Sparkies

Learning Webs from Deschooling Society

At present, attention is focused on the disparity between rich and poor children in their access to things and in the manner in which they can learn from them. OEO and other agencies, following this approach, concentrate on equalizing chances, by trying to provide more educational equipment for the poor. A more radical point of departure would be to recognize that in the city rich and poor alike are artificially kept away from most of the things that surround them. Children born into the age of plastics and efficiency experts must penetrate two barriers which obstruct their understanding: one built into things and the other around institutions. Industrial design creates a world of things that resist insight into their nature, and schools shut the learner out of the world of things in their meaningful setting.

[I’ve noted before the Ivan Illich’s _Deschooling Society_ should be required reading. Here he is prescient as always, most of the “Learning Webs” section is obviously so… some of the rest has the sad power of (so far) dashed hopes.]

(Source: deschoolingsociety.digress.it)

from “Why the Book’s Future Never Happened”

One conclusion you might draw from the recent total lack of hypertext fiction is that the genre is not viable: that the literary experiment of the ’90s got what scientists would call a negative result. And in fact, if you read those fictions now (if you can read them: I’ve got a copy of “Victory Garden” on my desk, but when I try to play it, my computer tells me that “the classic environment is no longer supported,” a strangely portentous phrase), they seem difficult and problematic and not encouraging of successors. For one thing, the interfaces are terrible. Michael Joyce’s “Afternoon, A Story” (1988) offers the reader short passages of monospaced text, in which some words lead to other passages, and some words don’t, and the only way to find out which words are which is to click on every word in a passage, one by one. It’s interesting in a John-Cage-like, if-it’s-boring-for-two-hours-do-it-for-four kind of way, but the appeal of endless clicking was perhaps greater in 1988 than it is now, when we click plenty at the office, thank you.

What’s more, too many of the early hypertexts relied on the novelty of their form to do literary work, particularly in the keeping-the-reader-interested department. (The same might have been true of the first bound books. Who cared what was written in your codex? Wasn’t it cool that you could turn the pages?)

(Source: entertainment.salon.com)

from “Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here”

Education has one salient enemy in present-day America, and that enemy is education—university education in particular. To almost everyone, university education is a means to an end. For students, that end is a good job. Students want the credentials that will help them get ahead. They want the certificate that will give them access to Wall Street, or entrance into law or medical or business school. And how can we blame them? America values power and money, big players with big bucks. When we raise our children, we tell them in multiple ways that what we want most for them is success—material success. To be poor in America is to be a failure—it’s to be without decent health care, without basic necessities, often without dignity. Then there are those back-breaking student loans—people leave school as servants, indentured to pay massive bills, so that first job better be a good one. Students come to college with the goal of a diploma in mind—what happens in between, especially in classrooms, is often of no deep and determining interest to them.

In college, life is elsewhere. Life is at parties, at clubs, in music, with friends, in sports. Life is what celebrities have. The idea that the courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd. In terms of their work, students live in the future and not the present; they live with their prospects for success. If universities stopped issuing credentials, half of the clients would be gone by tomorrow morning, with the remainder following fast behind.

The faculty, too, is often absent: Their real lives are also elsewhere. Like most of their students, they aim to get on. The work they are compelled to do to advance—get tenure, promotion, raises, outside offers—is, broadly speaking, scholarly work. No matter what anyone says this work has precious little to do with the fundamentals of teaching. The proof is that virtually no undergraduate students can read and understand their professors’ scholarly publications. The public senses this disparity and so thinks of the professors’ work as being silly or beside the point. Some of it is. But the public also senses that because professors don’t pay full-bore attention to teaching they don’t have to work very hard—they’ve created a massive feather bed for themselves and called it a university.

This is radically false…

(Source: oxfordamerican.org)

from “Solitude and Leadership”

Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself.

(Source: theamericanscholar.org)

from “Written on the Wind” (Stewart Brand)

It’s not just that file formats quickly become obsolete; the physical media themselves are short-lived. Magnetic media, such as disks and tape, lose their integrity in 5 to 10 years. Optically etched media, such as CD-ROMs, if used only once, last only 5 to 15 years before they degrade. And digital files do not degrade gracefully like analog audio tapes. When they fail, they fail utterly.

Beyond the evanescence of data formats and digital storage media lies a deeper problem. Computer systems of large scale are at the core of driving corporations, public institutions, and indeed whole sectors of the economy. Over time, these gargantuan systems become dauntingly complex and unknowable, as new features are added, old bugs are worked around with layers of “patches,” generations of programmers add new programming tools and styles, and portions of the system are repurposed to take on novel functions. With both respect and loathing, computer professionals call these monsters “legacy systems.” Teasing a new function out of a legacy system is not done by command, but by conducting cautious alchemic experiments that, with luck, converge toward the desired outcome.

And the larger fear looms: We are in the process of building one vast global computer, which could easily become The Legacy System from Hell that holds civilization hostage—the system doesn’t really work; it can’t be fixed; no one understands it; no one is in charge of it; it can’t be lived without; and it gets worse every year.

Today’s bleeding-edge technology is tomorrow’s broken legacy system. Commercial software is almost always written in enormous haste, at ever- accelerating market velocity; it can foresee an “upgrade path” to next year’s version, but decades are outside its scope. And societies live by decades, civilizations by centuries.

Digital archivists thus join an ancient lineage of copyists and translators. The process, now as always, can introduce copying errors and spurious “improvements,” and can lose the equivalent of volumes of Aristotle. But the practice also builds the bridge between human language eras—from Greek to Latin, to English, to whatever’s next.

(Source: longnow.org)

on “Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-Enchantment of Education”

Our divided academic disciplines have been wearied by their longtime separation, and Caldecott upholds objective beauty as a powerful, but neglected, adhesive. The book is not recommended, but urged upon all. The book may baffle moderns suspicious of the analogy of being, frustrate mathematicians who see their field as an escape from religious questions, annoy artists who thought their pursuit of beauty could avoid arithmetic, and bother scientists frustrated with the growing religious ranks within their onetime secular domain—but it will delight those with ears to hear the music of the spheres which hasn’t ceased. Dostoevsky’s prediction that “beauty will save the world” is pending eschatological verification. In the meantime, Stratford Caldecott successfully argues that it can at least save education.

(Source: thepublicdiscourse.com)

Lens Blogs

Prediction: the niche blog is old. What I’ll call the lens blog is what’s hot in 2010.

Of course, that assumes that for one thing to blossom, another must die, which is stupid, but hey, that’s how the prediction game works, right? You have to predict that one thing dies if you’re going to predict that another rises, right? Maybe I’ve been reading bad predictions.

Anyway, someone more influential than me has probably already coined a better name for this phenomenon, but here’s what I mean by a lens blog: we all know what a niche blog is. It’s one that is about a single subject. But consider BLDGBLOG. You might say it’s an architecture niche blog, but is it really? There are practically no limits on what kinds of subjects might appear on the blog. Everything is open to Geoff Manaugh’s investigation. What binds it all together is this: every subject is analyzed through the lens of architecture. Likewise, its sister site, Edible Geography, examines everything through the lens of food. For Strange Maps, the lens is cartography.

(Source: enthusiasms.org)

“The benefits of gripping and moving a pen or pencil reach beyond communication. Emerging research shows that handwriting increases brain activity, hones fine motor skills, and can predict a child’s academic success in ways that keyboarding can’t.”

(Source: The Globe and Mail)