When the fool learns the Way, He laughs at it.
Yet if the fool did not laugh at it,
It would not be the Way.
Indeed, if you are seeking the Way,
Listen for the laughter of fools.
~Lao Tzu
(via 43 Folders)
Some thoughts…
Free Mojtaba and Arash
Today is Free Mojtaba and Arash day. Set up by the Committe to Protect Bloggers, Free Mojtaba and Arash day was set up to raise awareness about Mojtaba Saminejad and Arash Sigarchi, two Iranian bloggers being detained by the Iranian government.
Arash Sigarchi of Panhjareh Eltehab was arrested on January 17th. He has been denied the right to see a lawyer and his bail has been set at about $25,000 U.S. (200 million rials). He has spoken out against recent arrests of bloggers and cyberjournalists.
Mojtaba Saminejad was freed one bail at the end of January. He was arrested again on February 12th with a doubled bail, 1 billion rials. While in jail, Mojtaba’s blog url was transfered to a group of hackers linked to the radical movement, Hezbollah.
Please do anything you can to support this cause. Consider donating the Committee to Protect Bloggers and let your voice be heard. More contact information can be found here.
Update: Arash has been convicted and sentenced on charges ranging from espionage to insulting the country’s leaders(?). This is very sad news indeed.
Andy is Working Hard in Tajikistan
Last week, my Physics/Math teacher Andy left on an educational trip to Tajikistan. He will be gone for three weeks but he has an eJournal (is this sort of like a blog?) that he updates most days. His latest entry is about him teaching the kids in Tajikistan how to play 19th century baseball. This is amazing because he is in a country not many people have heard of, teaching about a sport that not many people still play.
Openness at School
Recently, I have been reading about grassroots media and the bottom up design of the internet. As such, I have started noticing these two concepts around in different places, one of which happens to be school. Yes, my school is surprisingly open. The interesting thing about that, however, is they are open without even realizing it (or so it looks).
As you may or may not already know, I go to a school called High Tech High. Contrary to what the name may suggest, we are not a tech school but we do incorporate technology into our projects and such. One of these “projects” is the yearbook.
Normally, yearbooks are pretty top-down. A group of the journalistic “elite” usually spend months locked up in a classroom trying to pump out a book filled with the year’s “memories”. Not at my school. At High Tech High, students are encouraged to contribute photos for this year’s yearbook. We have a share drive full of photos from this year’s many events. Students usually edit the photos but rarely ever are the originals actually harmed. People can even retouch or take red eye out of the photos . I have yet to hear of a case where this happened but I’m sure it can’t be that far off.
Another example of collaboration was in one of our projects for English. We’re doing a project documenting 19th century baseball and some of the changes that happened during the early days of America’s pastime. We went to the library to check out some books but, we checked out so many nobody would have time to look through all of them. To solve the problem, we used the share drive again (wow, we use this like a wiki don’t we) but instead of everybody posting images, we wrote up little descriptions of books and what pages to find good information.
I hope to be posting more about school and the bottom up nature that I am noticing in it. I have no idea what to expect but whatever they are, I am looking forward to them.
Blogging, at 1 AM
Yes, I am sitting at school. It’s Saturday morning at 1AM, I’m having so much fun here…