Phillip,
I never said they were in the NZ context. I was talking bout their
experience in the US.
I still think you are overly optimistic bout the web. There is content
on the web which gives me a diversity I could not get otherwise, but it
takes a hell of a lot of work. Most internet traffic is filtered through
the main portals where information is as controlled as the conventional
media . Personally, I read no papers, and get very little news through
the US medium, but I can't assume this is the norm. In either case this
does not happen spontanously, but must be carefully constructed.
I don't think assuming there are 100 webpages out there is sufficient,
one would have to look into which ones are being visited by surfers. The
FBI and CIA have some pretty good data on this I hear.
I think going back 50, 100 years one would have much more diverse ideas
about education or even knowledge creation. Today, one needs to travel
via university just to get a decent job. The domains of knowledge you
see as lossening, schooling and higher education, are actually
strengthening. Even more so an academic and intellectual ceases to have
the differentiated meaning they one had.
Sorry, I still don't see it :)
N
Phillip Capper wrote:
> Nate,
>
> Perhaps I have not helped by using the word 'democratic' unconventionally. I
> was trying to get across the ideas of diversity and being beyond
> authoritarian control.
>
> 1. ORIGINALITY. I wasn't claiming to say anything new. I was trying to
> demonstrate a point.
>
> 2. THE QUESTION OF IDENTIFICATION. In any event Maori in New Zealand are not
> immigrants, we are the immigrants. There has been no point where my people
> have felt inclined to change their identification to Maori. Nor have I
> noticed that American immigrants have been inclined to change their
> identitification to Navajo or Apache. The indigenous peoples of North
> America may be ignored in the American analysis, but the indigenous people
> of New Zealand most certainly are not in the New Zealand analysis. There was
> a period when Maori in New Zealand veered towards changing their
> identification to European, but that process was reversed in the 1970's and
> is now moving vigorously in the direction of differentiation. That is
> precisely why I chose them for my example.
>
> Here is an illustrative story. A friend of mine. Maori. NZ degree in
> accountancy. MBA Harvard. By the time he was 40 a senior vice president in a
> large American corporation with a house in Connecticut and a holiday home in
> Provence. One day his phone rang. It was the kaumatua (chief) of his tribe
> in rural New Zealand. "Time you stopped all that stuff, boy, and started
> applying your knowledge to the good of your people." He resigned the next
> day. He is now managing a tribally owned hotel. So there are many factors
> at work when it comes to identification, are there not?
>
> 3. WEB PAGES AND TEACHERS AS ANALAGOUS. Your point about web pages and
> teachers. One web page is less diverse than one teacher. But teachers are
> there through a process of quality control (whether or not we affirm the
> basis for determining quality), web pages are not. I have no sure way of
> knowing to what extent I can rely on the information the web page presents
> to me, or through what cultural filters it has come to be written.
>
> I may, in one year, encounter a dozen teachers (in a high school), all of
> whom have been through a similar process of selection and training. In one
> evening of surfing the net I may visit a hundred web pages, each one of
> which speaks with a different voice whose origins may be unknown to me.
> Because the teachers speak to me from a position of articulated authority
> while having all sorts of qualities that make me suspicious of them (for
> example, their skin colour), while the web page may appear to me to speak to
> me with voices that are of my kind, and where the signals that this source
> of information needs to be mistrusted are less apparent, and maybe actually
> distorted, I am vulnerable to apportioning more credibility to what I get
> from the net than what I get from my teacher or from my parents.
>
> For me this is the qualitative difference with the Internet. Mass
> communications such as TV and Radio were never so anarchic. They may have
> been appropriated by large corporations with dubious objects, but they were
> never diverse in their messages from the very beginning. Of course, it is
> possible that the web will move that way, but it is difficult to pull off,
> and my guess is that it never will.
>
> As for the remediation of meaning (teacher v web page), I do not think that
> the web page itself remediates meaning. Social processes with peers
> remediate meaning. The web page is analagous to the textbook page. The
> basketball hoop is analagous to the classroom, and the dominant member of
> the social group is analagous to the teacher. I believe that the teacher,
> the classroom and the textbook are less and less privileged in the creation
> of meaning, and that they accelerate that process by demanding to continue
> as they alwats have.
>
> THE HOMOGENEIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE. Finally I believe that the phenomena you
> describe - dumbed down tests, failing schools stuff, and all those other
> awful things that we in New Zealand have largely (but not entirely) escaped
> to date (I'm not over optimistic medium term), I interpret as evidence in
> support of my case. I read them as the doomed, grotesque and absurd efforts
> of educational nostalgia. I believe that I live in a transitional age. I
> have no idea whether the destination of the transition will be a happier,
> more just world, but I do believe that it will not have in it educational
> institutions that look like they do today, and that it will be a world
> where the social construction of knowledge will occur in radically different
> ways to the ways we are currently familiar with.
>
>
> Phillip Capper,
> Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business Ltd. (WEB Research),
> Level 13
> 114 The Terrace
> (PO Box 2855)
> WELLINGTON
> New Zealand
>
> Ph: +64 4 499 8140
> Fx: +64 4 499 8395
> Mb: +64 021 519 741
>
> http://www.webresearch.co.nz
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Nate [mailto:vygotsky@charter.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, 9 July 2002 3:14 p.m.
> To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> Subject: Re: FW: ISCRAT: Epistemic Activity
>
>
> Phillip,
>
> This is nothing new. Would not any cross-generational history of
> immigrants point to a similar story. Usually at some point there is a
> change in identification.
>
> I would argue that in important ways the exact oppossite is ocurring.
> Hey, kids go to before school care, school, and then after care. Then
> many go to math and reading academies during the summer. Kids become
> immersed in pop culture, and while it is a challenge to education, it is
> rarely expansive. How do schools function in N.Z.?
>
> I certainly do not see the picture you are painting of diverse
> approaches to knowledge. More and more there are pressures to get
> eveyone on the same page if its local standards or "dumbed down" federal
> tests (what school wants a letter sent home notifying parents they can
> transfer schools because there failing).
>
> I guess part of me is still curious for an argument on how knowledge is
> more democratic? How is a webpage more democratic than a teacher? In
> many ways it would seem less so, particularily in the context of
> re-mediating meaning.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Phillip Capper wrote:
>
>>Hi Kevin et al,
>>
>>I broadly agree with Kevin, but I WOULD argue that more people have more
>>ways of knowing and more diverse social contexts in which knowing occurs
>>than in the past, and that there are consequences of that. Is not literacy
>>itself a gateway to participation in more multiple contexts than are
>>otthewise accessible?
>>
>>Let me take an example from my own country. Urban Maori youth today move
>>daily between schools, which largely reproduce European - even 19th
>
> century
>
>>European - social relationships and understandings of what counts as
>>legitimate knowledge; iwi (i.e tribal) contexts with wholly different sets
>>of social relationships, attitudes to authority and ideas about what
>>constitutes legitimate knowledge; hip hop, rap and other appropriations
>
> from
>
>>an alien culture that has been transmitted almost exclusively via
>
> electronic
>
>>technologies (that is, boundary objects), and which aggressively discount
>>much of mainstream legitimated knowledge; and families that are often a
>>complex synthesis of all the foregoing. Many of them use the mechanical
>>technologies of aeroplanes (a boundary object) to settle in New York,
>>London, Sydney, where (as a recent excellent documentary (another boundary
>>object) about Maori in New York demonstrated) they synthsise their
>
> existing
>
>>sets of knowledges to enter the Julliard, the dockyards of New Jersey, the
>>offices of the United Nations, or a hospital in the Bronx, without in any
>>way rejecting or abandoning their essential essence as Maori. Then they
>
> have
>
>>children......
>>
>>How widespread, and to what level of complexity, was such experience
>>accessible even a hundred years ago? In such a world educational
>>insititutions (and I include here the educational institutions of tribal
>>tohunga and kaumatua) have ceased to be dominant mediators of knowledge
>
> and
>
>>have to compete in a swirling marketplace of cognitive assonance and
>>dissonance. It is my view that they are struggling in such an environment
>
> by
>
>>trying to preserve the fundamentals of their historical practice.
>>
>>I acknowledge that if Kevin is correct, and things have not changed as
>
> much
>
>>as I assert, then my thesis is flawed. But I have said why I do not share
>>that analysis. However I do agree with Kevin when he talks about the ways
>
> in
>
>>which educational institutions (as shaman before them) have engaged in
>>pracices of mystification
>>
>>Phillip Capper,
>>Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business Ltd. (WEB Research),
>>Level 13
>>114 The Terrace
>>(PO Box 2855)
>>WELLINGTON
>>New Zealand
>>
>>Ph: +64 4 499 8140
>>Fx: +64 4 499 8395
>>Mb: +64 021 519 741
>>
>>http://www.webresearch.co.nz
>>
>>
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Kevin Rocap [mailto:krocap@csulb.edu]
>>Sent: Tuesday, 9 July 2002 1:33 p.m.
>>To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>Subject: Re: FW: ISCRAT: Epistemic Activity
>>
>>
>>Dear Phillip et al,
>>
>>By your description Phillip can you really say that there are many more
>>ways of knowing today than in the past? Well maybe a few technologically
>>specific ways more ;-)
>>
>>But it seems to me that knowing and knowers were always already plural.
>>
>>The real hinge point seems, imho, to be the issue you raise of
>>privileged ways of knowing.
>>
>>But even there it seems to me historically that there may have been many
>>more acknowledged ways of knowing prior to the advent of schools than
>>may currently be widely acknowledged even today.
>>
>>It seems that it is not knowledge that has been democratized, but
>>perhaps rather that the awareness of how democratic knowing has always
>>been is coming to the fore, after a period of school-induced
>>mystification, and primarily coming to the fore for those who have up
>>until now rather safely inhabited and believed in the realm of
>>schools/colleges/universities as the appropriate sites for knowledge.
>>
>>So I would suggest that some of that awareness is likely fairly
>>class-bound, and that many folks who were never part of the privileged
>>academy did not tend to underestimate their own or others multiple ways
>>of knowing in the way academicians may have. Just a thought.
>>
>>In Peace,
>>K.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>
> --
> There is no hope of finding the sources of free action in the lofty
> realms of the mind or in the depths of the brain. The idealist approach
> of the phenomenologists is as hopeless as the positive approach of the
> naturalists. To discover the sources of free action it is necessary to
> go outside the limits of the organism, not into the intimate sphere of
> the mind, but into the objective forms of social life; it is necessary
> to seek the sources of human consciousness and freedom in the social
> history of humanity. To find the soul it is necessary to lose it.
> A.R. Luria
>
>
>
>
-- There is no hope of finding the sources of free action in the lofty realms of the mind or in the depths of the brain. The idealist approach of the phenomenologists is as hopeless as the positive approach of the naturalists. To discover the sources of free action it is necessary to go outside the limits of the organism, not into the intimate sphere of the mind, but into the objective forms of social life; it is necessary to seek the sources of human consciousness and freedom in the social history of humanity. To find the soul it is necessary to lose it. A.R. Luria
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