I have to interrupt here and mention that, by ways of implicit protocols,
for example, on this list it's pretty hard to look foolish: or rather,
when folks [like myself!] post foolishly, it's ok. It may not be on other
lists, but here folks always seem to find a way to engage: and I've posted
some dillies, believe me. Here is a forgiving place. [gawd am I going to
break out in a song?! or a rash?!]
>"what if someone who winds up on my dissertation
>committee reads this and thinks I'm an idiot." "Failure" has as many
>definitions as there are people - times the number of situations in which
>each person feels they can be critically evaluated. And how our society
>has set up education so that the fear of failing is so constantly
>grinning over the student's shoulder!
Yes. And this actually is part of what I'm thinking about, social
dysfunctionality, that fear of failure is part of what drives and tortures
the nerd... what we need perhaps are nerd-support groups; but in the
meantime, this particular list is very nerd-friendly.
>
> I'm pretty weird for a grad student, being past the half century mark
>and older than some of my professors, but I can hear a lot of this coming
>from my under-thirty fellow students, who are looking at life-times made
>or marred by a bad committee, a dissertation topic which turns out (after
>two years) to be unresearchable, and just general free-floating dread.
>For me being in school is a shot at a second life, no one in my
>department but me has ever heard of xmca (only one has heard of Mike
>Cole) and I can give my middle-western informality free rein. But what
>about all those for whom the stakes are too high to risk?
Ironic isn't it. To get to where we are, we learn to play it safe and smart;
and then we're told that to succeed we must take risks, even though
safe&smart is, really, what gets the paper in the end.
I don't think I've ever struggled to contain contradiction as much as I
have these past few years.
>An additional possibility: some lurkers may lurk because they have
>expressed creative/nonconforming thoughts in the past and been punished
>for it. An assurance that xmca is lurker-friendly could bring them -
>with some very worth-while ideas - out from behind the bushes.
And what do you see this assurance looking like?
I think it would be a mistake, myself, to try and formally script a text
which can address the issues you raise about lurkers, and first-time
posters to the list -
it's like relying on "natural" laws to govern, say, mutual respect is a
"natural" law, it doesn't need to be coded as a rule specifically to be
practiced and observed: and similarly, by practicing mutual respect in an
electronic community, an environment is created which cultivates different
kinds of communicative space; alternatives, I mean, to the spaces where
fears of failure are being cultivated, for example.
I like to think this is apparent from the kinds of conversations and
discussions which take place here, the ways of speaking which are
practiced, I mean, in the end, it's not what we say we do, but what we do
that matters.
It's not how we say we communicate, but how we communicate ... (sorry
train-of-thought meltdown...)
;-)
diane