Re: computers and isolation

["Kafkaz" <kafkaz@xxxxxxxx>]

"John Walter" wrote

<<books and pencils seem to hold an almost sacred place for some of us. Why
is this? Because they're the technologies we grew up with? I'd take a well
developed memory over a pencil or a computer any day of the
week.>>

Mostly, the things that we grow up with (books and pencils, microwaves,
microwave popcorn, cell phones, Walkperson type devices, instant messaging,
Gamegrrrl,
spell-checkers, calculators, e-tickets, or whatever) don't seem like
technologies at all.  They're just part of the world, part of our day-to-day
routines, part of us.  They only become recognizable as technologies when
they *won't* work, as when a thunderstorm knocks out the power and we
suddenly realize how very unconsciously we do things like reaching for a
light switch the moment we enter a room.  Only academics and free-lance
intellectuals routinely think of a sharpened #2 as an instance of
technology--more than one, even, if its killer point came by way of one of
those automatic pencil eaters.  (Whrrrrrr--I love those things.)

Recently, one of my online students allowed as to how he HATES (he shouted
it) reading and he HATES (he kept on shouting) writing.  Interesting tack to
take during week one of a writing course, I thought--I almost always end up
deeply appreciating the handful of students brash enough to do that kind of
thing.  Then, he went on, with no apparent awareness of the emerging
contradiction, to explain how much of both of those very things he does
*daily* via the technologies with which he's comfortable--the ones that are
transparent to*him*.  Because he enjoys reading and writing in online
environments, those things don't merit a shout or a sneer, or count as at
all related to what he simultaneously learned to do and to hate in school.
He hates reading and writing, he shouts,  but he loves making web pages,
playing multiple-user games, finding interesting information on the Web, and
participating in online conversations about all of those things.

So, I think we have both students and teachers for whom the connection
between reading, writing, and learning and what all might unfold online is
not at all apparent.  In an environment in which reading and writing aren't
sacred things to be genuflected to from afar, this student routinely
splashes around in the stuff of which composition is spun and loves it.  To
many teachers, he'd count as the very embodiment of all that is alienating,
partly because he's already blazed a path into learning and text, and it
doesn't have anything to do with school; it quite deliberately excludes all
that smacks of school-as-usual.  Coping with such a student in the
traditional classroom would prove a challenge for any teacher not willing to
say something along the lines of, "Oh, I'm really struck by your "HATE IT"
shout since to me you seem so clearly a writer already.  Why do you think
you want to call this 'not writing' and 'not learning'?"  And I guess that's
pretty much the approach I'm taking with teachers, too:  here's a way, even
if you don't like or *want* to like all of it, that you might extend your
explorations of that which you already love.  Odd thing, this spending time
urging students and teachers to see that they occupy the same continuum
already--or maybe the same conveyer belt.  Some stand, some walk, some run;
everybody moves.

And you know what?  Sometimes one little link, one little web site, will get
things inching along--

http://www.pencollectors.com/

for instance.

Convincing my student that Plato has anything to do with hypertext might be
a weensy bit harder (though it would certainly be easy enough to show him
how much of Plato *is* hypertext, now) but we have time.  First, I gotta let
him continue teaching me why this doesn't count as text at all.

Kathy at C.O.D.

P.S. <<A noumenal world--a world of hyperspace, of higher dimensions--awaits
discovery by all the sciences, which it will unite and unify, awaits
discovery under its first aspect of a realm of PATTERNED RELATIONS,
inconceivably manifold and yet bearing a recognizable affinity to the rich
and systematic organization of LANGUAGE, including au fond mathematics and
music, which are ultimately the same kindred language. The idea is older
than Plato, and at the same time as new as our most revolutionary
thinkers...All that I have to say on the subject that may be new is of the
PREMONITION IN LANGUAGE of the unknown, vaster world--that world of which
the physical is but a surface or skin, and yet which we ARE IN, and BELONG
TO. >>

Benjamin Lee Whorf, _ Language, mind, and reality_, 1942. (But ripped off
from http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol3/issue2/bardini.html)








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