http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=44739&page=1&pp=15

The peanut gallery, the self-conscious pretentiousness of some of the futerati, the lack of a sound track, the lack of a point when presentations are wrapped in all this glittery, shiny cyber stuff. I wish the Saloners would just come IW and type like the rest of us. Just one time. Then fool around with all that other stuff if they can get it to work. On their blogs and elsewhere, I made note of this article in “The New Republic” about the demise of the book and “book-learning” and it isn’t at all the rosy picture you’d imagine since the premise is: you miss a lot.

https://ssl.tnr.com/p/docsub.mhtml?i=20050502&s=bell050205 (you need a subscription to view)

http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2005/04/reading_without.html (need to download the TK3 reader to view)

Especially that slide depicting academics as literate…if anything academics may well be some of the least literate people on the planet, given their prediliction for writing papers littered with technobabble and gobblygook, usually to impress their equally (il)literate peers.

I made a few peanut gallery posts, in particular a reference to a book that focuses on the decline of the english language through silo obfuscation lingo (dang!…see, I can do it too!)
http://shop.abc.net.au/browse/product.asp?productid=503717
“The book charts how “managerial language” has infiltrated the English of politics, business, bureaucracy, education and the arts. The book is about the rise of core strategies and key performance indicators, and the death of clarity and irony and funny old things called verbs. It is about a new language that Watson calls sludge and clag and gruel. Those three blunt words speak to the book’s larger intention. Death Sentence is also a manifesto, the first shots, Watson hopes, in a campaign everyone can join to bring the language back to life.” The Age, Nov. 2003″

That said, I fully agree with clarks approach to learning and simulations, and I hope to read more about his clarifications of “post-literacy” and the “death of books”…

God Save the Queen…:-)

I think ‘literate’ is just a verbal badge of honor that we give to people that we want to celebrate for their having a certain skill-set, which makes Clark’s position seem all the more bizarre. You aren’t literate because you store a bunch of sentences in your head. You are literate when you you have an important basket of skills which allow you to extract information and acquire abilities from various forms of written communication, and probably we could extend that idea to graphical communications as well.

At the end of the day books are just tools for communicating that take advantage of the real world knowledge and abilitites that we already have in place. I don’t think most people appreciate this and I’m pretty sure that Clark doesn’t appreciate it either.

Now as you can imagine, having taught at the university level in some capacity or other since 1983 I’ve experimented a lot with different teaching styles, techniques, and tools, and universities are constantly trying to get us to experiment with newfangled educational technologies. I can’t speak for anyone else, but in the case of teaching abstract subects like philosophy those technologies have been utter failures for me (I can’t speak for other subjects or teachers), and I think I know why they don’t work for me.

The problem, paradoxically, is that these new technologies that are supposed to be so newfangled and all are in fact quite retrograde in their underlying philosophy of the nature of the human learning experience. They are primarily concerned with pushing information, typically graphical information, at students. But the problem isn’t finding ways to package information, the problem is establishing a learning community with the student, and in large measure this means establishing a brand new micro-language with the classroom. Existing technologies are woefully bad at this for the simple reason that the basic science does not exist which allows us to understand how good teachers and good students collaborate in the construction of these micro-languages and the formation of their learning communities. Pushing machines at the problem is not only hopeless, it is a gigantic step backwards.

But then again, I haven’t read Clark’s books on learning, nor for that matter, have I read much of anything on the topic of teaching. I learned all this by doing it.

Oh and yeah, the Herald is an example of a brand that has moved into a new MMORPG. “Yesterday TSO, Today SL, tomorrow the World!” That’s the secret motto that we don’t put on the banner.

Couple of quick things. Clark and Julian have both agreed to do follow-up phone interviews and take unanswered questions from the Salon. I’ll be sure to include the issues you all raise here. Let me know if you have more.

On the comments regarding Clark’s research and presentation, some of them are a liiiiittle “fairly unbalanced” considering the awkward format he got caught in (like Uri points out with his Thinkers experience, it’s hard to get complex ideas across in a sea of chat, so I would point you to his pretty prolific writings (yes writing!) elsewhere online or most conveniently this audio recording). In everything I’ve heard and read, Clark focuses on fixing the gaps between school/training and the professional world, and what people know vs. what they do. He doesn’t focus on making books disappear but he does focus on why the status of book as penultimate learning tool is changing*. As a 23 y/o recent college graduate and avid book reader who’s now out there learning to do things “for real,” his slide with the “Infatuation with Books” axis really resonated with me, maybe because I didn’t take “post-literate”, well, too literally . The upcoming phone conversation should clarify things more, and I’ll be sure to ask him for pointers to his hard data, too.

*On this idea I’m also looking forward to getting my hands on Steven Johnson’s “Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter”. From an editorial review: “Worried about how much time your children spend playing video games? Don’t be, advises Johnson—not only are they learning valuable problem-solving skills, they’d probably do better on an IQ test than you or your parents could at their age…”

Switching subjects to Salon use and access, it’s interesting to hear how different people experienced it. Tony had his chat window nearly covering his whole screen, for example, and Uri walked away from his machine when the audio kicked in. I think that’s great, and we’ll expand and keep a variety of content and participation options open, some of which don’t involve direct use of SL at all. The Salons are already at a point where you can experience them 1. fully in Second Life 2. live on the Web in video and chat or just plain audio 3. after the fact in audio downloads and chat logs, or any combination of all three. Yes we had some audio roughness at the beginning of last Salon, but dude, when this thing is streamlined it’s gonna be suh-weet. Suggestions, constructive criticism, and volunteers much appreciated.

Lastly, regarding Betsy’s presentation where she asked for examples of a virtual world-grown brand transferring from one VW to another, I think I’ve got one that might count. Can you guess what it is? (Hint: the Herald, w00t!

what is interesting to me about the experience described in the article above was the idea that its real hard to communicate ideas in the IM/chat context. that idea is interesting because it defines a boundary around what you can and can not talk about.

Ironically, I think his argument would have been carried off better if it HADN’T been reduced to a blurb by the format, something what else but a *book* is good for.

But nonetheless really engaging… I’m with Tony that Jerry, the techies, and the speakers deserve madd props, and I’m looking forward to future future (?) salons.

This being said, I don’t want to minimize the efforts of Paffendorf and his merry band. They’ve done great work putting these discussions together and I look forward to more.

The other point is that they confused learning through books with converying knowlege through books. One can learn through doing, but that locks the future into an apprentice-journeyman-expert model that is mostly and thankfully, in our distant past.

Not being able to hear the audio gave me somewhat of a biased view of what was being presented. Are we next going to have a session for the blind?