Author: admin

Thank you for your comment, George. For me, Freire is less about the “breakthough” and more about transformation. He enjoined his followers not to “import” his ideas but to reinvent them. He realized that context (the existing state of affairs) was essential, contingent, and historical. My hunch (and hope) is that in the coming years the “banking model” will fall to the wayside. I do agree that students should be the subjects of their education — even, or rather especially, if experimentation is involved.

“the world wide web leaves open endless possibilities….” Yes indeed! I think we need to stay hopeful about the possibilities of de-schooling society using the educational structures we have. Let’s transform them! We can use those “endless possibilities” the web gives us to learn with and from each other, and to create skills repositories, and artifacts, and just about everything else. Last semester I found the Illich-ian answer to the Mooc in the Cmooc (http://connectedcourses.net/), and now I’m making my way through Code Academy. Both go beyond self-paced, self-motivated autodidactism (long good history of that, but it isn’t enough) to leverage learning webs, bring people into creative dialogue with each other, and empower them to solve re-world problems. Engelbart would be proud.

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“the world wide web leaves open endless possibilities….” Yes indeed! I think we need to stay hopeful about the possibilities of de-schooling society using the educational structures we have. Let’s transform them! We can use those “endless possibilities” the web gives us to learn with and from each other, and to create skills repositories, and artifacts, and just about everything else. Last semester I found the Illich-ian answer to the Mooc in the Cmooc (http://connectedcourses.net/), and now I’m making my way through Code Academy. Both go beyond self-paced, self-motivated autodidactism (long good history of that, but it isn’t enough) to leverage learning webs, bring people into creative dialogue with each other, and empower them to solve re-world problems. Engelbart would be proud.

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Yes! Agree that disassembling is empowering and that creative destruction can be an imperative. And I love the recycle-build-a-bike program as a network of educational objects. One of the key resonances I return to in Illich is the idea of de-centering expertise and focusing on the practical — it’s an oddly rich way of appreciating the bootstrapping qualities that make the web so powerful — small pieces loosely joined (http://www.smallpieces.com/index.php).

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Yes! Agree that disassembling is empowering and that creative destruction can be an imperative. And I love the recycle-build-a-bike program as a network of educational objects. One of the key resonances I return to in Illich is the idea of de-centering expertise and focusing on the practical — it’s an oddly rich way of appreciating the bootstrapping qualities that make the web so powerful — small pieces loosely joined (http://www.smallpieces.com/index.php).

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yes

I love this! So many real-life examples of creating learning webs beyond formal institutions and hierarchies. As implicated as we are in those institutions of “higher education,” how can we use the web to democratize access and reverse the funnel of credentialing in favor of lifetime experiential learning?

Yes – and the TV show needs to be the 42-minute variety without commercials! (She says, longing for the days when she had time and could stay awake for a feature-length film….and yet I can always find time and energy to binge watch Homeland. Hmmmmm) I love this gamers / no gamers confession! But I’m not sure about the game / Television comparison using “magnitude.” I think I would say that television, wonderful as it is, does not have the interactive elements necessary for enactment and the “computers as theater” model Laurel proposes?

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Yes – and the TV show needs to be the 42-minute variety without commercials! (She says, longing for the days when she had time and could stay awake for a feature-length film….and yet I can always find time and energy to binge watch Homeland. Hmmmmm) I love this gamers / no gamers confession! But I’m not sure about the game / Television comparison using “magnitude.” I think I would say that television, wonderful as it is, does not have the interactive elements necessary for enactment and the “computers as theater” model Laurel proposes?

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oh wow. So much here and I can’t wait to talk to you about it in person. I will confess that I did not “get” the first prompt for our make — “Of course all of the elements are essential!” But your explanation of the uses and limitations of a scientific / methodological model makes a ton of sense — so thank you! I’m thinking that Laurel’s “model” is a structural metaphor that explains the power of human-computer interaction?