1. A tutorial system, independent of any university, managed via a neutral online database; and an expanded system of degrees by examination.

2. Textop! I love this idea whenever I think about it!

3. A medium-sized secular (but not anti-religious) chapter book explaining for elementary-aged children, in non-condescending but easy language, why various virtues are virtues and their corresponding vices are vices. It should also explain why moral relativism is silly, which of course it is. I’ve looked for such a book, hard. I’ve started to write such a book, but never find enough time to finish. I truly believe such a book would be an enormous best-seller.

4. A system of non-fiction e-books, roughly similar to what you can find here, but which have more intelligently-written scripts, like some of these videos and these powerpoints. I hope to start such a system using the ReadingBear.org software as a platform.

5. This is going to be very hard to explain briefly, and it will sound half-baked, but since when did that ever stop me? Actually, the rough idea (not my version, but something vaguely like it) comes from a Heinlein novel (I forget what Heinlein calls them and where–maybe someone will tell me) combined with my original idea for neutrality on Wikipedia (and before that, Nupedia). I think that civilization could use a society of people who are meticulously and publicly committed to neutrality. Somewhat like judges, but who operate in the public sphere, they do not make any public judgments on controversial issues of any sort. Their role in society would be, rather, to summarize “what is known”–or what various people take themselves to know–about this and that, according to some clear and deeply studied rules of scholarship and neutrality. If someone, or a group, required a neutral, expert analysis of a question, a field, or a situation, they would provide it. These people would have to be experts in ideology, logic, and the arts of communication, understanding when a statement is the slightest bit tendentious, and be able to quickly formulate a more neutral one. These people would be perfect candidates to write neutral Congressional reports as well as serve as expert witnesses in trials. There would have to be a fairly elaborate system of professional ethics for this group, and members would no doubt have to be regularly evaluated by their peers. Among other things, they would not be able to serve in politics, as attorneys or judges, or as corporate executives. They could serve as journalists and scholars, but under stringent rules that do not apply to most journalists and scholars. – Why such a profession? Because the world has gone insane, and it desperately needs people who are professionally committed to explaining obvious things to crazy people. Do you really think that people well-qualified and publicly committed in the way I’ve described would lack for work? They’d be extremely well employed as consultants, internal and external.

6. A website+app with spaced repetition questions that teach basic facts school students (preK and up).

I’ve had quite a few more. I’ll make another post later, perhaps, with more of the same.

Feel free to swipe any of these ideas and do a world of good by bringing them to fruition. You might or might not get rich, but if well-executed, you certainly could help a lot of people.

Well, there is such a method, called spaced repetition. This is the method used by such software as Supermemo, Anki, Mnemosyne, and Memrise.

The figure, 95%, is very impressive to me. I’ve been thinking about it lately, as I delve into the world (it is a whole world) of spaced repetition. Ordinarily, we require much less out of our metrics. 95% is practically a guarantee. With just 15 or 30 minutes a day, adding maybe 20 questions per day, you can virtually guarantee that you will remember the answers.

In particular, I am wondering why spaced repetition is not used more widely in education. Of course, I’m not the first to wonder why. The answer is fairly simple, I think.

The more I read from and interact with educationists and even homeschoolers, the more I am struck by the fact that many of them hold knowledge in contempt (q.v.). Of course, they will cry foul if you call them on this (q.v.), but that doesn’t change the fact (q.v.). So naturally I expect them to sneer at me when I express amazement at the 95% recall figure. I can hear the “arguments” already: this is “rote memorization” (not if you understand what you’re memorizing); education is not about amassing mere facts (not just that, no); it suffices that you can just look answers up (wrong); we should be teaching critical thinking, not mere memorization (why not both?).

I am not going to defend the value of declarative knowledge (again) here. I simply wanted to observe what teachers (including homeschooling parents) could do with spaced repetition, if they wanted to. They could spend a half hour (or less) every day adding questions to their students’ “stack” of questions; then assign them to review questions (both new and old) for a half hour.

Imagine that you did that, adding 20 questions per day, five days a week, 36 weeks per year (the usual U.S. school year), for six years. This is not impossible to manage, I gather, and would not take that long, per day. Yet by sixth grade, your students would have 21,600 facts in recall with about 95% accuracy. These would merely be the sorts of facts contained in regular textbooks.

Next, consider an exam that drills on a random selection of 100 of those facts. The students who used spaced repetition faithfully would probably get an A on the exam. That, I suspect, is much better than could be expected even from top students who used ordinary methods of study.

Would students who spent 30 minutes out of every class day on this sort of review benefit from it?

I think the answer is pretty obvious.

4. How “social” is social media?

A person who is “social,” we think, gets along with others and does not always stay at home. They mix well. This is, we hope, because they like other people, not because they’re trying to take advantage of them. They have an interest in getting to know others and doing fun things with them.

So I wonder if “social media” is misnamed.

Social media features the trappings of social behavior: conversation (with head shots and indications of mood), sharing interests, and doing things together. But how these activities happen in so-called social media are mostly a weak shadow of what happens face-to-face. The conversation is typically brief. It is rarely one-to-one, but instead one-to-many, rather like broadcasting a message over an intercom to a group of people who are only half-listening and busy broadcasting themselves. We often do not know who, precisely, is receiving our message, and we act as if we do not care. We do not expect a reply, and if we do not receive a reply, we are at worst disappointed; face-to-face, if we received no reply at all, we would think the person we spoke to was rude and cold. In many venues, the conversation happens among literal strangers, often from around the world, which at first glance seems charming—and it sometimes is. But after the novelty wears off, we discover that the rewards are rare. Such interactions rarely involve personal understanding and regard, as friends share.

Conversation online is rarely as meaningful, from a social point of view, as conversation face-to-face among friends and known colleagues. (In terms of logic and rhetoric, I have found that it can be more rigorous and rewarding than much face-to-face conversation. But I’m talking about sociality now, not logic.)

When we get online and engage in “social” media, I wonder how much we—most of us—do so because we like people. I wonder if we do it because we want to use people and promote ourselves. This is not social, properly speaking, any more than PR work is “social.” “Now just a minute, Sanger,” I hear you saying, “you’ve gone too far. I like people. I am not a user. How dare you accuse me, and all users of social media, of being selfish ‘users’?” I apologize if I offend. I did not accuse all users of social media of being “users” of people. That really isn’t my intention. But I have an important point to make and it isn’t pretty. When you do an update, are you acting like a friend, or like a PR agent? I’ll be honest. Personally, I do a lot more PR updates than friendly updates. I find it a little surprising and charming when my friends and acquaintances respond to such updates, but that doesn’t stop them from being, mainly, PR updates. Sure, I understand that some people do mainly engage with their close friends. I think that’s nice (as I said before), as far as it goes. But a lot of what we say is personal advertising, so to speak. Some have even taken to speaking of their online identities, to mind rather pathetically, as their “personal brand,” and they invest much time on social networks buffing their “personal brands.” This behavior is “social” in a very weak sense, in that it involves people, but not in the strong sense that it involves building friendships.

Social media is a poor replacement for a real social life. To the extent that social media is replacing it, friendship as an institution weakens.

Relevant links:

I was tempted to try to coin a phrase, “anti-social media,” but of course someone beat me to it.

On “personal branding,” see this Mashable post.

3. How the Internet’s current design philosophy fails.

Websites compete for the really limited commodity online, namely, attention. That much is understandable, and not likely to change. How they compete is the problem.

Putting lots of menus, internal links, feeds, and self-promotional media on pages drives traffic around a website internally, while putting external links and various media on a given page is thought to increase its value and interest to end users. Competition for limited attention also motivates others to link to us (through reciprocal links, which are often automatic in blogging systems). More information seems better, so more pointers to information and ways to organize it seems better. Similarly, systems for regularly alerting us to mail, news, blogs, and so forth are straightforward attempts to grab our limited attention. Software-driven media tries to prove its relevance to us this way, and sometimes succeeds.

But if we really are trying to capture and hold each others’ attention, isn’t this busy, distracting design philosophy puzzling?

Why saturate a blog post (or other media) with a panoply of enticing choices to other things on our website, when we surely know that most users will, by habit, bounce right off of the page that brought them to our website, the very page that has the best chance of keeping them there? Such internal links might in a few cases get your user to go elsewhere on your site, but it also reduces the chance that the visitor will at least read the thing that brought them to your site in the first place. Why not seize the bird in hand? For that matter, why have so many external links right in our own text? Why don’t we design our pages so that, when we are graced with a visitor, the visitor will focus on, and actually want to stay to the end of, what brought them?

Similarly, if we really want to get others’ attention, why do we flood their Twitter and Facebook feeds with so much noise? Why do we bore them with too much news, repetition, and chitchat? We are instructed to increase the signal if we want more followers, yet most of us don’t. Why not?

Yet if the choices of web designers and marketers  seem paradoxical, how much more paradoxical is it that we, as end users, continue to consume—ravenously—what so often contains more noise than signal? Consider that many of us follow hundreds of people on Twitter (far more than we can really keep up with), that we have “friended” people from high school whose names we barely remember, that many of us welcome in more mail than we can reasonably manage, and so on.

Both paradoxes, of Internet producers and consumers, disappear when we reflect on the fact that we are very anxious about “missing out,” and Internet producers are merely exploiting this anxiety. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that we are in a collective panic, a veritable mania, over the fantastic content now online. Information purveyors, working in this frenzied atmosphere, and who are end users themselves, naturally go to great lengths to seize their portion of the online public’s attention. Faced with a zillion things to pay attention to, calm, slow decision-making seems ridiculously inefficient. In this atmosphere, there is no time to exercise wisdom.

It’s bad enough that this design philosophy looks, at least to some extent, self-defeating for information purveyors. Even worse is that it doesn’t really benefit the end user. Consider:

Many of us spend a lot of time on Twitter. Why? The people you’re following come up with some quite insightful observations? Actually, not so often. Few can say much that is really worthwhile in 140 characters. The best that most of our Tweeps can do is be occasionally interesting, clever, or funny—and otherwise a waste of time. But maybe you get a lot of links to fascinating news articles, blogs, and so forth? Maybe, yet most of the links go unclicked. You are usually quickly in-and-out of those that you do click. Even if you don’t bounce out after a glance, even if you actually read something, you’ll probably just skim it quickly and forget it, which means you don’t really benefit from even the things you spend the most time on. But, you fret, if you don’t follow your feed, wouldn’t you be out of it and disconnected? Not necessarily. If you focus on a few high-quality news sites and blogs that cover your industry and interests, if you actually read them, you’ll almost certainly be more up-to-date about those topics than someone who uses Twitter as a replacement for such sources.

But you knew that. No, surely in your heart of hearts you know that the reason Twitter exists is not information exchange, but a kind of socialization. Yet it’s rarely bona fide socialization or friendship-building. It’s mostly networking. For most people, I suspect, we just have a somewhat pathetic desire to see our username replied-to and retweeted. This makes us feel relevant, popular, and connected. Our ego swells with each new follower, reply, and retweet. Yet this is clearly illusory. It is increasingly fashionable to apply the self-effacing epithet “narcissistic” to these, our common social networking habits. We know that, just because our vanity is flattered by public attention, it does not follow that we are relevant, or popular, or connected in any way that matters.

Face it: the only reason we (some of us) waste so much time on Twitter and Facebook is that “everybody else” is there, wasting time too, and we would feel out-of-it and incomplete, somehow, to be drop out. The whole advent of truly mass participation in social media, beginning in the mid-2000s with Myspace, seems to reflect not “the wisdom of crowds” but “the madness of crowds,” like tulip mania. I think Twitter exemplifies this observation perfectly.

Facebook looks open to the same observations. Why do you spend time on Facebook? Because your Mom and old friends are on it, for one thing. Are you closer to them now than you were before Facebook? Probably not, in most cases, except for the few comments you’ve exchanged with people you haven’t otherwise spoken to in years. On Facebook, we frequently exchange sentiments (and media) with people close and not-so-close to you, and that is being sociable. I won’t be so churlish or anti-social as to deny that it’s nice. Of course it’s nice. But this style of interaction makes socialization less personal than it once was. If you spend a lot of time socializing on Facebook (I’m guessing; no doubt someone’s done a study) you probably talk less on the phone. You probably feel less of a need to spend face-time, or even ear-time, with loved ones. Be honest, now: is Facebook really enhancing the quality of your social life and family relations? For society as a whole, is it bringing us closer together and improving our social relations in general? I strongly doubt it. It seems only to make our social lives more “efficient”—and impersonal, too. Doesn’t this social media par excellence actually make us less social, in the ways that matter? Why shouldn’t I draw that conclusion? Some might have a knee-jerk tendency to call me a Luddite for saying such things. But I live online and have devoted much of my adult life to building bits of the Internet, so that would be silly; can you explain why I’m wrong?

Wikipedia is an amazing and frequently useful resource. (For all my criticisms, I’ve never denied this.) But when you look something up there, how often do you increase your store of knowledge, rather than gaining a temporary grasp of not-fully-reliable “fact” and fleeting sense of understanding? Is your mind significantly improved? Probably not. Even if you spent the evening lost in Wikipedia’s hyperlinkage, you are apt to forget most of what you come across. It’s intellectual fast food; the taste is strangely compelling, but it is not exactly mentally nutritious. Building your personal store of knowledge requires deep reading and critical study, focus on a topic for a lengthy period of time. The design philosophy of Wikipedia—the copious irrelevant hyperlinks, and the way text tends to be written in smallish, loosely-related chunks instead of woven into a coherent narrative—militates against deep reading and critical study. I’m not saying you can’t use Wikipedia as part of a program to do serious research and gain solid knowledge. Of course you can. Some people even have, I’m sure. But I doubt that’s how most people use it. Its design encourages surface grazing, not immersion.

Even Google Search itself falls prey to this sort of analysis. What could be better than Google, which delivers highly relevant results and often answers your questions instantly? Well, yes. But we should demand more. There is more to search than faux-relevance and speed. When you do a search to find the best possible information on a subject, is that what you are shown? Not necessarily, because what Google shows you is the most popular and the most recent (and now, if you’re logged in with your Google account, what they think you’ll be most likely to click on). The highest quality results are too often far down the list. Google’s daily influence on us may well have trained us to overvalue popularity and recency, frequently at the cost of more significant qualities like reliability, clarity, historical importance, and depth.

I could give many similar examples, but let me skip to a general conclusion.

The Internet is ostensibly set up to let us help each other navigate the wealth of information online and, by speeding communication and new ways of collaboration, bring us closer together. But that isn’t quite what it does. When I spend much time on social networks, I find the experience to consist more of noise and alienation than signal and connection. What many, including myself, have touted as a potential tool of enlightenment and increased social connection right now seems to be making us less enlightened, less sociable, and less disciplined to boot. The Internet caters particularly to those who want to promote their work. Because so many people are doing this at once, its most striking effect is to distract us endlessly with what are, at the end of the day, mostly trivialities.

Part 4: How “social” is social media? >>

Relevant links:

I know that SEO people have answers to my rhetorical questions about menus and links. Here is a sample (chosen only because it’s highly ranked in a Google search and thus, no doubt, played the SEO game well). But the SEO strategy is about building traffic. It is not about encouraging them to finish reading what they came for.

It’s common advice to Twitterers that they increase their focus and signal in order to get more followers; example.

This Google search is a good place to start reading about how social media is narcissistic.

The famous phrase “the wisdom of crowds” seems to have gotten its start in the book by James Surowiecki of that name. “The madness of crowds,” by contrast, comes from Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I’ve read the former but not the latter, even though it is free (courtesy a part of the Internet that really doesn’t suck).

I read on the Internet that 71% of all U.S. citizens are on Facebook. So, probably, your Mom is.

While I don’t recall ever being accused of being a Luddite, I probably was at some point. Nicholas Carr, though, makes much of the purported “Luddite” aspect of Internet criticism.

Wikipedia doesn’t seem to place much stock in narrative coherence, contrary to Citizendium.

On the idea that the Internet generally (Wikipedia is not mentioned) encourages surface grazing and does not increase our knowledge significantly, see this speech of mine.

2. The pernicious design philosophy of the Internet.

The way that the Internet is designed—not graphic design, but overall habits and architecture—encourages the widespread distractability that I, at least, hate.

This basic notion is not my idea; I freely admit that I learned it from Nicholas Carr. I did not quite notice some features about the Internet until reading Carr’s The Shallows some time ago, and the following borrows from Carr. My analysis consists of two related parts, the first being about the nature of the Internet, and the second being about the design philosophy of the Internet.

First, consider what the Internet is, or the public side of it, so to speak. (Not the technical, “back end” part.) The public side of the Internet consists of (a) information of various media that is presumably of some public interest, together with (b) ways of repackaging, sending, publishing, and rating the information and, especially, of linking to it for public consumption.

Category (a) is rapidly growing to include all of the public information we know of, or at least all of it that can be digitized—and not just all extant information, but also all new information that arrives on the scene. This fact is of interest not just to “geeks,” but to everyone who finds books, news, movies, and virtually everything else that we can communicate and share digitally. Category (a) is the concern of all of humanity, not just geekdom.

This makes category (b), what we might call the net’s meta-information, all the more important to us. Google makes the inherently interesting information findable. Wikipedia tries to summarize it. Email, texting, and VoIP (like Skype) allow us to communicate it more efficiently. Twitter gives acquaintances and colleagues a way to share the latest and greatest with us. Facebook gives us easy, one-page access to information about our friends and families. Other sites, like YouTube and Amazon, offer us view counts, ratings, samples, and reviews that are crucial to deciding what long-form content worth pursuing.

Now I can explain a notion, which again owes a great deal to Carr, of the current two-part “design philosophy” of the Internet, to wit:

Interconnectivity: information that is of some inherent public interest is typically marinated in meta-information: (a) is bathed in (b). It is not enough to make the inherently interesting content instantly available and easy to find; it must also be surrounded by links, sidebars, menus, and other info, and promoted on social media via mail. This is deliberate, but it has gotten worse in the last ten years or so, with the advent of syndicated blog feeds (RSS), then various other social media feeds. This is, of course, supposed to be for the convenience and enlightenment of the user, and no doubt sometimes it is. But I think it usually doesn’t help anybody, except maybe people who are trying to build web traffic.

Recency: the information to be most loudly announced online is not just recent, but the brand-spanking-newest, and what allegedly deserves our attention now is determined democratically, with special weight given to the opinions of people we know.

Something like this two-part design philosophy, I believe with Carr, is what makes the Internet so distracting. Carr found some interesting studies that indicate that text that is filled with hyperlinks and surrounded by “helpful” supporting media tends to be poorly understood, and we spend less time on each page of such text. As soon as we come across a link, video, or infographic sufficiently interesting to distract us, the surrounding mass of text becomes “tl;dr”. Over time, we have largely lost the habit of reading longer texts, and this problem is apt to get worse.

Moreover, when we and our social networks place a premium on recency, we naturally feel a need to check various news streams and data feeds regularly, and coders oblige this tendency by providing us various distracting push notifications when the latest arrives. Even more, the Internet industry hungrily pounces on new tools and devices that allow people to share and be connected in ever more and newer ways. The Internet increasingly goes wherever we are, first with the advent of laptops, then smart phones, then the iPad—and eventually, maybe “Google Glasses.”

The result is that, soon after we surf to a page of rich media, its interconnections lead us away from whatever led us to the page in the first place, even while our various alerts and, just as important, our habits of checking stuff, conspire to pull us away as well. Ironically, what might look to the naive to be an efficient, intelligent system of alerting us and giving us instant access to the latest and greatest online has the effect of making us unable to focus on any one thing for long.

Let that sink in a little. Back in 2000, what we were so excited about, when we thought about the potential of the Internet, was the sheer amount of knowledge that would be available and presented (and developed!) in all sorts of brilliantly engaging ways. Now it is 2012. Is that what we have? Yes—and no. Some of the dream has indeed arrived. Vast amounts of content are there. Frequently it is presented engagingly (although we have a lot more to do before we reach our potential). But it is also presented in a context that is so extremely distracting that we, even despite our best intentions, often do not really appreciate it. We are not encouraged to study, absorb, savor; we are encouraged to skim and move on.

I think there is something really wrong with this design philosophy. We ought to try to change it, if we can. But how, especially considering that it mostly grew organically, not as a result of any grand design?

Part 3: How the Internet’s current design philosophy fails >>

Relevant links:

Nick Carr’s blog, “Rough Type”

To see how SEO analysts (and many webmasters) think about recency, see “New Rules: Fresh Content Is King” (undated, natch!).

Of course, the Google Glasses that appeared in the video are probably vaporware, for now.

“Vast amounts of content” that is “presented engagingly”? Well, Wikipedia and YouTube, for just two examples. I didn’t say presented perfectly, but their popularity is evidence of their being engaging. Their vastness is obvious. Many more examples could be given.

Note, rather than tempt the reader to click out of the essay, I’ve moved links to the end, and annotated them. This is an example of one way in which the Internet could change (although I’m not exactly holding my breath).

1. It’s a problem that the Internet distracts us, dammit.

I too am distracted by ubiquitous digital media. This is a problem—a common, serious, and real problem—and I wish I could get to the bottom of it, but it is very deep.

In the last several years, like many of us, I’ve often felt out of control of my time. Following basic time management principles is more difficult than ever, especially when I’m spending time online and looking at screens generally. My situation is probably similar to that of many people reading this: I check my mail many times per day; Twitter and Facebook beckon, as do my favorite online communities (and I dread joining Google+); people push the latest news at me; people Skype me; and the time seems to slip away in spite of my better intentions to, you know, get work done.

What I think of as an unmitigated vice has been complacently described by some as “multi-tasking,” as if allowing yourself to be distracted were some sort of advanced technical ability. We are told (though, I gather, not by most psychologists) that being able to multi-task effectively is one of the skills that should now be in every plugged-in person’s toolkit. But the notion that multi-tasking is an advanced ability is merely an excuse, I think. When you are “multi-tasking,” usually, you are not using your time efficiently; you are simply letting yourself be distracted, because you don’t want to “miss out.”

That’s not all. As much as I hate to admit it, the Internet also seems to have made it difficult for me, as it has Nicholas Carr and Richard Foreman, to write and pay attention to long texts, and to think deep thoughts. To be sure, I still try and occasionally succeed. I seem to skim more along the surface of things, despite myself. Thoughtful insight is far from impossible, but it seems to require more deliberate effort. Creativity still flows, but less often and less spontaneously. Believe me, I wish it weren’t this way. I fear that I, too, am becoming one of Carr’s “shallows” and one of Foreman’s “pancake people.”

Many heavy Internet users have fairly admitted the same, often apparently with pride or without shame—or at least without hope of improvement. Do you feel the same?

The nature of these now-common problems—a mind ironically made poorer in spite of, indeed by, the Internet’s riches—has been much discussed, for example by Maggie Jackson in Distracted, Mark Bauerlein in The Dumbest Generation (a much better book than you might expect from the title), Nicholas Carr in The Shallows, and Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget.

So why do we let ourselves get so distracted? Why are we so often incapable of sticking to a single task?

I think there is a simple answer, actually: we intensely feel the presence of all the world’s information and people and the digital fun that entails, miraculously made available to us. Impersonal information made it bad enough for us early adopters in the earlier days of the Internet. But now that everybody and his grandma (literally) has joined social networks, the situation got a lot worse, for me at least. We are constantly available to our colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, so they may “interrupt” us at random times throughout the day, offering insights and telling us that some new website or blog post or picture or video is a “must read” or “must see,” or simply reporting their own sometimes-interesting thoughts and news. We constantly feel pulled in a thousand directions. This general problem seems likely to worsen as our access to the world’s information becomes more and more complete, speedy, and convenient. Before long, we will have virtually instant access to every bit of content we might want, always and everywhere, and with a minimum of effort (though not necessarily with a minimum of cost). We are nearly there, too.

This revolution—inadequately described as a revolution of ”information” or the “digital” or the “Internet”—is wholly unprecedented in history. Not long ago I had to tell blasé skeptics that it is not “hype” to call it a revolution. But clearly, a lot of regular folks, not necessarily in the vanguard, have started to understand the enormousness of how the world has changed in the last fifteen years or so. It’s a real revolution, not a mere fad or development, and even as we stare it in the face, it is still hard to grasp just how far-reaching it is. We have been swept up by the one of the most novel and dramatic transformations that humanity has ever undergone. We read about “revolutions” throughout history, the printing press, of religion, of ideology, of industry. This is another one; it’s the real deal. It’s more important than, for example, who will be elected president in 2012, whether the Euro will collapse, or Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Anyway, this revolution is so novel that it is not surprising if we act like kids screaming in a candy store, not knowing what to sample first. Maybe it’s time that we started taking stock of the Internet’s candy store more like mature adults and less like sugar-crazed children.

For some time, I’ve known that I would have to come to a personal understanding of this situation, and make some personal resolutions to deal with it. Like so much else, I’ve been putting this off, because the problem is massive and I haven’t felt equal to it. I’m not sure I am yet. Nobody seems to—not even the above writers, who offer bleak reports and little in the way of helpful advice. The Internet bedazzles us. But for me, things have come to a head. I do not want to go through the rest of my life in the now all-too-familiar state of Internet bedazzlement, if I can help it. For me, it begins now. It’s time for me—and maybe, for you too—to get over the fact that all of the world’s information and the people that drive it are (or soon will be) accessible in moments. But how?

Some people won’t admit that there is even a problem in the first place. They celebrate the Internet uncritically, leaping upon every new site, app, or gadget that promises to connect us in newer and deeper ways. But it is precisely the wonders of the Internet that we celebrate that have become a major distraction. Some people don’t seem to want to admit that distractability is a serious problem; they do nothing but offer blithe predictions and analysis of how thinking, social interaction, education, etc., are moving into a wonderful new age. That is all very well as far as it goes, but I sometimes wonder if some of the recent economic downturn might be explained by the amount of time we waste online. Surely it’s possible that the global economy is significantly less productive because we’re distracting ourselves, and each other, so much, and with so little to show for it.

Other people seem to think that there’s nothing that can be done about our distractability and “shallowness.” Whatever their disagreements, Internet commentators Clay Shirky and Nicholas Carr seem to agree on this: the brevity of information chunks, the pace of their flow, and the fact that they are mediated democratically by giant web communities are all inevitable features of the Internet; so we can’t help but be “distracted.” Or so Shirky, Carr, and many techie A-listers seem to think. This is where modern life is lived, for better or worse. If you want to be part of things, you’ve got to jump into the data stream and do your best to manage. If your distractability is making you “shallow” or “flat,” that is just a new and unfortunate feature of life today.

I will not “go gentle into that good night.” I can’t help but observe that this sort of techno-fatalism might be why some Internet geeks are becoming anti-intellectual. I’m far from alone in my view that the overall tendency of the Internet, as it is now and as we use it now, is to make us less intellectual. So, many Internet geeks make a virtue of necessity and begin slagging intellectual things like memory (and thus declarative knowledge), books and especially the classics, expertise, and liberal education. At least critics like Carr and Lanier have the good taste and sense to bemoan the situation rather than mindlessly celebrating it.

As to me, I disagree with techno-fatalism strongly. Isn’t it obvious that the Internet is still very new, that we are still experiencing its birth pangs, and that dramatic changes to how we use it will probably continue for another generation or two? Isn’t it also quite obvious that we have not really figured out how to design and use the Internet in a way that is optimal for us as fully-realized human beings? I love the new universal accessibility of so much recorded knowledge. Over the last dozen years I have been a booster of this myself, and in my work I still aim to enlarge our store of free, high-quality knowledge resources. I also deeply love the free exchange of ideas that the Internet makes possible. These things are why I “live online” myself. I do agree with the boosters that all this will, in time, probably, change us for the better. But the idea that the mindless digital helter-skelter of the early 2000s is how things will always be, from here on out, is highly doubtful.

We simply can’t go on like this. I think we can change, and we should.

Part 2: the pernicious design philosophy of the Internet >>

Relevant links

A good place to start learning about what psychologists say about Internet distraction would be via this search.

Nicholas Carr’s famous essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in The Atlantic, is one of those articles you kind of wish you’d written. It focused many people’s thinking about the effect of the Internet on how we think. I actually prefer his book The Shallows, however.

The “pancake people” reference is to a short essay by Richard Foresman in Edge.

For some of what I’ve said about the “revolution” that the Internet and digital media represent, see this, this, and this, just for example.

When I think about the suggestion that it’s not a bad thing that information chunks are getting smaller, I think of this Britannica Blog post by Clay Shirky, lauding short-form online communication as an “upstart literature” that will “become the new high culture.” Perhaps an older, more widely-read introduction to this notion would be Small Pieces, Loosely Joined by David Weinberger–it’s just that the pieces are even smaller and looser than when Weinberger published that book (2002).

“Go gentle into that good night” is, of course, a phrase from the poem “Invictus.”

The surely absurd notion that there is a new geek anti-intellectualism is broached in this much-discussed essay.

I had an interesting conversation with Dr. Miles Jones, an accelerated learning and memorization expert. I asked him for his advice on how we might best remember the things that we are learning in our book-reading. After all, H. and I read an awful lot of books, and while I’m sure some of it does sink in, most of it becomes implicit memory (the sort of memory that makes you go, “Oh, yeah, I remember that,” when someone reminds you of a fact–but which you can’t articulate when someone asks you about the fact). This strikes me as a perennial problem for education, one that teachers seem to assume is solved by exams and finals. As homeschoolers, we don’t have to do exams, so I am free to explore other, possibly more efficient ways to solve the problem.

Now, apart from those exams, most of us go through our schooling with very little memory work, and we don’t think it’s pointless to read books just because we’ll forget most of them. If we didn’t read them, we’d be really ignorant. So if that’s how it has to be with my boys, I’m resigned to their fate. They’ll still be well-educated.

But what if there is a way to retain more of what we learn?  Obviously, always re-reading books after reading them once will help do the trick. But ultimately, you can’t read as much that way and it’s not clear that you would learn a lot more that way.

Anyway, Dr. Jones gave me an intriguing answer. He said that you’d review the information one hour, one day, one week, one month, and one year later. Seems this is something that people in the field often say. He recommended that I highlight the info I want H. to retain as we read, then read the highlighted portions into a recorder, then we simply listen to the recording a day, a week, a month, etc., later.

So, never one to pass up trying out some easily testable idea, and since I have a nice handheld recorder and am an unimaginably fantastic user of it (not really, but I know how to edit sound files and stuff), I decided to give it a try.

For a couple of days, I was doing 12 minutes of summaries per day. I quickly calculated that, while continuing on that way might seem admirably ambitious, it’s really just plain crazy.  I mean, it’s OK as long as you’re reviewing just one of these recordings per day. But suppose you limit the recordings to 10 minutes a day, and each day you are reviewing recordings from a day ago, a week ago, a month ago, a season ago, a year ago, and two years ago. That would be 60 minutes per day of listening to yourself summarize stuff that you read…that long ago.  Have you ever heard of anyone doing such a thing?

Now, H. expressed great enthusiasm after listening to our first recordings. We talked about it and he said basically that it was a lot of fun, because it reminded him of what he knows. His reaction surprised me. I thought it was pretty interesting, most of the time, but maybe not that exciting. I did see two great advantages aside from the long-term memory aspect. First, it immediately reinforces what we just read. That alone might make the practice worth doing. Second, H. (when he pays attention to my summary while I make it–he doesn’t always) gets a very lively idea of what a good summary “narration” looks like. I flatter myself that I am good at summarizing things I’ve just read quickly and accurately, and picking out the important points.

But I just can’t imagine that we’ll want to listen to a full hour of this stuff every day. Eventually, I saw reason, as I’ll explain further down.

Then I thought, suppose it were (somehow) practical. But is it really desirable? Well, there are several considerations here. The first is knowledge. Knowledge is good, and we want to maximize it. Second is love of knowledge, or motivation–a different thing. We don’t want to burn out kids (or parents) by requiring too much of anything or more than tolerable of what is tedious. Third is pleasure, we want life fun, especially life for children. Fourth is opportunity cost–even if it is in all a benefit to do, would the time we spend on this be better spent on something else (like reading more books)?

Would it be worthwhile in this sense? I tend to believe Dr. Jones. I’ve heard his advice before, I don’t know where, and it’s very plausible that jogging your memory according to that pattern would help you retain information that otherwise would be forgotten. Well, if so, it would be extremely valuable. It might even be worth some unpleasantness, or at least foregoing of more intense pleasures. After all, what we’re talking about is remembering a hell of a lot more stuff than you would remember otherwise. Suppose that someone could wave a magic wand and suddenly you’d remember, instead of 20% of what you learned in school, more like 60%. (I’m picking numbers out of the air, but you get the idea.) You know that, right now, you’d be a lot better-informed than you are. Having a handle on all that information would in turn enable you to draw connections and make insights that are unavailable to you because, well, you’ve forgotten so much. Reflecting on this makes me wonder if this is something that we should all be doing, even as adults. Should we be spending an hour each day simply reminding ourselves of what we have already learned? I don’t know. It sounds like a fascinating idea to consider, though. (I have since been informed that some people actually do this.)

Another consideration I’ve been thinking about, however, is that we might very well achieve a similar effect simply by reading increasingly difficult books on the same subjects that we’ve already studied. In this way, maybe we don’t have to review, and we get a similar effect. Perhaps–but I don’t think so. Even someone who revisits the same fact four times in his education, in increasingly difficult contexts, might still forget it because it never, on any of the passes, makes it into long-term memory. But the method Dr. Jones describes is designed specifically to get those facts into long-term memory. Reviewing info a day and a week later, in particular, seems important to getting it into long-term memory. My guess is the month and three-month reviews will set the neural pathways quite well. Then one will likely come across the information later in one’s education, and if one is still using the same memory technique, and one has forgotten it, then it will be revived all over again. Of course, that assumes that the technique would be used long-term…

So anyway, I was off and running. That was about five weeks ago. After about five days, H. was very excited about the memory method. He said twice that he was grateful to Dr. Jones for suggesting it. (H. is a very weird kid.) But after a week, H. started resisting, a little. Then he went back to being fully supportive, then resisting, and so forth. A couple times, I’ve started talking like maybe we’ll quit and he quickly backtracked and said he likes recordings, he learns a lot from them, and so forth. It effortful to listen to these recordings, but it’s a “good hurt.” He and I both are learning a lot.

A week in, I wrote, “I am 90% sure that within a week to a month, we’re going to either give up on this or completely change it.” Well, it’s been a month, and we’ve made only one significant change: I made a big effort to reduce the recording amount per day to no more than eight minutes. Rarely, it’s more and often it’s closer to five and sometimes three. Let me put this in terms of the length of time spent summarizing individual readings: instead of three minutes to summarize a reading that took 20 minutes, I summarize in 2 or 1.5. Shorter readings get just a minute or less. There are some books that are just really hard to summarize so quickly, and I indulge in longer summaries. Anyway, using shorter summaries makes the whole thing much more doable. This did require that I reduce the amount of information I put into recordings, but really that’s OK; the big important points are the ones we really want to remember anyway, of course.

I have tried to get H. to do summaries. I have tried to train him, give him examples, explain about the main idea, etc. We have been practicing outlining stories, and he’s not bad at doing that, with some help from me. But none of this training makes it feasible for him to do summaries on the tape recorder. Actually, there was one that he did that was actually a summary rather than a word-for-word reading with commentary, out of a half-dozen tries. So, if we want to do this memory method, then for now, I have to make the recordings. I expect I’ll continue to have to do them for at least another year or two. When he starts doing more reading to himself (when I start reading more to the baby at the table instead of him–which I suspect will be reasonably soon), either he won’t do summaries of those readings, or he’ll have to learn to do them quickly and accurately (seems like a non-starter right now), or we’ll have to figure out something else, I don’t know what.

In case someone is interested in technique/how-to, here are a few more notes.

I summarize only nonfiction and poetry, not fiction (except for myth–I treated Norse myth like nonfiction). We’ll read, say, 20 minutes during breakfast, and then I’ll wander away from the noisy family and take a few minutes to make the recording (often yelling to H. and others to be quiet). I don’t mark up the books, because it isn’t necessary. I keep a thumb on the Pause/Record button, and record only when I know what I want to say, and pause as soon as I run out of things to say. Whether I summarize or simply pull out interesting facts depends on the kind of nonfiction. For example, with the Usborne Encyclopedia of World History, there’s no summarizing it because it’s not a narrative, so I just record the most important facts. But with the Look-It-Up Book of Presidents, a summary usually hits the factual high points too. When we read poems (Piping Down the Valleys Wild, these days), we usually read from 5-10 poems, depending on how many we really try to analyze, and then what I do is simply ask H. which one he wants to record. If we read a famous poem, I will record that one in any case, which means that yesterday I recorded two poems; that’s OK, because kid poems are short and are nice to listen to in the recording. He often picks or goes along with a famous one. I find I have to speak with a very clear voice, i.e., not slurring and aspirating consonants, or the recording can be difficult to understand. Speaking too quickly is a mistake, but so is using lots of um’s and pauses. The most efficient way all around (to keep recording times down but also to make a listenable recording) is to speak clearly and deliberately, but without long pauses. Brief pauses are necessary for the listener to be able to mentally process the recording. It also helps for listenability if you keep the recording as dramatic or at least as interestingly worded as possible. It would be nice if the recordings word made by a professional voice person, but since that’s not possible, just try to sound clear, convincing, engaged, maybe excited, but definitely not bored.

I use a Sony Digital Voice Recorder, I think it cost me something like $200 back when I was recording music sessions. It comes with some pretty good software (“Digital Voice Editor”), which makes it easy to save recordings quickly, organize them, and convert recording formats if necessary. At first I was saving recordings to wav format, but this increased the file size so I decided to stick with Sony’s proprietary .msv format, which combines high quality with low file size. As long as I have the software, it’s easier to go with this than to convert to wav. I also used to combine the day’s recordings automatically (which the software makes it easy to do), but H. didn’t like that, and I also found it somehow satisfying (as opposed to annoying) to start each short recording individually.

As to how I organize the recordings: I have a “Recordings” folder. Each day gets its own new folder, where I put the day’s three to six recordings. It’s easy enough to find the recordings from a week ago. After we’ve listened to the 1-week recording, I transfer it to the “To review one month” folder. After we’ve listened to the recording made one month ago (I go with the same numbered day last month, resigning myself to some confusion as there are greater or fewer days at the end of months…it’ll all work out), I transfer that to a “To review three months” folder. It’s usually easy enough to find the recording to review–it’s the oldest one in any given folder (together with yesterday’s recording).

Sometimes we don’t get around to listening to yesterday’s recording after dinner (the reserved time) so we do it early the next day.

I have noticed that it takes a considerable amount of attention to stay focused throughout what is now 15-25 minutes of recordings to listen to. The recordings are, after all, nothing but information. The only reason we can stick with it is that it does, after all, remind us of something we read, and that usually has some interest for us. Sometimes I have to settle H. down…he is only five, after all…I’m not meaning to brag, but I am sure that most kids wouldn’t be able to do this. As hyper and independent as he can be, H. actually has a remarkably good attention span and he’s a very geeky kid. Just as I thought he would be. (To illustrate that further, we recently started learning/playing with Scratch, a programming language learning program from MIT, and he just plays with it endlessly as he would a game. I’m not sure if he’s learning much, but, well, he’s learning something…) Baby E. is very different, we can and do read him books, but not like I read to H. I simply can’t sit down with him anytime, the way I did with H., and read any number of books–even though I try pretty often. He has to be in the mood and it’s only one or two board books at a time. He’s also more extraverted and sociable. So if we can do this with baby E. when he is five, I’ll be very surprised.

As to the “success” of the memory method, I still haven’t tested H. on much since we first started the memory method a month ago. I am very sure that he does not remember 100% or even 80% of the facts, in the sense that I might ask a straightforward short answer question based on some statement made in the recordings, and he would give me a more or less complete and correct answer. My guess is that the number is closer to 50%. Still, I do have the distinct impression that he’s learning significantly more because of these recordings than if we had not used them.

I have had one confirming bit of evidence. We were going through the Story of the World (Vol. 2, we’re 2/3 of the way through this…along with the other 3+ history sources we’re covering at the same time) test book orally. We did some quizzes over material we read over a month ago, and some quizzes over material we covered in recordings. He didn’t get 100% on the latter (several of the questions weren’t even covered in the recordings) but he definitely did better.

I also had the impression that the questions he did best on (i.e., he was most confident on, or said the answer before the multiple choice options were given, or was confident of the answer and turned out to be correct when I wasn’t sure, etc.) were questions over information that appeared in multiple sources we’ve read. Whether this better performance is due to sheer repetition, or having the information embedded in different, complementary contexts, or something else, I do think it’s a good idea to use multiple sources when learning history, science, geography, and other such subjects. We find it indispensible to use multiple math systems concurrently as well, he simply wouldn’t understand math nearly as well if we weren’t using Singapore and MEP and 2+2 is not 5 (almost done with this).

Still, doing recordings definitely seems to be highly beneficial memory training, so far. We’ll see if we can keep it up for the “one season” and “one year” reviews–doesn’t seem likely, but it’s possible. Then we’ll really have a good idea of how beneficial this method is. One thing seems fairly sure to me already: it won’t give you perfect memory of everything you’ve read. It will simply improve your recall and ultimately deepen your understanding. While doing this, we started reading about physics in depth. We’ve read a lot about Newton’s three laws. The combination of reading about them in 4-5 different books (really! It’s amazing how many accessible, simple explanations of physics are out there!) and listening to summaries of all of these as well has really helped them to sink in. The proof will come in a year–we’ll see if H. (or I!) can remember them well enough to explain them then, long after we’ve moved on to chemistry.

The post has two parts. The first is about the availability of porn on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, which for most people reading this is probably old news; but they’ve reached some new lows, such as actual pornographic films. The second part contains what I think is real news: that the much-debated porn filter they were developing is no longer in development and looks likely to be dropped.

I

There are, as many people reading this know very well, stupendous amounts of explicit imagery on Commons as well as Wikipedia itself; simply search for any fetish, porn industry term, or body part, and you’ll be likely to find it illustrated literally ad nauseam. Users, whether they like it or not, can be exposed to all sorts of inappropriate, explicit content when doing perfectly innocuous searches. This degree of smut is obviously inappropriate for an Internet resource touted as “educational” and promoted for classroom use.

Almost two years ago, I reported the Wikimedia Foundation to the FBI (as I was required to by law) on grounds that Wikimedia Commons was hosting two image categories, labeled “Pedophilia” and “Lolicon,” which featured depictions of child sexual abuse. I tracked the fallout in two posts. Recently, FoxNews.com followed up their coverage, reporting that little had been done since then. The Fox News reporter did a good job, I think. But some more developments have come to light.

The pervy categories are still there, and include whole hierarchies of categories under the titles “Erotic images of children” (NSFW) and “Child sexuality” (NSFW). The garbage by Martin van Maele, who drew many illustrations of children being sexually abused in the early 20th century, is still there, aggressively and proudly defended by the powers-that-be on Wikimedia Commons as “historical” and “educational.” To give you an idea of the attitude of the pedophilia sympathizers on Commons, who clearly feel themselves to be put-upon and wronged, consider that there is a so-called “Hate for pedophiles” category which has existed, unmolested, since May 2010 (which, come to think of it, is the month when my FBI report made news). Consider also (as was recently pointed out to me) that the activists-for-free-porn on Commons have been awarding each other the new, outrageously gross, “Hot Sex Barnstar” (NSFW!) for their efforts. There are clearly some (to me) extremely unsavory characters involved who have made it their mission to make Commons, and Wikipedia as well, as free as possible to host the most explicit sorts of imagery on this tax-exempt, non-profit 501(c)(3) website.

Recently I received an email from someone who follows this issue. He called a few things to my attention. One item: a convicted child pornographer has apparently been prominently involved in curating adult pornography. It seems he is one of those who loves to use Commons to post pervy naked pictures of himself–discussion here. He is probably not the only one. Another item: Commons is now hosting an antique video (really, really NSFW) which I am told (I didn’t watch the whole thing) shows a dog fellating a woman (in a nun’s habit) and a man.

The Wikipedia community’s more prurient tendencies are, so far from being reined in and moderated, exercised more boldly than ever.

II

My correspondent also directed me to this extremely interesting discussion on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list (Foundation-L). Read both pages–here is page 2. As I write this, discussion is ongoing.

This discussion has revealed two pieces of news so far.

First, the powers-that-be at the WMF have directed their programmers to stop working on their opt-in “controversial content” (including porn) filter. They have higher priorities, we are told.

This needs some background. The very least that Wikipedia could do, on this issue, is to let people turn on a filter so that they (or the children using their computers) would not be shown porn and other grossly inappropriate content. In fact, my understanding is that the porn would merely be “collapsed,” meaning that the user could still easily display it by “uncollapsing” the image. This, as sane people can agree, sounds both welcome and completely uncontroversial. This is what the WMF’s consultant recommended in 2010, and it was widely assumed, after a referendum indicated general support (if lukewarm), that it would be implemented soonish. After all, the tool would simply let people turn on a personal filter. (It wouldn’t be turned on automatically–users would have turn it on in user settings.) And the filter would only hide “controversial” images, not completely block them. But, no. There’s no compromise on porn in Wikipedia-land, despite this being an “educational” project constitutionally committed to consensus and compromise. They want their commitment to free speech so loudly proclaimed that two full-color vulvas greet you at the top of the page (with a variety of others further down), should you have the temerity to look up the subject on Wikipedia. There has been such a groundswell of loud opposition to the opt-in filter idea that the project was never implemented.

This leads me to the second piece of news. It appears that two Wikimedia Foundation Board members, Kat Walsh and Phoebe Ayers, have both changed their positions. The Board was sharply divided on the need of this filter (which is just as amazing and silly as it sounds) last fall, but things have become even sillier since then. There is more community opposition, and so Ms. Walsh and Ms. Ayers no longer support it. They strongly imply that the earlier decision to build a filter is now a dead letter.

This says something very disappointing and even disturbing about the Wikimedia Foundation as an institution. It certainly looks as though they are in the thrall of anarchist porn addicts whose scorn for the interests of children–the group of users that stands to gain the most from a high-quality free encyclopedia–is constrained only by the limits of the law, and maybe not even that.

Eighteen months ago, after speaking at length to both WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner and the consultant she hired, Robert Harris, I had the distinct impression that the WMF might be capable of prevailing on Wikipedia and Commons to the extent of, at least, installing a completely innocuous opt-in filter system. So color me disillusioned.

I don’t wish any grief or embarrassment upon Wikipedia’s more sensible managers, like those I’ve mentioned–Gardner, Ayers, and Walsh. They are clearly right that politically they’re in a “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” situation. But given the choice, I’d rather be damned for doing the bare minimum needed to meet the needs of children, or at least trying to do that, than be more richly damnable for not doing anything. I’d suck it up and remind myself that there are quite a few more important things than power and status. Since such a complete no-brainer as an opt-in filter is currently politically impossible, Gardner and other sane adults among the Wikimedia managers face a dilemma: maintain some degree of power in the organization, but implicitly supporting what is only too clearly a deeply dysfunctional and irresponsible organization; or resign. If I were Gardner, or a member of the Board, I would seriously consider resigning and making a clear and pointed public statement.

Ultimately, the WMF, which has legal responsibility for the project–and which is supposed to be the grown-up, after all–has shown in its inability to act on this issue that it cannot avoid a truly spectacular scandal or a really serious lawsuit. The potential trouble isn’t that the government might shut Wikipedia down, or slap it with judgments it can’t repay. Rather, the biggest potential trouble is a mass exodus of profoundly disillusioned contributors, which is surely the Achilles’ heel of a project with tens of millions of articles and files to manage.

If she really wanted to take serious leadership on this issue, what Gardner might do is spearhead a brand new project to use some of the many millions they’ve amassed and start a serious Wikipedia for young people, one that K-12 teachers can be proud to use with their students. It could be a curated version of Wikipedia. It would not only have obvious controls regarding age-appropriate content, it would also have reviewed versions of articles, Citizendium-style. They could brag that they have finally adopted “flagged revisions,” which the media has been repeatedly led to believe is “right around the corner.”

I do not think the WMF needs to ask the Wikipedia rank-and-file to vote on this. Or, if they ask those people, they should also ask their contributors to vote on it, as well. The WMF has to ask itself: who are we serving, the Wikipedia rank-and-file, which is dominated by anarchist porn addicts, or readers? Are they sensible enough to answer this question correctly?

As an added bonus, if a WMF-supported responsible version of Wikipedia existed and were growing healthily, then I would shut up about the X-rated version of Wikipedia. Maybe.

I think I understand the trouble people are having. The trouble is that there are many different options and many ways through the same material. So what I think I need to do is to add a section to the help page explaining about use cases–in other words, advice to people in particular situations. Here’s a draft for your more immediate consumption, addressed to teachers, homeschoolers, and parents of very small children.

What path should I take through Reading Bear?

How you should use Reading Bear depends on your situation. Let’s address some cases.

As a classroom supplement for a phonics program. Suppose you’ve already got a rigorous phonics curriculum in your pre-K, Kindergarten, or First Grade class, and you don’t want to give up the curriculum, but Reading Bear looks great to you. In that case, you’d take a few minutes out to match, as best as you can, the scope and sequence of your program to the Reading Bear scope and sequence. Not all phonics programs follow the same methods or introduce the same rules, but there are often similarities or useful overlap. For maximum use in individual workstations, have your kids begin with “Sound It Out Slowly” and, if they find they don’t need that preliminary practice, tell them to switch to “Sound It Out Quickly.” If they don’t need words sounded out for them, then have them switch to “Let Me Sound It Out.” If they can already decode the words in a set, and you want to use Reading Bear for reinforcement, then they could use “Silent Flashcards,” the review presentations, and the quizzes for that. Note that the reviews and the quizzes are different (randomized) each time you open them. The sentences and videos in “Audio Sentences” can be used as a little reinforcing treat, if students like them. Finally, if the students are advanced and just want some fun practice, they can use “Silent Sentences.” While the sentences are not leveled, they are at a low (1st-3rd grade) reading level. If students get stuck on a word, they can simply click on it and the pronunciation dictionary both sounds out and blends the word.

As a classroom supplement for a whole language program. If your class has only limited exposure to phonics, and your focus is more on student reading of leveled texts and teacher read-alouds, then you might want to use Reading Bear–which is 100% free–as a quick, efficient introduction to systematic phonics. When we have finished creating our presentations (we’re hard at work, but it takes time!), the site will teach a complete set of phonics rules following a painless, yet effective and proven method (it is basically a digital version of Flesch’s method from Why Johnny Can’t Read). We recommend that you use the procedure outlined here (see “Steps to Follow”).  In individual work stations, let students understand that they should stay on a presentation only as long as they have to. If they have mastered a set of words, and are getting 14 or 15 out of 15 on the quiz for a presentation, then move on. We are confident that with just 10 minutes a day, your little readers could be recognizing words with renewed confidence.

As a resource for remedial work. A number of remedial reading educators have praised Reading Bear. It is well-known that what many poor readers need is to have the phonics rules of written English made extremely clear. They also often have trouble blending words. While Reading Bear is a brand new program and so no studies have yet been done, these problems are things that it seems we can help with. Reading Bear is, first and foremost, a systematic phonics site. Rule are simple, and typically illustrated with a few dozen examples. Our emphasis is on making phonics rules second nature. We also do something that no other free phonics program does–sound out every word that is introduced, at two speeds, and blend it slowly, before reading it at full speed. This teaches both the individual parts of words and how they come together as a whole. So we believe Reading Bear’s unique strength, along with its combination of phonics and vocabulary work, is in its power to teach blending. We are sure that remedial reading instructors are capable of determining how best to use the resources of Reading Bear, but we recommend that students be allowed to go through the program at their own pace, not moving forward until they have achieved mastery. “Mastery” here means reading words rapidly and accurately, without sounding them out, or sounding them out only “in the head.”

One last thing to teachers. A couple teachers have complained that Reading Bear moves too fast. In their classwork, some teachers can spend a long time on a single word, and they can’t get past the fact that Reading Bear, even in the “Sound It Out Slowly” setting, covers a single word in a half-minute at most. If there is a disagreement here, it is methodological. But first, we do assume that students have completely mastered the consonant sounds and do not have any trouble reproducing a sound immediately on seeing a letter. Once students are at that comfort level with the letters, the Reading Bear method can teach students a rule rather than teaching words. For purposes of teaching a rule, going through many examples quickly and explicitly, with the aim of making use of the rule automatic, is more effective than a slower, analytical pace. If a student has indeed mastered the consonant sounds and then learns the short /a/ sound from the Reading Bear presentation, she should have no trouble decoding the words. She will not have to memorize individual words.

As a homeschooling program for complete beginners. Reading Bear is perfect for one-on-one work. You work at your own pace. But we do not start at the very beginning. The first step to learning to read, using phonics, is to gain absolute mastery of the letter sounds–not just familiarity, but mastery. So if your students cannot reproduce the sounds of the consonants instantly (the vowels don’t matter so much, because they are highly variable and are taught in phonics), you could have them practice the consonants with books or with these videos. When they can instantly and reliably say the most common sounds (hard c, hard g) of any consonant upon being presented with it, they’re ready for Reading Bear. Once they’re ready, if they’re between 4 and 6, we recommend easing students into the program with “Sound It Out Slowly,” gradually switch to “Sound It Out Quickly” and “Let Me Sound It out,” and aim for mastery. They’ll pick up the rules automatically after they see many examples. Don’t go onto the next presentation until your student really understands the previous one and can read the words without pausing to sound them out. The rules are cumulative after the first five, so there are definite advantages to doing them in order. If you’re using Reading Bear as a supplement to your main phonics program, however, you might want to do them “out of order”–see above under “As a classroom supplement for a phonics program.”

As an early-education program for preschoolers, toddlers, and even babies. Reading Bear is highly visual and introduces its information explicitly and at a pace that can hold the interest of the very young–your mileage may vary, but we know of many small children who sit still for Reading Bear. Very young children are at a golden age in which they can absorb complex information effortlessly. This is how they learn to speak without any lessons–and even in multiple languages, or sign language. Writing is, after all, just another and rather clearer form of this very complex phenomenon we call language. If you think about it, there is no reason to suppose small children are incapable of decoding written language if they can pick up French, Spanish, or Mandarin, or sign language, along with spoken English. Moreover, this is the experience of a rapidly growing community of people who use methods like Glenn Doman’s and products like Your Baby Can Read.

While there is no hard-nosed research on methods of teaching babies to read (see this discussion), there is a lot of individual experience shared in books like Doman’s (and one by Timothy Kailing) and in the BrillKids.com Forums. Reading Bear can be used with some of these methods. Simply playing one part (i.e., the A, B, C, etc. parts under the title) of the “short a” presentation using the “Sound It Out Slowly” setting to a two-year-old, once per day, can be enough to let the child infer phonics rules and, eventually, learn to read. But by itself, Reading Bear is unlikely to have this effect. The child should be exposed to his ABCs and letter sounds and be read to daily, and in other ways benefit from a rich language environment. It also helps greatly to point to the words as you read them to your child, even a very small child who can’t read at all. Finally, don’t expect immediate, dramatic results, and don’t test your child–doing so tends to put small children off, and increase stress levels, we have found. Simply think of your early language development tasks–including use of Reading Bear–as just fun enrichment activities, and enjoy the journey.

First, I’m happy to report that E. is able to read! He can read most words that he can say out loud (although he doesn’t say much–see below), and he can show that he recognizes several other words.  Here are some of the words he says, with a few associations:

“Ball” – he is often saying “ball” when we are downstairs near the family room, which is usually messy with toys.  I think he knows that “ball” means ball, but he sometimes seems to use it to mean “play,” because as soon as I get out a ball he says “no” and goes to a different toy.  In just the last couple weeks he has started saying “no” a lot.

“Moon” – for some reason he has a deep fascination with the Moon.  I think it made an impression on him when his Mama pointed it out to him a few months ago, on a few different occasions.  He often “requests” (well, he points and says “moon,” and I guess) my “Moon for Kids” video, which he usually watches partway before losing interest.  He seems to use “moon” to mean anything in space.  For a long time he was saying “moon” while pointing at either the sun or the moon, but now he seems to know that the sun, at least, is different from the moon.  He does call any picture of a planet or other moon a “moon,” and sometimes just a picture of a galaxy will elicit the word.

“Eye” – now this is a strange one.  Baby reads and pronounces it “eye-t” whether he sees “eye” or “eyes.” The weird thing is I could swear that H. also pronounced “eye” in exactly the same way when he was a baby.

“Mama” – when he was about six months old, he was using “Mama” and “Papa” discriminately.  (He used to slap or pat me in the morning while saying “Papa.”  I woke up quite a few times this way.)  Then he stopped using “Papa” and about four months ago or so we discovered that he was using “Mama” to refer to me. I can ask him, “Where is Papa?” and he will pat me.   But it seems easier for him to call me “Mama,” so he has been doing so.  He seems somewhat amused by my repeatedly insisting that I am Papa, and that person over there is Mama.  (Sigh.)  Actually, in the last week, he has started whispering “Papa” in reference to me, heavily aspirating the P’s, which I think means he doesn’t understand how to put aspirated P’s together with the voiced “ah” sound in “Papa.”

His name – he can say it and read it.  Often when he reads the word, he doesn’t say his name (he’s only said his name 3-4 times that I recall), he just pats his chest.

“Nose” – he sniffs upon when reading it, or points at his nose.

“Lips” – he moves his lips, a little like giving a kiss.

“Dog” – he pants like a dog.  (This is very cute.)

“Cat” – he meows like a cat.  (This is also very cute.)

A – lately, he has liked identifying the letter A whenever he has seen it.  ”A,” which he sometimes pronounces “eye,” also seems to be his abbreviated way of saying or asking for the ABCs, like ABC videos we watch.

There are quite a few others, familiar to users of Your Baby Can Read, that he has read, but he also has indicated that he knows some other short vowel words from ReadingBear.org, like “fan,” “tap,” and “egg.”

I don’t think he is reading phonetically yet.  While he can pick out many more words than I have listed here, he often refuses to play or gets it wrong when I give him several non-obvious, not-totally-familiar words to choose from.

Like his big brother at the same age, he still doesn’t use very many words and rarely speaks in sentences.  He does occasionally come out with sentences, usually “I want” or “Mama go” or something like that.  His performance from last September, “I get the ball,” was unusual.  He did use several other sentences, usually “I get” or “I want” something, for a long time, then he stopped using sentences for several months.  It’s as if he were trying harder to talk when he was 10 or 12 months, but since then, he has gotten a bit lazy–maybe he proved to himself that he could talk and now he just isn’t so interested in developing the ability.

In terms of comprehension or vocabulary, he has shown that he knows a lot more words than he can say.  I play simple word games with him often, asking him to pick words or point to objects either in books or lying on the floor, and he clearly does know a lot of what he sees in baby books.  For example, he could identify red (the color), the numeral 4, lots of animals, etc.

Along the same lines, he seems to know at least most of the letters of the alphabet so far.  In the last few weeks I have had him identify letters on H’s old LeapFrog Alphabet Bus, just one at a time (his attention span is very short), and he was able to identify the A, E, and X.  (I said, “Press A” and he pressed the A.)

As to how he’s learned these things, I’ll cover that below.  I haven’t tested him systematically–it’s play, not scientific testing, and only as long as baby wants to participate.  I really don’t know how far his abilities extend, and I am not so eager to find out that I would subject him to a lot of testing.

Now a little about other abilities and personality.  Except when a longer attention span is needed, he is a pretty cooperative and tractable little guy, unlike H. at that age.  Whereas H. wasn’t very interested in building towers of blocks, and just wanted to knock mine over, E. quickly started imitating me in building some, and was able to build a tower of five blocks on his own, before we stopped.  We haven’t really practiced that either.  I guess that’s pretty good, for this age.  He also follows instructions.  I have told him to get down off a chair and he will.  H. often would not do that.  At the time, I thought he wasn’t understanding; I now suspect that he understood, and decided he didn’t want to.  But H. was also much more independent, and would play for hours at a time by poring through his baby and toddler books at age 16 months, whereas E. hangs quite a bit on Mama (which of course tires her out) and, to my disappointment, is not very interested in books.  But he does pick up books from time to time, on his own, and flips through them.

As with H., his mother speaks her native tongue exclusively to him while H. and I speak English almost exclusively.  Mama and I mostly speak English to each other.  H. does use a few words in his mother’s language, and clearly understands her, but most of the words he comes up with are English.  This is not surprising, because H. displayed the same pattern, although I think he used less of his “mother tongue” than baby has been using.  H., by the way, can understand and translate his mother’s language very well (much better than me), and can even read some in it, but has trouble speaking/answering in it.

H. and E. get along quite well.  I won’t get into all the details, but they seem to have a very healthy, normal relationship.

Quite apart from these “intellectual” skills, E. is definitely a bright little guy–quick on the uptake with his motor skills, quick to imitate, etc. He’s also a happy and funny baby.

Well, so much for what you might notice through interacting with him.  Now let me discuss what we’ve been doing with him, education-wise.

When we get up in the morning, while still in bed, I spend probably a half hour reading books and playing on the iPad with him.  Baby’s word for the iPad is “bop.”  It’s always “bop bop bop” whenever the iPad comes into view.  He loves the bop.  He strongly prefers the bop over books–which makes me wonder if having it around might have soured him somewhat on books.  When H. was 16 months, the iPad did not yet exist.

Now, for many months on the iPad, I was able to show him a variety of flashcard programs, videos, counting apps, and so forth.  But in the last two or three months or so, he’s been insufferable in how he opens one app (which…of course…he has learned to do) only to close it five seconds later, then open another, then close that and open the first, etc.  It’s very difficult to get him to concentrate on any one.  Once again it was rather different with H., who had a longer attention span for both books and videos.  As soon as he shows that he’s just bouncing around apps, I put the bop away.  I don’t want him getting into such bad habits; I also want to reward him for sticking with a task.  Occasionally he does stick with an app or a video for a few minutes, and then of course I let him.  And sometimes, he does get tired of the bop, and I can read a book to him, sometimes two or more books.

Here is a list of apps that he does stick with for a minute or two, if he’s sticking with any:

WatchKnow (selected videos, especially Elmo and India Arie singing the ABC song, counting songs (especially this one which he listens to over and over and over), and Peter Weatherall videos–thanks so much Peter, you’re a kind of genius! Did you know he’s a philosopher like me? Figures!)

Solar Walk – I said he’s very much into the Moon–well, this is one reason why.  He’ll sit and stare while I talk about different planets and moons, orbits, rotation, etc.  His main comment while watching all this is “Moon,” but I think he’s having slightly more complex thoughts than that.

Counting (iTot Apps) – Simple but effective, teaches both counting and names of common objects.  We’ve used this app maybe longer and more consistently than any other (for many months, every day for a few minutes day).  While he has lately become a bit tired of it, so we don’t look at it daily anymore, we still open it up regularly and he can now touch the items himself, even into the teens.

Various Kindergarten.com flashcard apps. These inspired the Reading Bear “interludes.”

SpongeWords – Simple but very well designed and often holds his attention when others won’t. (Still can’t figure out the speaker’s accent…)

Little Reader – Since he likes the LR software, it wasn’t at all surprising to me that he likes the LR app–again, even when others won’t hold his attention.

“Alphabets in the Zoo” (Googly) – E. was addicted to this alphabet video/app for many months but has gotten tired of it in the last couple months.

KidCalc (a really fantastic math app, by the way, even still for H.) – He likes the Counting Cards.

Apps that I thought he’d love, but really kind of doesn’t: Starfall ABCs (!?), various cute and well-designed animal apps, and Smart Baby Apps’ “First 1,000 Words” (damn it, if he liked this, we’d be set for content for a long time!).  We did use “DomanCards Mathematics” until one day he decided he didn’t like it anymore and that was the end of that.

As to books, his tolerance for them comes and goes.  He really has to be in the mood.  He tends to like the small Priddy board books, and he particularly liked the Tomie dePaola Little Mother Goose board book, The Hungry Caterpillar, The Three Bears by Byron Barton–all board books–and others from time to time.  The only regular paper book he seems to have time for is Go Dog Go. I try out a book on him every day, and some days he just isn’t interested.  I strongly suspect his interest will increase, however.  H. wasn’t interested in reading so much in the few months after he really started walking, too.

When H. was E.’s age, I read to him while his Mama fed him.  I’m still reading to H. at mealtime (and explaining things), and E. frequently is paying attention to us, more or less.  When H. gets up from the table, E. climbs into big brother’s seat.  He wants to do everything big brother does, of course.  Occasionally I do read to baby E. instead of H. at mealtime, but usually he doesn’t have patience for it, so I just go back to reading to H.  I do think I’ll start reading more at mealtime with baby–as soon as he is more tolerant of it.

After his daily nap, and often at other times when Mama needs a break, I find baby in my lap, saying, “Beah! Beah!”  That means Reading Bear.  He’s my biggest fan, I think.  When he doesn’t want to look at anything else, he still has time–and an extended attention span–for Reading Bear.  While we usually look at just 4-6 minutes or so, sometimes he’ll sit there for a full 15 minutes and we’ll look at one from beginning to end.  We use the “Sound It Out Slowly,” and with interludes turned on, the video voice-over turned on (he loves Melissa and for a while was waving when he saw her picture), and the “Can you read this?”-prompts turned off.  So it’s like a video.  I often talk about things that come up (as I do whenever we’re reading or watching anything).  So does E.  If he sees a picture of a cat, he will meow.  If he sees anything like the Moon, he says, “Moon.”

For a long time we were doing the Little Reader curriculum daily, and we still do that once a week or so.  I like it and E. often stays still for it.  I guess we stopped watching so often when he started asking for “Bear” so insistently whenever he saw the computer.  But we do plan to continue on to the end of the curriculum, which I think is excellent.  Doesn’t take long, either, something like three minutes.

By the way, a lot of critics of “baby reading” and very early education fail to realize or accept that, apart from reading books which they generally approve of, it doesn’t take long at all.  It is not done all day long, to the exclusion of play.  It is just a supplement.  Believe me, baby still has lots and lots of time to do baby stuff.  H., too, has lots of time to do little kid stuff.

As to videos, every day he still watches parts of a Your Baby Can Read video, a Brainy Baby video (especially ABCs), or a Baby Einstein video (for a while it was all On the Go all the time).  His habits of watching these are different from the habits H. followed–probably because I am not there.  The time I would have had to sit with him and narrate the videos is now spent, I guess, homeschooling H., and while baby’s Mama does narrate them a bit (in her language), it’s really not enough.  But he doesn’t watch them very much, and his attention for the videos is limited–after five or ten minutes, he’s wandering off.  He prefers to be riding around on his sit-on truck or throwing the ball or following H. around or bothering Mama.  My guess is that he doesn’t spend more than 15 minutes a day actually looking at the television set.  (Of course, he gets other screen time when looking at Reading Bear and the bop.)

In short, things are looking well for baby E.  He’s started actually reading and seems to know lots of baby-accessible stuff, from one source or another, even if he isn’t so keen on books right now.