Learn Your Stroke Order! Kanji Recognition & Education

Posted on 20 February 2009 by Alex Leavitt

[Author's note: I don't think this is that well-written, given that I didn't have much time to put into it. But I think my final idea should be implemented, because so many foreigners (and probably natives) in Japan would take advantage of it.]

It is difficult to look up kanji in a paper-based dictionary. Plainly and simply, one spends a considerable time on the process of flipping through pages and searching through characters. If the method of kanji search is by stroke order, one must know the number of strokes in every character. Although stroke order is a prerequisite to writing kanji, difficult characters with many strokes remain confusing, especially to those persons who frequently consult a dictionary (ie., students). If the method of kanji search is by radical, one must look up the radical, turn to its page, then search for the illusive kanji by browsing through all of the characters with the same corresponding radical. The dictionary user must also understand the concept of primary and secondary radicals, if the character contains more than one radical. For example, the Japanese kanji for farm or field, 畑 (はた), is composed of two radicals; however, the primary radical with which to search for 畑 in a dictionary is not 火 but 田 (though at first glance, one would assume the primary radical to be the radical on the left). Although books are still in print and circulation, in such a technological age, the retention of paper-based kanji dictionaries remains open to debate. With modern computing hard- and software, the exercise of spending minutes flipping through pages is outdated.

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Digesting Intarwebs

Posted on 7 June 2008 by Alex Leavitt

At Berkman@10 during the Language of Openness breakout session, someone in the audience complained about the too frequent use of the word “consumer” when discussing the Internet and media in general. Ever since, consumer has also irked me and yet I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps it’s the English major coming out in me. Clearly the word has been contextualized and habitualized enough so that those familiar with the area of study understand and will employ the term. The association of consuming with eating, drinking, or generally ingesting, I believe, is what irritates the word’s users. I would go further to say that by utilizing the word consume in its gustatory fashion, we must also consider its consequences, thus alluding to digestion. And unless we’re speaking about the Internet strictly on academic grounds (where it would be mentally assimilated), I do not care for the WWW to pass through my bowel.

I will propose, then, that the use of consume came about because of adults. Yes, Generation X, I’m blaming you. Power to the Millennials! (I’ll discuss my intentional evasion of the phrase “digital native” in a later article. In fact, I don’t put faith in the term millennial either, but for the sake of brevity, it will remain for now.) I blame the older folk who grew up with television and commercials, spent money to go to the movie theater, and customarily lived in a pecuniary society. They are living, breathing customers. As customers, the adults of today matured regarding the world with an eye bent on finances rather than fervor. Therefore, it follows that they would approach the Internet with fiscal perspectives and intentions. Consuming digital media, specifically media inherent to the Web, then evolved from a money-hungry stomach.

And us kids are just, well, different. We’re not online to make money or use money (at least not all the time, though I do not deny calling the Internet the new teenager’s shopping-mall-turned-after-school-hangout). I’ll even go far enough to accuse adults and their outdated perspectives as the cause of the dot-com crash way back when, because they simply approached the Internet in an ignorant manner (I commend them for taking risks). My hypothesis reflects what David Weinberger and Jonathan Zittrain discussed at the final discursive session of Berkman@10, Onward!. Weinberger said, “It occurred to me that what does hold Berkman together and probably for everyone here is that we really really love the internet, just love the internet. How many people were at ROFLCon? The atmosphere at ROFLCon (an internet pop culture conference) was very different type of love of the internet. So in 10 years, how are we going to love the internet?” He expounds that the youth approach to the Internet is one of curiosity, intimacy, and passion. Youth are developing a culture online because they are not consuming the Web, acidically digesting its content and defecating LOLcats, but instead embracing the Internet creatively and living inside it, rather than using it as a tool while remaining outside its realm. In response to Weinberger, Zittrain stated, “I was struck by David Weinberger’s description of ROFLCon. I wasn’t there, but I can’t help but think that some of the goofiness, and the wonderful inanity of it, is exactly the spirit of the Internet that we celebrate here that I am continually amazed and amused by. … It’s the ability not to take ourselves so god damn seriously, while doing serious things and worrying about things like billions of people who are about to join the club, digitally speaking.” Charlie Nesson’s final words echo a similar response: “The question in shorter term for me really is, can we figure out how to engage kids of all ages in an open integrated media educational environment in a way that has them learning critical, algorithmic, strategic, thinking skills, in a form that we can measure — and that can be used as a meaningful credential.” Both professors identify the Internet as a space of informal learning, just like the neighborhood streets where adults grew up. Kids are just doing it online these days.

So how do youth engage with the digital space, strategically thinking and processing the culture that they unconsciously create? Certainly not through consumption. It’s simply by maturing, growing up, experiencing.

Notescribing, or The Problem of Accuracy

Posted on 30 April 2008 by Alex Leavitt

When I take notes in class, they tend to become rather extensive. If the professor turns out to be particularly engaging, I may end up with three or four pages of arrows connecting a multitude of disjointed phrases. I will admit though that I compose most of my notes verbatim, or at least recording the precise phrasing used by the instructor.

I continue to wonder now whether or not documenting lectures in this way imitates some sort of plagiarism, or bluntly is a pen-and-paper piracy. I don’t open and close my lecture notes with quotation marks, nor have I ever written the date, time, and name of the presenter as an excuse for a citation.

Recently, when I have attended lectures relevant to the content on my blog, I’ve lugged my laptop to the event and furiously banged out notes via keyboard. In the past few posts, I’ve simply copy and pasted the sketchy outlines directly from my text editor, sans paraphrasing or formatting. However, I doubt many, if not all, members of my audience cannot extract even a basic meaning from these digital (fingers, not technology) excreta. They’re in my own note-taking language, so I don’t blame anyone.

But how do I reformat the notes and then publish them? As I mentioned before, most of the notes I take are fairly verbatim from the presentation. If I translate from notes to prose, and I feel the need to write in a style that includes the first person (“I”), does such a strategy not only plagiarize but also possibly infer misquotations? I decided to call the results of my note-taking methods “notescriptions,” a bastardization of “note” and “transcription” (the latter used because I am sooo close to transcribing word-for-word). So, from a journalistic perspective, I can only hope that no reader will attack me for transcribing, paraphrasing, or simply “notescribing.” I do not intend to misquote in the least. Yet if a reader considers my published notes an attempt at literal faithfulness, then I’ll certainly feel the blow. I recently finished listening to a podcast from MIT’s Communications Forum of a lecture entitled The Emergence of Citizens’ Media, in which one speaker, commenting on the aspiration of newspapers to remain ahead of digital journalism, stated that print journalism must strive not for the truth, but for accuracy. Certainly, as a blogger (read: journalist), I must endeavor for precision. But I’m not recording audio. I’m not video taping. I publish my notes so that people can gain a better sense of the event I attended, the lecture that I sat in on, the generalities of the debate that I am trying to discuss in any of my blogged articles.

My point in direct terms:
I will publish my notes (or, “notescriptions”). They will contain a significant amount of verbatim language. Please do not view the notes as complete and literal transcriptions, nor quote from them as such. Please do regard them as comprehensive (though not perfect) window into a lecture (or any other event) you may have not attended.