Subject: [IFETS-Discuss] salvation from what?
corrie@itasca.net
Date: Mon 26 Jun 2000 - 06:20:13 MEST
From: corrie@itasca.net Subject: [IFETS-Discuss] salvation from what? Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 21:20:13 -0700
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Rick, I understood your analogy of container-as-content, but you lost me
after that point. Pretty words, but I'm not quite sure what you meant to
say.
Clark's argument has to be understood in context. The point of the grocery
truck argument is that it doesn't matter whether you use a live
demonstration, a videotape or a black-and-white line drawing, so long as the
materials can convey the critical attributes you're trying to get across
(e.g., you can't use black-and white text to teach about Picasso's use of
color). Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the comparative-media studies he
trashed almost exclusively dealt with well-ordered, well-structured,
tightly-constrained cognitive skill domains. I don't think the same rules
apply to ill-structured, unconstrained affective goals.
Just because the Web gives us access to a brave new world of immersive,
hypermediated, contextually-relevant, socially constructed "experiences,"
don't think that the need for "flatlandish" learning will go away. No
communications technology has ever fundamentally altered human needs.
Mazlow's ladder applied to Stone Age flint-chippers, and it applies in the
same way to Information Age silicon-chippers. Yes, new technologies change
HOW we do what we do, but they do not change WHAT we do. The invention and
assimilation into human culture of writing, movable type, photography,
motion pictures, radio, telephony, television, did indeed trigger widespread
changes. They enabled new ways of communicating - perhaps even new ways of
thinking. But human beings remained human beings. And so it will be with
the Internet, despite what you read in WIRED. The new clerk at the co-op
still needs to be able to tell the difference between a plantain and a
banana.
The whole thing reminds of a cartoon I clipped may years ago: A monk is
sitting at a computer terminal, gazing intently at the screen. Two others
are standing behind him, conversing. One says to the other, "This is the
third system we've tried. Why don't we just take them out to the field and
SHOW them how to pick the grapes?"
Corrie Bergeron, Jr.
"An educated mind is useless without a focused will,
and dangerous without a loving heart." - W.J. Deijmann
corrie@itasca.net
www.itasca.net/~corrie
> Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 09:35:57 -0400
> From: Rick Parkany <rparkany@borg.com>
> Subject: Re: [IFETS-Discuss] salvation through technology
>
>
> 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.
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