Your all going to love this cartoon!!

From here, which is being added to my google reader…

In media res; was it ever thus?

Nevertheless, it is also instructive to take a longer, historical view. This is not the first time such fragmentation has occurred: as Paul Starr, a Princeton professor of sociology notes, in the 19th century the newspaper was arguably as polarised – and tribal – as television news today, and as important in disseminating news. There were, for example, almost a dozen different papers in Washington alone in the 19th century, many of which were closely tied to political figures or parties. “As a young republic (and to a large extent even after the civil war), the nation had partisan newspapers; the second stage, stretching across the 20th century, was characterised by powerful, independent media outlets that kept their distance from the parties; and in the third stage, we now have a hybrid system that combines elements of the first two,” he says.

Pick your channel, choose your news
Gillian Tett
Financial Times magazine Jan 21/2 2012

Getting things done? No chance

To plan or not to plan, that is the question.

Leavergirl has just written a thought-provoking post about the Dangers of It (as has Antonio Dias over at Horizons of Significance).

Much as I love and respect them both, I remain unconvinced; in my day job, which involves huge amounts of data and distraction and “noise” accompanying the rather important “signal”, if I were not to plan, things would rapidly go tits up, with serious consequences.
If I didn’t try to gather some sort of picture of the day, and try to be aware of possible problems, I would collapse in a gibbering heap (even quicker than I currently do).

Maybe I am being unfair, setting up a strawperson? I doubt they’re saying that you should try to understand your universe. But the point is not, of course, to interpret it, but to change it. And if I don’t plan, I will end up even further from my goals (both personal and imposed) than I currently am…

Eisenhower said it best, imho: Plans are largely useless, planning is essential…

PS Conflict of clear-thinking statement: Am beginning to get hacked off by our chronic short-staffedness. This may be blunting my usually razor-sharp intellect (cough cough).

What price loyalty?

Had a typically good experience at the bike shop this arvo. Chap fixed my bike (the rack had shaken loose) and taught me something basic, and didn’t charge me for parts or labour at all (just the oil I bought). For this he got me telling a bunch of people about it, this blog post and my loyalty – I don’t know if their shop is the cheapest and I don’t care; I get friendly service from people who aren’t bike snobs. That’s enough for me.

How often do social movement organisations build such a feeling, during ‘moments of truth’? Not nearly often enough, IMHO.

“How do we build a movement?” Oh, ffs…

Who is this “we” that you speak of? A bunch of self-selected would-be-if-they-could-get-some-followers vanguardists. Fuck that noise.

What is this “movement” you speak of? An invitation to followership, to inertia, co-optation and the depoliticisation that follows the dashing of exaggerated expectations.

Ask me instead how we use our very limited social power to create opportunities for the creation and maintenance of loose ties. Ask me instead how we demonstrate, through our example and with compassion for others’ fear of innovating, that meetings don’t have to be sage on the sage ego-foddering events that bore and scare anyone who isn’t already in the gang.
Ask me instead how we cultivate in both – ‘organisers’ and ‘attendees’ – physical and mental habits, physical and political expectations that are geared to finding out what knowledge, skill, enthusiasm and energy already exist in the room. And ask me at last how we figure out routines that allow for those flows to happen without gatekeepers and greedy-for-status centralisers.

Ask me that, and – although I am unsure of my answers, which are always provisional – I probably have as much to offer to you as you do to me.

Hooray for our side

“What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side.”

from here –

What, never? No, never… well, hardly ever

do I go to see Gilbert and Sullivan productions.  And good as tonight’s am-dram performance of “HMS Pinafore” was, I still left dredging from my memory Tom Lehrer’s assessment – “you can always rely on Gilbert and Sullivan for a rousing finale full of words and music and signifying …. nothing.” (Clementine)

And also, I now know where Russel T Davies got all those ridiculous hand-waving shouting and wrapping up of plots in 30 squeezed seconds at the end of an otherwise acceptable episode of Doctor Who.

The Feedback is an Illusion

It’s rare for Dwight Towers to be rendered speechless, but it happened today.  This below is part of an evaluation form for a course I attended.  Comments?

And if the title of the post seems like a repressed memory, it’s because it sort of is…

The enemies of innovation

A list I would love readers to add to…

Don’t see the point

Complacency – “we’re doing alright.” (Rocking the boat will achieve nothing except getting us damp, anyhows)

Complacency – “Our “audience” wouldn’t want it. They come to meetings to listen” etc

Fear – “We might fail.” (And since we were taught at school to measure ourselves by how much better we were than the Failures, we loathe failure and failures. Those who fail are weak, contemptible etc)

See the point and don’t like it very much!

Fear - “The new way might be better and then I would look like a muppet for not having thought of it myself/sooner. And the underling who DID think of it would look good. Can’t be having that…”

See the point, neutral/like it, but don’t champion it

Don’t have time/resources – “I agree with you that we came here to drain the swamp rather than wrestle with individual alligators. Unfortunately all our fellow drainage engineers are off on long-term sick, and there’s no back fill.  So, until they’re back from sick leave, will you PLEASE GRAPPLE ‘Bitey’ – he’s got hold of me arm!”

And, of course, the ways that people pretend to want innovation/improvement and then sabotage it because it doesn’t meet their needs for status/a quiet life etc. are myriad…

The Educated Mind? Vygotsky, Egan and zones

So, I am trying to reduce a stack of reading that is literally three feet high (includes issues of Viz, London Review of Books, Private Eye etc). I am putting in about 4 two hour sessions on the stepper at the gym per week, and the stack is down to two or so feet…

The quote below is from one of tonight’s (re)reads – “Hyperlectures: Schole: Teaching culture in a non-linear environment.” I printed it off at least ten years ago and it now no longer seems to be on t’web.

“Lev Vygotsky developed the concept of a zone of proximal development to describe “how learners can be aided through contact with those who have just passed through their curent developmental stage, able to serve as models and guides.” Vygotsky envisaged this zone predominantly as a linear track distinguishing between what a student can perform alone and what he or she can do with the help of others. Kieran Egan rereads the zone “as a space for expansion in all directions outward from a central node,” thereby transforming the zone into a space descriptive of overall didactic transference, and calls for “a deliberate teaching effort to extend the zone, into the most advanced kinds of understanding.” He then continues: ‘Students may grasp only the haziest hint of the more distant resonances set off by such teaching, but that does not mater. Its purpose is to create a dimenstion toward which the student’s understanding may grasp.’”

And who is this Egan chap? You know where sez

Kieran Egan (born 1942) is a contemporary educational philosopher and a student of the classics, anthropology, cognitive psychology, and cultural history.[1] He has written on issues in education and child development, with an emphasis on the uses of imagination and the intellectual stages (Egan calls them understandings) that occur during a person’s intellectual development. He has questioned the work of Jean Piaget and progressive educators, notably Herbert Spencer and John Dewey.
He currently works at Simon Fraser University.[2] His major work is The Educated Mind.

The book – The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding – sounds interesting…

Criticism of previous education theories

Egan argues that much of educational theorizing pivots around three basic ideas of what the aim of education should be:

to educate people in content that would give them a “privileged and rational view of reality.”[1] (Plato). Here we find the ideas: reason and knowledge can provide a privileged access to the world; knowledge drives the student mind development; education is an epistemological process.
to realize the right of every individual to pursue his own educational curriculum through self-discovery (Rousseau). Here we also find the ideas that the student development drives knowledge and that education is a psychological process.
to Socialize the child – to homogenize children and ensure that they can fulfill a useful role in society, according to its values and beliefs.

Egan argues in chapter one that, “these three ideas are mutually incompatible, and this is the primary cause of our long-continuing educational crisis”[2]; the present educational program in much of the West attempts to integrate all three of these incompatible ideas, resulting in a failure to effectively achieve any of the three[3].

Following the natural mind development

Egan’s proposed solution to the education problem which he identifies is to: let learning follow the natural way the human mind develops and understands. According to Egan, individuals proceed through five kinds of understanding:

Somatic – (before language acquisition) the physical abilities of one’s own body are discovered; somatic understanding includes the communicating activity that precedes the development of language; as the child grows and learns language, this kind of understanding survives in the way children “model their overall social structure in play”.
Mythic – concepts are understood in terms of binary opposites (e.g. Tall/Short or Good/Evil), images, metaphor, and story-structure.
Romantic – the limits of reality are discovered and rational thinking begins. Egan connects this stage with the desire to the limits of reality, an interest with the transcendent qualities in things, and “engagement with knowledge represented as a product of human emotions and intentions” (Egan, 1997, page 254)
Philosophic – the discovery of principles which underlie patterns and limits found in data; ordering knowledge into coherent general schemes.
Ironic – it involves the “mental flexibility to recognize how inadequately flexible are our minds, and the languages we use, to the world we try to represent in them”; it therefore includes the ability to consider alternative philosophic explanations.

“Drawing from an extensive study of cultural history and evolutionary history and the field of cognitive psychology and anthropology, Egan gives a detailed account of how these various forms of understanding have been created and distinguished in our cultural history”.[4]

Each stage includes a set of “cognitive tools”, as Egan calls them, that enrich our understaning of reality. Egan suggests that recapitulating these stages is an alternative to the contradictions between the Platonic, Rousseauian and socialising goals of education.