24 July 2004
Some new utilities (details at blogworld) suggest means to augment electronic facets of the course, and I sketched out some possible components for the course while walking this morning, and largely as a consequence of reading Wenger et al. Seven principles for cultivating communities of practice. It occurs to me that Webnote could be used as a group tool, a medium of collection and expression and commentary for subgroups. My thought of the moment is to constitute affinity groups of maybe 4 or 5, around general subject areas such as Environmental, Literary, Cinematic, Economic, Political, Aesthetic, Demographic... Each person would post in a separate color, and a record of discussion and commentary would thus accumulate. I could seed each with images, texts, etc., and keep a finger on the pulse as uses developed.
At the same time, the general communications work of the course could take place in a course blog --a consanguinity group (though people could have their own blogs if they wanted, too)
A third component could be the usual Web page constructed to create and distribute an individual Project... and 'participation' could be measured/assessed via postings to Webnote and blog environments.
participation, initiative, followthrough --these could be the metrics on the basis of which the end-product grade was developed.
A lot of any course is telling people stuff. But that really needs to be moderated by getting students to express themselves, to respond, to pose questions, to engage with each other, to be piqued and motivated to explore, and then to build something with what they find. I think of that exploration as information-centered, using tools and resources and then DOING something with what's found, if only describing/narrating the hunt and displaying its results, with commentary.
I don't think it's particularly useful to emphasize formatting and presentation details in projects, though it IS necessary to require intellectual responsibility in citations for included materials.
Thanks to Skip's pointer, I'm adding iMarkup to the array of tools I'm planning to use, but it will necessitate the use of the (free) plugin by anybody who wants to make use of the resulting maked-up pages. Perhaps that plugin wants to be part of the setup of Parmly 302 machines?
25 July
Consider the array of resources and materials new since last year's version (and the point is to start gathering them up...):
29 July
We always work with fragments, and the perpetual task is to assemble them into coherent pictures. Not unlike doing a jigsaw puzzle, except that the pieces are not die-cut: they don't snap together, and the 'coherent pictures' are rarely two- (or even three-...) dimensional. New pieces are forever being instantiated and entering the field of view, competing for our attention. The more we know, and the more attention we pay, the thicker the rain of new pieces. Cases in point of the 29 July moment, all from the online Asia Times:
Item: Where politics and religion mix in Japan By Jamie Miyazaki (Asia Times)Each of these is a facet of the grand Tale (Drama? Saga? Fable?) of East Asia, and each connects to a myriad of other facets and fragments. 'Kaleidoscopic' might begin to describe what we see: every tiny shift of position presents an altered view, a new pattern in which we may discern something orderly ...or something chaotic.TOKYO - A perennial player in Japanese politics, and considered a coalition king-maker, the New Komeito Party is linked to a pacifist religious group that claims it is the only true Buddhist religious organization. The New Komeito Party currently is the enabling coalition partner with the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who sent troops to Iraq, but speculation abounds that it might be wooed in the future by the increasingly successful opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ)....Item: Chinese migrants and the power of guangxi By David Fullbrook (Asia Times)BANGKOK, CHIANG RAI, HONG KONG - Despite China's red-hot economy, more and more mainland Chinese are moving to Southeast Asia, believing opportunities there are golden and the lifestyle agreeable. Their money and shrew business skills should serve the region's economies well... China's high, increasingly visible unemployment, cutthroat competition and expensive bills in big cities are causing mainlanders once again to look south, whether for a few years or indefinitely, just as their forbears have for centuries...Item: N Korean refugees the beginning of a flood? By Aidan Foster-Carter (Asia Times)Some 460 North Korean refugees flew into Seoul's Songnam military airport on two chartered Asiana flights on Tuesday and Wednesday. They came from the same officially unidentified Southeast Asian country. (Shall we stop the pussy-footing, please? It's Vietnam, is it not?)Item:China-Uzbek pact bad news for Uighurs By N T Tarimi (Asia Times)
This is an important moment. First of all, the numbers. At a stroke, the Vietnam 460 take the total of North Korean defectors, as they are officially called, reaching South Korea this year, which stood at 760 as of end-June, almost up to the 1,285 who arrived in the whole of 2003.Bad news for the Uighurs and their aspirations for genuine autonomy, democracy or even independence came recently from the heartland of Central Eurasia. Uzbek authorities bowed to Chinese demands to further clamp down on any Uighur activity that appears to support and advocate human rights and greater political and cultural rights for the Uighurs in what they call East Turkestan, but China calls the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region... Uzbekistan has a large number of what is called the Uighur diaspora. Uzbekistan's stance on this matter is unique in Central Asia. Although other Central Asian countries, particularly Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, have also curtailed and limited Uighur movements of the same character, they did allow Uighurs to carry out some activity within the boundary of their existing laws. However, Uzbekistan has not given Uighurs the right to organize in support of their ethnic brothers in East Turkestan, or Xinjiang...
Our Grand Challenge is to create a foundation that will help us to comprehend new bits as Events Unfold. We aspire to see the patterns more clearly, to somehow be able to make sense out of the complexities of civilizations that contain something more than 20% of the world's population.
While walking to work this morning I sketched "EAS Essentials" with these elements:
And after all, it's all about how to learn about whatever we're looking at...
1 September
Several books of note:
AUTHOR Nisbett, Richard E.6 September
TITLE The geography of thought : how Asians and westerners think differently-- and why
IMPRINT New York : Free Press, c2003.
CALL NO. BF311 .N565 2003.AUTHOR De Mente, Boye.
TITLE NTC's dictionary of Japan's cultural code words
IMPRINT Lincolnwood, Ill. : National Textbook Co., c1994.
CALL NO. DS821 .D467 1994.AUTHOR Eberhard, Wolfram, 1909-
TITLE Lexikon chinesischer Symbole. English.
TITLE A dictionary of Chinese symbols : hidden symbols in Chinese life and thought
IMPRINT London ; New York : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
CALL NO. DS721 .E32613 1986.--and The Chinese Have a Word for It, on order
8 September
Another from Asia Times:
South Korea's retrograde politics By Won Joon Choe(This underlines the importance of Keeping An Eye on the unfolding news...)Politics in Korea's last monarchy, the Chosun dynasty (1392-1910), was a vicious "winner-take-all" affair. The losers faced confiscation of their property, exile, and often execution. In a Confucian culture that elevated the rule of men over the rule of law, everything was permissible for those in power. Further, the sins of the fathers were not only visited on the children but on the grandchildren as well, as three generations of family members were enslaved or exterminated. Unfortunately, in spite of the glib rhetoric about South Korea's "vibrant democracy" in the Western media, South Korean politics today resemble the politics of the Chosun dynasty.