Tag: neo-luddite

Digital Futures?

As I introduce students in the UK to the joys of online readings through a virtual learning platform, students in Greece protest at the lack of books (yes, paper books …) available in cash-strapped high schools. Because of cut-backs, many schools can’t afford to supply textbooks in the ways in which they have always supplied them. Instead, they’ve turned to photocopies and CDs.

Now normally it would be students who photocopy/burn materials for study and easy exchange. There might be outcries from the authorities about copyright infringement, plagiarism and the like.  The symbolic act of schools doing the same though is not lost on the students in Greece. Their reply – equally symbolic – speaks to the cutbacks but also, perhaps, to the digitisation of their education. So easy to cutback when the digital can be re-produced at almost zero cost.

At the same time those students I introduced to their ‘online reader’ and who are beginning to explore the vast databases of resources available to them at the click of a mouse, (are made to) feel priviledged. I wonder, could we ever imagine a similar reaction to an ever more costly education produced at ever decreasing costs here in the UK?

 

Writing in ink

My eight year-old came home recently with a request. She needed an ink pen which she would start to use in October in her literacy classes. An ink pen. Only after pushing her on what she thought was meant did we arrive at the idea that  the teacher wanted her to have a fountain pen. I was pleasantly surprised. In a world dominated by the keyboard, Emily was to experience the craft of writing through flowing ink. She’ll have to master that flow, inscribing her thoughts in ways that will force her to develop her own individual style. That style will remain with her in a way that is denied in the ascquisition of ‘typing skills’ where the only individual variable (although fascinating for other reasons, font selection is only a choice amoung pre-selected standards) is speed.

Instead, she’ll struggle and eventually gain a fluency which will be her fluency. Allied to an idiolect (her idiosyncratic way of speaking) she’ll also have an … ‘idioscript’ through which she will express herself in writing. Whilst this might be a romantic throw-back, there is also evidence that connects the physical inscription of ink to paperwith developing the brain in unique and important ways.

Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says handwriting differs from typing because it requires executing sequential strokes to form a letter, whereas keyboarding involves selecting a whole letter by touching a key.

She says pictures of the brain have illustrated that sequential finger movements activated massive regions involved in thinking, language and working memory—the system for temporarily storing and managing information. (WSJ Oct. 5 2010)

 

So, Emily’s physical and cognitive development continues with fountain pen in hand. The question is: how long will she keep using it? Will it become, like so many of those activities which we begin at school only to subsequently give up, obsolete as she manipulates the next generation of digital inputing devices? And if so, what will her brain lose in the process?

John Coffer

John Coffer lives on a fifty acre farm three miles outside of Dundee, New York. Home is a wood cabin. Aside from various subsistence activities on the farm John is also a master and teacher of wetplate photography. I learnt about his life from Ben Wu and David Usu who made this film about him:

COFFER from thismustbetheplace on Vimeo.

It’s a beautiful visual reflection on the nature of home. At one point John Coffer considers the role of technology in his life:

I’ve kind of created a hybrid situation where there are some things I continue to do the old nineteenth century way. Some things may be the way it was done before Christ. But then there are cutting edge high tech that I have here and do. I have  wind generator, solar panels, a laptop computer how you can blend the old timeless things with the latest technology to do the things that need to be done in life. I think there are going to be more people looking back for models from the past and use it to blend in with new ideas and technology today.

Here’s someone who thinks clearly about the value of all technologies and particularly their costs – and makes decisions on that basis. It’s a slightly modified, moderate version of the Amish philosophy where the adoption of the new is considered in terms of its impact on the community. It’s akin to Kevin Kelly’s aspiration of finding the minimum amount of technology to maximise his options.

 

Nicholas Carr: Get on my lawn, kids

the young are still the enemies of uniformity, and the Internet, as it extends its reach into all the nooks and crannies of our days, is looking more and more like an enormous conduit of conventionality. What are Facebook and Google but giant institutions, arms of the new establishment? What are smartphones if not high-tech leashes? Today, online databases hold more information about us than could fit on a mile-high stack of punch cards. Some kind of rebellion seems in order.

via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Get on my lawn, kids.

‘Of course there’s a new luddism!’ Shirky

RJ: I recently talked to an author who was afraid that we’re slipping into some kind of contemporary Dark Age. Are we seeing a new Luddism?

CS: Of course there’s a new Luddism! There’s always a new Luddism whenever there’s change. I mean, Luddism is specifically a demand that the people who benefited from the old system be consulted before any technology is allowed to disrupt it. That’s what the Luddites wanted. And they wanted it in the most violent, murderously direct way possible. But, to say, essentially, that the change should be stopped because it’s disrupting previous value is exactly Luddite. I mean, no one is anti-technology in general times, right? The use of Luddism as a description for anti-technology is ridiculous. What Luddites are is anti-change, and, in particular, they are anti-change in a way that discomforts the beneficiaries of the previous system.

via cjr.org