[Xmca-l] Re: Prototyping

[Peg Griffin]

Times are tight right now --trying to figure out what’s going on with 23 Masters’ students and what’s going on in York PA voting.  
It makes me smile to know that Mike and his neighbors are keeping Issa hopping out there -- first time in a long time he had any worries!

There is such power in that article – starting with the Edwidge Danticat example puts up front the concrete/specific whole so motivating the careful examination of the various pretenders to a throne for the so-called maker movement.  It really irritates me I can’t give it enough good thinking time.  
Recently I’ve learned more about Arabic alphabet blocks – they encode not just upper and lower case for the letters of the alphabet but up to four “cases” for many of the letters. (And some alphabet symbols can serve as number symbols, too!)   Maybe the discussions of Quranic literacy for beginners need to consider this (as well as diglossia) more deeply.  Might be an example of socio-cultural work-around for pedagogy as beginners recite memorized passages – starting with a “whole” that pricks at/teases perceptions of letter shapes while you are reciting it from memory.  It’s an alternative to focusing on “leveled” synthetic or analytic phonics.  The juxtaposing of memory feats and visual field littered with affordances could be related to the kind of teaching/learning described in the after school school of Vossoughi,  Hooper, and Escudé.

I can’t do much until the York voting focus is finished (hopefully first week in November) and my repairs with the students are in hand (maybe as late as mid-December).

Meanwhile, as you tend to your tomatoes or whatever is in your garden, Mike, remember my long ago slogan about academic work:  Isn't it more worthwhile to drive tomatoes to market?   

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Glassman, Michael
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2016 3:25 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Prototyping

It's interesting, I haven't really been following the conversation due to other pressures, but then I saw Mike post this article, which I happened to pick up yesterday.  Based on some recent conversations I have been reading Ivan Illich in some depth recently, and that's what brought me around to the maker movement.  But I have to admit I am having a difficult time getting my head around it.  Is the maker movement a replaying of Tools for Conviviality - the idea that by exploring how things work in the world we come to know and be part of each other?  Or is it attempting to put learners in some type of system, give them the right tools and let them build and they will somehow end up in a learning place.  It's interesting that the Maker movement, at least as represented by the fellow Doughtery at the Technology, Education and Design conference in Detroit, seems to be an offshoot of the Silicon Valley/Libertarian approach to technology.  Let loose young innovators upon the world and see the power that they will create!!!  As the article suggests this is a very elitist view of how individuals see the world and their own success.  Like Grit (also introduced at a Technology, Entertainment and Design conference) it allows the entrepreneurs  to say I am successful because I got out there and innovated, and did it with a lot of grit.  Does the maker movement allow us to cast innovation in a libertarian mold.  Almost the opposite of what Illich thought about this type of exploration I think.  For him to my current reading it is more about transparency, the idea that nobody is controlling you, but you through your own actions can know the world.

Anyway, that's enough of rambling for the moment.  I guess you can see how scattershot my thinking is about all this.  I keep wondering about its relationship to the DIY movement of the sixties, bootstrapping and the Homebrew Computer Club in the seventies, and how that all got turned in to a libertarian mosh in the eighties.  

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Peg Griffin
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2016 3:01 PM
To: 'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity' <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Prototyping

Hoo HOO! And Hooray, too!  Thanks, Mike.  I needed one more liitle push to get that article in my attention span.
Peg

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of mike cole
Sent: Wednesday, October 19, 2016 1:49 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Prototyping

For those interested in pursuing the implications of Zaza's work on Kukiya kiya and the maker movement fashionable in affluent societies, I suggest a new thread with the title, prototyping.

Attached is the paper by Vossoughi, Hooper, and Escudé suggested by Molly.

mike

-- 

It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an object that creates history. Ernst Boesch