homoLudens

Terry Elliot is baying on a wiki scent. I should be sniffing out
Tinderbox and I will, I will, as soon as jetlag eases a bit. Meanwhile,
just what hunt are we on?

We’ve got knowledge and experience about teaching writing. (Doing
it in public, urban schools is what interests me professionally. Sure, private schools and home-schooling
count. Teaching writing isn’t the sole preserve of a democratic
commons.) We know less
about how to teach writing while using digital tools. Blog posting
isn’t writing; it’s publishing. Writing happens before the ‘post’ button gets clicked. Good writing is more than news, more
than pointers, but benefits from news and pointers. Good writing is
re-writing. What digital tools especially help us re-write?

Here are some disruptive challenges from Xanadu’s Ted Nelson’s dated (2000) but resonant essay, Where our hypermedia should really go.
It’s old news to many, but new to me in k-12 land. He argues that
“the real problem [for computer development] is how to create
parallel mechanisms for the deep  consideration of alternative
structure.”

• He bluntly dismisses the paradigm (’big idea’) of hierarchical design: “The point is that we have
  fetishized hierarchy as a kind of structure, thinking that this is a real
  structure, which  is preposterous???”
• Then, describing a Japanese colleague’s request for a database tool
  that would help him do complex historical research, he offers a simple example of the problem with hierarchical structure:
  “???the data
  base guy said to him, ‘oh you need to decide in advance what all of
  your fields are going to be.’ That is how it is in the data base world,
  you have to  decide all of that in advance. I guess thatís how
  they
  feel about theirs. For some of us, ideas keep  changing. You have
  to be able to change those fields all the time.” [emphasis added]
• And finally he pushes a BAWP
  mirror up to my face with these thoughts about writing and what writing
  wants from a digital tool: “Similarly, the problem about writing,
  is about re-writing. Especially
  re-writing???. if you are doing a novel, a book of history, an
  encyclopedia,
  the issue is not the fiddly little stuff you can do on a small window
  on
  the screen. The issue is how to massively rearrange, and keep track of
  large pieces of content. Anybody who has done this knows it has
  nothing to do with word processing [or blogging], as presently
  constituted. It
  has to do with being able to find all of the pieces. Being able to
  keep 
  track of where they were in previous documents and rearrange them.”

more…