I'm tag-teaming today, as I did yesterday, with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

"One of the country's, and the world's most accomplished, inventive, and personally generous master fiddle players," says Andrew Zolli, introducing Mark O'Connor (Pop!Tech bio; website.)

CC photo; O'Connor practices in the Green Room before coming onstage.

O'Connor's fiddle playing is fast, virtuosic, lyrical, like the rush of notes pouring from a wood thrush's throat. It's mesmerizing, somewhere between classical music and something I wish I knew how to dance to. The piece he's playing keeps shifting, a sonic patchwork quilt with all sorts of influences and more different time signatures than I can count.

Many of the early motifs return, by the end, giving me the sense that we've come full circle. Through key changes and almost unthinkably fast waterfalls of notes, we're all mesmerized.

When he stops playing, O'Connor tells us that his presentation is going to be about how natural habitat interfaces with music education. The piece he just played was commissioned for the bicentennial of Tennessee, about 15 years ago; it's called "The Mockingbird," which is Tennessee's state bird.

"The next piece has to do with the ocean," O'Connor says, and with how waves reach the shoreline, each one carving a chapter in the history of the ocean. He hopes we'll hear solitude, drama, hope. "While I'm playing this I'll think about the earlier presentation about the albatross on Midway island." (He's referring to Chris Jordan’s photos of plastic inside an albatross at Midway Atoll, seen here on Thursday. You can see some of them here.)

This one starts out slow and melancholy. Maybe it's because I've been tipped off beforehand, but I can imagine this accompanying a walk along a cold, windswept north Atlantic beach. After a time the tempo picks up, like the wind raising itself into a squall, and runs of notes crest like whitecaps. The piece ends with a long slow rise toward silence, and at first the crowd hesitates, hoping for more before we applaud.

I'm tag-teaming today, as I did yesterday, with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

"Sometimes giving the right information at the right time can create change," says Andrew Zolli. "Our next presenter is engaged in a 'meta-cultural hack.'" Naif Al-Mutawa (Pop!Tech bio; here's his standard bio) is the creator of THE 99 -- the first group of superheroes born of an Islamic archetype. (You can download a pdf of The 99: Origins for free here if you're interested.) Al-Mutawa is speaking as part of the Meaningful Engagements session this afternoon.

Here's an animated trailer for "The 99: Origins." This is not the trailer for the forthcoming animated series, which has much higher production values, but that latter trailer doesn't seem to be online, alas.

"I'm from Kuwait; I'm disappointed, I'm not getting the love for oil in this room," Al-Mutawa quips, and everyone laughs. He's father and step-father of seven children, all born in New York. Al-Mutawa's five boys (and his step-children from his wife's previous marriage) attend Camp Robin Hood, which is not far from here. His own parents sent him there in 1979. "Back then the best we could do for television in Kuwait was...maybe catching a glimpse of something from Baghdad." He had no idea what Fantasy Island was; other pop cultural references likewise went over his head. When he got home, he told his parents about his friends: Steinberg, Greenberg, Goldberg. His parents asked, where are they from? Kids at the camp had joked that these were nice Italian names, so that's what Al-Mutawa told his father!

The next year his parents sent him to a camp in Switzerland -- but within a year he was back at Camp Robin Hood. He went there for 10 years, and his sons go there now. "It was there that I started to navigate self and other, how I'm seen, how others see me." (You can read more of this story in Al-Mutawa's essay Concentration Camps and Comic Books.)

I'm tag-teaming today, as I did yesterday, with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

"To complete this trio of investigations into food, we're going to shift perspective," says Zolli. Marije Vogelzang "looks with an artist's eye at what it means to bring mindfulness and artfulness to the act of putting this wonderful stuff into our bodies."

CC photo by Kris Krüg.

Marije Vogelzang (Pop!Tech bio, homepage) is part of the Edible Futures module. She studied design at Eindhoven Design Academy in Holland, where she went to workshops in ceramics and plastic molding. "In the end, I find myself back in the kitchen -- I open my cupboards and say, wow, I have lots of materials here! I see my kitchen tools, these are my workshop tools. Food is a material to work with."

People think this means she's a food designer. She wondered: if she would be a food designer, would that imply that she designs food? Food is perfectly designed by nature. Imagine a red cabbage sliced in two: it's perfect. "I'm more interested in the verb of eating, what food does to your body, what food does to your mind, what food does to people in general." She wants to apply design ideas and creative thinking to these questions.

I'm tag-teaming today, as I did yesterday, with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

"This is one of the sessions I've been most looking forward to," says Andrew Zolli, calling it a session of "incredible bounty." (He adds that he is a "recovering hyperbolic," given how often he calls things here 'incredible' and 'wonderful' -- though it does seem to me that often as not, sessions here really do fit that bill.) "It's hard not to use those words when describing the impact that our next presenter has had on the world. Michael Pollan has changed, fundamentally, the way many of us understand what we eat, how it's made, how it gets to us." By the way, Pollan's book The Botany of Desire has been made into a PBS documentary which will air next week, on October 28th at 8pm Eastern, so if you don't know it, check it out on PBS.

CC photo by Kris Krüg.

Michael Pollan (Pop!Tech bio) appears as part of the Edible Futures module. "I brought us lunch as we approach the lunch hour," says Pollan, putting a McDonald's bag on the podium, "and like Chekhov's gun on the mantel, we'll see if it gets eaten."

A few years ago he set out to conduct an investigation and trace a McDonald's double quarter-pounder with cheese back to its origins. He bought a steer, Steer #534, in South Dakota and followed him to a feedlot. "I had never been to a feedlot." If we haven't been to see one of these, he says, we must go. "It's one of the most hideous landscapes in the 20th century." This is where our burgers come from.

But he realized when he was there that he had to go further still. Burgers come from corn and soyfields in the Midwest, where feed is grown. From ther ehe had to go further, to oilfields from the Middle East because feed is grown with petroleum-based pesticides. The burger can be traced all the way there.

The food chain is not only complex but implicated in three of the most serious problems we face: the energy crisis, the health care crisis, and the climate crisis. 20% of the fossil fuel we burn in this country goes to feed ourselves, to produce this processed food. Five hundred billion dollars of health care costs go to preventable chronic diseases linked to our diet. And a third of greenhouse gases are produced by the food system. This is "not a pretty picture or a happy meal."

I'm tag-teaming today, as I did yesterday, with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

Nicholas Felton (Pop!Tech bio) "has been deeply categorizing his own life," says Andrew Zolli. "We started a conversation not only about his work but about how we react to all of these messages. We decided to work together on an interesting project, involving Nick's work, looking at the impact of these messages on our conversation -- which I'm excited for you to hear about."

CC photo by Kris Krüg.

"I've become fairly well known for the Feltron Personal Annual Report," Felton explains. (Find it at Feltron.com.) In 2005 he summarized his year in this document which appeared online -- where he'd gone, some of the food he'd eaten, the music he'd listened to. For some reason it traveled well beyond those circles; design bloggers were entertained, stock brokers found it amusing. The following year he created a print version, and started working harder at documentation. In 2007 he printed 2000 copies and found an audience willing to purchase it.

All the streets he'd traveled down in New York (taxi routes and so forth), eating and drinking and dining: all of these things are mapped-out. The report became increasingly elaborate in 2008: he chronicled everywhere he'd traveled that year. "My primary interest in 2008 was determining how far I'd traveled" -- walking, flights, a stray hayride, chairlifts (up and down.) "This has become increasingly popular," and it's since turned into a web application, Daytum.com.

Felton worked with Rob Deeming and Ken Reisman on a project called What we are saying. (Ken has created pluribo.com, which looks at Amazon reviews of products and summarizes them into something short and digestible.) The three of them decided to look at America over the course of a single week: July 27 through August 3, 2009. They analyzed NYTimes front pages, analyzing the Times and other sources for keywords. (Looking at a set of screencaps of those front pages, the prevalence of health care headlines is particularly noticeable.)

I'm tag-teaming today, as I did yesterday, with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

I should mention, by the way -- in case you're not finding Ethan's and my liveblogging to be sufficiently exhaustive -- that you can watch a live stream of the conference here.

Nick Bilton (Pop!Tech bio; homepage) is speaking as part of the (Re)Mixed Messages session this morning.

"He's a deep thinker about the future of media," says Andrew Zolli. "We thought it would be potentially worthwhile for you to see just how far we've come, in terms of the media and the internet, so we'd like to show you an actual early report from the early 1980s -- one of the first experiments in the space."

We're shown a video in which a news reporter posits that someday we might sit down to read our morning paper on the computer -- "it's not as far-fetched as it might seem," the anchorwoman says, and the whole room laughs. We see someone dialing an old-fashioned rotary telephone hooked up to a modem, and the voiceover explains how the newspaper (without pictures, ads, or comics) can be sent through the phone lines into someone's television set! "We're not in it to make money," says someone from the SF Chronicle (which draws some knowing laughter from the room.)

"This is only the first step in newspapers over computer," says the voiceover -- someday, he predicts, we might get all of our news via computer! "It takes over two hours to receive the entire text edition of the paper," adds the anchorwoman. Ah, the 1980s.

I'm tag-teaming today and tomorrow with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

CC photo by Kris Krüg.

"For a different perspective on where we go next and fleshing out the American story," Andrew Zolli says, "I'm very excited to introduce our next speaker. Reihan Salam is a profound thinker about conservatism in the Umited States."

Reihan Salam (read more about him here) begins by saying, "I am incoherent as a general rule so I like to break things into tiny pieces." He tells a story about doing interpretive dance on stage as an undergrad, wearing a red fez and a dirty white singlet. "It's likely that this experience will be at least slightly less embarrassing than that! For which I thank all of you."

"Andrew was talking about how I'm a passionate obsessive about the future. Like a lot of you, I'm guessing, I read a lot of science fiction as a kid" -- so since he's so interested in the future, naturally he's going to talk about the New Deal, a conservative project to transform a country which was going to hell in a handbasket. It's useful to look back at that time, and see what we can and can't learn from that time.

I'm tag-teaming today and tomorrow with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

Robert Guest writes the Lexington column in the Economist. "I'm going to talk," he says, "about America and why I think it is uniquely positioned to be not merely the current superpower but the next superpower. I'm going to focus on one very narrow aspect of this. America's greatest strength, in my view, is that people want to live here. That's something that the people who already do live here take for granted" -- maybe because we haven't visited the other countries of the world and seen how much they suck? We assume that people want to live here for reasons having to do with money, and that's an important part of it, "but that's only half of it." One can earn reasonable amount of money in a lot of places. "The other part of the equation has to do with freedom."

By freedom he means not only the absence of coercion, "but the availability of choices. The fantastic number of different lifestyles and niches you can find in America."

He's interviewed a lot of immigrants to ask about the non-economic reasons why they came here. He has three stories to tell us. The first is a Korean man named Joshua Levy, a fundamentalist Baptist, who came here to attend seminary in Kentucky. He moved to Virginia, got a job, got married. He's surrounded by Korean restaurants, can attend a fundamentalist Baptist church where sermons are in Korean -- "and at the same time he can enjoy all the advantages of an American suburban lifestyle." A nice house, big back yard, good schools.

I'm tag-teaming today and tomorrow with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

The final long session of the day is called Challenging Conversations, and will involve a series of speakers whose work falls under that rubric. "We're going to hear from four very different points of view about the Amercan experience, the American moment," says Andrew Zolli. First up is Amanda Geppert (here's her Pop!Tech bio), who comes to us from CeaseFire: the Campaign to Stop the Shooting. Geppert is speaking alongside Lincon Schatz.

Lincoln Schatz is a video artist. "I use chance to break habitual modes of thinking." He presented his work here last year and one of his co-presenters was Gary Slutkin from CeaseFire. "I thought to myself, my God, how can I get involved?" They had lunch in Chicago the next week, and from that was born Cure Violence, a project that's being launched today at Pop!Tech. Cure Violence empowers communities to openly and safely discuss the causes -- and more importantly, solutions -- to violence.

I'm tag-teaming today and tomorrow with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

Daniel Nocera (Pop!Tech bio, professional bio) is going to talk to us about personalized energy. "I'm going to be different from the last talk; the last talk worried about you, and I don't care about you," he says.

Globally, we currently use 14 terawatts (a trillion watts) of energy each year; we'll need 16 TW/year by 2050. (You can read more about how Nocera reached this statistic in this article in Reason Magazine.) "Close your eyes and think about 42 years from now... think about a kid, right now, that you like: this is going to be their future. It's going to be a bad future if you look at these numbers." If we converted the entire crop basis of the world to fuel and burned it, we'd reach a figure of 5-7TW. Photosynthesis has a limit.

If we take all the wind that's 10 meters above the ground, we'd find that 2-4 TW are extractable. In terms of nuclear power, we can generate 8 TW; we'd have to build 200 nuclear power plants each year to reach our needs. That's one new plant every 1.5 days, and bear in mind that we'd have to decommission them almost as fast as we can build them.

Right now we use 14 TW; why do we need 16? "The first assumption I made is that you will do all the right things, and save 100% of the energy you're using today. We'll still need 16 TW. If you want to be dummies, and not [do the right thing], then we'll need 40 TW." The picture as he initially paints it looks pretty dire.

I'm tag-teaming today and tomorrow with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

CC photo by Kris Krüg.

Nicole Kuepper's bio is not in the printed program -- she's a special addition to Energy, Form and Motion program today. She comes from Australia where she's working on "low tech ways of producing low-cost solar devices," Andrew Zolli explains.

"I'm passionate about bringing affordable solar electricity to the developing world," Kuepper says. "If like me you're lucky enough to be born to two very nerdy German mathematician parents, and you get given a solar-powered car for your 8th birthday, it is pretty inevitable that you will end up, like me, a major nerd, hanging out in a lab, going giddy about solar technologies whenever you get the chance to talk about them!"

She's excited about solar energy because it has potential to solve two major problems, climate change and global poverty.

I'm tag-teaming today and tomorrow with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

CC photo by Kris Krüg

Deb Levine is a Pop!Tech social innovation fellow. (Here's a list of the 2009 cohort.) "Deb is doing extraordinary things using mobile devices...to help drive access to information in an area that impacts everyone in the room," Andrew Zolli explains.

Levine founded ISIS – Internet Sexuality Information Services – in 2001 to build better tools to promote sexual health and prevent disease. (Levine's bio on the social innovation fellows page explains that "[u]sing the web, mobile phones and mash-ups, ISIS gives people private, convenient and accurate access to information on today’s major health issues, from HIV prevention to unplanned pregnancies to access to healthcare.")

Raise your hands, she asks us, if you've ever been a teenager. "Now raise your hands if you know a teenager! Raise your hands if you know a teenager with an STD?" (Most of us raise our hands for questions one and two; very few for question three.)

I'm tag-teaming today and tomorrow with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

CC photo by Kris Krüg.

Derek Lomas is a Pop!Tech social innovation fellow. (Here's a list of all of the 2009 fellows.) Lomas is part of The Playpower Foundation, created "to foster development of affordable, effective and fun learning games for under-privileged children around the world."

"Derek Lomas is doing something absolutely extraordinary," says Andrew Zolli. "You've heard about the $100 laptop experiment; Derek's here to tell us about the $12 computer."

Lomas asks, "What would you do if you were walking through a crowded electronics marketplace in India and someone tried to sell you a computer for only $12? I didn't buy it! I had to live in INdia for almost a year before I discovered that it is a real computer, and also that if you bargain, you can buy it for ten bucks." These computers are sold around the world, in Nicaragua and Pakistan and other such countries. How can a computer only cost $12? It uses an existing television as a screen, first of all. But beyond that, it's based on the 8-bit 6502 microchip, originally popularized with the Apple II computer and Nintendo entertainment system. The computer is effectively in the public domain because the patents on the tech have expired. Hence, it can be affordded by the emerging middle calss -- those who make between $2 and $10/day.

"I first encountered this computer while wokring in India...doing ethnographic design research on uses of mobile phones in urban and rural contexts." He decided to stay in India and teach a course remotely via Skype to students at UCSD. He bought the computer because he thought it would make an interesting class discussion. When he first turned it on, he wasn't sure whether ot be disappointed or amazed -- it works! You can compose 8-bit music, or learn to program in Basic. But most of the software was pretty low-quality, a hodgepodge of typing games and 8-bit karaoke. But his own education with 8-bit educational games was very rich: Carmen Sandiego, etc. "It occurred to me that if this platform had just a few decent games, and one good typing game, it could be economicallyt ransformative, because touch-typing can make a difference between earning a dollar a day or a dollar an hour.

The companies that makes these computers are concerned with keeping costs down -- "not educating kids." They can't design and research effective learning games. That's why we created PlayPower.org -- a global open source community" made up of 8-bit hackers and developers. The intention is to develop 8-bit games around the world. "We are looking to move into some uncharted territory by trying to license some of that 8-bit abandonware software. It no longer has commercial value but would be incredibly valuable for our product."

Distribution network: giving this educational software away so it can be bundled instead of the 8-bit karaoke. The companies have asked whether there's any programming in Arabic. "We can leverage the existing low-cost manufacturing base and also the informal distribution network bringing these computers around the world to places where consumers are buying them."

I'm tag-teaming today and tomorrow with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

CC photo by Kris Krüg.

We're still in the Teaching Change session this morning. "How do we teach, and how do we build curriculum?" asks Zolli.

For an answer, we hear from Dennis Litky (Pop!Tech bio, webpage), founder of Big Picture Learning, an organization which works to radically reform what education is. But before he gets going, one of his students gets up on stage and takes over, leading the room in a chant. Half of the room is chanting "Pop!Tech, Pop!Tech," and the other half chants "We can change!"

"We all know that everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame," Litky says, quipping that being here is clearly his 15 minutes. He asks how many people in the room have been fired, and a lot of hands go up. "We've all done great work in our life, and then we get fired and we get known; that's what happened to me. When I got fired, they wrote a book about Dennis Litky and his fight for a better school." The book was Doc: The Story Of Dennis Littky And His Fight For A Better School. NBC also made a movie, called A Town Torn Apart, which tells this same story. (Here's a review.)

The question, he says, is how to change the system and how to change what's going on inside the school. He'd been a principal most of his life, and thought he was done with that; he came to Brown University; and then he was asked whether he would start a school. "Only if we could do it exactly how we want," Litky said, not thinking anyone would say yes -- "and they said yes."

They asked 300,000 students to name one word that describes school, and they said "boring." So his plan was, let's create a school that's not boring. "That's why kids drop out," he said. "They're bored, they're not engaged. We really closed our eyes and said, we're not going to tweak around the edges. This is too big; we have to redesign. What would school be, if you didn't know there was such a thing as school?" If you were homeschooling your kid, would you make him sit and read a book for 45 minutes, then ring a bell so he could go to the bathroom, then make him do science for 45 minutes...? A lot of reformers, he says, are trying to make teachers a little better, or materials a little better, but really change needs to be about engaging students in developing their own personal learning plan.

I'm tag-teaming today and tomorrow with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

CC photo by Kris Krüg.

Our second session on Friday morning is themed around Teaching Change. First up after the break is James O'Brien of Brooklyn Community Arts & Media High School. He's a Pop!Tech social innovation fellow, along with the rest of the 2009 cohort.

The school started four years ago; now there are 4 grades and 430 students. "We believe that our students...simultaneously have access to every form of media, but also are the most susceptible to being consumed by that media." They use a 3-pronged approach of academics, creative arts, and professional development to support their students.

"Hopefully someone in the BCAM community is watching this live streamed" -- Fridays at BCAM students get to dress how they want (no uniform shirts) and today is pyjama day at BCAM, and it sounds like O'Brien got some flak for not being there. "Pyjama day will be never-before-seen like we do it at BCAM," he says. "Yesterday when we were hyping pyjama day and I said I wasn't going to be there, I'd be at a conference, the kids said: you're scared to wear pyjamas!" So he hopes they're watching the live stream and can see that he really did have someplace to be today. He had pyjamas on earlier today, he acknowledges, but now he's wearing a suit.

BCAM is a small school in Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City. "Our students are like any set of students in any inner city across the country or world. We're an un-screeened open-enrollment school... we have access to students who aren't selected for specialized schools, didn't audition or take a screened exam." Some come in with college literacy levels; some come in with third and fourth grade literacy and academic skills, "and every place in between."

I'm tag-teaming today and tomorrow with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

CC photo by Kris Krüg.

Hayat Sindi is a Saudi medical researcher who has invented a machine "combining the effects of light and ultra-sound for use in biotechnology." (So saith Wikipedia.) A few years ago she was part of a group of Arab women who peddled for peace -- participating in a bicycle ride from Beirut to Ramallah intended to "send a message to world leaders to get on with it and stop the suffering that continuous conflict brings."

She's the first Arab woman to win a Pop!Tech fellowship, and she's part of this morning's Mindshifts session, speaking as a Pop!Tech social innovation fellow. (Here's a list of the 2009 fellows -- not surprisingly, it's a pretty august crowd.)

"Hayat is an extraordinary scientist... an incredibly passionate advocate for the role of women and girls in the sciences, in particular in an important region of the world," says Andrew Zolli, welcoming her to the stage.

"This is my first time addressing such a diverse American community; I'm honored to be here," she says. She's the co-inventor and co-founder of Diagnostics For All, but wants to share a bit of her journey & passion before telling us about it.

"My journey has involved breaking boundaries between the East and the West, to help society and save everyone: child, man, or woman of different religions and cultures." She was born in Mecca and comes from a family of 8 children with a traditional upbringing and enormous love for knowledge. Since childhood she has admired people who do something for humanity. "I dreamt one day to be like them, to make a difference in this world."

I'm tag-teaming today and tomorrow with my partner in crime (and husband) Ethan Zuckerman to liveblog the 2009 iteration of the fabulous Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine. You can read about today's events at the Pop!Tech blog, or via the Pop!Tech 2009 tag at Ethan's blog and via the Pop!Tech 2009 category here on this blog.

If you're new to Velveteen Rabbi, welcome. Here's some information about me, and here's my comments policy. Enjoy the conference posts -- not my usual fare, but hopefully interesting. (And to longtime readers: never fear, I'll return to my usual subject matter in a few days.)

"The theme of the session this morning is thinking differently, about shifting our mindsets, about big shifts in how we relate to technology, how we think about science, how we think about the natural world," says our host Andrew Zolli, welcoming psychologist Daniel Goleman to the stage.

Goleman (here's his Pop!Tech bio, and here's his blog) wrote the 1995 bestseller Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. His latest work tends more toward the political than the psychological per se; he's author of Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything, which challenges readers to confront the real consequences of our purchasing decisions. He speaks this morning as part of the Mindshifts session.

"I want to do some mindshifting," he says, which will change our relationship to some of the environmental tragedies we heard about yesterday. He notes though a cautionary tale about believing everything you read on the web: his bio here says that he co-founded the Yale Child Studies center, but "I was about ten when that got going," though had he walked over there at the time perhaps he would have been the first kid they studied!

"How many folks here recycle? Everybody recycles. How many print on both sides of the paper? Those who can, compost? Print-on-demand business cards -- if you want my contact information, I write it out for you...?"

Imagine you have a morning yogurt, and recycle the lid in a plastics bin. What's the impact on global warming -- how much do you remediate via recycling that lid? People call out 0%, 23%, and 5%. The answer is five percent. Most of the global impacts from your morning yogurt come from the cows, the farming, the transportation -- "there's an enormous amount of invisible impact from everything we buy and consume, everything we don't see but are about to." The new discipline of industrial ecology allows physicists, chemists, and engineers to study the hiden impacts of everything. A glass jar, like you might buy your pasta in, goes through more than 1000 steps from manufacture to disposal, and each one of those steps can be examined for social and environmental impacts. Emissions into air, soil, and water. "We have a new lens on everything we buy."

It's possible I'm wrong about this, but I'm guessing that I'm the only person who's planning to attend both Pop!Tech 2009 in Maine, and then the first ever JStreet conference in Washington DC, which happen back-to-back this weekend and early next week.

I attended Pop!Tech once before, back in 2004. It was Ethan's first time speaking there, and I came along for the ride. It was a fabulous conference: smart, interesting, thoughtful people having wild conversations about thought-provoking things. This time Ethan and I will be liveblogging the conference together: on Friday and Saturday we'll take turns sharing the sessions as they unfold. Pop!Tech's theme this year is "America Reimagined," and though most of the speakers aren't yet known to me, I'm guessing they'll impress and inspire. I'm looking forward to that, and also to visiting coastal Maine -- one of my very favorite places to be.

Driving Change, Securing Peace will be JStreet's first conference, and I'm incredibly excited to be there and to be a part of it. With sessions like "How Jews, Christians and Muslims Can Work Together For Peace" and "How We Stop Talking to Ourselves: Innovative Ways to Broaden the Conversation," it's clear to me that this conference is right up my alley. I'm eager to learn from the sessions, and also to meet the other people there; as at the Rabbis for Human Rights conference I attended last December, I'm guessing that most of the people who choose to attend the JStreet conference will be people who care about some of the same things I do.

If you're going to be at either conference, please come and find me! Pop!Tech is limited to 700 people (which still feels pretty big to me); the JStreet conference will apparently be attended by 1,200 people, which kind of blows my mind. One way or another, I'm pretty easy to recognize -- visibly pregnant, laptop, sometimes a rainbow kippah.

For those who are curious: here's the Pop!Tech schedule, and here's the JStreet schedule. Expect a deluge of blog posts over the weekend and into the middle of next week...