I dig Illich even when I occasionally disagree with him. He seems like an older, wiser Ted Nelson.
The point I’d love to start with is
“Tape Recorders vs TVs”
This pre-figures an analogy from one of my few political heroes, Lawrence Lessig who refers in several speeches and articles to
Read-Only Media vs Read/Write Media.
Traditional Instruction Model / Transmission (?) (by the pain of fleeting joy)
Learning Web / Community of Scholars (?) (by the pain of fleeting joy)
I’d like to bring this woman to campus. I’ll be bringing in a beginner set of her tools today. This is the kind of intervention that interests me. Get this in the hands of tech-phobes. It’s a baby step towards a more healthy relationship with technology for the average person in society. I think it might have powerful repercussions.
Again, I’m a bit ambivalent about this weeks reading. Turkle is bright and makes plenty of interesting points. However, despite the fact that she makes occasional defenses of video games and game-playing, she also has a tendency to pathologize. Consider the first portrait she paints of an anti-social child yelling at a cafe owner. As opposed to video gaming being at the root of her behavior could it be something about the neighborhood she grows up in? The failure to even acknowledge this possibility is a pretty big oversight. Sloppy.
However , some of Turkle’s diagnoses may be useful.
…It is a chance to say”No , let’s wait. Let’s look at the whole thing more closely.” It feels like a chance to buy time against more than a video game. It feels like a chance to buy time against a new way of life. p.501
I think much of the culture at Whitman hopes to buy time against a new way of life. I’m not sure if we have the luxury. There’s something so reactive about that mode of living that it looks rather anemic to me. Why aren’t we intervening in how our lives are changing, instead of developing an ideology to hide from those changes. And this ideology is as present amongst the students as anywhere else.I’m interested in where we might intervene.
Perhaps I’m simply exhausted after a long day, but I’m not particularly finding the essays to be much of a revelation. If there is one thing I might draw from them it might be the notion of “objects” or particular types of objects that we’ll call “agents” might be seen as theatrical actors.
I’ll be curious to see if others in the group might bring out some of the nuances in her discourse.
via On Point with Tom Ashbrook:
We talk so much about memory. Not losing it. Enhancing it. Diving into it. Working through it. Sometimes, says a raft of new science, it’s better to just forget. Forgetting, it turns out, may be a key part of mental health, mental hygiene.
Sigmund Freud said deal with it. Dive into that repressed stuff. Work it out. Work it through. Tony Soprano said “fuggetaboutit.” Tony Soprano may have been right. Remember and you’ll ruminate. Ruminate, and you’re bummed. The brain is also built to forget.
This hour, On Point: memory and forgetting, and when forgetting may be for the best.
—
Bill Viola “Will There be Condominiums in Data Space?” 1982.
I think forgetting is important in terms of technological change. Duke professor Cathy Davidson , in her book “Now You See It”, suggests that todays students today need to be able to
Learn
Forget
Re-learn.
When was the last time I consciously cultivated my own forgetting? When was the last time I encouraged that in a student? As educators must we become obsessed with cultivating memory? Remember. Remember. Remember. How might we imagine education that doesn’t repeat that mantra?
