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<div>Hello iDCers,</div><div><br></div><div>it's wonderful to read all of your introductions and to hear about all of the excellent work you are all doing. Mobility Shifts certainly looks to be a great event. </div><div><br></div><div>May I take the liberty of nudging this listserv back towards conversation and follow up with a few thoughts and questions?</div><div><br></div><div>In your post, Elizabeth, you say, in reference to your book about the disconnect between the academic learning establishment and socially networked students:</div><div><br></div><div>"Each side is not really fighting the other, I argue both opponents are actually conducting an incredibly destructive war on learning itself."</div><div><br></div><div>Is this simply because so much energy is being wasted on defining the terms of this conflict? Or is it a deeper failure of both parties, as you see it? </div><div><br></div><div>Because while I definitely agree that there is a war under way in education, personally I see it as an epistemological as opposed to a pedagogical one. Not an attack on learning or even a conflict between pedagogical models so much as a conflict between different - and in many respects incompatible - knowledge systems. To my mind the intransigence of educational institutions is based on their deeply entrenched allegiance to a literate epistemology that is hundreds of years old, and the crux of the emerging crisis is not that students have access to new networked technologies but that as a result of their having such access they do not define knowledge the same way as their teachers. </div><div><br></div><div>No doubt you have addressed this in your book to some extent, but I wanted to probe a bit deeper on this subject, and also to raise it in relation to the many other interesting projects that have been described in various introductions here, like Anya's ebooks (Anya, when will these come out please? I would love to read them), as well as Kiko's ambitious escuelab, Nishant's activist Digital Natives With a Cause, Michael's inspired visionsofstudents.org, Cathy's revealing research on attention, etc. </div><div><br></div><div>I would ask any of you to feel free to respond to these practical thoughts about epistemology and how it informs the new pedagogical models you are exploring. I am particularly interested in hearing about any situations in which epistemologies collide in the real world. In Peru and India, for example, I wonder if you have found that in doing outreach using innovative digitally-driven learning models that what the students end up learning unexpectedly challenges (or reinforces) other social power structures? That what is being learned is fundamentally different from what was being learned in the traditional academic context? I'm curious to hear if you have any concrete examples of this.</div><div><br></div><div>I would just add that I see this as a very common sort of event, this kind of epistemological collision. We see it for example in the academic context which certifies published peer-reviewed research as more 'true' than, say this listserv post, or in the scientific insistence that only what can be objectively reproduced counts as 'true', which de facto excludes all 'anecdotal' or 'subjective' insight into the nature of the world as not true. And of course these sorts of epistemological determinations have profound consequences at the political and economic levels, in terms of what can be owned and by whom, such as a patent on a human gene, or the copyright on a sound or image, or whether or not a treaty is enforceable, or whether or not Julien Assange is a journalist, etc. etc.</div><div><br></div><div>All comments welcome...</div><div><br></div><div>Regards,</div><div>John Sobol</div><div>--</div><div>www.johnsobol.com</div><div><a href="mailto:john@johnsobol.com">john@johnsobol.com</a></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><br><div><div>On 27-Jun-11, at 9:07 PM, Anya Kamenetz wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; "><div>Hello!<br>I'm intrigued by the goings-on on this list and excited to join you in the fall.</div> <div>My somewhat unusual entree into the topic of education was as a freelance writer in my early 20s writing about the effect of student loans on young people. I published a book (Riverhead, 2006), and two columns, one in the Village Voice and later on Yahoo! Finance, all titled Generation Debt, all dealing</div> <div>with generational economics and politics including student loan policy. Message: the system is broken.</div><div><br></div><div>This led to my first job at Fast Company magazine where I ended up covering technology and innovation, with an emphasis on social entrepreneurship and sustainability. The two streams merged when I published </div> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">DIY </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">(Chelsea Green, 2010) which investigated the roots of the cost, access, and </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">quality crises in higher education as well as innovations to address these crises. Message: the system can be fixed, or maybe we'll just make a new system! </span><div> <font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;"><br></span></font></div><div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">DIY U was researched and written in conversation with an amazing community of thinkers such as yourselves. So were two forthcoming followups:</span></font><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; "> Learning, Freedom and </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">the Web, funded by the Mozilla Foundation, and The Edupunks Guide, funded by the Gates Foundation. Both are free ebooks. LFW, which will also be available print-on-demand, glances over the scene of makers and hackers using openness and technology to transform learning. The Edupunks Guide is a hands on manual for people without a lot of cash who want the shortest path to an education that will transform their lives.</span></div> <div><font class="Apple-style-span" face="arial, sans-serif"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse;">I have a </span></font><b>Fast Company column</b> <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/user/anya-kamenetz" target="_blank">Life In Beta</a>, a <b>Tribune Media column</b> <a href="http://www.tmsfeatures.com/columns/business/personal-finance/savings-game/" target="_blank">The Savings Game</a>, my b<b>ook is found here</b> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/DIY-Edupunks-Edupreneurs-Transformation-Education/dp/1603582347" target="_blank">DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education </a>, I <b>Blog</b> <a href="http://diyubook.com/" target="_blank">DIYUbook.com </a> and <b>Twitter </b><a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/anya1anya" target="_blank">@Anya1anya</a>. </div> <div><br></div><div>A</div><div><br> </div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">_______________________________________________</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">iDC -- mailing list of the Institute for Distributed Creativity (distributedcreativity.org)</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="mailto:iDC@mailman.thing.net">iDC@mailman.thing.net</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc">https://mailman.thing.net/mailman/listinfo/idc</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">List Archive:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/">http://mailman.thing.net/pipermail/idc/</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">iDC Photo Stream:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/idcnetwork/</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">RSS feed:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc">http://rss.gmane.org/gmane.culture.media.idc</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">iDC Chat on Facebook:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647">http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2457237647</a></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Share relevant URLs on Del.icio.us by adding the tag iDCref</div> </blockquote></div><br></body></html>