Monthly Archives: January 2008

snowball gathers mass and speed

Here’s what occurred as I unfroze pipes and washed dishes: cultivate the Art of Contextualizing Juxtaposition, spinning out the stories liberated by juxtapositions, and encouraging others to play at doing the same. In the context of teaching-learning, it’s encouraging students to MAKE things; whether they’re haiku or collage or mashup or essay matters less than the evolving taste for making and mooting own expression, in [semi-] public space. The essential is that the instructor be seen to be doing the very same thing.

A snowball perched on a hilltop

Sometimes a confluence of quite disparate influences provokes a blog posting that bursts out into a new vector of interest and attention. One never knows when that’s going to strike, and sometimes it comes to nothing: having stricken, moves on. At the moment, the bits that seem to be shouldering their way to the fore are:

  • Scott Atran’s rumination on fictive kinship (perhaps you have to be an anthropologist to jump at a title with ‘fictive kinship’ in it, but read on…)
  • Scott Horton’s quoting of Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” at harpers.org (dunno if you have to be a Subscriber to see it, but if so the text is here), which is known to one and all as a cliché [“Good fences make good neighbors’], but not generally attended for its other Messages, or for its geological and New England landscape Verities
  • the delicious richness of Gardner Campbell’s working toward the coming term, and the wonderful prospect afforded by his vow to blog daily. His use of sound clips is, well, exemplary, and his choice of quotations goes unerringly to my heart. I mean, jeez, who else juxtaposes Jerome Bruner

    A curriculum is more for teachers than it is for pupils. If it cannot change, move, perturb, inform teachers, it will have no effect on those whom they teach.

    and Paul Greenglass

    …freedom, improvisation, the moment, the… the thing that happens in front of your camera that you didn’t predict…”

These seem to be parts of a bigger Something that’s taking shape in my mind. Stay tuned while I figure this out…

Tim O’Reilly is right

He points to the Edge Foundation’s annual Question, this year’s being What Have You Changed Your Mind About?. Hmm, I thought… and I still don’t have anything coherent to say myself, but O’Reilly is right that it’s quite interesting to read what others have written. And it’s the extraordinarily broad compass of rethought things that’s the really interesting part. I’ve spent half an hour looking at various people’s takes on topics quite tangential to what I thought were my own concerns, and recommend the exercise most heartily, especially as a New Year’s calisthenic.