> Date sent: Wed, 10 Feb 1999 09:26:30 -0700 > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > From: Michael Reber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Subject: Re: CCL-LLC ... > As many groups as possible should be involved in such discussions; > however, I am concern about the framework within which such > discussions would take place. I have proposed framing the > discussions around the knowledge that has accumulated over the years > about human development. This scholarship should point us toward the > direction of establishing a framework that values individuals for > who they are and discusses how we can create educational > environments that nurture the innate potentials of individuals. If > such a conference (forum) were to take place, it could occur on > three levels: theory, methodology, and application. > > In addition, the forum would address the issue that you raise > below concerning management. Should a CLC be a private based center > or public, and if public, how? I am struck by the close parallels to the current discussions regarding the new Internet administration (ICANN). At the application level, people agree it should 'nurture the innate potentials' of the net; but most of the traffic is concerned with the methodology -- the structure of the 'supporting organizations' and whether the system should be self-supporting and so on. Almost entirely absent is any regard for theory. I have also been reading James Bailey's _After Thought: The computer challenge to human intelligence_ ( NY: Basic Books, 1996), which argues for 'intermaths' -- "Much of what we need to forget in life we learned in kindergarten. It is there, for example, that we learned to think of 'sharing' in terms of using a scarce piece of hardware, like a toy truck or supercomputer center, one at a time sequentially, as opposed to sharing a piece of software like a song all together in parallel.... Charles Babbage scoffed at the idea of 10000 people cooperating in a task, yet thousands of students in projects such as 'Live from the Stratosphere' ( http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/livefrom/stratosphere.html ) are already beginning to work together electronically, perhaps because they are too young to know it is impossible. "Beginning to find patterns in the vast amounts of data becoming available about life on earth may require tens of thousands of computers singing the songs of the new maths in parallel each night... "Home computers will have another advantage that the Connection Machine [64000-unit parallel processor] did not have: individual human owners to coach them along and contribute clever ideas and diversity of their own. Participants need not all sing in tune, nor even sing the same tune. It is the old sequential mode of thought that puts the premium on uniformity..." (pp 204-5) Now he's painting his picture in terms of 'science,' but I think that he's just trying to keep things simple -- obviously it is equally pertinent to think about intermaths as a way to sustain 'individual cleverness and diversity' itself (i.e. the process we call education), but such 'reflexivity' muddles the distinctions between theory and methodology and application, and thus rather tends to put off us sequential-minded folk. But once we start to think about 'community learning' and (in Ron Miller's words) > whether the community at large could provide such learning > centers, rather than their being the property of small clusters of > like-minded people, dont we also have to talk about 'distributed education' and the (very!) large community at the same time? It seems to me Bailey's vision provides a workable context for both of these 'ends of the spectrum' (not to mention 'good citizenship' and environmental responsibility and yes, drug addiction) -- that is, his sort of 'theory- in-practice' might be one that CCL-LLC (and ICANN) can use. Cheers, kerry
