NETFUTURE
Technology and Human Responsibility
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Issue #79 A Publication of The Nature Institute October 27, 1998
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Editor: Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)
On the Web: http://netfuture.org
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
CONTENTS
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Editor's Note
Quotes and Provocations
On Selling Educational Software
Do They Have Television on Mars?
Finding Wholeness in a Pile of Manure
DEPARTMENTS
Letter from Des Moines (Lowell Monke)
Why Information is Not Enough: Tales from a high school computer lab
Correspondence
College as a Cover for Grade School Failure (Dan Lyke)
What the Objectors to Distance Education Ignore (Peter Denning)
On Activism and the Credential Wars (Bruce A. Metcalf)
Words Past and Present
Conquering time, space, and labor
About this newsletter
---------------------
** From the NETFUTURE Archives **
"Nobody sees the stars now .... Though observatories are multiplied,
the heavens receive very little attention. The naked eye
may easily see farther than the armed. It depends
on who looks through it. No superior telescope to this has
been invented. In those big ones the recoil is equal to the
force of the discharge." (Henry David Thoreau)
(For an updated context,
see "Words Past and Present" below.)
==========================================================================
EDITOR'S NOTE
I have again managed to coax Lowell Monke away from his high school
advanced technology classroom, and away from the finishing touches he's
putting on his Ph.D., long enough to give us another "Letter from Des
Moines". Fortunately, we'll be favored with a series of trenchant
commentaries from Lowell in coming issues, all seasoned with his immensely
sane wisdom and tales from his daily experiences with kids and machines.
After many years in high school education, Lowell hopes to make a
transition next fall to a college setting, where he can use his rich
experience and his "Foundations of Education" doctoral work to help other
teachers find their way amid the tremendous political, social, and
commercial pressures brought to bear on the school classroom today.
If I had the resources, I'd hire Lowell to work for NETFUTURE. As it is,
some college is going to be very fortunate.
SLT
Goto table of contents
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QUOTES AND PROVOCATIONS
On Selling Educational Software
-------------------------------
Dr. Jane Healy, in her new book, Failure to Connect: How Computers
Affect Our Children's Minds -- for Better and Worse, tells of
attending a "technology in education" conference in the midwest. She
stopped at a prominent display for a multimedia package designed to teach
reading and writing "all in one iridescent package with countless
components and a huge price tag". The salesman started up the demo, which
resembled nothing more than "a loud, gaudy Saturday morning cartoon". As
she tells the story:
"You interested in our great new system here?" he booms heartily.
"I'm not sure. Can you give me a couple of reasons why I should
use this instead of regular materials -- you know, books, pencils,
teachers?"
His eyes widen, and he stares at me as if I had just landed from
outer space or, more likely, should be sporting a hoop skirt, bonnet,
and bustle.
"Well, I don't really have an answer for that", he fumbles through
the promotional flyers. "No one ever asked me that before."
"How long have you been selling this product?" I inquire.
"About two years."
"So how many educators have you shown it to?"
"Oh, I don't know ... probably several thousand."
"And I'm the first one who ever asked you why it is better than
traditional methods?"
"Yup. What do you do, anyway?"
(I'll be reviewing Healy's book a way down the line. I can tell you right
now, though, that it's an excellent antidote to software salesmen, whether
they're on commission from Microsoft or the White House.)
Do They Have Television on Mars?
--------------------------------
"You'd have to be made out of wood to not want to go to Mars", claims
Robert Zubrin. The 46-year-old aerospace engineer wrote The Case for
Mars and recently founded the Mars Society to work toward early
exploration of the red planet.
We are a nation of pioneers! [Zubrin says] .... We need a central
overriding purpose for our lives. At this point in history, that focus
can only be the human exploration and settlement of Mars.
Zubrin has managed to generate a lot of passion on the subject. One
leader of the Mars Society, a NASA researcher, talks about members
chaining themselves to the White House to promote their goals.
Oddly, though, members also fret over what they see as a major obstacle to
their hope: space travel is mind-numbingly boring. As one reporter
summarized their concern: space travel "has to be turned into
entertainment or the American public will never care".
So it is that there is talk of privatization, television rights, an
Olympic-style logo, advertisements on the astronauts' spacecraft and
clothing, lunch boxes and action figures for kids, and so on.
But one wonders: if it is really all that urgent to escape ourselves and
our planet, and if mindless distraction is the way to do it, then why go
to Mars? We've already got television and the Web here.
(News from New York Times, Aug. 18, 1998.)
Finding Wholeness in a Pile of Manure
-------------------------------------
Will Brinton, who runs a prestigious agricultural laboratory, began his
talk by saying, "I do reductionism by day and wholism by night". A
specialist in soil quality and composting, he keeps his ripening manure
piles artfully camouflaged, lest the conventional, daytime customers of
his laboratory get alarmed.
Not that he has any problems with credibility. As founder of the Woods
End Research Laboratory in Maine, he is beset not only by curious
scientists, but also by television crews, Pentagon officials, and the
agricultural ministers of foreign states. One reason for their interest:
he solves their problems, such as what do do with toxic wastes. Folklore
credits him with being able to compost "anything", from oil spills to
radioactive sludge -- and many of these things he has composted -- but he is
perhaps most notorious for having found a way to convert the explosive
TNT into fertilizer. As Mother Jones whimsically summarized the recipe:
Blend a ton of waste from any mint (the plant) processing factory with
TNT sludge. Mix well. Sprinkle in one ton of carbon-rich sawdust from
a local lumber mill. Let stand. Spoon in a ton of buffalo manure.
Bake for 30-90 days. Feed your flowers. (Warning: "Composting can
produce an intense heat," says Brinton, "which is the last thing you
want with explosives.")
Brinton explains that the incomprehensibly complex life processes in
compost take up toxic substance and transform it into the terms of their
own healthy existence. While the details of the transformation may be
hopelessly beyond analysis, the overall achievement is by no means hidden
from us. We can gain an ever deeper understanding of the process as a
whole, and we can observe the effects of compost when applied to cropland.
Brinton's own considerable accomplishments have resulted from his ability
to look at crops and soil and compost, and "read them whole". And that is
what he tried to get across to his audience of about thirty people, who
met last October 10 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts: the difference
between a wholistic and a reductionist stance.
One way he illustrated the difference was by describing soilless farming.
He showed a picture of "factory-produced" lettuce: the crop was grown on
huge, thin slabs of nutrient-impregnated styrofoam, standing on edge
(nearly perpendicular to the floor) and facing a bank of lights. The
system is based on the most exhaustive analysis of plant requirements the
researchers can manage. Each individual nutrient is calculated, the
nutrients are drawn from separate tanks, mixed, and then applied
continuously to the top edge of the styrofoam. As the solution drains
downward, the plants absorb what they need.
Of course, analyzing what the plants need is equivalent to analyzing all
the transactions going on in a compost pile: it can't be done. But the
compost pile, under the supervision of one who has learned to understand
something of its dynamic as a whole, will go ahead and do its work
regardless of the incompleteness of our analysis. That piece of styrofoam
"soil", on the other hand, will not; it provides only the elements
packaged in the nutrient solution, and these elements are guaranteed to be
incomplete. This is not just an incompleteness of knowledge; it is an
incompleteness of the critical life processes producing the lettuce that
you and I have very likely been eating.
Grow lettuce in compost-enriched soil, and, in an immediate, practical
sense, you have wholeness. Grow lettuce in styrofoam, and you have
reductionism.
Not surprisingly, there is a more or less continuous series of problems to
be overcome in the lettuce factory. To begin with -- although it is not
seen as a problem by those who run the factory -- some $40,000 in plant
nutrients are collected at the bottom edge of the styrofoam and flushed
into the environment every year.
"Why can't it be re-used?" Brinton was asked. Because the collected soup
of nutrients is too untrustworthy. The lettuce plants continually vary in
what they take up, depending, for example, on the time of day and their
degree of maturity. In other words, once those well-analyzed nutrients
get caught up in actual life processes, you can never know what will
happen in any precise, analytical sense, and therefore you don't know what
you'll get in the left-over solution.
Then there are pest problems in the factory. The industrial-strength
remedy is obvious enough: fumigate the place with poisons regularly.
Unfortunately, this seems to be causing health problems for the workers,
so the managers acknowledge that they may be "forced" to adopt integrated
pest management. They lament, though, that the more they experiment with
that alternative, the dirtier their factory tends to get. And god forbid
that their lettuce should come in contact with dirt!
A few comments of my own. Reductionism is necessary as one direction of
thought. We really do need to consider the reduced, skeletal pictures we
can produce by analyzing particular elements out of a phenomenon. Brinton
himself has done much analytic work to elucidate various aspects of the
composting process. But he does not imagine that his analyses add up to
anything like the whole. Moreover, his analyses will remain on-track only
as long as he continues to grasp and respect the whole -- only as long as
he insists on reconnecting every analytic product back to its never fully
analyzable context.
The problems arise, then, when reductionism is our only method. This
drives us to pursue our analyses with a kind of fanatical absoluteness; we
must isolate all the parts, since we have no other way to get at the
whole. But in a world that really does come whole, this simply isn't
possible -- not just because things are too complex, but because it can't be
done even in principle. True wholes do not yield a definitive list of
parts. Everything depends on how you look at them; each such view is
limited, and there are always new, revelatory vantage points. (For
examples of this wholeness, consider any meaningful text, or the human
body with its various organs, or for that matter an atom, which turns out
not to be absolutely separable from all other atoms.)
How, then, do we see wholes? The answer, of course, is that we don't, or
scarcely so. We have for too long strained toward the opposite, analytic
pole. That's why so many of the efforts to develop wholistic disciplines
have proved disappointing. We have a long learning curve ahead of us.
But we can glimpse enough of the path to take the next few steps. Brinton
-- or any farmer who is still intimately connected to his land -- can tell
a great deal about the health and the needs of plants by simple
inspection. How? The overriding fact, I think, is that he must attend to
the sensible qualities of things -- the very same qualities that
scientists consciously chose early on to ignore, and that every analytic
thrust tries to eliminate from consideration.
Qualities are expressive; they must be read in the way we read meanings.
They have none of the yes-or-no character so desirable in all quantitative
and analytic inquiries. It is this absence of hard, sharp edges that
makes it possible for quality-laden images to interpenetrate, to shade
into each other. And this in turn is why profoundly reading any part of a
qualitative image is at the same time to read the whole. A trained eye
attending to qualities can read the whole of a plant in a leaf, and the
whole of the soil in the plant. This is the contrary, balancing gesture
required in order to keep reductionism from becoming a one-way dead end.
In sum: either we will have a science of wholeness that is also a science
of qualities, or else we will have no science of wholeness.
There is hope. Some of the images of health and abuse that Brinton
presents are so powerful that many of those committed to a purely
reductionist science are sitting up and taking notice. And Brinton points
out that more and more research shows, for example, how crops benefit from
compost in a manner far exceeding what would be expected from an analysis
of its recognized nutrients. That styrofoam-entrapped lettuce,
apparently, is missing out on something good, and we don't know what it
is.
Take off the reductionist blinders, though, and we know very well what it
is. It stares us in the face and sticks under our fingernails: good,
quality dirt.
SLT
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==========================================================================
WHY INFORMATION IS NOT ENOUGH
Lowell Monke
(lm7846s@acad.drake.edu)
Letter from Des Moines
October 27, 1998
---------------------
TALES FROM A HIGH SCHOOL COMPUTER LAB
Recently, one of my students designed and managed a Web page for a
project involving the comparison of cultures from various parts of the
world. This student gathered and categorized hundreds of messages so
that others could reference all contributions easily. For several
months he did just what proponents of "Information Age Education" say we
need to teach our students to do: he organized, selected, processed and
even electronically published information that was sent to him every
day. He did such a good job and was so proud of his work that we decided
he should enter the Web page in a contest.
But the entry form completely baffled him. He spent an hour pondering and
asking me for help with the question, "What is the value of your project?"
With all of his hard work he didn't seem to have any idea how to express
why he had spent so much time developing this extensive body of
information. Finally, I gave in and told him what I thought the value of
his project was but it did little good. He soon came back, unable to
remember the exact words I had used.
This nice, hard-working young man, who can gather and process information
off the 'Net so well, has nevertheless been failed by all of us in the
educational system. His problem had nothing to do with technology or
information and couldn't be fixed by them. His problem was lack of
insight, the inability to discover meaning by finding relations between
experiences and ideas. In a truly educational environment experiences and
ideas interact to create knowledge and the insights that feed the seed of
wisdom.
This recalls T. S. Eliot's famous lament, "Where is the wisdom lost in
knowledge? Where is the knowledge lost in information?" (1963, 147).
Still, our infatuation with technology has blinded us to this
discrimination and resulted in data and information being lifted to
exalted status. The promoters of information have inflated its definition
to absurd dimensions (Machlup 1983). John Perry Barlow (1996), for
example, claims that "Information is an activity. Information is a life
form. Information is a relationship".
As information becomes a "living" entity inhabiting the electronic grid,
once-prized attributes of human life like wisdom and truth -- which
technology cannot traffic -- have become empty terms almost embarrassing
to utter. "Living in the bureaucracies of information, we don't venture a
claim to that kind of understanding" (Birkerts 1995, 74). Even in
education we no longer speak in those terms, and end up with students who
have no idea how to find meaning in the information they process. As
Theodore Roszak has pointed out, "An excess of information may actually
crowd out ideas, leaving the mind (young minds especially) distracted by
sterile, disconnected facts, lost among the shapeless heaps of data"
(1986, 88). The Internet provides us with nothing so much as an excess of
information.
Trees and Spiders
-----------------
How does a child understand trees? At various times I have watched my son
Benjamin climb our trees, sit under their shade, pluck their leaves, break
off branches, listen to cardinals singing in them, peel their bark, watch
them sway in the wind. Without conscious attention to learning, he has
come to know our trees and, by extension, the idea of trees. This is a
depth of understanding that comes only from experience that employs all
the senses within the context of a physically rich environment.
The 'Net (or a CD ROM or an encyclopedia for that matter) can only teach
Benjamin about trees. There is a huge qualitative difference here. The
information obtained is fragmented, desensualized, decontextualized.
Taken alone, its meaning to him will be obscure and lifeless. It will
never be linked to refuge from a blistering sun, or the strength of an
immovable living object. It will never carry the emotional force of
first-hand experience.
I recently participated in an Iowa Public Television panel discussion
which focused on technology uses in the classroom. As part of the
introduction a videotape was shown of a second-grade class that used the
computer to produce an electronic book report on Charlotte's Web, the
charming children's classic that teaches about living and dying,
friendship and community. The teacher explained that her students were so
enthusiastic about the computer project that they stopped going outside
for recess, preferring to stay in their seats working on the report.
(This echoes a recent advertisement by IBM (1997) which tries to impress
the reader with the same message.)
The teacher's enthusiasm was contagious, but I found it troubling that the
scene of three students sitting completely still, narrowing their
attention to a colorful but flat 10" by 12" screen, struck my colleagues
on the panel as preferable to exercising (and most certainly educating)
growing legs and arms, not to mention lungs, hearts, vocal chords, and,
yes, fists and tear ducts.
I also found it sad that the teacher chose to encourage her students to
take pride in the jerky animated movements of a coarsely drawn oval with
eight lines sticking out of it rather than help them develop a sense of
wonder through observing real spiders spinning fluidly in a terrarium;
that in studying a story that conveys dignity and meaning to the life
cycle the children spent their time working with machines rather than
visiting elders and infants in the community; that in a story that focuses
on farm life they preferred to stay in their classroom rather than visit
local farms. (This is Iowa, after all, where farms are not hard to find).
On the one hand, the world can be represented as the same old
decontextualized, abstract information, but with the added intriguing
feature that the child can now manipulate the representations using the
computer. On the other hand, we can encourage the child to relate
directly to the people and things of the world. These are fundamentally
different ways to approach learning. One stresses control and
manipulation of objects, reduced to abstract images -- the world as
information. The other forges connections between the child and his or
her immediate, personal, concrete world, and invites the child to become
involved with the tangible things and people that exist in it. Both
approaches promise to spark interest in a child. But the former does so
through mechanical maneuvering, while the other reaches the mind through
the heart. The former can be fun, the latter can be deeply fulfilling.
The former is ultimately dehumanizing, the latter helps the child to
discover himself or herself in the world.
This does not mean that information is not important in its own right.
Gradually the time will come when abstract information about trees, elders
and the world in general, will be valuable to learn. But that value will
be in proportion to the amount of opportunity and time the child has been
given to repeatedly engage the real thing. Information eventually becomes
important in confirming and analyzing experience and providing a test for
ideas, but to place it at the center of education is to build the search
for meaning around a meaningless core.
Give Kids a World First
-----------------------
The issue here extends beyond just small children or learning about
nature. In my field of teaching I constantly encounter students who
possess a technological sophistication that astounds adults, but rarely do
they display a strong social, political or even ethical maturity to guide
it. Name your destination on the information superhighway and they will
take you there; but ask them to tell you what it means when you arrive
and, like the student mentioned earlier, they tend to be at a loss.
Design a web page? No problem. But ask them, as I sometimes do, what
"freedom of speech", "citizenship", "justice", "ethics", or "community"
mean and their responses rarely rise above the level of the undigested
sound bites they have consumed through other electronic media.
My students, having been raised on TV, and later video games and
computers, bring ever fewer first-hand experiences and ideas to my
classroom, and find little to do with computers except what the computer
itself offers. Joseph Weizenbaum warned twenty years ago that the
computer "enslaves the mind that has no other metaphors and few other
resources to call on" (1976, 277). Left without those other resources,
many of my students default to the computer and make it their primary
metaphor of thought and life.
Ironically, these students generally have trouble thinking of projects to
undertake even with the vast technical resources they have available in my
lab. Their minds are full of skills, but empty of impassioned ideas.
They have plenty of ability, but too little real-world experience on which
to draw to inspire and guide its use.
Certainly, not all of my students exhibit these qualities. But it is a
growing problem. I find myself wondering how much these students'
extensive computer education has prepared them for contributing to
community life? How much has it distracted them from preparing to
contribute to it? Given that prophets of technology like Barlow and
Rheingold (1993) are heralding a new form of community engendered by the
'Net, it seems to me that we have a greater responsibility than ever to
teach children what community can mean before dumping them into this
disembodied form.
How do we do that? By having them do on-line research on community,
justice, equality, and so on? By participating in listserve discussions,
where flaming is endemic? Or by first concentrating on helping them
experience and eventually reflect upon the physical community in which
they reside? Does this require high technology? No. It requires the
physical and active presence of those most important to their lives.
How the Quest for Power Displaces Learning
------------------------------------------
So why have so many embraced information as the cornucopia of education?
It is my contention that it is, in part, because they have confused and
substituted for the greater purpose of education -- the development of a
responsible, thoughtful individual able to live a fulfilling life -- its
occasional consequence, power. The real significance of the Internet for
students lies not in its educative capacities but in the power it confers.
Look carefully at the hype swirling around the 'Net as a means of
education and you will find that it is all about power, or what Perelman
(1992) calls "intellectual capital": power to access information any time
from any place; the power to "go" and communicate with anyone anywhere in
the world; the power not only to access but to publish mountains of
information. In short, the power to overcome time, distance and the
limitations of our own physical bodies. Learning in the era of the 'Net
tends to get degraded from comprehending ideas through experience and
thought into enhancing personal power through the possession of
information.
All of the attributes of power cited above may be valuable in the world of
business or politics, but in the realm of education they are deadening.
They focus attention not on developing thoughtfulness and insights but on
improving performance. In part because of the mindset encouraged by the
computer, the words of Kenneth Keniston are, if anything, even more on
target today than they were when he spoke them over a decade ago: we
measure the success of schools not by the kinds of human beings they
promote but by whatever increases in reading scores they chalk up. We
have allowed quantitative standards, so central to the adult economic
system, to become the principle yardstick for our definition of our
children's worth (Keniston, quoted in Elkind 1984, 53).
It is the pursuit of ever higher levels of performance that guides
educational policy today, not a concern for developing strong, deep
comprehension of the world. Students have to produce measurable skills at
every rung of the educational ladder. With the emphasis on performance
and the measurability of that performance, there is neither the time nor
the payoff for letting children sink those deeper, less measurable roots
of understanding from which meaningful knowledge can eventually emerge.
Rather, we search for the vendor who can sell us the machinery with the
necessary skill built into it to help the children meet decontextualized
standards of performance.
And already a disturbing trend can be observed: the more we rely on the
ever increasing capabilities of the machinery, the more time and effort we
invest in learning the technical skills necessary to get performance out
of the machine. From the moment our children enter the school system we
systematically sacrifice reflection upon ideas and experiences for the
development of skills that will "empower" them. And more and more this
empowerment is seen as coming through the computer-based accumulation and
manipulation of information.
References
----------
Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies -- The Fate of Reading in the
Electronic Age. Faber and Faber, Boston 1994.
Barlow, John. The Economy of Ideas, part 2.
www.nirvanet.fr/bienvenue/cybergate-fr/cibrary-fr/economy2-xfr.html. 1996.
Eliot, T.S. "Choruses from The Rock". Collected Poems 1909-1962.
New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1963.
Elkind, David. The Hurried Child -- Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon.
Addison Wesley, Reading, MA 1981.
IBM. "IBM's Reinventing Education Partnerships," advertisement in The
New Yorker, p. 125, October 20 & 27, 1997.
Machlup, Fritz. "Semantic Quirks in Studies of Information" in The
Study of Information, eds. Fritz Machlup and Una Mansfield. Wiley, NY
1983.
Perelman, Lewis. School's Out. Avon Books, NY 1992.
Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community. Addison-Wesley,
Reading, MA 1993.
Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture -- Reflections on
the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. Doubleday & Co.,
Garden City, NY 1969.
Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer Power and Human Reason -- From Judgment
to Calculation. W. H. Freeman and Company, New York 1976.
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CORRESPONDENCE
College as a Cover for Grade School Failure
-------------------------------------------
Response to: "Who's Killing Higher Education?" (NF-78)
From: Dan Lyke (danlyke@flutterby.com)
Once again, thank you for a great NETFUTURE! (And: "Damn. Once again he
said it better.")
I saw through the fallacies of department heads who insisted I take
classes on subjects I already knew so that their enrollment figures could
be higher, and the expectations that for most people effective learning
takes place in a lecture environment, and all of those other lies, and
dropped out of college so I could further my education.
I look back at my sisters who've graduated liberal arts programs with
crippling debts, exhorted at their graduation speeches to "go out and
change the world" while saddled with debt which made it necessary to
immediately join the wage-slave consumerism grind and after enduring four
years of indoctrination into the worst aspects of that philosophy, and
wonder how long we'll continue to put up with this hypocrisy.
For the most part, the college system that exists today is an excuse for
the failure of grade schools to teach and to instill a desire for
learning, and a breakdown in the mechanisms of trust. Those who rely on
degrees as confirmation of ability are assuming that the skills necessary
to follow rules, sit, listen, and parrot back what they heard at test time
are transferable to real world tasks.
Perhaps they are, but I'm glad to have avoided those particular tasks so
far.
Dan
What the Objectors to Distance Education Ignore
-----------------------------------------------
Response to: "Who's Killing Higher Education?" (NF-78)
From: Peter Denning (pjd@cne.gmu.edu)
Steve,
I enjoyed your article in NETFUTURE about higher education. I resonate
with much of what you say: I've been sounding the same warnings myself for
nearly 10 years. I've also worked with Perelman over the past two years
and don't find his claims about hyperlearning to be as one-sided as you
might have concluded from School's Out.
There's a growing "movement" on campuses, crystallized around David
Noble's objections to distance education that echos some of the same
themes you have brought up. The rhetoric is about quality; but when you
decode it, it's about the concern that distance education will displace
teachers and that course materials will be claimed as university (rather
than faculty) intellectual property. There's little concern about the
vast audiences of adults who want more efficient, practice-oriented,
customized and individualized curricula. Or about the private for-profit
corporate universities who are threatening to take the adult education
market away from universities.
Take a look at these reprints and see if they resonate with you or not:
http://cne.gmu.edu/pjd/PUBS/teachers98.pdf
http://cne.gmu.edu/pjd/PUBS/ProfComp.pdf
Peter Denning
On Activism and the Credential Wars
-----------------------------------
Response to: "Who's Killing Higher Education?" (NF-78)
From: Bruce A. Metcalf (bmetcalf@magicnet.net)
> I've often wondered -- especially after interviewing such an effective
> spokesman as Sclove -- why I myself am so little drawn to traditional
> forms of activism. Part of it is probably that I have no skills for it,
> just as I have no skills as an entrepreneur. Part of it, too, may be my
> discomfort with those portions of the political spectrum (on left and
> right) that seem to spawn most activism. But much of it, I fear, may
> just be a personal irresponsibility I've been managing to conceal from
> myself.
Buck up, buddy!
To fail to see activism in your life is to ignore the impact your writing
and speaking have on others. True, you may not be manning the barricades
against the advancing Know-Nothings in the physical sense, but the best of
your efforts do tell.
Thomas Paine was a notorious rabble-rouser in person, as well as in print,
yet I do believe he would be remembered as an "activist" had he remained
mute. Do not underestimate the power of the written word -- observe how
long Russia has suffered as the result of a single book!
Know that "traditional activism" has many forms, and that you have chosen
well-worn and carefully sharpened tools from an ancient and honorable
arsenal. Know too that you use them well.
On which point, let me thank you for the main essay in #78. At four times
I was driven from my keyboard to wander the house, muttering to myself as
I considered the implications of your words (this is a good thing, BTW).
Having taught at five different colleges, public and private; in industry,
both directly and through a college; and having fought in the credential
wars throughout my education and employment, I found your commentary most
illuminating.
Not that your proposals have a snowball's chance in hell, but you knew
that, right?
I only regret that I am not presently a member of a faculty on whose
lounge walls I might post this article.
Bruce A Metcalf
Adjunct Instructor
Valencia Community College
mailto:bmetcalf@magicnet.net
http://www.magicnet.net/~bmetcalf/
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Bruce --
Thanks -- I needed that!
Steve
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WORDS PAST AND PRESENT
(See "From the NETFUTURE Archives" above.)
Today, even more than when I reproduced it in NF #20, Thoreau's remark
(taken from his Journal for January 21, 1853) strikes me as a
wonderful penetration of technology. Perhaps it is because in the
meantime I have had occasion to think about the telescope, and how its
"recoil is equal to the force of the discharge".
The irony of the telescope, as Thoreau points out so well, is that it
brings the stars nearer to us, and yet we scarcely see the stars today.
Many children grow up never having noticed the Milky Way. And as for the
rest of us, we may dream of traveling to nearby stars (see "Do They Have
Television on Mars?" above), but stars we must get into a spaceship in
order to visit are stars that are no longer with us.
There's a principle at work here that goes to the heart of the
technological incursion into modern life. Many technologies, perhaps
nearly all, are intended in one way or another to "annihilate" space or
time or labor. It's not terribly odd, therefore, that today "we are
learning what it means to have no time and no place" (Albert Borgmann,
quoted in "Move Along Now!" in NF #69). Borgmann might have added: "and
no meaningful work".
The general opinion, of course, is that we need to overcome time, space,
and labor in order to get to that other time, that other place, that other
work, which is somehow going to be fuller and more deeply meaningful. Yet
it doesn't seem to work this way, and I tried to point out some of the
reasons why in "Speeding toward Meaninglessness" (NF #17).
SLT
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ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER
Copyright 1998 by The Nature Institute. You may redistribute this
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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #79 :: October 27, 1998
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