http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-Mff23hgidqmHGqbcv.lfskakEtS6qLVHUEMFUG4-?cq=1&p=78

From this you may deduce that I also believe that education should pay at least as much attention to “how we talk about it” as it does to “what we talk about,” if not more. My justification is very much a reflection of my own culture: I believe strongly that reality is CONSTRUCTED, partly through our subjective experiences but more so through our social experiences. Thus, our understanding of what we talk about it is very much a by-product of the conversations we hold; and those conversations “work best” when we are duly conscientious regarding “how we talk about it.”

I read an interesting comment by Burke while waiting on line to buy Symphony tickets this morning: “For the most part, political platforms are best analyzed on the rhetorical level, as they are quite careless gramatically.” For my money this is a clever way of saying that there is not much (if any) “constructed reality” in the text of a political platform, probably because it has been deliberately designed to mean all things to all readers. An educational system designed to focus on “how we talk about it” should not only attune us to articulating our constructed realities but also make us more aware of the claptrap of others!

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-Mff23hgidqmHGqbcv.lfskakEtS6qLVHUEMFUG4-?cq=1&p=82

There is a link to an earlier blog entry about Burke there that is more of a summary of some of his key ideas.

In this context of this conversation, however, I would interpret Burke as saying that conversations can be about TWO things (possibly together) and is conducted on three levels (again possibly together). The two things a conversation can be about are nouns and verbs (or, to make it sound a bit less simplistic, objects and acts). The three levels on which we conduct the conversation are the grammatical, the rhetorical, and the symbolic. The grammatical level is where we clarify the categories that shape our understanding of whatever we are talking about (I really hesitate to use the word “ontology” because it has suffered so much absue over the last few decades). The rhetorical level is where we persuade others of our understandings. The symbolic level is where we recognize that both the words and the gestures we invoke in that conversation can be (and usually are) SYMBOLS that only acquire meaning by virtue of those OTHERS who “process” them.

I wanted to raise this point, because I think it provides a valuable lens through which we can view both education and blogging. It was not hard for me to come into the blogosphere because I used to be very active in Usenet groups on both “serious” music and artificial intelligence. Later I was involved with an intellectual community that coined the phrase “persistent conversation” to characterize the study of this technology and how it was used. I really like that phrase because it couples the noun-like quality of persistence with the verb-like quality of the ACT of conversation. This Hegelian synthesis of the noun-based and the verb-based now seems to thrive in the conversation environment of blogs; and I simply cannot imagine education taking place in the absence of that synthesis. However, education also has to confront the three levels; and, if the blogosphere does that it all, it is only by virtue of contributors who choose to honor them. To some extent, I suppose, those three levels “fit” the mediaeval TRIVIUM, two of them in name (grammar and rhetoric) and one in spirit (logic); but the SPIRIT behind the levels does not offer as good a “fit.” The should not surprise: The context within which we now view education today is quite different from that of the Middle Ages!

My point is that the current vocabulary of subject matter that reflects how universities are organized is now as outmoded as both the TRIVIUM and the QUADRIVIUM. Whether our conversation involves technology or the humanities, we need a new framework for the education that will prepare us for it (and prepare us to conduct a conversation in which BOTH technology and the humanities figure). Those of us who can work on that framework will be those of us who are as comfortable with verbs as they are with nouns, and I would like to believe that the blogosphere is the right place to cultivate a culture of individuals prepared for the task!

Let me try and answer as many of the questions as I can. Remember all they are is one person’s opinion, provisional and vulnerable. I am no oracle, and don’t want to aspire to being one either…

First, the comments by Gordon on individual capitalism. I think that we have avoided this term in the past because we haven’t trusted the individual. We have preferred to believe that any form of altruism is unlikely if not impossible, that man is essentially selfish. And so anyone who dared to venture into this space landed up being accused of utopian thinking at best, and rank stupidity at worst. I think we know more about man’s emotional make-up now (cf Nitin Nohria’s book, Driven; cf Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence; cf Johnson’s Emergence; cf the whole opensource movement). And with consilience amongst professions, we will learn even more. Man was born to bond, to act in community. To be altruistic. To make sacrifices for his family and friends. To belong. So the individual capitalist is not really an individual, but an active agent in a number of communities, only some of which overlap.

Gordon also speaks of the uneasy peace we live in. I think that increased education and enfranchisement will make that peace more durable and less uneasy. When you get a real collective together, a real connected global democracy, with empowered and enfranchised and educated people, the system gets harder to game. Today we have weaknesses that can be exploited by extremists all over the place, for a variety of commercial as well as religious reasons. That’s why Fear and Greed are seen as important drivers. But not for long. [As an aside, I think human beings will blow the whistle against bad behaviour in the community much more openly and transparently going forward, but not in a Salem witch or McCarthyist manner. Peer pressure and peer reviewing and peer recognition are amazing things.

When you can create closed cliques you allow power to corrupt. Openness and transparency are the primary antidotes to corruption. And peer pressure the best prevention.

So I remain optimistic. I think the youth of the sixties saw all this, but the system could be gamed. It was gamed. And they lost.

This time the mob is smarter. The tools are better. And gaming the system will get progressively harder. Especially if we get universal education and enfranchisement.

http://www.discover.com/issues/dec-05/departments/emerging-technology/

Oh Ho! Of course even i did an interview with Sascha Meinrath on Katrina last September. provides a pretty good answer to my musings of worry about the system in disaster. Stronger than FEMA? You bet!

I have had the New York Times set as my browser home page for a few years now. Read Seymour Hersch in the New Yorker magazine. Bad :-(

I’d like a plugin for my browser, that would randomly open it to the top pages of the 20 best idea blogs. I am finding ones I like. But imag9ine a piece of software that would offer users sets of authoritative blogs on ideas, sports, science, economics, politics, etc – a knowledge tree of blogs .

Tell the software what interesteted you and it might do a myer briggs like analysis on the way you answered the questions and come up with recommendations.

Does such exist?Anyone willing to build it?