Subject: Re: [IFETS-Discuss] salvation through technology
From: Rick Parkany (rparkany@borg.com)
Date: Sun 25 Jun 2000 - 00:15:54 MEST
From: Rick Parkany <rparkany@borg.com> Subject: Re: [IFETS-Discuss] salvation through technology Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 15:15:54 -0700
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Muhammad: I have thought often of this metaphor of Clark's. Here is _another_ reason to shitcan this
shibboleth of Clark's. I challenge the use of it based upon a certain type of *flatland* thinking prevalent amoung
many IT critiques.
My point: Clarks' metaphor looses its dynamics when we consider that we now have deleivery trucks that
are...fruits and vegetables, themselves! Yes, the container matters, and in so many ways other than just transmission
of an assumed and postulated *Kowledge Base*. Let me inidcate where I'm going with this...
Vygotsky investigated the phenomenon that has been called the *social mind* (after Wertsch & others). He spoke of the
power of tools across semiotic dimensions to facilitate cognition in the human being in quite profound and compelling
ways. Vygotsky was not familiar in his time with any interactive, recursive tools other than that of language, yet
his thinking is seminal and entirely useful for us more than a half century of technologic development later.
Presently, via the medium of hyper-mediated, socio-cultural spaces such as those in which we presently commune, we
are facing a generation of recursive, interactive tools that offer runes, icons, text, and organically complex images
that emulate, simulate, and at times, even titillate miliuex in which our very tools *talk back* and interact with
our cognitions and affectations in environments in which we, our cognitions, and affectations are simulataneously
cuaght up in one dynamic, semiotic tapestry across which experiences effervesce and unfold not before our very eyes,
but within them--as extended by objects that are co-extensive with the subject, itself, so to speak--a dialectic
solution that dissolves the anomalies replete in Cartesian dualism in ways that Engles and dialectics in general
until now could only see in muted forms and sepia tones. The reader as co-author, the comsumer as producer, the
surveyor as purveyor, the persona with soul as mask...
Kant, who remained a positivist, despite his research agenda to go beyond this moment in science, had tried to find
this *third thing* (i.e., between subject & object--see below), but fell into the very dualism he sought to overcome
by depending upon hemeneutic sublimation of the mind's *faculties* (Pure Reason, Practical Reason, Judgement) in
order to constrin Reason, he enabled it as a metaphysical task-master. We are in an era where this *third thing*
(between subject & object), as a force in creation, is more and more evident to us as researchers, yet a Name for
*It* remains hidden--*It* is not *IT*, BTW-IMHO, however, but It's presence is all the better revealed thereby, and
hence, my point. For a name, I will call it for now, the Dialectic Moment--sorry! not a new player upon the scene,
after all.
Clark's thinking, however, IS quite flatlandish. No? ;-} rap.
Refs:
"It was Kant who initiated the decisive restoration movement back to a human and finite man. Like Aristotle, Kant was
strongly critical of the theory of a pure soul or pure consciousness, which he called pure reason. (Kant
additionally) said that the philosophers of the old metaphysics, which he called dogmatic metaphysics, 'look
upon experience as do doves which regard the air, which in fact supports them, as offering them nothing but
resistance, so that were they free of the air, they could fly all the more perfectly.'" [Kant, I., 1949, p. 47] Like
Aristotle, Kant was interested not in launching a wholesale debunking of the old metaphysics, but simply in curbing
its pretensions. Kant did not want to deny reason altogether but to limit the 'ideas' of 'pure reason.' Kant tried to
make a classically Aristotelian move: to mediate between the opposites, to strike a compromise between the excesses
of reason on the one hand and of reductionism on the other...Kant wanted to check the excesses of reason and to allow
experience its proper place."
(Caputo, J. D. in Seebohm & Kocklemans, 1984, p.131)
As Caputo indicates, "Kant did not make the Socratic mistake: he did not think that everything was either divine
madness or conceptual reason. Kant knew there is a third thing." (Caputo, J. D. in Seebohm & Kocklemans, 1984, p.141)
That Kant ultimately failed to find the "third thing" in this reconciliation between reason and metaphysics is
attributed to his insistence on purity among the respective faculties of Pure Reason and Practical Reason, together,
conjoined speculatively with Judgment (Morals), again, in one whole system--what Caputo calls Kant's "hermeneutics of
sublimation". By separating the domains one from the other he, thereby, structurally and systematically slipped into
the Cartesian method of dualism which he wished to avoid by constructing his transcendental subjectivity in the first
place. Kant indicates his struggle for this "third thing" (transcendental subjectivity) by reflecting upon the
activities of natural inquiry.
Natural scientists, Galileo, Torricelli and Stahl, for example according to Kant "learned that reason has insight
only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were,
in nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws,
constraining nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining." (Kant, I., 1949, p. 20). Caputo's point
is that, having made this holistic observation of the interactivity between the senses and reason, his hermeneutics
of sublimation threw him back into the older metaphysics (scholastic) which he had sought to extinguish in his
section entitled Transcendental Dialectic, where reason winnows itself from the grips of speculation, thereby
structurally separating and, consequently, captivating Moral Discourse in the greatly emasculated Practical Critique
(Ethics) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Judgment)._
(Parkany, 1997; Avaliable: http://www.borg.com/~rparkany/Resources/ed841kcx.htm)
Muhammad Betz wrote:
> List address to send message to everyone: ifets-discuss@topica.com
> Details of current discussion: http://ifets.ieee.org/discussions/discuss.html
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> As a field, I think we should pursue more productive research rather than
> trying to place our faith in technology to "save us." G. Morrison
>
> Opposition to the Clark premise does not derive from the actual premise
> itself. The premise I attribute to Professor Clark is that an instructional
> medium, does not, in and of itself, affect the quality of instruction.
> (Reconsidering research on learning from media, Review of Educational
> Research, 53(4), 445-459.)
>
> Professor Clark has used the metaphor that, like the nature of the vehicle,
> which brings produce to the market does not affect the quality of the
> produce, neither does the nature of the media, which brings instructional
> content to the learner affect the quality of the learning.
>
> I am not suggesting that there be an out-and-out denouement of traditional
> research rigor and focus on non-technological components of the
> instructional milieu to create excellent teaching and learning. Neither am
> I placing my faith in technology to "save us," presumably from
> instructional, learning debacles.
>
> Students could perhaps read by candlelight and still read well. Teachers
> could perhaps avoid technology altogether and still teach well. No one is
> suggesting that either students or teachers do so, because technology is
> ubiquitous in the present state of business and personal affairs. Here is
> the crux of the argument against carrying the Clark premise into the next
> decade.
>
> Muhammad Betz, Ph.D.
> Graduate Coordinator & Associate Professor
> Department of Educational Instruction & Leadership
> Southeastern Oklahoma State University
>
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-- "Dein Wachstum sei feste und lache vor Lust! Deines Herzens Trefflichkeit / hat dir selbst das Feld bereit', auf dem du bluehen musst." Peasant, Richard A. Parkany: SUNY@Albany Prometheus Educational Services - http://www.borg.com/~rparkany/ Upper Hudson & Mohawk Valleys; New York State, USA--------------------------------------------------------- Forum website: http://ifets.ieee.org/ Forum's contact person: kinshuk@massey.ac.nz Info on Join/Leave List: http://ifets.ieee.org/maillist.html Change your subscription options (digest, vacation hold etc.) at: http://www.topica.com/lists/ifets-discuss/prefs --------------------------------------------------------- ___________________________________________________________ T O P I C A The Email You Want. http://www.topica.com/t/16 Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Your Favorite Topics
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