Shen Yun 2015

A banner from Shen Yun's web site

Tonight, I attended the Quad Cities performance of the Shen Yun performing arts tour at the Adler Theater. Shen Yun is a dance and orchestral organization dedicated to sharing Chinese culture and history with the world. I went to the performance with my Chinese class and teacher, and we were fortunate enough to get excellent seats in the second row of the upper level.

It was an amazing experience. The dancers (of which there were at least 16 female and 10 male) were always in perfect sync and had really brightly colored clothing, sometimes using sleeve- or ribbon-like things that fly around and look really neat. They changed outfits between dances, to fit the theme or specific ethnicity being represented.

Behind the stage was a wall on which images and animated video were projected to augment the story and setting. Sometimes they were just static images (which looked really nice), but many dances had video that "pushed" objects into the world. There was a short wall behind which dancers could hide and jump out when a virtual character in the animation was about to "exit" into the real world - it must have required amazing precision. In two dances, real-world objects were "applied" to the background to "cause" things to happen on it (like writing). That timing was pretty amazing.

There seemed to be a half-and-half mix of dances that tell a story from Chinese mythology and ethnic dances from a particular region of China. There were also three solo performances, two singers and one player of a two-stringed violin-like Chinese instrument.

An interesting thing to note is that the Shen Yun performances are banned in China. That's because they depict a particular form of meditation that the current Communist government wants to suppress, thereby throwing out the old and gaining complete control of the culture. In fact, two dances contained overt references to the Communist Party in a very negative light. (In the final dance, Communism caused a volcano to erupt and end the world.)

After the performance (which lasted two and a half stunning hours), I and my class were ambushed by news reporters asking us our opinion of the show. I attempted to express my impressedness, as did my classmate. As we were attempting to exit the vehicular deadlock in the parking complex, I saw some nuns leaving the theater. Hooray for cross-cultural experiences!

Introducing Ineffable Learning

Tonight at my school's annual Academic Fair, I presented a new idea for a large collaborative project. I call it Ineffable Learning, and it will be an online learning website where students can explore advanced topics in computing at their own pace and in subject areas of interest to them.

Most schools' computer literacy courses cover the typical peripherals, the Office suite, web browsing, e-mail, basic file system concepts, and maybe something like computer art or drag-and-drop video editing. However, there is so much more - computing is such a fascinating and deep subject - that is immensely helpful to know. For example, archive file formats, networks, privileges, local and Web paths, system administration tools, and network/Internet layout are excellent things to know about. And, there are always shortcuts that save time and effort; they should be more well-known.

I've talked about a model for class progression based on "skill trees", and I think that would be extremely helpful here. Students will follow a core curriculum assigned by teachers or suggested by the site's defaults, but every lesson creates a subtree of more advanced exploration of the topic. For example, when studying Microsoft Word, a student may choose to stick around to explore more advanced uses, like mail merges or use of the built-in bibliography tools.

The second major feature I propose is drill-down explanations. Students learn at different paces: an explanation of a certain length may be entirely repetitive and boring for one student but confusing and overcompressed for another. Therefore, a little "what?" or "why?" or "what's a ___?" link at the bottom of explanations would allow quick students to save time and the others to get more examples and basic review to help them understand.

Finally, I would like to see "infusions", broad subjects like security, ethics, or history that can apply to everything in the course. A student interested in one of those could choose to have it infused into the course, injecting extra paragraphs and lesson branches into the content.

I got two volunteers to help make this a reality, one graphics designer and one programmer/IT person. Doing this alone would take huge amounts of time, so I'm glad there are some people interested in helping. Everybody I talked to seemed really interested in this style of education.