Pretty incredible clip. I'm actually a bit speechless.

Thank God the newspapers are keeping everyone honest, right?

Recently, one of our faculty, a leading authority on Autism, shared this amazing video he had found:



This to me is the promise of education writ large: helping kids (and adults!) to find their unique abilities, no matter who they are.

One thing that makes it possible, of course, is that it is free. In a world where SketchUp still costs $500 most of this is unlikely to happen.

So I kind of wanted to hate this project, b/c a) it's a Microsoft Competition, and b) the project is so mired in the bureaucratic context of grade-school that it begins to sound like something out of The Office:



2009 U.S. Innovative Teachers Network: Columbus East High School, Columbus, IN from Carrie Hipsher on Vimeo.

But as I listened to it, what I saw was something different -- a way to introduce some amount of choice in a bureaucratic system that aligns against student choice. A way to build choice into an environment where state standards and testing and the need for far too many documented outcomes pull one in eighty different directions.

I have two daughters in public school right now. Would I love to see a real revolution in education, where we did away completely with the one-size-fits-all curriculum? A thousand times yes. But failing that, would I like them to have the option, even in this strange way, of choosing projects which suit their unique talents better? Absolutely. They'll be well on their way to college before the current idiocy in education is addressed. Whatever helps them in the meantime is welcomed.

I feel like I'm constantly in this spot, hating the reform by increments approach, but painfully aware that the students we have currently need more flexibility right now, if only by degrees.

I still don't know what is right, but I think I have finally decided that these people are my friends, not obstacles in the path to a bigger revolution. We're completely different creatures in some ways, but we can't afford to be enemies.

It's increasingly important to consider how the Good Enough Revolution pertains to education. I'm a fan of educational research, but worry that it focuses too much on marginal differences, in a world that does not value marginal differences in quality anymore.

What does the world care about? The Wired article gets it right -- we want ease of use, accessibility, and continous availability. And education is no different.

One way of looking at it is that the idea of quality has been enlarged, not demeaned. In the manufacturing model, quality was something that pertained to objects, because objects were their own contexts. A dishwasher doesn't need to play well with your clothes dryer or your radio. It can,  for the most part, be evaluated on how well it does its job.

What the MP3 explosion showed us is that people are willing to trade quality as traditionally defined for portability, shareability, and availability. As the Wired article points out, we've seen this again and again with netbooks, Skype, Google Docs,  and YouTube. The question is not "How good is this?", but "How well does this play with the other parts of my life?"

I've heard people mock the quality of University of Phoenix courses and other online offerings  -- and in traditional terms they may be right As an object, I am sure that any course we are offering on campus is better than a UoP course.

But taking a more holistic view of quality this is not as clear. And as we move from the Manufacturing Age to the Network Age that is where the future of quality is headed.

Google Bundles is likely to be a good thing for classroom use, because it's essentially the OPML idea with a catchy name (in fact, it looks like every bundle also creates an OPML file).

I don't want to get into an argument about why things like Google Bundles and Twitter take off while things like OPML languish (one clue: OPML is a crappy, crappy name). If every Bundle produces an OPML file, I think we should postpone the religious war and promote this.

Google Bundles are a great way to turn sense-making and curating from concept to practice. I can see a teacher in a journalism ethics class selecting out the CJR feed, Jay Rosen's blog, and a couple other sources and asking students to scan these for relevant posts. Bundles can also be used to pull together all the blogs created by students in a class, so that an institution with no internally provisioned Web 2.0 system (like Otago Polytechnic, for example) can reduce the administrative load of providing a way for all the students to see each other's work -- Bundles aren't just for curators, but for peer groups as well.

Finally, I can see a group of people (whether students or staff) divvying up all the things they want to read into different bundles -- Wendy and I will take Bundle A, Jenny and Mel will take Bundle B, Russ and Kim will take Bundle C, etc. Stories of interest that each group finds they can bookmark via delicious with a specific tag (which then flows it back into Google Reader). There's less of this divide and conquer around than I'd like to see -- Bundles might add a level of ease to it.

[And yes, the first person that says "You can do all this with OPML" gets flamed.... I know, you can. That's not the point.]

Most people don't understand the mess the Senate has become in terms of its delaying tactics and the use of filibuster by delay. The press doesn't cover it, because they'd rather film people shouting at town halls than tell us why our system is broken.

The game nowadays, especially for Republicans, is not to vote against popular legislation. It's to try to kill bills through endless amendments that delay or ultimately prohibit votes -- and ultimately the use of the threat of filibuster by amendment to extract concessions from the Democrats that poison the chances of the bills passing.

When the Republicans tried this tactic two years ago to try to block the minimum wage increase by proposing amendment after amendment, and it looked like once again the minimum wage increase would not pass, despite the overwhelming victory the Dems had achieved, Ted flipped his lid, in an absolutely beautiful way, and showed why he will be sorely missed. Please take five minutes to watch it, it will inspire you:



Remember this video as you watch the health care debate, and the talk of reconciliation. When the Republicans say that reconciliation is not fair, they are saying that because of one reason only -- it does not allow these sort of tactics. The best tribute to Kennedy at this point would be to push a good bill through via reconciliation, which will kill the game playing and allow our Senators to focus on the issue that was so close to Kennedy's heart -- how do we protect the weak, the underpaid, the people our society has forgotten. How do we of good fortune help those who have not been as lucky?

We can make that the discussion, or we can have another four weeks of pretend revisions and amendments and centrist posturing by people who are in practical terms obstructionists.

I know what Ted would have done.

...and good riddance. From the NY Times:

Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.

“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said.

Her reluctance to use Twitter, a feeling shared by others in her age group, has not doomed the microblogging service. Just 11 percent of its users are aged 12 to 17, according to comScore. Instead, Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations.

In fairness, Digital Native Theory isn't dead, because there was never any such thing. There was talk of Digital Natives in feel-good sessions across academia, but not, at least as far as I can remember, any serious exploration of the concept as something falsifiable. It would be as if I decided that British English was a completely different language than English, and then stood around for a couple hours swapping stories about how those crazy Brits call trucks "lorries" and elevators "lifts". It wouldn't pass muster in linguistics and we were insane to let it spread in education.

Now maybe, finally, we can get to the real questions: How do we teach our students to collaborate, cooperate, and communicate in ways fit for the agile projects the future requires? How do we give them methods to make sense of a world where filters are no longer at the point of production?

These teens that we are teaching are the same ones my wife watched go to McDonald's on their high school Italy tour. Taken as a group, they aren't the most adventurous lot, and that hasn't changed because they have cell phones. It used to be the job of colleges to open up their mind to the possibilities they didn't know about, to expose them to the opportunities they weren't exploring, to get them to rethink how they approach problems. Now that this digital native nonsense is finally dying, maybe we can start addressing that.

"Kay's dad has got recessive gene that she may have, she doesn't know if she has it has it, so she is genotyping that gene in herself in her closet, and she's going to figure out if she has it...."

If you are thinking of doing some authentic instruction in biology, you MUST, repeat, MUST watch this video on DIYbio and the biohacking movement.

The DIYbio Community - Presented at Ignite Boston 5 (2009) from mac cowell on Vimeo.

I cannot imagine a more compelling way to engage the future biologists of the world than to show them this video and to encourage them to come up with their own projects (or to join up with someone else's project). The "standard" approach to biology (first, memorize some stuff, then do some lab work that has been done one million times before and check your results against the key, then maybe by senior year do some original research) weeds out many of the exact people biology needs -- hackers, creative types, problem solvers. While it might seem that biohacking and institutional education are incompatible, this is by design, not definition. And we can change the design. After all, that's what hackers do, right?

On a related note I came across this while putting together the instructional design sourcebook. I'll talk about the sourcebook more later -- it's a project based on my belief that teachers need a browsable resource that ties networked learning pedagogies to specific classes, organized by discipline (I know for us that might sound ridiculous, but thee is some discipline tunnel vision holding us back, we can either deny it or address it, and denying it is not working). I am desperately in need of some innovative instructors in the sciences who can provide me with syllabi of innovative courses, or descriptions of unique net-enabled, student centered processes or techniques they are using. Please mail me at mcaulfield at keene dot edu. I'd be including them in this beast I am assembling for our faculty.

Downes makes the point repeatedly that we talk too much about collaboration (which is something new technology allows us to do better) and not enough about cooperation (which is something the network allows us to do for the first time on this unprecedented scale).

The neat thing about cooperation is that if you can structure a solution to a problem as a cooperative one rather than a collaborative one you can solve very big problems in a very short amount of time -- because at it's best, cooperation requires simply that you do what you normally do, but in a way that allows cooperation. Which is why I will be watching this project closely:

If you’re a lawyer, and you use the crazy-outmoded PACER system to access federal court documents, check out the new RECAP system launched today by Tim Lee, Harlan Yu, and Steve Schultze with the help of Princeton’s CITP. If you use PACER, you know it’s difficult to use. It also charges citizens to access what are nominally public documents, something that makes little sense online. This combination has resulted in a multi-million dollar surplus for the judiciary’s IT department, and lousy access to data that would be useful not just to lawyers and litigants, but to bloggers, librarians, reporters, and scholars.

Schultze, Lee, and Yu’s scheme to free the documents on PACER is an ingenious one. They have built a Firefox plugin called RECAP that attorneys and other regular users of PACER can install on their computers. When a user downloads a document from PACER, the plugin sends a copy to RECAP’s server, where it is made publicly available. If enough PACER users install RECAP, it will only be a matter of time before the entire database is liberated. Why would lawyers participate? When they search for a document, the plugin first checks the RECAP database to see if a copy has already been liberated. If it has, then the lawyer can retreive it without paying PACER. Like I said: ingenious.

I think we have to teach our students to think about problems in this way. It's a shame that the one area where students have solved problems in this cooperative way, through music file-sharing, has been criminalized. But that just makes it more urgent that we introduce kids to the legitimacy of the cooperative approach.

We are still just at the beginning of understanding what can be accomplished in cooperative frameworks. So one question for any instructional designer has to be whether we not only encourage students to develop collaborative frameworks, but cooperative ones as well. That starts with defaulting to open solutions, providing RSS, using open licensing, etc., but as the above example shows one can go even further in designing such approaches. And the potential impact graduating hundreds of thousands of students who understand how to think in this way -- well, it's huge. It's the sort of thinking that could likely solve global warming, famine, income disparities -- you name it.

(Side note: Is it just me, or is it enraging to think that the actions of the record companies are likely reducing our ability to solve problems that are core to the continued existence of our species -- just because Billy Ray Cyrus needs his royalties for Achy Breaky Heart?)

If anyone has any good examples of encouraging cooperative thinking in a project-based class (beyond a general predilection to openness), please let me know, either through the comments or email to caulfield dot mike at gmail.

We scoff at the ancestor worship of other cultures, and consider divine right and kingship and all that stuff to be anti-American. So can someone explain to me why we will endure any kind of nuttery if it is tied to something one of our Founding Fathers once said?

Case in point -- at the town hall Obama will be at in New Hampshire today, there is a right-wing freak with a pistol strapped by his side and a big sign that references the Jefferson quote "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." This quote he is so endeared with is not a public statement of Jefferson -- it's a comment on the Shay's Rebellion made in a letter to a friend in 1787. From a pre-Reign of Terror Jefferson.

In other words, take away the Founding Fathers as Gods myth, and it's just something some guy said to a friend, something that he may not have even believed a couple years later.

And once you realize that, guess what? It turns out you're guy bringing a pistol to an Obama event with a sign that seems to be calling for Obama's assassination. That doesn't make you a hero, and at best it makes you a dick. At best.

Just a short follow up to the last post -- when we talk about efficiency or productivity in education, I know that eyes roll and someone usually starts composing a rant about how kids aren't items on an assembly line and the point isn't to push out twice as many in half the time.

This misses the point that productivity is value neutral. It's an increase in capacity that can be used to do more things at the same level of quality, or do the same amount of things at a higher level of quality.

Given the current funding constraints on higher education, you can't be for quality education and against looking for ways to increase productivity, at least productivity in the sense of finding more efficient uses of limited time and physical resources. If I read the cost disease theory right (and I may not be), without productivity gains a product is either going to have to cost more over time or be produced at a lesser level of quality. And the time where we could continuously charge more for our product is about to end.

I couldn't get at the Chronicle article "College Administrations Are Too Bloated? Compared With What?" from home (no login here),  so I read the paper it looks like it may have been based on instead.

It's well worth a look -- it articulates what I think many of us knew but could not express -- that college is expensive because it is structured as a service industry, and the rise of college prices relative to the rest of the economy is actually in line with how all other labor-intensive service industries have tracked. And it introduces an explanation which is apparently well-known to economists, but is new to me -- cost disease theory. In cost disease theory, gains in productivity in industries benefiting from technological and process enhancements adversely affect costs in service industries, where there are no such gains -- both types of industries compete for the same pool of workers, and the rising wages in the industries experiencing productivity gains force wages in the service industries upward -- even in the absence of productivity gains.

There's really only two solutions to this, according to the authors. The first is not really a solution per se -- it is to see the situation rather like a haircut or a musical concert -- you cannot significantly increase productivity associated with the delivery of the service. You're just going to have to lump the costs. The second is to reconfigure the process of delivery and achieve productivity gains.

But the key point here is that if you do not achieve productivity gains, costs will not remain stable -- they will rise.

[One interesting note -- I probably could have written this in half the time if I could have blockquoted some text from the paper to explain the above concept. But the PDF is locked against copy and paste. If you want to explain why higher education is doomed when it comes to productivity, closed processes like that might make a good start.]

Please discard from your pitch:

• Tom Friedman world-is-flatism


• Kurzweilian Singularities


• Prenskyan Digital Nativism


• Dot-commer "Marginal cost of zero" talk

And please replace it all with this simple observation by Tom Hoffman:

I don't understand why "computers can make it easier to do the difficult, sophisticated things we've been trying to do for years" is a less appealing, or at least less used, argument than "New! Disruptive! Etc."

(Feel free to suggest additions to the discard list).

There's a great post over at Zeroday -- a project to have a mob of us ask, politely, via twitter, what the artists cited in the Sony v. Tenebaum decision think of it. In other words, there are 17 bands or so Joel Tenenbaum was cited for downloading. The plan is to get a comment from each band on what they think of the $675,000 fine.

As part of that activity he's posted a spreadsheet of the bands Joel was sued over. And excuse me if I don't get a whiff of must off of it:

Nine Inch Nails
Radiohead
Aerosmith
Nirvana
Sublime
NOFX
Green Day
Janis Joplin
The Rolling Stones
Pink Floyd
Simon & Garfunkel
Elliot Smith
Buckethead
The Kinks
Beatles
Unity Reggae Band
Creedence Clearwater Revival

Put aside the irony that Reznor released his last work for free, and the most idiotic thing about the list is how old the works must have been (assuming Joel wasn't listening to that hot new CCR record).

Most of this music has to be thirty to forty years old. A lot of the people that made it are dead. (How long do the record companies feel they are entitled to make a living off of Janis Joplin & Elliot Smith?)

In other words, the list tells us the same thing that crappy radio does -- the plan of the record companies has always been to make a living off the short-tail back catalog, first by forcing everyone to rebuy old albums on CD, and then hopefully by selling more of it to a whole new generation.

"Teens don't tweet" is trending on twitter right now, I imagine in response to this Nielsen report.

My thought on this is that there are an awful lot of activities that are useful to adults but not to teens, and vice versa. If we'd get over the insane notion that the cultural wave we are experiencing right now is being driven by 12-year-olds (it's not), maybe we'd get further on analyzing this.

My guess is that many teens don't tweet partially because the micro-societies they belong to are rather insular, and often place-bound, places where the "friend" model works well. Twitter's "pub-sub" system is a far more flexible and effective system for gathering information outside your primary group of friends -- but I think for many teens this is not a huge issue.  Things move directly from the College Humor site or YouTube hotlist, into their circle of friends and that's fine.

I don't know about you all, but what I find is that for professional communication at least, Facebook is lousy. It's lack of pub-sub seperation discourages people making the sort of far-flung connections they need to stay informed. The way that it closes off your updates to non-friends is great for concealing you life from the eyes of parents, but lousy for professional use, where all of your updates are not searchable by the community at large.

What I use Facebook primarily for is keeping up with friends. Twitter ends up being about collecting and disseminating professional and political information (with some cultural bits in there). If we dropped the Prensky nonsense for just a minute, it might be easy to see that although many teens don't use tools like Twitter they may need them in the future as they develop networks based more on interest and professional need than on, well, socializing. In an ideal world, responsible higher ed institutions would see guiding students through that evolution as one of their primary roles.

That's what we'd do, at least, if we'd get over the insane notion that the cultural wave we are experiencing right now is being driven by 12-year-olds. And I think society is on the cusp of making that realization -- just not quite yet.

As many of you know, my dad, Art Caulfield, died two weeks ago, at the age of 66, from anaplastic thyroid cancer. In a way it was due to a long illness -- the anaplastic form of this cancer was new, but he had battled thyroid cancer before, both in his 30s and about eight years ago. But the new incidence was sudden, moving from a pain in the shoulder on father's day to his death five weeks later.

I could have written a river of prose on this blog about him and his life in the days just after he died, and I felt compelled to, but something about that felt to cloying and too raw, as if I was asking for pity or condolence, when that wasn't really the point.

But today, curious, I googled "Arthur Caulfield" and "Arthur E. Caulfield" and found that the man that had introduced me to the power of the Internet -- the person who encouraged me to join my first bulletin board site as a kid of 13, the person who I remember excitedly coming home one day in the late 80s with a copy of Vanevar Bush's "As We May Think" and telling me how hypertext on top of networks was going to change the world -- this man has no internet footprint of his own.

And that's just wrong, just plain wrong.

So I beg your indulgence here -- I am pasting his eulogy below.  It's not a plea for sympathy or condolence -- but just a matter of justice I think -- For those that may be looking for him in the future, whether they be old friends from Presque Isle, people he knew when he served in Vietnam,  or friends he may have had at Digital Equipment (DEC)  -- I want them to find something substantial. And this blog is the most effective way to make that happen.

Eulogy for Arthur Caulfield

===========================

The Greeks had a word to describe a quality of perfect conversation, one which translates roughly as "a graceful playfulness". It's the place in between being meaningful yet joyless, and, on the other extreme, being light-hearted yet lacking in depth. It's the perfect intersection where a lightness of heart and creativity of the mind meet deep meaning and emotional resonance.

Anybody who talked to my Dad for even a couple of minutes knew he had that in spades. A conversation with him was a joy. It was never labored, it was engaged without being adversarial, it was witty but deeply meaningful. He fired on all cylinders: emotional, moral, intellectual, and it was all suffused with the joy he took in being with you in that exact moment. I've been struck all my life how deeply people that have only talked to my Dad a couple times feel they know him. I'd be defensive, and think that they can't REALLY have known him, but often talking to them you find that they do. And I think that that is because his conversation was very much a reflection of his life. He had a graceful playfulness in all he did.

His relationship to my mom was extraordinary. They never fought. For 45 years they drank in one another's company, and they never ran out things to say. They were partners, best friends, true lovers. They were inspiring to watch. Once when I was joking about Nicole and I going on a "date night" I remembered that my Mom and Dad had had a couple date nights way back when and I asked my Dad whatever happened to that. He told me he and my Mom had figured out they didn't have to go somewhere to be on a date. And as much as I'd like to attribute that to his legendary frugality, it was true. Every morning at the breakfast table was a date for them.

He loved us kids. The images and memories we will treasure are often related to the curiosity and interest he had in everything in the world. He loved a good science project, the boom of the Van De Graf generator at the Boston Museum of Science, or sitting in the backyard watching a total eclipse of the moon. Even when he was completely overwhelmed with work, he couldn't resist a Lego or Erector Set.

And he'd turn all these things into good-natured competition, not out of a sense of aggressiveness, but out of that boyish exuberance and wonder that he never lost, no matter how old he got. He would sometimes lumber and shuffle around, but challenge him to a game of ping pong, and the man was Baryshnikov. I am sure it was not lost on him that in the last All-Caulfield ping-pong tournament he won, at the age of 66, over us thirty something upstarts.

He treasured his retirement. He was made to be a grandfather, and he took to it like something he had trained for all his life. His grandchildren adored him, and he indulged them accordingly. Once in Florida, my sister watched two of her kids making a game out of dumping buckets of warm and cold water over his head in the pool. He hammed it up, thanking them for the hot buckets, and making mock-aggravation noises when the cold buckets were dumped on him. Jen watched, wondering when he would finally have had enough of the water torture, but soon realized as long as the kids were having fun, he would never say he had enough.

He always took better care of other people than he did of himself. The minute someone had car problems he'd pack up his tools and help them out, and get their car into tip top shape. At the same time, he preferred to drive his Taurus wagon around with a bumper visibly affixed with twine and superglue, clearly avoiding the chore of maintenance. For every unfinished project in his own house, there are four or five projects he finished in someone else's.

He couldn't stand for people to be worried over him, although he worried very much about other people. He fought very hard on his last day to stay lucid, because he knew his children were on his way to be with him. He wanted us to have a chance to say goodbye, for our own sake. We were told not to stop, because Dad thought that he could only hold on a bit more. When we got there could barely speak through the pain and the swelling, but with us all around the bed looking so despondent he managed to say "You know, I sure wish I could throw a better party." It was the last sentence he would end up saying.

Grace, and wit, and a deep resonant love that warmed you to your core.

In the hospital, the day before he died, my brother Ben came to visit him and my Dad told him how happy he was that Ben and Caitlin were getting married. "I hope you have a wonderful marriage," he said. Then he struggled a bit, trying to concentrate through the toxins and said "After all these years you'd think I'd have have some better words of wisdom for you, but I just can't think of anything else right now".

He shouldn’t have worried. He had given us wisdom all his life. "Life is what happens while you're making other plans" he would always tell us, quoting Lennon -- and it was true, because in the end for each unread book in the house and each abandoned business idea in the basement, for each thing undone or unsaid or unfinished, there are the things he chose to put his time into instead -- the people around him, his friends, his family, and most of all, his life with Mom, who he loved more dearly than anything. People in the hospital would ask if this was their second marriage -- they couldn't imagine people being so tender and dedicated to one another after forty-five years. I watched as nurses came into the room crying, and saying how much my parents love had inspired them. That was over a period of two and a half weeks. Many people here saw that love over a lifetime, and it inspired all of us that much more.

It's hard, it's very hard. He was taken away far too young. I'd say he had so much more to give, but he gave so much already. More to the point, I wish he was here so we could give back to him, to repay him for everything he did for us. But it's not to be, and anyway it would take a lifetime to repay.

When I think of him, and how he would want us to react to this, however, I'm pretty sure I know. He wants us all to be happy, and light-hearted right now -- he knows that we can be serious without being depressed and moral without being self- important. He went as far as he could, and it is now up to us to share that graceful playfulness that was his gift to us for so many, many years.

Eulogy for Art Caulfield
===========================

The Greeks had a word to describe a quality of perfect conversation, one which translates roughly as "a graceful playfulness". It's the place in between being meaningful yet joyless, and, on the other extreme, being light-hearted yet lacking in depth. It's the perfect intersection where a lightness of heart and creativity of the mind meet deep meaning and emotional resonance.

Anybody who talked to my Dad for even a couple of minutes knew he had that in spades. A conversation with him was a joy. It was never labored, it was engaged without being adversarial, it was witty but deeply meaningful. He fired on all cylinders: emotional, moral, intellectual, and it was all suffused with the joy he took in being with you in that exact moment. I've been struck all my life how deeply people that have only talked to my Dad a couple times feel they know him. I'd be defensive, and think that they can't REALLY have known him, but often talking to them you find that they do. And I think that that is because his conversation was very much a reflection of his life. He had a graceful playfulness in all he did.

His relationship to my mom was extraordinary. They never fought. For 45 years they drank in one another's company, and they never ran out things to say. They were partners, best friends, true lovers. They were inspiring to watch. Once when I was joking about Nicole and I going on a "date night" I remembered that my Mom and Dad had had a couple date nights way back when and I asked my Dad whatever happened to that. He told me he and my Mom had figured out they didn't have to go somewhere to be on a date. And as much as I'd like to attribute that to his legendary frugality, it was true. Every morning at the breakfast table was a date for them.

He loved us kids. The images and memories we will treasure are often related to the curiosity and interest he had in everything in the world. He loved a good science project, the boom of the Van De Graf generator at the Boston Museum of Science, or sitting in the backyard watching a total eclipse of the moon. Even when he was completely overwhelmed with work, he couldn't resist a Lego or Erector Set.

And he'd turn all these things into good-natured competition, not out of a sense of aggressiveness, but out of that boyish exuberance and wonder that he never lost, no matter how old he got. He would sometimes lumber and shuffle around, but challenge him to a game of ping pong, and the man was Baryshnikov. I am sure it was not lost on him that in the last All-Caulfield ping-pong tournament he won, at the age of 66, over us thirty something upstarts.

He treasured his retirement. He was made to be a grandfather, and he took to it like something he had trained for all his life. His grandchildren adored him, and he indulged them accordingly. Once in Florida, my sister watched two of her kids making a game out of dumping buckets of warm and cold water over his head in the pool. He hammed it up, thanking them for the hot buckets, and making mock-aggravation noises when the cold buckets were dumped on him. Jen watched, wondering when he would finally have had enough of the water torture, but soon realized as long as the kids were having fun, he would never say he had enough.

He always took better care of other people than he did of himself. The minute someone had car problems he'd pack up his tools and help them out, and get their car into tip top shape. At the same time, he preferred to drive his Taurus wagon around with a bumper visibly affixed with twine and superglue, clearly avoiding the chore of maintenance. For every unfinished project in his own house, there are four or five projects he finished in someone else's.

He couldn't stand for people to be worried over him, although he worried very much about other people. He fought very hard on his last day to stay lucid, because he knew his children were on his way to be with him. He wanted us to have a chance to say goodbye, for our own sake. We were told not to stop, because Dad thought that he could only hold on a bit more. When we got there could barely speak through the pain and the swelling, but with us all around the bed looking so despondent he managed to say "You know, I sure wish I could throw a better party." It was the last sentence he would end up saying.

Grace, and wit, and a deep resonant love that warmed you to your core.

In the hospital, the day before he died, my brother Ben came to visit him and my Dad told him how happy he was that Ben and Caitlin were getting married. "I hope you have a wonderful marriage," he said. Then he struggled a bit, trying to concentrate through the toxins and said "After all these years you'd think I'd have have some better words of wisdom for you, but I just can't think of anything else right now".

He shouldn’t have worried. He had given us wisdom all his life. "Life is what happens while you're making other plans" he would always tell us, quoting Lennon -- and it was true, because in the end for each unread book in the house and each abandoned business idea in the basement, for each thing undone or unsaid or unfinished, there are the things he chose to put his time into instead -- the people around him, his friends, his family, and most of all, his life with Mom, who he loved more dearly than anything. People in the hospital would ask if this was their second marriage -- they couldn't imagine people being so tender and dedicated to one another after forty-five years. I watched as nurses came into the room crying, and saying how much my parents love had inspired them. That was over a period of two and a half weeks. Many people here saw that love over a lifetime, and it inspired all of us that much more.

It's hard, it's very hard. He was taken away far too young. I'd say he had so much more to give, but he gave so much already. More to the point, I wish he was here so we could give back to him, to repay him for everything he did for us. But it's not to be, and anyway it would take a lifetime to repay.

When I think of him, and how he would want us to react to this, however, I'm pretty sure I know. He wants us all to be happy, and light-hearted right now -- he knows that we can be serious without being depressed and moral without being self- important. He went as far as he could, and it is now up to us to share that graceful playfulness that was his gift to us for so many, many years.