Postseason Celtics vs. Red Sox

First of all, you must understand I love the Celtics and I love the Red Sox. Having grown up in Cambridge, I've been going to games for both since I was little.

Second, you must understand I'm kind of weird. I'm graduating from BYU in August in Math. So sometimes I notice things that go unnoticed by normal people. But I couldn't hold this in any longer.

So check this out:

The postseason Celtics have gone, starting April 29th against Atlanta, 11-7. The Red Sox since that day have gone 16-19.

The nights the Celtics got those wins eleven wins, the red sox went 5-6.

The night the Celtics got the seven losses, the Red Sox went 4-3. They were 4-1 after the Atlanta Series losses.

Now I'm not saying the Celtics can't win if the Red Sox win but I won't be crushed if they lose when they play the Orioles on Thursday because I really want the Celtics to go to the NBA Finals.

I realize I could have done a better statistical analysis on these numbers but I don't think that would have strengthened my point much, if at all, and I've got work early in the morning. So whatever.

There is some small trend here and I know correlation doesn't mean causation but still...

Either way,

Go Celtics!

I Learnededed

Introduction

This class has been quite an experience. From the initial confusion as to what it was really about to the dispersed bits of confusion for grades being assigned, for what most of the time seemed like, arbitrarily. Overall I feel like I learned a good amount. It has not been Econ 110, the largest amount of learning I have had in one class, nor has it been Spanish 321 (RM Spanish), absolutely no learning. I feel like the greatest thing I have developed from this class is the ability to use the internet in a better way. Honestly, I have not changed what I use on the internet, except adding and using Google+ and actually writing in my blog, but I have changed how I use the internet.

Through this class I have developed the ability to use the internet to learn, connect with people, and share my ideas. I also learned through my class blog that people want to read what is trendy. My most popular blog post was KONY 2012 because I wrote it right as the Kony video went viral. This is interesting because I also learned through my assigned book, The Information Diet, that journalism is changing from being informative to telling people what they want to hear, which I think is very bad.

Nonetheless, I digress. I have really enjoyed this course and feel like I have reached a great level of aptitude on all the learning outcomes.

Here are the highlights of my learning under the learning outcomes sections:

I Invite Peoples/Woohoo for the Event

Pre-Event Report:

I like to invite people to things.

I did it for two years on my mission for the LDS Church, inviting people to come to church and read the Book of Mormon. I used to invite girls to go on dates with me. And now I've invited people to the "Digital Citizens Unite!" Event.

How did I do it?

First, I wrote a blog post explaining the event to people and invited them to come. I posted the link on facebook and google+. It got 16 reads so somebody might show up or check out the live streaming because of that.

Digital Citizens Unite!

So if you've been following my blog for the last four months I've been trying to connect past history to today's digital world. I've been doing this for my Digital Civilization class, a class at BYU that fulfills a general education requirement. It has been a pretty cool experience.

Half way through the semester we decided (well the teachers decided and we had to do it) to write a ebook that combines a bunch of ideas that have been developing over the semester. It was hard. We have a beta release of the book but it still needs a decent amount of work in order to be a good final draft.

We're having an event to present the ideas in the book on Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 7 pm MST. If you're interested you should come. It's in 251 of the Tanner building on BYU's campus. If you don't live in Utah or are too lazy to get off the couch there will be live streaming available at digiciv.byu.edu.

I am part of the Arts chapter. I wrote some stuff that I thought was interesting. I put some of the ideas in recent blog posts.

We're presenting our ideas in the form of a poem with live and digital music, live and recorded dancing, and accompanying graphics. It sounds kind of weird. It is kind of weird. But it should be pretty good and it'll only be five minutes.

Each chapter of the book gets five minutes to present their ideas and these are the groups:

• The Arts
• Business
• Education
• Government
• IP & CC
• Inquiry
• Openness
• Science
• Ebook Team

The order is yet to be determined. It should be fun and there will be refreshments afterwards.

Whether you come or not, I hope you've enjoyed reading my blog and maybe even learned something. 

The Arts: One on One

Many of the arts can be learned easily through the diverse outlets available through the digital age, whether it be Youtube, Adobe, Paint, Garage Band, or something else. An argument could be made that this means that traditional arts education is unnecessary but this is not true. 

The problem with these digital learning resources is that there is no feedback, no personal criticism, which is essential for learning. 

The Arts: An Annotated Bibliography

I tried to find people who were interested in the arts and especially with education. I used some regular Google searches, fiddling with different key words, to find groups that fit this category. These were my findings:

http://www.arteducators.org/
http://artsusa.org/networks/arts_education/default.asp
http://www.yea.org/
http://www.ijea.org/

I also thought about people I knew. Being a music minor, I have had contact with some professors in the music department. Here are a couple of them:

Luke Howard

Eric Hansen

Claudine Bigelow

I also did a search on Google+ in order to find thought leaders without much success. So I used the library to find a book and used that to find people.

Education: Promoted by The Arts

The arts are an important part of education. They foster creativity and help students to develop in many other areas. Some of these areas will be explored.

Creativity

The arts help students explore a skill that is not used that often in school, that of creativity. There is creative writing but that is about the extent of creativity in schools outside of the arts. There are only so many ways to do a math problem correctly. Some of these solutions may be more interesting than others but it is hard to call a math solution creative.