The New Digital Age

Recently Brad Acker asked for comment on Google+ about an excerpt from

Schmidt, Eric; Cohen, Jared (2013-04-23). The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (p. 4). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

He quoted this:

• The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history. Hundreds of millions of people are, each minute, creating and consuming an untold amount of digital content in an online world that is not truly bound by terrestrial laws.... Never before in history have so many people, from so many places, had so much power at their fingertips. And while this is hardly the first technology revolution in our history, it is the first that will make it possible for almost everybody to own, develop and disseminate real-time content without having to rely on intermediaries. ~Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen

and asked if people agree. I responded:

• The political frame which calling the spirit unleashed by the internet "anarchy" evokes points to some of the pitfalls in both our understanding of the phenomenon and our discussions on what structures we need to support in order to ensure that the Internet survives the multifarious efforts to control or at least dilute its power. Anarchists are forever tainted with the bearded bomb-thrower image of European and thus European immigrant martyrs and activists of the 19th and 20th centuries. The attempts of Anonymous and their cohorts to "protect" the internet with vandalism and aggression reinforce this association. A better analogy, I suggest, is Anarcho-syndicalism and the kind of worker- and community-led democratization efforts Gar Alperovitz documents and advocates for in his new book "What Then Must We Do?" 
• The anarchy of the Internet must be supported by governmental and community based agencies and businesses, so its supporters must abandon the purity of anarchy's extremes to collaborate and cooperate with those who protect its free nature and eschew the tactics of the bomb-throwers as we struggle against the forces that would transform the Internet into a mere tool for propaganda and commerce.
• In the education world where I live, this means supporting open source and the Creative Commons, and opposing the profiteers who want to transform our connected learning devices into mere delivery systems for the delivery of "content" into seated students who earn their overlords ADA without the expense of actual teachers.

Low-grade clerical work

If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget. Sir Ken Robinson on why the ADHD "epidemic" is phony


 

I had to stop listening to this talk to post this line, since it's such a powerful image of what's wrong with our school system.

Discussing the Forage IV Project on "Teachers Teaching Teachers"

Here's a video of our Google+ Hangout discussing the Forage IV Project on "Teachers Teaching Teachers" :

A gift from a flower to a garden

Making a comment after signing a petition for gun regulation, I proposed a tax on gun sales that would directly fund a Cabinet-level Department of Peace, dedicated to putting as much energy into the active search for peace-creating cultural events as we now put into war-making. The work begun in the sixties, consciously creating a culture of peace, of understanding -- fully manifesting -- our common humanity, at levels of collaboration and cooperation which would transcend the illusory barriers of nations, languages, and creeds. 

Gatherings of tribes, a growing network of inter-dependent and fluid communal homes and ranches and live-in businesses in urban areas, a new oeconomics emerging parallel to the crumbling behemoth we were trying to play around the edges of...

The dreamy naiveté of that era is embarrassing today, and yet still inspires me. I liked Donovan's "Gift From a Flower to a Garden" even more than "The White Album." 

Taking a Feminary View

The OED word-a-day email for today is feminary, adj.

Etymology:  < classical Latin fēmina woman (see female n.) + -ary suffix1.
derogatory. Obs.


  Feminine, womanly.

1630   S. Lennard tr. P. Charron Of Wisdome (new ed.) ii. iii. 277   A feminarie, sottish calmenesse and vitious facilitie [Fr. une feminine, sotte, bonasse & vitieuse facilité].

A wonderful word. Makes me realize there's always been something a bit off for me about the feeling of the word feminist. I use it regularly to describe myself and many struggles I've been in, but there's a harsh sibilance to "-ist" which has always felt combative in a way I don't really feel about these issues. Now feminary, that's a word that just lolls along, not in any hurry, ready to open her heart that's been hinted at with the smile of the femme at the opening, not cut off like the definitiveness of an -ist, that t that slams shut in defiance. I'd much rather roll along with the long drawn out song of shifting identities which a feminary can slide into, dragging out the eeeey into a proper fairy verse.

This is another entry in the category "men who wear scarves and cry in public."

Spontaneous Free

Listening to a podcast from Your Call, interview with Nina Simon, Executive Director at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History: she describes their policy of "spontaneous free" -- If someone is looking around, hesitating, not reaching for their wallet, we'll go up to them and invent a reason to invite them in--"Oh, it's your first time here? It's free for you. You're an artist? It's free for you today." Makes me think of the Diggers' 1% Free..

What exhilarates you most about Connected Learning?

From a free write at the Connected Learning dinner meeting at the Annual Meeting this year: The potential to return real learning to ordinary public schools is exhilarating. The possibility that this movement we’re part of could actually accomplish the goal we’ve all dreamed of is spine-tingling. Things have felt so depressing, overwhelming, in the face of the testing and control regimes of the NCLB era. It does appear that a small window is opening. If we can make the light that shines in clear enough, it will have the power to spread in its rhizomatic fashion.