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November 5, 2009
Quick reminder: live session - today at 6 pm CST (time zone conversion) here in elluminate. Topic: openness and transparency...
Against Transparency
Lawrence Lessig surprised a lot of people a few weeks ago when he posted this article opposing transparency. "How could anyone be against transparency?" he asks. "Its virtues and its utilities seem so crushingly obvious. But I have increasingly come to worry that there is an error at the core of this unquestioned goodness. We are not thinking critically enough about where and when transparency works, and where and when it may lead to confusion, or to worse."
Lawrence Lessig,
The New Republic,
November 5, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none]
[Comment]
Here's what course members from around the world had to say. Want to join the conversation? Submit your feed. Then put this at the beginning of your post: CCK09
Re: Power to the PeopleAs Francis was characterizing the discussion about networks or network as essentialist, if everything was reduced to the physical characteristics of the network, then it would lose all the contextual information and how the network and the power within it operate. Even what we are observing is characteristically a network or networking of people, it hardly guarantees an open, democratic, innovative and adaptive configuration. The idea of openness has to be contextualized in order to understand how the nature of openness within a given situation or context helped organize something better. Unless we can pinpoint how power operates in a specific situation, the power remains somewhat abstract and we cannot explain what effects it has over the members of the network and how the network works. Asako
November 5, 2009These links are comments posted to the Moodle Discussion Forum, Week 8. If you want to participate in the discussion, but don't want to set up a blog, then you can post here.
TransparencyRereading that post this morning made me smile; thank you for reminding me of it. I'm much more interested in being transparent. I'd rather present myself to an employer as I actually am than pretend I'm someone else. If I pretend, what's the best that can happen? I get hired for some job--but it's a bad fit because they hired some fantasy person that isn't really me.
In one of my previous jobs, part of our interview process was aimed at trying to find out how people dealt with problems. I remember one woman with eight years of instructional design experience who claimed she had never had a project fall behind in schedule and had never worked with anyone with a "challenging" personality. We kept trying to give her opportunities to talk about how she solved problems, but I think she thought we were asking trick questions to get her to admit she wasn't perfect. We didn't hire her; we could tell how she'd respond when things went wrong. Maybe she really did have a perfect track record--but we couldn't guarantee that everything would be perfect in our team. We wanted someone who could recover from a mistake, and she couldn't prove to us that she'd ever done so. That same kind of fear of being open prevented her from getting the job, even though her instructional design samples were good.
I'd rather hire someone who I know genuinely is the person they appear to be, and I'd rather be hired by someone who approaches it the same way.
Halliday (1978, p. 16) asserts that 'in the psychological sphere, there have been two alternative lines of approach to the question of language development including the 'nativist' and 'environmental' positions. In particular, Halliday (1978, p. 17) states that
'the nativist model reflects the philosophical-logical strand in the history of thinking about language, with it's sharp distinction between the ideal and real (which Chomsky calls 'competence' and 'performance') and its view of language as rules - essentially rules of syntax. The environmentalist represents the ethnographic tradition, which rejects the distinction of ideal and real, defines what is grammatical as, by and large, what is acceptable, and sees language as a resource - resource for meaning, meaning defined in terms of function. To this extent the two interpretations are complementary rather than contradictory; but they have tended to become associated with conflicting psychological theories and thus to be strongly counterposed'.
Furthermore, Halliday (1978, p.17) asserts that 'a functional theory is not a theory about the mental processes involved in the learning of the mother tongue; it's a theory about the social processes involved'. In this perspective, 'language is a form of interaction, and it is learnt through interaction'.
In Halliday's (1978, p. 39) social-functional view 'the key concept is that of realization, language as multiple coding. Halliday states (1978, p. 40)
'I would use the term network for all levels, in fact: semantic network, grammatical network, phonological network. It refers simply to a representation of the potential of that level. A network is a network of options, of choices; so for example the semantic system is regarded as a set of options. If we go back to the Hjelmslevian (originally Saussurean) distinction of paradigmatic and the syntagmatic, most of modern linguistic theory has given priority to the syntagmatic concept. Lamb treats the two axes together: for him a linguistic stratum is a network embodying both syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations all mixed up together, in patterns of what he calls AND nodes and OR nodes. I take out the paradigmatic relations (Firth's system) and give priority to these; for me the underlying organization at each level is paradigmatic. Each level is a network of paradigmatic relations, of ORs - a range of alternatives, in the sociological sense. This is what I mean by a potential: the semantic system is a network of meaning potential'.
Halliday, M.A.K. (1978). Language as social semiotic: the social interpretation of language and meaning. Edward Arnold: London.
November 5, 2009Dear One, how can I apply for a different allocation of power from the network, if I'm not happy with what I've got?
(more than one sentence answers please - of you can cheat, and just make it a long sentence).
November 5, 2009I´ve found the post very interesting too, Geoff, especially this statement: "We need strong support systems and parallel learning structures for all the innovators of the current school system in order to balance the immune system reaction of the old system." There´s definitely such need for support systems. Otto speaks about switching from a 2.0 to a 3.0 approach and that sounds like a not-so-unfriendly scenario to me. I guess in other countries most institutional structures have yet to switch to 2.0, I´d say Spain is one of them. The more certain individuals and sectors evolve into 3.0 (or whatever comes next), the bigger the gap between them and public institutions reticent to change.
November 5, 2009As Francis was characterizing the discussion about networks or network as essentialist, if everything was reduced to the physical characteristics of the network, then it would lose all the contextual information and how the network and the power within it operate. Even what we are observing is characteristically a network or networking of people, it hardly guarantees an open, democratic, innovative and adaptive configuration. The idea of openness has to be contextualized in order to understand how the nature of openness within a given situation or context helped organize something better. Unless we can pinpoint how power operates in a specific situation, the power remains somewhat abstract and we cannot explain what effects it has over the members of the network and how the network works. Asako
November 5, 2009Post in Twitter and use the hashtag #cck09 to be listed here. (These should be fresh. Still working on improving the Twitter display.)
Hopping from #cck09 Elluminate session to #NITLE session
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