|
Follow up: 'Using New Technologies ...' article in the Creative Learning Exchange
Posted by Janis Dutton on 11/23/2009
In Reply To:Follow up: "Using New Technologies ..." article in the Creative Learning Exchange Posted by John F. Heinbokel on 11/20/2009
How ironic that, in replying to an article on using new technologies to further communication with the goal of building community, I absent-mindedly clicked "reply" rather than my intended "reply all."
I wasn't critiquing your writing or copy-editing skills. I was merely curious about your mental models underlying community expressed in the piece, and, in the interest of brevity, focused on the quotation-marked examples.
I think a discussion of what community means on this list could go a long way to help achieve the gains in the quantity of playmates AND the quality of interactions AND in joy and satisfaction you seek. I'm guessing others on the list seek it too. It's that shared vision thing.
What is the essence of community? What enables it? Diversity? Curiosity? What disables it? Exclusion? Certainty? Privilege?
Janis
On Nov 23, 2009, at 6:29 AM, john heinbokel wrote:
Mornin’ Janis. Thanks for weighing in and contributing to this. I just now realized that this was a ‘private’ note, not one posted to the whole K-12 list.
I appreciate your distinction between the two versions of ‘community.’ I probably shouldn’t speak for Jeff while he was working on the article, but, not having made the distinction between the two communities in my mind, I was almost certainly mixing and blending those meanings pretty indiscriminately and unawares. That may well explain the inconsistent use of quotes. At one level that was just symptomatic of our tendency to overuse quotes but not having uniformly cleaned up the prose before sending it to Lees. On the other, they likely reflect a bit of unconscious uncertainty on just what we did mean at any given point in the piece. In answer to a direct question, I don’t believe that community is impossible over distances; I doubt that I would have invested the time and energy on the article, or much that we continue to struggle with in our office and in collaboration with Lees, if we had given up hope. However, achieving gains in quantity of playmates AND the quality of our interactions AND the joy and satisfaction that arises from doing this education thing well/better (see I’m still mixing meanings!) has proven difficult, if not yet daunting.
Thanks again. Please feel free to share any of this with the greater listserve community. I took the liberty of cc’ing Lees, but will leave it to you how much further to pass it.
john
John F. Heinbokel
Partner, CIESD, LLP
Suite 185; 1 Mill Street
Burlington, VT 05401
jheinbokel@ciesd.org
http://www.ciesd.org
802.861.SysD = voice = 802.861.7973
802.861.IESD = fax = 802.861.4373
________________________________
________________________________________
From: Janis Dutton [mailto:jldutton@iac.net]
Sent: Friday, November 20, 2009 6:09 PM
To: jheinbokel@ciesd.org
Subject: Re: Follow up: "Using New Technologies ..." article in the Creative Learning Exchange
John and Jeff,
I enjoyed reading your article, and would like to offer some comments based on my work in community engagement.
John Dewey wrote that community has both a descriptive sense and a eulogistic or normative sense. The first sense is relatively simple to define, the second is more difficult because it is more abstract with a variety of interpretations, ideological meanings, and connotations. People's different mental models about the word can be confusing and get in the way of, well, creating community. It is a "virtue word" used to appeal to people's positive emotions. I also think it can be considered an "ideograph," defined by rhetorical scholar Michael McGee as "an ordinary-language term found in political discourse...a high order abstraction representing commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined goal."
You describe your community quite clearly, but I am left to bring my own meanings to the other. I find it interesting that in some sentences you encase the word community within quotation marks and in other sentences do not. I don't think you are using quotes to suggest you have your fingers crossed behind your back and don't really mean what you say about building community. I have to ask if, in your first paragraph and the last paragraph on page 8 where you use quotation marks, you are suggesting that the shared understanding of the meaning of community is yet to be articulated by your described community or that the essence of community is not possible across great distances?
So, when you express an interest in building community, are you seeking to increase the number of people in the bathtub (descriptive) or the quality of the interactions of the community you describe? What is community? What is anti-community?
I have been in many groups where people's different mental models about community created barriers to communication. And then there is the flip-side where people's mental models about the hierarchy and purpose of communication interfered with building community.
Janis Dutton
Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education.
McGee, M. (1980). The "Ideograph": A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology. The Quarterly Journal of Speech. Vol. 6 #1
See also: Roberts, C. (1999) Blinking Words. In The Dance of Change by Senge, et al.
|
