what moonbats say when they say goodbye

Introducing the Moonbats

There are three core members. Founding members, you might say. And here they are.

from a non-moonbat re: recursive public

There was a suggestion that the notion of a "recursive public" isn't any different than a public public--in that the notion of "recursiveness" only means self-reflective. As non-Moonbat Nick Seaver pointed out, there's a question over whether all publics are, in various respects, actually self-reflective. What do you think?

cross-post: RIP Augusto Boal

(originally posted at sleeping alone and starting out early)

"Oppression is a relationship in which there is only monologue. Not dialogue."

Brazilian theater director, playwright, and activist Augusto Boal has died of respiratory failure at the age of 78.

Boal was best known for his work in establishing the "Theatre of the Oppressed," an approach to public performance intended to draw spectators in to the action. In becoming active members of the live theatre, the public, the nominal "oppressed," have the chance to participate in and transform the conditions of their everyday lives.

Boal wrote:

TO (Theatre of the Oppressed) was used by peasants and workers; later, by teachers and students; now, also by artists, social workers, psychotherapists, NGOs... At first, in small, almost clandestine places. Now in the streets, schools, churches, trade-unions, regular theatres, prisons...

Theatre of the Oppressed is the Game of Dialogue: we play and learn together. All kinds of Games must have Discipline - clear rules that we must follow. At the same time, Games have absolute need of creativity and Freedom. TO is the perfect synthesis between the antithetic Discipline and Freedom. Without Discipline, there is no Social Life; without Freedom, there is no Life.

The Discipline of our Game is our belief that we that we must re-establish the right of everyone to exist in dignity. We believe that all of us are more, and much better, than what we think we are. We believe in solidarity.

The world got Augusto Boal for 78 years, and all it had to do was work to confront injustice and oppression. What a bargain.

(What Wikipedia can teach us about) why social tools matter

Embattled Moonbats defend themselves against charges of technological determinism

There's an interesting post on Moonbat Russ Francis's Media Moonbat blog about technological determinism. The Moonbats are not new to this phrase--which is, as Moonbat Jenna's sensei, Dan Hickey, explained, "just about the worst thing you can be called in media studies."

Calling someone a technological determinist suggests they're focusing on the wrong things: Instead of considering emergent social practices around new social tools, they only care about how cool Wikipedia is. They only want to know how to use MySpace in the classroom. They only want to find out how to use Twitter.



As Moonbat Francis points out, a "false dichotomy" exists around the notion of technological determinism. He cites a section of his dissertation, The Predicament of the Learner in the New Media Age, to show how post-Vygotskian theory helped him push past this dichotomy which he argues "has held back research in [media and education studies]." Here's the chunk of his dissertation:

Scholars interested in the relationship between cultural and media change invariably become embroiled in a debate that polarises into two camps: those accused of technological determinism, often linked with the work of McLuhan (1962; 1994); and advocates of the Social Shaping of Technology who emphasise that technologies are always invented and adapted by real people in particular socio-historical circumstances (MacKenzie & Wajcman, 1999). Socio-cultural theory provides an alternative way to think about the implications of media change that stems from the centrality of the idea of the dialectic in post-Vygotskian thought. Wertsch (1998, pp. 23-72; 1995a, pp. 65-68) develops this line of thinking using an analogy that makes reference to the history of pole-vaulting following the invention of fibreglass poles that young athletes exploited to gain an advantage in a competitive Olympic sport.

The technique allows vaulters to exploit the elastic properties of glass fibre to slingshot themselves over the bar. Historically, it allowed vaulters to surpass the records set by Cornelius Warmerdam in 1957 who used a rigid bamboo pole. Interesting, Wertsch tells us that, while young athletes around the world started to appropriate the elastic properties of glass fibre poles, old timers, whose technique depended on the relative rigidity of bamboo poles claimed that the rules of the game had fundamentally changed. Indeed, some claimed it wasn’t the same sport and retired.

This provides a model for thinking about the changing culture of university learning in the new media age. Significantly, the invention of new mediational means (i.e. glass fibre poles) didn’t cause change. Change was driven from the bottom up by young vaulters as they exploited its affordances to gain an edge in a competitive Olympic sport. Similarly, access to digital tools and resources does not cause change in itself; rather change is driven from the bottom-up as advanced learners start to appropriate, experiment and innovate new strategies that depend on the affordances [of] the available cultural tool-kit.

Moonbat Katie once made an argument that (and I hope I'm getting this right) literacy itself had been reduced to a technology instead of a social practice. Indeed, isn't everything, at some point or another, reduced simply to a technology? As Clay Shirky writes, "Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring."

Add to this my own position that focusing on a specific tool to figure out the interesting social practices that emerge around (or, if you prefer, surround and embrace) that tool is the exact opposite of technological determinism--so far away from it, in fact, that having a serious conversation about the notion of technological determinism gets difficult. Those of us over here thinking in similar ways to Wertsch and Moonbat Russ have a hard time figuring out what they're even doing that makes people think they're deterministic.

Lemke thinks schools are effed beyond repair

Hey, Moonbats. I've uncovered a recent article by Jay Lemke in which he explains why school as an institution is dysfunctional beyond repair and explores alternate approaches to education. As he explains in setting up his argument:

Education, we should remember, is not the same as schooling. Education consists in what a community does to promote learning and understanding of what it values. Schooling is a particular technology for doing education in some human communities. It is a very old technology. I believe that today it is largely dysfunctional and that schooling is seriously in need of radical re-engineering if we are to succeed with education.

I want to describe just how schooling is dysfunctional today as an educational technology. I want to argue that it is beyond reform and repair and that it is urgent that we begin to develop more effective alternatives. I will sketch some ideas for what such alternatives might realistically look like, how we might get from here to there, and what we need to know in order to create a new educational future.

For Lemke, one of the significant faults of the institution of education is structural. He explains:

Thirty students in an empty room with one teacher. In a building that has no other function than to house and support what happens in those empty rooms. Add to the empty room a set of textbooks, and maybe some maps or charts on the walls. What do teachers and students do in these rooms? For the most part they talk, listen, and write. Traditionally the teacher does most of the talking, writes out an official knowledge, which is copied down by students. All the students are the same age to within one year. Very often they have fairly similar social backgrounds and life experiences. The teachers also are a pretty homogenous bunch, compared to the diversity of our society as a whole. The students, past the early grades, change teachers and subjects every hour in the course of a day, and every few to several months in the course of year.

What is wrong with that picture? We live in a complex society in which a myriad of different kinds of knowledge and forms of human activity take place in different institutions, different walks of life, different jobs. Which ones is schooling preparing students for? all of them? or none of them? Why do we imagine that in a society as complex and diverse as ours that you can learn what is important and valued in our society by sitting inside an empty classroom, by spending all your days in one building? We bring in books and pictures, slides and films, television and the Web. But those are very poor substitutes for observing and participating in at least some of the millions of real activities in real places in our society. No other buildings are as empty as schools, except perhaps for prisons. We do not bring other people into schools for the most part, and even if we did, they would be fish out of water, unable to demonstrate what they do in their jobs and lives, able only to talk. Students would not be able to observe or participate in what they do, only listen and maybe see a picture here and there, at best a short movie. Schools and classrooms are impoverished learning environments compared to any office, factory, farm, hospital, courthouse, laboratory, department store, or even prison. Teachers spend their lives teaching. They have little to teach about what goes on in any of the rest of the world's jobs and professions, though we can be grateful for those for whom teaching is a second career.

Questions for discussion:

• Surely Lemke's argument is slightly more sweeping than necessary. Surely there is something salvageable in schools as currently structured. Isn't there?
  
• In omitting the notion of Communities of Practice (and a new term that Moonbat Katie introduced to me yesterday, Communities of Interest), does Lemke's argument overlook a key element needed to consider the value--and, perhaps, the lack thereof--of schools?
  
• Lemke identifies two elements of effective education, (1) deep understanding, and (2) critical perspective. Then he explains how these are not obtainable in schools as currently structured. Yet all of them Moonbats are products of the very education system Lemke excoriates. What's the deal with that?
  
• Solutions? Solutions? Solutions? Lemke does offer some. What do we think of them? Are there others he has not yet identified?

Are the Moonbats Høegian, in the Engeströmian sense?

What a character that Yrjö Engeström is. He explores a fictional relationship between three children as if it existed in reality in his 1999 article "Development as Breaking Away and Opening Up: A Challenge to Vygotsky and Piaget."

He uses Peter Høeg's autobiographical novel Borderliners, and he uses it for a purpose: To consider three challenges to Vygotsky's and Piaget's theories of development based on the work of dialectics and cultual-historical activity theory (CHAT):

(1) instead of just benign achievement of mastery, development may be viewed as partially destructive rejection of the old; (2) instead of just individual transformation, development may be viewed as collective transformation; (3) instead of just vertical movement across levels, development may be viewed as horizontal movement across borders.

The novel focuses on three children at a boarding school; the children are described thus:

Peter is a 14-year old boy who has no parents and has grown up through severe troubles in institutions. He is transferred to Biehl's Academy, an elite private school in Copenhagen. The question is: Why? He is drawn to two other outsiders in the school, Katarina and August. Katarina has recently lost her parents through illness and suicide. August has murdered his parents after years of abuse. Why was August taken into Biehl's Academy?

But that they took August was inexplicable. When they had the waiting lists and had no need to keep anyone. Why did they take someone like him? It was this question that made me sure there had to be a plan. (p. 31)

In the closed, controlled and tightly scheduled school environment, the three start a laboratory experiment to find out what is the plan behind their placement in the school and behind the school's functioning. It is truly an experiment in that it involves changing or disturbing the stable state in order to figure out its logic.

These three, brought to the school as individuals, develop as a collective. As Høeg writes, "It had never been just us two, never just Katarina and me. There had always been three of us, even before he came and I saw him for the first time."

Engeström, building on this idea, adds that when the three children act, take risks, put their very lives on the line for each other, they are working within a notion of reciprocity: Of doing something for another, who would do the same if given the change. Engeström writes:

Here development means changing one's course of life, including the destructive rejection of the old - but changing it together with significant others, in a process of constructing a collective. The challenge to developmental theory is to account for such processes of formation of new collectives.

There's more, of course. It's Engeström, we're talking about, after all--of course there's more. But let's leave it for now and ask the simple question: Are the Moonbats like the three children in Hoeg's narrative? Do they exist as a challenge to the positive, individual, and vertical aspects of developmental theory? In explaining them, and their coherence, is the solution as Engeström writes, "a combination of the positive and the destructive, individual and collective, vertical and horizontal aspects of development?"

More likely, Engeström argues,

the outcome is: not either one, not both combined, but both alone, connected and transcended. Development emerges as everyday creation or construction of the new in zones of uncertainty riddled with contradictions and surprises and heavily dependent on re-mediation by cultural artifacts. Developmental theory that takes these challenges seriously will be able to explain significant transformations in human life courses, at least partially.

I haz a ponder. And I hope someone out there has an ansur.