Christine Gardella's Profile

There is an Indian lady very sick

the dark

lantern

lights of the shanties

holding a lamp

in the dark

But her screams are not important. I don't hear them because they are not important.

You see, Nick, babies are supposed to be born head first but sometimes they're not. When they're not they make a lot of trouble for everybody.

Damn squaw bitch

"Ought to have a look at the proud father. They're usually the worst sufferers in these little affairs," the doctor said. "I must say he took it all pretty quietly."



    He pulled back the blanket from the Indian's head. His hand came away wet. He mounted on the edge of the lower bunk with the lamp in one hand and looked in. The Indian lay with his face toward the wall. His throat had been cut from ear to ear. The blood had flowed down into a pool where his body sagged the bunk. His head rested on his left arm. The open razor lay, edge up, in the blankets.

"Do many men kill themselves, Daddy?"



    "Not very many, Nick."



    "Do many women?"



    "Hardly ever."

The sun was coming up over the hills

he felt quite sure that he would never die.

the problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded
and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly.

And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online
collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea
that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence
concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with
the most verity and force. This is different from representative
democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences
when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left
in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced
today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many
cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

I have noticed specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities
or labs onto wiki pages. And when that happens, each text loses part
of its value.

A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance
to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning.

If you want to research a TV show in terms of what people think of
it, Myspace will reveal more to you than the analogous and enormous
entries in the Wikipedia.

In all of these formulations, real people were still in
charge. An individual or individuals were presenting a personality
and taking responsibility.

In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent
of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance
of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as
a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses
the line into delusion.

But at the layer of popurls, the
ice cream story and the Javanese earthquake are at best equals, without
context or authorship.

The problem with that presumption is that people are
all too willing to lower standards in order to make the purported
newcomer appear smart.

My point here is not to argue about the existence
of Metaphysical entities, but just to emphasize how premature and
dangerous it is to lower the expectations we hold for individual
human intellects.

If we start to believe that the Internet itself
is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people
and making ourselves into idiots.

The aggregator is
richer than the aggregated.

What we are witnessing today is the alarming rise of the fallacy
of the infallible collective. Numerous elite organizations have been
swept off their feet by the idea. They are inspired by the rise of
the Wikipedia, by the wealth of Google, and by the rush of entrepreneurs
to be the most Meta. Government agencies, top corporate planning
departments, and major universities have all gotten the bug.

Every
individual who is afraid to say the wrong thing within his or her
organization is safer when hiding behind a wiki or some other Meta
aggregation ritual.  

It seems to me
the reason is that bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they
are packaged as technology.

The exception is
American Idol.

But John Lennon wouldn't have won. He wouldn't have made it to the
finals. Or if he had, he would have ended up a different sort of
person and artist.

It's safer to be the aggregator of the collective. You
get to include all sorts of material without committing to anything.
You can be superficially interesting without having to worry about
the possibility of being wrong.

What makes a market work, for instance, is the marriage of collective
and individual intelligence. A marketplace can't exist only on the
basis of having prices determined by competition. It also needs entrepreneurs
to come up with the products that are competing in the first place.

Yes,
there have been plenty of scandals in government, the academy and
in the press. No mechanism is perfect, but still here we are, having
benefited from all of these institutions.

History has shown us again and again that a hive
mind is a cruel idiot when it runs on autopilot. Nasty hive mind
outbursts have been flavored Maoist, Fascist, and religious, and
these are only a small sampling. I don't see why there couldn't be
future social disasters that appear suddenly under the cover of technological
utopianism.

By avoiding that nonsense, it ought to be possible to find
a humanistic and practical way to maximize value of the collective
on the Web without turning ourselves into idiots.

"flattening"

but they are at one in seeing the free market as the fountainhead of human freedom.

deregulated markets

Because they were on opposite sides of the cold war it is often assumed that neoliberalism and Marxism are fundamentally antagonistic systems of ideas. In fact they belong to the same style of thinking, and share many of the same disabling limitations.

The expansion of European capitalism in the nineteenth century involved the Opium Wars, genocide in the Belgian Congo, the Great Game in Central Asia, and many other forms of imperial conquest and rivalry. The seeming triumph of global capitalism at the end of the twentieth century followed two world wars, the cold war, and savage neocolonial conflicts.

the first

the second

the third

Friedman's advocacy of American energy independence illustrates the error of a unidirectional view of history. Energy autarchy may be a sensible policy, but it signifies a retreat from globalization.

Havelock illuminated Plato's educational concerns by showing how the development of alphabetic literacy in Greece facilitated the emergence of abstract reasoning.  I found it immensely helpful, both in understanding Plato and in making sense of key changes in the history of education.

Western educational history as a sweep of cultural aspiration punctuated by structuring transformations in the prevailing communications technologies — oral-epic performance, alphabetic literacy, iconographic popularization, printing, and perhaps electronic communications.

portentous

Learners are far too passive, meek receivers — instead, they should be impassioned transformers of culture.

I then judged that electronic technologies were exacerbating the cultural tendencies educators needed to resist.

Each person would be able to appropriate substantial control over their intellectual lives by making good use of digital technologies.

Leadership, historical inertia, the flux of fortuna — epidemics, depressions, wars — all contribute to actual historical outcomes.  Consequently, as technological determinists, we find ourselves, not marionettes acting out a foretold fate, but autonomous persons working in the midst of an open historical drama. 

why educators need a clear historical vision in developing the pedagogical uses of information and communications technologies.

It contrasted Innis, as a spokesperson for the importance of time and a developed historical sense, with McLuhan, who celebrated the post-modern immersion in the now and the indiscriminate subsumption of things past into the present. 

diachronic

When action in the here and now seems to be everything, one sees neither past nor future and one loses the sense of historical movement.

 In academia the pressures of promotion and tenure have destroyed the sense of a historical mission.  We have a huge collective interest in throwing out all past work every decade or so in order to keep the opportunities for original scholarship open.

Educators are getting the burden and opportunity to exert historic leadership in our time.  To so so well, educators need to generate an inspiring vision of twenty-first century democracy, a cultural democracy, one that will enable all peoples to coordinate our differences, to pursue our various aspirations in ways that move beyond the divisions and limits of the present. 

With respect to practice, educators seem to have become fixated on marginal improvements in schools and universities.  This fixation is symptomatic of our loss of historical vision and our lack of historical vision will channel us into a churning effort that leads us nowhere.  All the criticism moaning about how schools and universities are failing to meet the educational imperatives generated by economic competition lack sufficient sense of historical movement. 

The problem in reality is not that some schools are failing schools; it is that schooling, as our only educational strategy and system, fails with a significant portion of the population. 

The former concerned the historical problem of achieving and preserving effective self-governance in complex societies and examined the educational challenges incurred by peoples who wished to preserve their political autonomy in the face of the diverse vicissitudes that polities face over time.  The latter ignored historical problems and depicted schooling as a component of comparative economic power: ineffective schooling put the nation a risk, a failure of pedagogical omission and commission, evident by comparing the current statistical results registered by key age cohorts in various nations on narrow measures of school achievement.

The concept of permanent education rested on an historical diagnosis of the pedagogical problem that people faced in realizing their democratic aspirations — the scope of knowledge that a person needed was very great and subject to continuous changes through the span of a normal life in order to sustain full political participation in the polity, continuous, meaningful employment in the economy, and creative engagement in the culture, the home, and the community. 

The proponents of permanent education wanted to shift the basic conception about education from an experience concentrated in a person's childhood and youth towards one that would make education a person's central concern throughout life.

propaedeutic

they were aware that powerful historical forces were driving changes in social structures that people had to try to manage without knowing exactly what they could or should accomplish.

At some point, one at which we have arrived, I believe, educators need to stop seeking to push the operation of the present system closer to its functional limits, and find ways to break through those limits by transforming the given structure into something new. 

To reach beyond the possibilities associated with a given form, a new form must displace the old.

What features of existing educational arrangements derive from the affordances and limitations of print-based media of communication?

Educational innovators like us pay far too little attention to this question, for we are too busy implementing the new technologies to pay much attention to how old technologies have functioned educationally and shaped the institutional landscape within which we work. 

Prior to print the basic pedagogical problem of learning to read and write was much more difficult than it became after printing made textbooks dependably available.  Over the past 500 years, however, a tight relationship between the material characteristics of books and the organization and structure of schools has developed.

Books are physical objects, workable only within a range of sizes and weights.  The material characteristics of books limit how much intellectual content authors and publishers can include in a manageable way.  This limitation makes a structure of subjects and one of grades a necessity in a school that codifies its curriculum in books.

educators have perceived that self-paced learning, within a full, multifaceted presentation of a field, might be a better pedagogical practice because individual students seem to learn best when they pursue their own answers to questions that really intrigue them.

Such evaluation says nothing about the quality of mind any given student may have formed.  And further it gives the particular student little dynamic feedback useful to the student in pursuit of his or her self-expectations.

Of course, these exclusions have long been in force and the campus has universally developed as a bounded place, open to a few, closed to the many, grouped around its library with a certain rough scale of possibilities for scope and quality of its programs associating in necessary ways with the physical characteristics of its printed tools of production. 

I want to advance a proposition that educational technologists may resist: namely, we are spending far too much energy trying to recapitulate with electronic media the basic repertoire of campus courses in an effort to gain market share through distance learning.  Through this strategy, a few institutions may wax a little and a few want a little, but it will not do much to realize new potentialities in education.

To develop e-Learning and i-Study to their full potentials, and to make possible the fundamental transformations envisioned forty years ago by the proponents of Permanent Education, educational technologists need to concentrate on implementing what does not and will not work on campus.  I'll go so far as proposing they develop these impossibilities by harnessing the creativity of scholars who seem to be over the hill and out to pasture.

Children and youth will not bring the long tail of advanced options for the continuous education of adults into operation across global electronic networks, however.  This purpose needs a different source of untapped creative energy, a grown-up source.  Unfortunately, grown-up sources of historical energy seem to be exactly the ones fully occupied with the existing business of life and therefore not available for something new.  But on reflection, we can see a new source fortuitously emerging. 

Rather than requiring the reallocation of existing expenditures, it requires uncovering untapped human energies.

We, the well educated, look down on the nonsense that fills the super-market press, but this nonsense reveals a curiosity about the character and limits of human experience, a not unworthy curiosity, and it elicits nonsense because no one who knows better deigns to engage this curiosity at its starting point.  The well-educated assume that only little children can entertain naive, important questions.  Adults must do so from a substantial prior base of learning.  These expectations sell many fold short and result from the ingrained elitism of our systems of education.

At the very least, I want to suggest, we need to test the proposition that the historical elitism evident up to now in cultural creativity has arisen largely from material constraints on access to the tools of cultural creation.  These constraints are radically loosening.  We need to test out what is possible under the loosened constraints.

When you speak about developing a vision of cultural democracy for the 21st century, you need to make it clear that this is a continuous process of development that will unfold through the entire duration of the 21st century, which may, like the 19th, be a long century by historical measure. 

egalitarian

Marx had too little sense of historical irony.  He was probably right that the material forces of production determine the cultural superstructure — systems of law, organizational procedures, patterns of education, tastes, and conventions.  While secondary as historical determinants, the texture and quality of the lives we experience largely depend on these superstructural arrangements.

Holding resources in common, for use by any and all, is a wonderful principle as long as the use of them does not become excessive, degrading their potential productive value to all.  But there are, of course, powerful tendencies to overuse, and the seeming ubiquity and inevitability of this overuse has been succinctly described as "the tragedy of the commons." 

Truth and reason are common to all: they no more belong to the man who first put them into works than to him who last did so.  It is no more secundum Platonem than secundum me: Plato and I see and understand it the same way.  Bees ransack flowers here and flowers there: but then they make their own honey, which is entirely theirs and no longer thyme or marjoram.  Similarly the boy will transform his borrowings; he will confound their forms so that the end-product is entirely his; namely, his judgement, the forming of which is the only aim of his toil, his study, and his education.

Schumpeter's law of creative destruction

This transformation occurs, not by introducing something novel, something previously never thought of or accounted for in experience.  Rather the transformation happens by changing what we take to be primary in geopolitical perception.  It makes something formerly primary secondary, and something once secondary primary. 

As a bounded entity, Europe has become highly malleable.  It is best defined, not by area maps, but by networks of transportation and communication, and the movement of workers, students, goods, and tourists along its networked linkages. 

Globalization as an accentuation of connections between many places creates communities of interest and patterns of activity that challenge the authority of those who control boundaries and the spheres of activity within them.  Some of these network-based challenges such as terrorism are deeply destabilizing.  Others, such as the global flow of labor, capital, and knowledge, which simply do not conform to established jurisdictions, require creative institutional innovation with respect to environments that are rapidly emergent, poorly described, and ill understood.  Future generations will have to develop netsmanship as past ones developed statesmanship.

But thinking persons are beginning, more and more, to switch from enclosure to disclosure, from the area to the network, a world of interconnected nodes, in making sense of how the human understanding and collective intellect actually function. 

Places and the connections between them, and the uses to which persons put them, define the Commons, and the Commons, its places and their connections and uses, is inherently open to all, to be exploited according to agreed-upon patterns of acceptable use.  Enclosure bounds and closes off a set of places and their potential connections.