts…