“The pupil is ’schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.” ~Ivan Illich

This article corresponds suspiciously well with an argument, er, discussion I was having with my friend over Easter weekend about education. Both of our dads are professors at the same college, and we were walking around said campus discussing education with regards to both church and school. I think the controversy started when he began insinuating that English (my field) was a “soft” major, because “anything you say is right,” where as his major was about facts and method. I started getting a real bee in my bonnet over that suggestion (of course) and started going into this spiel over how my humanities courses helped me to break free of all this dogma we have been indoctrinated/brainwashed with throughout elementary/junior/high school.
“But indoctrination is what education is supposed to be,” he said. “What else is there?”
::Enter Ivan Illich::
This article is the eloquently thought-out, fleshed-out version of my own response to my friend’s disturbing belief in the value and necessity of institutionalized values.

Say whhhat!!??
Yeah. I do not even know what to do about this one. I was hoping to glean a kernel of comprehension by reading my classmate’s posts about Viola’s essay, but it seems they are generally stumped as well. At least that makes me feel more comfortable admitting I didn’t get it. I hate having to admit stuff like that.

I’m sorry but I really don’t know. Heh…so! Umm…how about them there non-linear diagrams! The squiggly one was weird eh? The “Schizo Structure?”- that’s my mind on this article.

I glances over some of my classmates’ posts on the subject before actually reading the Morningstar/ Farmer article, and I have to say that for the most part, I am in agreement with Elizabeth: I’m not into video games, and I just don’t get it. The two authors, however, are clearly big into programming, and are not self-conscious to admit it, “…the details of the technology used to present this environment to its participants, while sexy and interesting, are of relatively peripheral concern” (664). HAHAH. Sexy huh? Guess I don’t see it.

I don’t want to look like one of those people who “knock something before they try it,” so I was trying to remember the last time (if ever) I had participated in any type of computer game universe. The nearest I have come was during my Pokemon fetish in middle school. That’s right. I’ll admit it- I spend hours and hours on my Gameboy color, wandering around a fake world, using an avatar and fake money to duel competitors. While most of the “people” I’d battle were already programmed by the game, you could use a cord to link to a friend’s Gameboy, and have your monsters duel! Boy that was the greatest. I had forgotten.

Middle school is over now, though. Yeah, stuff like this is amusing, but I can’t see myself ever taking a more sophisticated program (like Second Life) seriously. I think any adult who does proooobably doesn’t have enough going on in their real life, and they should focus on THAT. The LENGTHY discussion about DEATH and THE SHADOW spanning pages 674-675 was so…trivial! Why waste time moralizing over the fate of a fake gun! Honestly, there is real crime and real drama in the REAL WORLD, without us “escaping” into more of the same.

That was amazing! I love that McCloud’s article, or should I say comic, drew my attention to details about comics that I have never noticed or thought of! At home I read the comics everyday and yeah…I had never before considered the implications of the text, the shape of the cell, their very presence! Like McCloud mentions at some point, cartoons are designed to look deceptively simple. Makes me wonder how these cartoon artists can not only come up with a fresh/witty idea EVERYDAY, but also determine the best way to translate it visually: there are so many choices to be made. I had no idea. It was very eye-opening. When McCloud was describing the ways in which artists try to get their readers “involved” with the scene, I was reminded of “Maus” by Art Spiegelman. This was the first and last serious comic I had read until now. I think it was assigned to me during freshman year in high school. Anyway, as sacreligious as it sounds, the book is about the Holocaust, and depicts the Jews as anthropomorphized mice, with the Nazis as cats. Anyway, the book is still languishing on my shelf at home, and after reading “Time Frames,” I think it would be interesting to revisit “Maus” with a more critical eye.

Seymour Papert’s ideas about using computers to “turn every child into an epistemologist” were exciting! He said that essentially, by having children program computers- instead of having computers basically program them- children become not just active learners, but “active builders of their own intellectual structures.” By ‘teaching’ a computer how to think, they better understand their own minds. At first I wasn’t sure exactly how this would work. Fortunately, Papert’s illustration (of ordering and pairing beads as a metaphor for programming a computer) was perfect. It actually seems counterintuitive to say that doing something more abstract, like programming a computer, could help a child with more visual, concrete tasks such as findind every colored pair of beads with no repetitions. Wouldn’t…learning to make bead families help a child learn to program, not vice versa? It sounds like Papert wants to teach children to run before they walk. Not that I know anything about childhood education…it just seems strange.

The part of Papert’s thesis that I did applaud, however, was his idea that learning to program, “is learning to become highly skilled at isolating and correcting ‘bugs,’…The question to ask about the program is not whether is is right or wrong, but if it is fixable” (416). After being educated in the way that Papert suggests, children would, it seems, be more innovative and aggressive in their problem solving. It “changes out notion of a black and white version of success and failure,” (416) he says. Kids would learn not to immediately give up when they were ‘wrong,’ but to seek out new solutions. This is a very important idea to communicate to kids, because I would say that feeling like losers after getting the “wrong” answer is a problem that haunts all students, even college kids.