On Saturday, we went to Baltimore to take pictures for Craig’s photography class. But…we didn’t have any film. It is not an easy thing to find black & white film without prior planning, but through various phone calls home where my brother is online 24/7, and we were directed to an area where we might find film.

Sunday was also devoted to image collecting, in Tenleytown…where Craig wanted to take some photos of the radio towers there. Then we went to Krupin’s Deli for lunch, which is, to my knowledge, the only Jewish deli in DC and if it’s not the only one, I’m sure it’s the best one.

At the table next to us, there was a mixed table of about 4 adults and 4 or 5 kids. The kids’ conversation was like listening to an Edward Albee play.
“Cool, he sacked the quarterback!”
“M is for Matthew”
“What’s that mean?”
“Who ordered coke?”
“Is it diet?”
“no”
“S is for Saving Money”
“Is it diet?”
“Did you put your mouth on this?”
“ew”
“they tackled the quarterback”
“Joe! look at Joe’s face. Look at Joe’s face. He’s making a funny face. Look at Joe.”
“Is it contaminated?”
“You don’t even know what contaminated means”
“Yes, I do. It means someone put their hands on it.”

And with that one of the moms there paid attention and said immediately:
“That’s not what contaminated means. It means…”
and she gave a very technical description, like what you’d find in the dictionary.

I have a habit of often responding to someone’s paraphrasing with “No, that’s not it. ” And then I’ll go on to describe exactly what the person said, in a slightly different way. It just wasn’t exact enough.

And I thought, if that mom had said instead, “wow, I’ve never thought of it that way before. It can also mean this…” …the tone of that entire exchange would have been different. But it’s hard, when you’ve spent your entire life working on getting at the exact meaning, to appreciate the subleties of meaning that other people have to offer.

I haven’t exactly been sitting around twiddling my thumbs, but once out of the habit of posting, it’s hard to get back in. Last weekend I attended the Patterson Research Conference in Washington DC to explore issues in education since Brown v. the Board of Education. Apparently, not enough has changed. There I presented a poster on digital equity with an emphasis on guiding students, learners, anyone to develop content that is culturally relevant to their lives and experiences as well as their community. In practice, this would include projects such as digital storytelling (a popular buzzword right now), video, creating websites of community resources and information.

By the time I got back from the conference, I was in high speed catchup for the next week. So I will be back to reflecting on Habermas tomorrow…

While waiting for my copies of Habermas’ Theories of Communicative Action to arrive, I am attempting to get started by reading analyses of his theories in order to familiarize myself with some of the concepts. I am starting with the first chapter of Language and Reason by Maeve Cooke, published in 1994.
Moving through the chapter, what caught my attention was the description of a dialogue between Habermas and Walter Benjamin where Habermas addresses the difficulty of Benjamin’s concept of “secular illumination,” which is closely intertwined with the “redemption of tradition” (17).

The quote goes on to say,
<em><blockquote>”Now it is true that hte liberation of culture is not possible without overcoming the repression anchored in institutions. Yet, for a moment, one is beset by suspicion: wouldn’t it be just as possible to have an emancipation without happiness or fullfilment as it is to have a relatively high standard of living without the abolition of oppression” (18). </blockquote></em>

This is exactly the sort of quandary I have been contemplating with my dissertation pilot exploring attitudes of immigrants to multi-media technology. First, why is technology intertwined with a belief that it will only do good things for people who are exposed to it? Second, how does this new technology, which has already steam-rolled over traditions of western, “developed” nations (and in fact to use “steam-rolled” is rather deterministic isn’t it? We have, for the most part welcomed technological progress, embraced it for all that it does for humanity, and turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the resulting complications our new technologies bring.

And what is most troubling is that very few people question the machine. As a designer and instructional technologist, the hardest thing to get people to really hear is that machines are NOT going to solve problems or save money necessarily. The larger system, the process for how things are done is the whole sum of technology, and without carefully taking into account people, throwing a bunch of hardware and software at a problem is essentially useless.

Maybe I should title thisdawn breaks over marble head.

What got me motivated to start a blog is a symposium I attended at Ed-Media 2004 in Lugano Switzerland (see picture above). The symposium was conducted by two Sebastians and an Adrian, with several others billed on the program. I had never considered before using a blog for one’s own learning growth.

Of course I haven’t exactly done that effectively so far.

I also met Aldo de Moor in Tilburg, the Netherlands and he was very helpful and friendly and enthusiastic about virtual communities.

But now here’s an interesting question—how does one become part of a community without being presumptuous? I am not as interested in discussing how a blog works on a blog as much as talking about whatever comes to my mind?

So I’m also thinking about how to organize the blog—maybe I should code my posts by topic? Some blogs I find so confusing because they seem to lack order—but maybe calendar-wise isn’t the best way for me to organize. And how to go about finding a community?