A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z #
Alphaphon an ANALOGY? (2001)
Imagine that a fictional product called AlphaPhon is the world’s leading English language GUI (Graphemic User Interface). AlphaPhon is the entry-level product of a company (also fictitious) named USASoft. All is not well with USASoft. Market research has revealed that 92 million older AlphaPhon customers, due to their poor use of the product, are suffering major financial losses.
42 million adult Americans can't read; 50 million can recognize so few printed words they are limited to a 4th or 5th grade reading level. According to Literacy Volunteers of America, 237 billion dollars a year in unrealized earnings is forfeited by persons who lack basic reading skills.
The National Right to Read Foundation
Perhaps even more alarming, user-test reports indicate that 60% of the company’s new customers are less than proficient with AlphaPhon even after 12 to 13 years of day in and day out attempts to learn it: USASoft is in serious risk of losing its future customer base.
69% of 4th graders read below the proficiency level
60% remain below it in the 12th grade
National Assessment of Educational Progress 1998 Reading Report Card
The first casualty is self esteem: they soon grow ashamed… about half of youths with a history of substance abuse have reading problems.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
35% of children with reading disabilities drop out of school, a rate twice that of their classmates. 50% of juvenile delinquents manifest some kind of learning disability, primarily in the area of reading.
National Center for Learning Disabilities
Disturbed by these reports, USASoft undertakes a massive research campaign to discover why their customers are having such difficulty learning to use AlphaPhon. Billions of dollars and thousands of research studies later a scientific consensus emerges: the customers who have difficulty learning AlphaPhon exhibit a common ‘core deficit’ in something the researchers call ‘alphaphonemic awareness’
Phonemic Awareness: It’s the hottest topic in education.
National Adult Literacy and Learning Disabilities Center
Converging evidence from all research centers show that deficits in phonemic awareness reflect the core deficit in reading disabilities.
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Moreover, they also lack ‘alphaphonic’ code knowledge and skills.
Letter knowledge, which provides the basis for forming connections between the letters in spellings and the sounds in pronunciations, has been identified as a strong predictor of reading success
National Center to Improve the Tools of Educators
Moreover, if the letter-sound code (phonics) is not taught, all reliable studies concur that poor readers and nonreaders will not become fluent readers
National Adult Literacy and Learning Disabilities Center
Based on this new understanding, USASoft issues orders to all of its distributors to initiate a nationwide training program designed to train the minds of its users in the alphaphonemic awareness and alphaphonic skills required to use AlphaPhon.
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If it worked, the analogy started to sound absurd as USASoft began to act like AlphaPhon’s problems were exclusively in the minds of its users. As if it were inconceivable that anything could be wrong with AlphaPhon, or, that if something was wrong, that AlphaPhon could be in any way changed or improved. What’s disturbing, of course, is this is exactly how we have come to think about our reading problems and the role our reading technologies play in creating them. How could USASoft be so blind and negligent about the usability implications of such a human-engineered human-interface product? How could we?
Apple University
Apple Computer's in house educational arm charged with educating incoming managers and employees and with developing the overall company's capacity to learn. David Boulton worked there as the principal consulting architect and designer of 'Virtuality' - Apple's Electronic Campus project that won Personnel Journal's Optmius Award.
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Attention (a tension)
Attention is not the same thing as concentration or awareness. Attention is the raw illuminating work-energy of the mind. Every experience happens in attention. Learning is not happening anywhere attention is not. Obstacles to engaging and sustaining attention obstruct learning. As attention is where the action (learning) is occurring, engaging the learners attention is a prerequisite to facilitating learning.
We should become keenly sensitive to the notion that learning is a process sustained by the second—to—second (high frequency real-time) movements of the learner’s attention. The underlying design criteria of tools or processes intended to facilitate learning must focus on engaging and minimizing the distractions to the learner’s attention.
Bohm, David - Click here, he now has his own page at implicity
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Co-implication
See cycle of engagement and disambiguation 
Compass of Meaning
Having a compass we can reliably refer to allows us to orient our travels in physical space toward the direction or destination we intend - it keeps us from getting lost. When in the midst of uncertainty or ambiguity (potentially lost in meaning space) we likewise need a compass to orient and inform the direction of our attention. We are born with such a compass and its true north is discernable by disambiguating our meaning needs.
Construx
More complex than 'tinker toys' and less fastener intense than 'erector sets' Construx enable children to construct a near infinite variety of objects.
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Copernican Inversion
- The revolution that occured and that was in significant part responsible for the Rennisance, was an inversion in the orientation of thought. The sun, planets and stars still looked as if they orbited the Earth - what changed was the 'mental model' which oriented and contextualized our sensory impressions.
A similar inversion about the role of learning in human affairs is dawning on us now. The old paradigm held that learning was the means, knowledge, skills, experiences the end. With "knowledge" growing obsolete sooner and sooner, this is now being inverted. Rather than thinking of our capacities for learning as vehicular to acquiring knowledge and experience, we now see knowledge and experiences as vehicles through which we sensitize, extend and enrich our capacities for learning.
We are coming to see that the issue isn't learning to know, it's learning to learn. This shift may prove to be as profound as the shift from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican world view.
In the old paradigm, learning is something kids do in school, gaining knowledge that teachers already possess. Uncertainty is a sign of insufficiency and a source of stress. In the new, inverted paradigm, learning is something we all do every instant of our lives. Facilitators of learning learn with, and at the same time about, learners. Uncertainty is illuminative and leads to deeper understandings and insights. "Subjects” become gymnasiums (semnasiums) for our learning capacities. Learners become conscious of their own learning process.
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Cycle of Engagement
As somatic and cognitive processes resource the foreground stream of attention with meanings, they also relevate (as in relevancy to 're-lift') into the flow of attention (according to bio-energetic resonance as well as cognitive associative processes) memories. These re-emerging meanings provide the 'background' context learning occurs in. The foreground and background processes (both concurring in real time and within attention) move through a cyclic process of coherence, dissonance, discoherence, confusion, tension, Co-implication and, closing or coherence. They often invert. Between the flowing meaning arising out of the foreground and the background meaning arising in response to its wake, the creative perception of new meaning (learning insights) takes place.
It is during the discohering of attention that new learning begins. Learning happens as the foreground and background meanings, suspended in attention, co-implicate one another and re-synchronize in a fresh coherence.
The critical aspect of this inner relationship among meaning processes, is how attention spans the stretch. If the span of attention is inadequate for the stretch required to cohere the experience, (when confusion and frustration erode attention's ability to suspend (span) the multiplicity of meanings being co-implicated) the learner disengages and learning stops.
PERSONAL STORY BEHIND THE INITIAL CHILDREN OF THE CODE PROJECT
In 1989-90, my son, Daaron who had, since his birth, been my partner and co-pilot in learning about learning began to want to read. Daaron grew up in an environment of rich dialogue and quickly developed a remarkable proficiency with language. By the time he was three he could engage in complex conversations about his own thought process and he and I were able to travel together throughout our thoughts and feelings.
Daaron’s kindergarten teacher described him has having ‘the vocabulary of a 20 year old’. He was masterfully, verbally, dexterous. From the time he was a month old I read to him. I never read him baby books; I read him whatever I was reading. He picked up the alphabet sounds when he was 2 and, because he loved playing games, he had a good sight vocabulary by the time he was 3. He was never pressured to read before Kindergarten. It was his starting school that precipitated our journey into learning to read and it was then that, for the first time since I learned to read myself, I was drawn into the learning challenges involved.
His game playing had taught him to trust the game he was playing – that if only he learned what he needed to learn he could win. This had enabled him to stay with his frustrations because he knew it was possible to learn through them. Daaron became an exceptional learner because he had developed a refined sense of his own meaning needs and he trusted them to direct him, like a compass, through any learning challenges he encountered.
When he began to read he couldn’t believe the incoherence in the learning to read process. He was incredibly frustrated by the seemingly arbitrary ways in which reading was so different than the ABCs had prepared him for. He had no problem with the alphabet letter sounds; he had no problem with understanding the meaning of words. It was the ambiguity in-between the two domains that broke the flow in his mind. With his ability to articulate his confusion and our combined ability to track the flow of meaning in his mind, we bumped right into the sound-letter correspondence problem. Why was it so confusing? So many rules and exceptions, he asked me ‘why dad?” “Why does it work this way? It just doesn’t make sense!” “How could it be such a mess?” He was sure there must be something simple that once he understood it would enable him to read.
At the time I couldn’t answer the question very well. I explained to him that his struggle wasn’t his fault. The problem was in the mess, not in him. It really annoyed us that something so fundamental and basic as reading could be so unsystematic, illogical and so inconsiderate of the way our mind's functioned most naturally. I explained that there was a very complex set of rules that made the mess make sense to adults that studied it but that there wasn’t any explanation I could give him that would make sense of it to him. Though I couldn't help him understand it, paying careful attention to what he was going through made it obvious how I could help him.
What I did worked so well that soon Daaron was quickly off and reading. I never did explain the complex rules and exceptions I just reduced the confusion in the process and he learned his way through. The technique we developed brought about an ease and acceleration in the flow of his reading.
As my work was about learning and my concern was how our insidious curricula is damaging the health of our learning, this reading issue really troubled me. But, for many reasons I never actively pursued or further developed the technique – Daaron was no longer struggling and my work went back to its earlier focus on the health of learning.
It wasn't until almost 10 years later that my daughter Deanna, began to learn to read and once again I was drawn into the frustrating reality of a child's struggle with this process. Deanna's strengths were different than Daaron's. Like him, she is emotionally and somatically smart and conceptually dexterous. However, unlike him, she had a slight but noticeable auditory-memory-processing deficit. In reading this manifested itself as an inability to remember a word she had just decoded. She had to re-decode the same word she had just decoded only a sentence or two previously. Once again the spotlight was on decoding and, I think more accurately stated, overcoming the ambiguity in the code. I began to use the technique again.
This time, because the process lasted so much longer, I experienced a side-affect of the process that I hadn’t encountered with Daaron. Even though I helped her understand that the problem wasn’t her fault, she couldn’t help but ask “why can’t I read as well as everyone else”? She began to doubt her own mind – her struggle with reading made her feel bad about herself, feel shame about her own mind. To avoid these negative feelings she began to comfort herself by saying ‘I am just not a good reader’. This time as I felt such compassion for her struggle, I vowed to give the field of learning to read my full attention....and that led to the work of the Children of the Code.
Dialogue
The most ancient root comes from leg (Indo-European.) to collect, speak. Also, from lekjaz (Germanic) one who speaks magic words, from legere (L.) to gather, to speak, and from dia + logos (Greek.) flow through of speech, word, reason, meaning; mindful reflection of embodied meaning, a sustained inquiry into the structures, assumptions, and cultural certainties that compose everyday experience. (Dialogue Research Project)
"...it is proposed that a form of free dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated." By David Bohm
"It allows a display of thought and meaning that makes possible a kind of collective proprioception or immediate mirroring back of both the content of thought and the less apparent, dynamic structures that govern it. In Dialogue this can be experienced both individually and collectively. Each listener is able to reflect back to each speaker, and to the rest of the group, a view of some of the assumptions and unspoken implications of what is being expressed along with that which is being avoided. It creates the opportunity for each participant to examine the preconceptions, prejudices and the characteristic patterns that lie behind his or her thoughts, opinions, beliefs and feelings, along with the roles he or she tends habitually to play. And it offers an opportunity to share these insights." By David Bohm, Donald Factor and Peter Garrett
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Dialogue Research Project
The Dialogue Research Project was initiated by Peter Senge and William Isaacs of M.I.T.s Center for Organizational Learning. David Boulton was a member of the original research team. To M.I.T.'s Project Description.
DiaCom Technologies
The company founded by David Boulton to develop the business applications of the Distributed Dialogue paradigm. On January 1, 1997 DiaCom Technologies changed its name to the 2WAY corporation. It is located in Seattle Washington: 206-284-2WAY.
Dickinson, Dee
Dee Dickinson was the founder of New Horizon's for Learning an educational organization and research clearing house that supported educators and researchers involved in learning world wide. Dee was responsible for encouraging and editing two of David Boulton's articles: From Here To Implicity and Learning to Learn.
Disambiguation
To reduce ambiguity - to dismiss, dissolve, negate, differentiate, distill, co-implicate, etc., towards a more distinctive and coherent meaning, the multiplicity of meanings that co-present in attention, particularly if undifferenetiated, discohere attention.
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Disengagement
We must get focused on those aspects of experiences intended to facilitate learning which cause unnecessary disengagement due to their incompatibility with what is relevant to the individual learner. While disengagement is legitimate and unavoidable when the stretch in meaning is beyond the scope of the learner’s relevant experiences, it is illegitimate and totally avoidable when it is caused by incompatibilities introduced by the form and structure intended to be facilitative (for example incompatibilities in learning style, sensory modality emphasis, vocabulary, pace or over generallized assumptions about 'the' learner's conceptual development). Such disengagements should be seen for what they are: compromising artifacts of our systems -- not disabilities or inadequacies in the learner.
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Distributed Dialogue
The process of mediating a dialogical relationship between people not physically co-present to one another. Any organization, from a government to a business, is only as effective as its ability to mediate a dialogue amongst the constituents that comprise and compose it. The intention of Distributed Dialogue is to model and manifest a way of mediating the relationship between constituents in a human system that calls forth and enables a quality of participation that is as Dialogue like as is possible. For more, go to "Download" and download one of the booklets on "Distributed Dialogue Processing".
Distributed Dialogue Processing™ (DDP)
Grounded in the principles of Quantum Semantics, Semnastics and Dialogue, Distributed Dialogue Processing is a technological model for facilitating Distributed Dialogue. DDP is a ground floor layer of communication and networking infrastructure that provides the constituents in a human system the means to engage one another in a contextually synchronized, situationally relevant and low-overhead-to-participate, Distributed Dialogue. There is an implicit relationship between every person that contributes 'content' to a product, process, service or issue (thought in the form of words or work product in the form of artifacts) and the person(s) (constituents) who interact with that contribution. DDP provide a means for processing the experiences of such a constituency and maximizing the opportunity for each contributor to learn from the experiences of each of their constituents. DDP also provides each constituent with the means to exercise their core capacity to make and articulate the kind of meaningful distinctions characteristic of participating in a Dialogue. For more, go to "Learning Democracy and Technology" or download one of the booklets on "Distributed Dialogue Processing".
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Fetterman, Roger
Roger L. Fetterman is founder and principal consultant of MAST, a consulting firm that focuses on the impact of networked interactive media on business. He works with client management teams to help them achieve breakthroughs in the operation of their businesses in the new information and knowledge-based economy.
Mr. Fetterman has authored three books and published a number of articles on the application of interactive media to business.
* Mainstream Multimedia: Applying Multimedia in Business (Van Nostrand Reinhold, August 1994).
* Interactive Selling in the '90s: Applying information technology, multimedia & communications to the sales process (Ellipsys International.Publications, July 1995).
* The Interactive Corporation: Using Interactive Media to Enhance Business Performance will be published by Random House in July 1997.
Mr. Fetterman can be reached at rogerf@best.com
Fulcrum
1) The point or support on which a lever pivots (the 'reference' point of most efficient leverage to lift)
2) Zoology An anatomical structure that acts as a hinge or point of support
3) An agent through which vital powers are exercised
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Inner Interface
The human organism has evolved over millions of years to be wonderfully adapted to the “all at onceness” of natural, sensory-existence. Yet, the hallmark of human society is the incredibly complex “not nowness” of interacting contingincies that make it possible. Our biological inheritience is out of time sync with our cultural inhertience. How we learn to bridge the timescape of our nervous systems with the abstraction processes of thought (our “sense” for contingency awareness) is the “inner interface” we tacitly learn. This inner interface is what regulates our learning - our being. I believe we are about to participate in the birth of humanity's next evolutionary generation. This next generation will have a "sense" for learning - a significantly different, subjectively learning oriented, inner interface.
Intelligence (sorry still working here )
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Krishnamurti, Jiddu
"Truth is a pathless land and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path." Later he wrote, "Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection."
J. Krishnamurti, 1922
"Our education is making us more and more shallow; it is not helping us to uncover the deeper layers of our being, and our lives are increasingly disharmonious and empty. Information, the knowledge of facts, though ever increasing, is by its nature very limited. Wisdom is infinite, it includes knowledge and the way of action; but we take hold of a branch and think it is the whole tree. Through the knowledge of the part, we can never realize the joy of the whole. Intellect can never lead to the whole, for it is only a segment, a part."
J. Krishnamurti, Education and the Significance of Life
To the Krishnamurti Foundation of America
Learning-Oriented
Human beings are born learning oriented. We come with nervous systems wired/oriented toward continuously learning. The core process of learning is a psycho-energetic, cognitive-emotional dis-ambiguation process oriented towards extending ourselves - extending our presence. In this respect learning to extend ourselves in the 3d space of walking or Nd space of physics or semantics has at root the same core process though the environment it's occurring in is different.
Though we are born with a learning-oriented nature we aren't able to sustain it in the artificial world we grow up in. Adapted to support our learning in nature, our wiring serves us well somatically, spatially, and kinesthetically where reactions (feedback) to our actions are comparatively coherent and co relatable. However, during our emotional and cognitive developments, particularly in relation to learning to function in artificial ways, like reading, the feedback we receive is so comparatively incoherent non-co relatable that we learn to dull to the learning instincts we came in with. Without sufficient feedback to calibrate our compass for meaning in these areas, our learning oriented nature becomes subordinated to comparatively habitual and mechanical modes of processing our experiences.
But, what else could we aspire to facilitate, nurture and develop in our children (and one another) that would be less presumptuous or more cleanly empowering than an overall conscious-subjectivity that is self-sustainably learning-oriented?
Learning to dis/cover or sustain our learning-oriented natures implies learning to `sense' our own `live' learning and orienting our living and working towards sustaining its engagement and refinement. At a value level, a learning-oriented person recognizes that life is what they learn it to be - that their capacity to learn their way through life is their most important asset.
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Learning Insights
The limited partnership formed to explore and develop David Boulton's early conceptions of the 'learner interface'.
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Learner Interface
In contrast to the notion of a 'user' interface, the learner interface was designed to respond to the various kinds of meaning needs that emerge when a person is learning. The original prototypes of the interface were built to run on Macintoshes. Metaphorically, the interface was a cross between an electronic book, a game machine and a Nautilus exercise machine. Subject content were like weights, the electronic book component made it easy to relate to and the game like qualities made it easy to make high speed choices between (potentially) hundreds of available options.
The learner interface is the first implementation of the concepts of a SEMNASIUM. The principle intention of the interface is to provide an environment that is responsive enough to the learner's articulation of meaning needs that it exercises the learner's ability to be more discriminating (disambiguating) of them in the first place. Because these needs fluctuate at frequency levels we are barely conscious of, the interface was designed to provide the learner the means to choose among hundreds of situationaly relevant yet semantically/contextually related choices in an instant. This included 3 modes of interface: navigational, representational, referential.
The Learner Interface was tested with grade school students in the Cupertino School District (California) where, according to one of the teachers involved, it enabled students to grasp in a few minutes what the teacher thought would have taken weeks.
Unfortunately, business reasons caused product development of the interface to be suspended. Development of the interface as web based product is in the planning stages. For more on the concepts and technology of the Learner Interface, click here to download the .pdf booklet: "Electronic Publishing for Learning".
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A great question is the differentiation, unfoldment, explication and articulation of a need for meaning. When actually in the moment of experiencing uncertainty or ambivalence, we are needing more meaning.
"Meaning Needs" refers to the impulses that underlie, emerge within and give direction and impetus to conscious awareness and activity. Impulses of, for example, desire, fear, curiosity, uncertainty, ambivalence, anxiety, self-esteem and creativity. As these impulses fluctuate, how the learner has been habituated to, or has learned to respond to them, (consciously and/or subconsciously follow through with or suppress them) fundamentally regulates his or her capacity to learn. Analogous to the somatic impulses that propel and direct our physical movements, meaning needs propel and direct the movements of consciousness.
At the core of a learner's capacities to employ "critical thinking skills", to formulate a "good question", to "construct knowledge", to "abstract coherently", to avoid "premature closure", to avoid "tendencies toward self-deception", to live with "ambiguity" and to "creatively learn" is the learner's both tacitly spontaneous and consciously instrumented response to his or her own fluctuating meaning needs.
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Mutually Learning Oriented Relationships
The education process must be turned inside out. Facilitating learners who are able to continually learn is a significantly different objective than instructing knowledge into people. The global paradigm shift from "knowers" to "learners" demands a fundamentally new relationship, one of mutual learning between learning facilitators and learners, businesses and clients, and political representatives and constituents.
Educators and the educational environment will have to become sensitive, responsive and encouraging to learners gaining awareness of their own highly dynamic and subtle fluctuations of attention. Learners must be enabled to easily articulate their unsatisfied meaning needs in ways which flows back to educators as feedback, so that the learning environment continually improves as a learning medium for each learner.
Facilitating a learner’s awareness of his or her own meaning needs can only occur in an environment capable of responding to them. The only way to evolve an environment capable of responding to the meaning needs of individual learners is if the environment (human, technical, infrastructural) is fundamentally design-intent on learning about them. Thus, a mutually learning oriented relationship.
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Phonics is a code patch: If we think of the 'code' of written English as a code, as we might think of any other code we have invented (which after all it is), from that vantage, we can see that 'phonics', which emerged in the mid 1600s, is an attempt to 'patch up' the code's letter-sound-spelling inconsistencies by introducing another layer of code (letter-sound correspondence patterns) to assist learners in processing the underlying code. In the software world when one code is found to be inefficient or have problems (bugs) but it is not practical to change or repair it directly, another code is created to 'patch into' the primary code and 'patch-up' its defects or otherwise correct and/or extend its functioning. If you use computers much you have probably experienced Microsoft or some other vendor suggesting or automating the process of your machine downloading 'patches'.
There is no such thing as phonics or the need for phonics in transparent orthographies. Phonics is an artifact of our attempt to compensate for the underlying code's complex letter-sound-spelling irregularities. We have to use "phonics" in the sense that we must help people learn their way through the letter-sound confusions. However there is a difference between the domain of intention of phonics, 'learning a code for using a code', and any particular 'phonics teaching method'. Phonics the religion is dangerous to our learning about phonics the domain of intention.
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Psycho-Energetic (sorry still working here )
Psycho-Semantic (sorry still working here )
Quantum Semantics™ (sorry still working here )
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- Rosetta Stone
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The Rosetta Stone represents the notion of translating from one language or symbol system that is known into another system that is not. It is used here as a metaphor for showing the equivalence of the statements regarding the critical role of feedback in every system.
- More on the Rosetta Stone
Semnasium™ (sorry still working here )
Semnastics™ (sorry still working here )
Stutter (sorry still working here )
System (sorry still working here )
Tacit (sorry still working here )
Underlying Assumptions (sorry still working here )
Uncertainty
Questioning minds are the underlying engines of philosophy, science and technology. Answers — at all levels of living and learning — are only as good as the questions that give them context. A healthy mind questions. The process of questioning stops when and where the questioner is certain.
Clarifying uncertainty is the process of questions and answers. The juxtaposition of meaning and uncertainty in the field of attention is implied in insight, cognition, and the articulation of questions. When the learner experiences an incompatibility with the facilitating experience uncertainty results.
Premature certainty inhibits questioning and the freedom of mind necessary for learning. Provisonality should be emphasized more strongly than certainty.
The process of education should stress the value of being at ease with uncertainty. Like a flashlight in a dark cave, uncertainty illuminates the way forward by bringing the obstacles into focus. The interface relationship between the learner and the learned should be responsive to the learner’s uncertainty.
- Virtual Politics
A new form of politics is emerging. It’s not emerging out of today's governmental system. Rather, through a ‘Virtual Nation’ (one forming today on the Internet)
Its signature difference will be the level of participation possible (granularity and frequency). Its foundational assumption that radically enhancing the quality of constituent participation will effect the dialogue in ways reframing and rehashing issues can no longer address.
The greater the level of participation possible (granularity and frequency) the less political "representation" required - the greater the need for education regarding participation (both how to and substantively about what)
This new relationship will be mediated by technology and technology always effects who uses it - the ‘alphabet effect’ is a case - voter apathy is a case - not only are we "what we eat" - we become what we use - technology not only effects how humans do things it effects how humans internally relate to and process meanings.
Just as our current governmental systems are a form of technology - a crude form in which the issues of voting (in terms of the range of choice and the frequency of choosing) and representation and lawmaking and executing all reflect a distributed people mediation system (one designed for a kind of representation that was technically possible over 200 years ago [horseback and walking]) a new form of technologically mediating a political body of people is both possible and (as the recent election demonstrates) needed today.
As it is inevitable such a system will form it behooves us to consider its implications for both body politic and the ecology of the bodies & minds who will use it.
The underlying ETHIC of INTERFACE of such a system will be the "COMMON SENSE" and BILL OF RIGHTS of the next generation of government.
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for all children
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