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October 30, 2006
From Hangzhou
They made your day.
Posted by Xiao at 07:56 PM | Comments (0)
October 28, 2006
After completing a new route
up the face of Leaning Tower......
God must be a climber. Why else would He create such fantastic lines and features in remote places that tourists never dream of entering? He created them for people like Todd who in his early climbing years lived out of a tepee for months at a time, just to be near the rock. Who didn't have an apartment for 7 years because he was "looking for a rock with a future." -- from a vibrant soul.
Posted by Xiao at 06:21 PM | Comments (0)
October 26, 2006
北京访客
飘忽的思绪
Posted by Xiao at 05:47 PM | Comments (0)
October 25, 2006
“在人间“
网上偶遇
佛光山人
Posted by Xiao at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)
October 23, 2006
HotSourp
From Post-realism & Emerging Identities:
Anyone interested in issues of identity and discourse owes it to themselves to visit HOTSOUP!
Posted by Xiao at 09:46 PM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2006
One after another
Class is over.
Evening begins.
Posted by Xiao at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)
October 18, 2006
西游后记
"一切都结束了，终于我把脚踩在了如来佛祖的身上。看着佛殿下七倒八歪的十八罗汉和神志不清的观音菩萨我知道我胜了，曾经将我压在五指山的如来佛祖现在趴在我脚下。 出佛殿我走向天庭，各路神仙让开道路，他们手中的兵器随着身体不停的颤抖，两眼中我看到了恐怖。踏入天庭，一片混乱。玉帝老儿哆哆嗦嗦的蹲在成千上万的天兵天将身后，他抱着头，背着身，胡言乱语。四周一片死寂，只有我的脚步声才能证明这一切都是真的，我进，众神退，我进，众神退。"
"忽然我转身离去，任身后的他们惊恐而莫名其妙的注视。我该离去了，要做的事情已经做完了，可是我并不感到兴奋与快乐，相反一股莫名的失落袭卷全身。不可质疑我再也找不到对手了，天界至高无上的如来佛祖已经败倒在脚下，我已经所向无敌了，目的达到了。
自从被压在五指山下第一天，我就发誓一定要将如来踩在脚下，定让他体会一下被压制的感觉。那种感觉至今难以忘怀，我不能跳，不能飞，不能去自己想去的地方，虽然有生命，却像个没有魂魄的皮囊。清楚的记得我只能鸟儿在头顶盘旋，而不能同它嬉戏，身边的果树挂满鲜红的果实，却不能塞进嘴中大口的品尝。那种无法形容的痛苦像千万条毒蛇钻入我的身体咀嚼着五脏六腑，还有一些竟然深入血管中，它们无日无夜的扭动，无时无刻不牵动着我抽搐。那时如来像一张无形的网笼罩着我整个天空，我告诉自己一定要冲破这网寻回自由，一定要。
唐僧的出现使我看到了希望，看到那张网出现了裂痕。在护送唐僧西行的路上我斩妖除魔无数，败在金箍棒下的妖怪有威猛厉害的，也有不堪一击的。唐僧称赞我积极向上，肯定会感动佛祖，立地成佛。可我知道，我不会让佛祖感动，更不会成为佛，之所以如此的疯狂完全是为了锻炼自己，通过和不同的妖魔鬼怪战斗来精湛自己的武功，我要强大起来，必须强大起来，因为还有一张网紧紧的束缚着我。
直到取得真经，我也并没能真正的杀死几个妖怪，因为每当我的金箍棒就要砸在它们的头上时菩萨们便会出现，他们会满怀歉意的告诉我，那些妖怪是他们的宠物、坐骑、侍童什么的，还会一本正经的骂上几句，然后大喊一声：“孽畜，还不快快现出原形！”便腾云驾雾的离开。我曾一度认为去西天的意义根本就是为那些佛祖找回逃走的宠物、坐骑和侍童们，我就像条拥有灵敏嗅觉的狗，顺着妖怪们发出的恶臭匍匐前进。后来我才知道那些妖魔鬼怪的存在完全是为了给我们西行增添困难，说好听点就是磨练我们的意志。当知道这一切全是由如来佛祖一人策划的时候，我为之一惊，意识到这张网的可怕，他竟然可以随意派遣几个小神仙落到凡间化为妖怪与我争斗，又可以轻描淡写的解决这一切，然后仍能坐在高高的佛殿上看着下面无数向他跪拜的神佛微笑。整个西行完全掌握在他的手中，而我只是一条网中垂死挣扎的小鱼。我开始感到恐惧，对如来佛祖无法形容的强大恐惧，但这恐惧又让我异常的兴奋，好像看到一头凶猛的猎豹见到了一块血淋淋的鹿肉。
功德圆满后我开始潜心修炼，仙术、武功甚至佛法都是我每天修炼的课程。当每个神仙乐悠悠享受天国安逸的时候，我却在做枯燥的修炼。我是一只猴子，出生在一块顽固的石头中，虽然他们称我为战斗佛。但我不想做佛，佛是什么？佛就是如来，他掌握一切喜怒哀乐，他不停的制造痛苦，微笑着导演生命的完结。我不要做佛，佛是残忍的，所有的生灵全部控制在他们的手中，生与死在他们眼里只不过是简单的轮回。佛，石头。
终于我杀进了佛殿中，金箍棒使十八罗汉卧地不起，金箍棒把观音菩萨砸的神志不清，如来躺在我的脚下，可我看不到他痛苦，他只是不停的微笑，那种笑声使我感到孤独，使我感到失落。这是为什么呢？我已经胜了，我打败了如来，我应该感到高兴啊。
前面一片火红，红的刺眼，就像身上斑斑血迹。这是哪里？出奇的熟悉，四处红光包围着我，我好像回到了那颗顽固的石头中。这大概是天的尽头吧，如果踏出一步会怎么样的？我决定试一试，我踏入火红的尽头。
好美，好暖和。忽然我看到自己的身体慢慢破裂，一小片一小片的，它们雀跃着、换叫着，象是回到了阔别已久的家乡。慢慢的、慢慢的，它们融入火般的红色中……"
－－ 作者：蒙牛
Posted by Xiao at 04:25 PM | Comments (0)
October 17, 2006
Emergent Information Architecture
The spectrum goes from implicit, meaning derived from user behavior but not consciously created by the user, to explicit, meaning consciously created by the user.
Algorithmic refers to the kind of emergent information architecture witnessed on Amazon, with tools such as “People who bought X also bought…” and the Page You Made. Amazon keeps track of everything everyone does, and the underlying information architecture evolves to reflect that.
Tags seem to me as a hybrid. They’re explicit in that people have to engage in some explicit act of applying the tag. They’re implicit because the aggregate of that tagging leads to folksonomies and other social metadata that starts making connections between information that was not there before. Flickr takes this one step further (and back towards “algorithmic”) with clusters (my favorite being “pitcher“).
Wikis represent an extremely explicit mode of emergent information architecture. No connections or relationship between information exist without users making them themselves. What’s fascinating to me is how communities self-regulate in such a way that this doesn’t lead to a linked-out mess. Lostpedia demonstrates strong organizational principles, yet allows the freedom for users to pretty much do as they will.
Posted by Xiao at 10:42 AM | Comments (0)
October 15, 2006
Center for Collective Intelligence
Here is the new center:
While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities.
Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?
Posted by Xiao at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)
October 13, 2006
Large scale collective action
Marc came to the class today, talked about AURA:
"The biggest success stories on the web are all the product of large scale collective action. Systems like eBay, Amazon, Wikipedia, file sharing networks, and Usenet are all created by a large population of loosely coordinated individuals.
These systems highlight the capacity of information technology, networking, and mobile devices to significantly alter the nature of collective action, common goods, and individual rewards.
......The related AURA project is an effort to link online conversations to the objects and locations to which many are related. Using AURA today, users can scan the barcodes on everyday objects in the home, office, or store and gain access to related information and services such as competitive pricing and product reviews. Other kinds of tags, such as tags placed on art or equipment asset tags, can be easily linked to related data through Web sites or Web service interfaces."
Posted by Xiao at 01:38 PM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2006
村上的章鱼
“住在深海底下的巨大章鱼，拥有强壮的生命力，张舞着许多长脚，往黑暗的海中某个地方前进。......那家伙可以采取各种形式。有时候采取所谓国家的形式，有时候采取所谓法律的形式。也可以采取更复杂，更麻烦的形式。你怎样切，怎样斩，他都会重新再张出脚来。谁也没有办法杀死那家伙。因为实在太强悍了，实在住在太深的地方了。你连他的心脏到底在那里都不知道。“
“还有就是，不管你逃到多远的地方，都不可能逃的过他，类似这种绝望感。这家伙啊，丝毫不会为人设想，我是我，你是你之类的事情。在那家伙面前，所有的人都失去了名字，失去了脸，我们全都变成了微不足道的记号和号码了。“
Posted by Xiao at 09:51 PM | Comments (0)
October 10, 2006
$1.6 billion worth communities
This is news:
"YouTube figured out what Google and Yahoo and Microsoft and all the others in the marketplace didn't," Li said. "It's not about the video. It's about creating a community around the video."
Posted by Xiao at 05:32 PM | Comments (0)
Pattern language and collaboration - Wiki
Eugene's words:
(1) permission to participate - "edit this page"
(2) visible pulse: on wiki - recent changes
(3) spotlight on others - notion of BarnStar
(4) Link as you think - link to a concept which is not exist, as long as you have a name.
Posted by Xiao at 10:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 09, 2006
Google Freedom?
From Google Blogoscoped Forum:
Maybe NOW they will have time to work on Google Freedom? That of course would be the smart browser add-on which would try many, many methods to route search and web traffic for sites and words banned in China. It would update itself frequently to add new methods as the dictators discover and block existing methods. Google would determine all sites which are blocked in any way (including those Google censors) and create temporary mirrors of the content, encrypt the content, and transfer the content. Thus, search for "human rights in China", and the famously banned hric.org would be mirrored to a randomly-created IP address, and delivered in encrypted form to the end user in China or elsewhere.
A team of Google engineers would invest at least 10% of gross revenue from Google.cn operations into this research and development.
Posted by Xiao at 08:35 PM | Comments (0)
October 08, 2006
Spice of Life
Posted by Xiao at 05:29 PM | Comments (0)
October 04, 2006
残戟
秋意又起
未消之铁
仍然静待着杀机
Posted by Xiao at 05:28 PM | Comments (0)
October 03, 2006
Barn Raising: Collaborative Group Process in Seminars
In the classrooms of higher education, the seminar is a puzzling phenomenon. Most teachers understand what to do with a lecture and, usually, what causes its success or failure. But the seminar is another matter. Most instructors aren't sure what a good one ought to look like, and, even if we did know, how to accomplish that. The problem is both technical and attitudinal. It seems intuitively clear that a seminar ought not to be a question-and-answer session, though often it is. Conversely, the implication is that it should be conversation among the students in which the participation is widespread and the teacher is just another participant, or else in some way a facilitator of the discussion. But what sort of conversation? Experience teaches that when it is not a question-and-answer session, it is either aimless drifting ("just a bull-session" in the students words) or an argument.
"Well," the reader might ask, "what's wrong with a good argument? It keeps people on their toes, forces them to have prepared and punishes those who haven't thought through their ideas. A boxing match is fast and aggressive or it is dull. Isn't that true of an intellectual conversation, as well?" This paper will take the position that the boxing match is not the best possible model for a seminar. "But," our reader might reasonably object, "for two hundred years the European and American tradition of education has been that students must be challenged to sharpen their thinking. They must continually test the validity of their ideas by exposing them in combat. The classroom is a dueling school in which one's most basic weapons are sharpened for the battle of life."
We would like to suggest:
1. The classroom battle is not a good way to teach thinking.
2. Even if it were, it makes idea-conversation so unpleasant that students do their best to avoid it, in college and afterwards.
3. It is a significant contribution to the building of a society of contention and enmity.
4. And, as an alternative, there is another way to talk about ideas which obviates those difficulties.
The model we are about to offer is not a boxing match but rather a group of builders constructing a building together or a group of artists fabricating a creation together. Anyone who believes the old aphorism that no work of art was ever made by a committee has never attended a good jam session.
It is not hard to imagine why the fight model has clung so in American education. For one thing, it has had the support of much of academic psychology. The motivation psychologists have taught for many years that moderate arousal is good for performance and that the source of the arousal is irrelevant. While acknowledging that a lot of fear or anger would paralyze the student, psychologists have steadfastly maintained that a little bit of adrenaline is what keeps things alive and that moderate amounts of fear and anger are perfectly acceptable ways of generating it. In the old rat labs of Yale and Iowa all drives were the same and could be added and subtracted to each other. That tradition has died hard. The truth of the matter is that there is absolutely no evidence that fear or anger in any quantity enhances complex mental activity and there is plenty of evidence that it interferes with it. There is no question but that moderate arousal is necessary to keep the students awake. But it matters considerably which drive generates that arousal. If fear and anger are not useful, what would do? Well, breaking down of old cognitive structures is arousal; so is the excitement of working at an intellectual task; so is the joy of building a structure with collaborators.
Football coaches are apt to get a lineman angry before a game; all he has to do is beat hell out of the guy across from him. But coaches have cause for concern if the quarterback is angry. The quarterback needs all his smarts; he cannot afford the functional cortical damage caused by the mid-brain firing off the fear and anger signals. So we are going to offer here a collaborative model for the seminar.
Before describing how to go about setting up a more effective seminar, we will quote from an earlier paper which describes three dysfunctional kinds of seminar and then describe our fourth model. The four are
. . . the Free-for-All, the Beauty Contest, the Distinguished House Tour, and the Barn-Raising. We think they go in that order toward being progressively freer from our cultural liabilities, and consequently, that they go in that order toward being progressively richer styles of intellectual conversation.
Free-for-All-In this seminar there is a prize to be won, whether it's the instructor's approval or one's self esteem. There is no other goal but to win. If fighting fair won't win, then one fights in whatever way will win. One wins not simply by looking smart, but by looking smarter. Thus, important as it is to look smart, it is equally important to make the others look dumb.
Beauty Contest-This is the seminar in which each idea is paraded in all its finery, seeking admiration. When it has been displayed, its sponsor withdraws to think up the next idea, paying little attention to the next contestant. Thus, each person's ideas bear little or no relation to anyone else's.
Distinguished House Tour-Similarly, the Distinguished House Tour seminar begins with one member advancing an idea. The other students spend some time exploring that idea as they might an interesting house. They ask questions and look for inconsistencies, trying hard to understand the conception. When they have a good grasp of it, someone offers another idea and the seminar members explore that. Just as gracious hosts don't compare houses or claim one is better, each idea is thought to be interesting in its own right. This is a high form of discourse and can produce a good seminar. It also has some problems.
In our early work we had thought that the Distinguished House Tour was the most advanced seminar. It is, after all, the Socratic dialogue. Socrates invites a friend to adopt a position and then incisively questions that position. Gradually, we learned from our own experience what Socrates' students may well have learned from theirs: defending or explaining a position is lonely and stressful. When one is trying to explore a new thought, the pressure of the group probing for problems or inconsistencies is at best like a trial and at worst like an inquisition. We began by observing that the young and the shy, far from feeling encouraged, quickly retreated in the face of this exploration, however friendly and polite it might have been. Later, we saw that it was not just the inexperienced; there are few people, even those who enjoy fencing, who find that this position enhances the development of a thought. In most Socratic dialogues, we realized, Socrates emerges one-up and everyone else comes out looking a little foolish.
That discovery led us to our next step.
Barn Raising-In frontier America when a family needed a barn but had limited labor and other resources, the entire community gathered to help them build the barn. The host family described the kind of barn it had in mind and picked the site. The community then pitched in and built it. Neighbors would suggest changes and improvements as they built.
This seminar begins with a member telling the group ideas which might be newly formed and not yet thought out. Then the community gathers to build the barn, to put together that idea. As I hear you say the original idea, it may be something I "disagree" with or something I've never thought about before; but now it becomes my project, and I set about helping you build it, helping us build it. After you've offered the idea, you have no more responsibility for developing it, defending it, or explaining it than anybody else in the group. If I have a problem with that idea, the problem belongs to the whole seminar, not just to you. You are not the lonely defender of that idea but part of a task-force whose job is to develop it to its fullest potential, to make the best possible case for it. It is not your idea anymore; it belongs to the seminar. The energy which might have gone into conflict, or into polite challenge-and-defense, now is directed toward a common goal.
One advantage of the Barn Raising seminar turned out to be that people don't come out of the seminars holding their original ideas. Social psychologists' work on persuasion has made it clear that an effect of argument is to entrench the original ideas all the more firmly (Hoveland, Janis & Kelley, 1953). In contrast, one of the most effective methods of helping someone to unfreeze an old attitude or idea is to ask that person to make the case for an unfamiliar or unwelcome position (Nels, Helmreich, & Aronson, 1969). Thus, students, building on colleagues' ideas, maximize the chances of freeing their own flexibility and creativity.
It is not easy at first to discuss ideas in this way. Two problems quickly arise. First, we all tend toward intellectual conservatism (Festinger, 1957). Letting go of an idea can be quite wrenching.
Second, it is often difficult to acknowledge peers as teachers. We are raised to believe that the person who teaches is one-up and the one who accepts that teaching is one-down. It takes some time to learn the particular gratification of giving another the ungrudging, even admiring, acknowledgment that he or she has taught me something.
It should be made clear that the freedom to build ideas in this way depends on the crucial difference between idea-groups and groups required to make a decision. In the early stages of conversation, a decision-group can learn much from barn raising. But, eventually, mutually exclusive alternatives must be recognized as such. That fact serves to underline the major freedom provided by idea-groups. It is ironic how rigidly trained we have been to squander that freedom and argue ideas as though we believed a decision had to be made. Is Hamlet mad or not? The world will little note which decision we reach. But we will long remember whether we have explored the question in a way calculated to enrich our understanding of the play and our relationship with each other (Kahn, 1981).
We learned in barn-raising that when a seminar develops a point of view about anything, another point of view is likely to emerge which seems at first hopelessly contradictory to the first. In doing this work we have come to see the world as composed of an endless collection of dilemmas. In our culture what we typically do (and most academic discussions are no exception) is deny the pain of the dilemma by assuming that one horn or the other must be wrong. We then set up an argument-my horn against yours. The undesirable consequences of this way of defining differences are clear. First, it is very hard to think during combat. Second, it makes winning more important than understanding or analysis; and third, it forces us into a greatly over-simplified view of the issue when its complexity may be its greatest beauty. So, in our seminars, we learned to try to identify and preserve the dilemmas rather than allow them to deteriorate into debate.
But what do you do with them, beyond merely preserving them? It seemed to us that the thing to do was to try to convert them not to debate, but rather to dialectic. Dialectic consists of two posed, potential antagonists (thesis and antithesis) which come together and give birth to the synthesis. It also leads discussants to collaboration, instead of struggle, with each other.
The goal of the seminars we facilitate is to have as much barn raising and as few beauty contests and free-for-alls as possible. So how is that to be done?
Preparing the Students
We begin by asking the students to read a paper on barn-raising (Kahn, 1974). This paper offers the attitude of collaborative idea-conversation and teaches the general concepts of barn-raising. It also sets two guidelines for the student preparing for a seminar. The reading must be done - all of it, carefully and on time. There is no way to play this game if everyone is not familiar with the material to be discussed. In reading it, we give participants the following task: "Read the material looking for a question about it which you can offer the seminar. Choose the question you would most like to ask a very wise person who had read this material. Choose the question that seems to you put the material in the widest possible perspective."
In addition to asking students to prepare by reading this paper, we have found it useful (and fun) to introduce the concept with a nonverbal experience designed to illustrate the principles of the four kinds of seminars. The exercise goes as follows:
1. "Divide up into pairs. Now, with your right hand, make the most beautiful hand sculpture you can, and with your left hand, screw up your partner's." (Let them continue for a minute or two or until it gets rowdy.) "OK. Now stop and quietly reflect on how that was for you. What feelings did it evoke?"
2. "Now, with both hands, make the most beautiful hand sculpture you can, but don't get caught peeking at your partner's. You might though, sneak a peek to see if it is better." (Allow this to continue for a minute or two, then ask them to reflect on it.)
3. "Now, one of you, with both hands, make the most beautiful hand sculpture you can. The other person should explore it and examine it." (Let this continue for a minute and then have them reverse roles. When both have completed, have them reflect quietly.)
4. "Finally, make the most beautiful four-hand sculpture you can." (Let this continue for a couple of minutes, then ask them to reflect on how this is different.)
5. "Now talk to your partner about the different experiences for a couple of minutes."
Following the discussion, we have a general discussion with the pairs sharing their experience (paying particular attention to what they have learned about their own attitudes in doing these exercises). This exercise nicely compliments the aforementioned paper as a way to introduce the seminar.
The Seminar
We begin every session with a brief "check-in" round, asking everyone to say a few words about how they're feeling and what is occupying them. We have found this very useful for ice-breaking. Then we ask everyone to read her or his question, with all of us writing down each question; thus writing them down is necessary. Also, it focuses attention on the process and makes each student feel a certain welcome respect as the entire class writes down his/her question. And finally the questions prove useful later in the seminar as the developing discussion casts them in a new light.
Then the seminar leader randomly picks one of the students to choose a question. We remind them that we will undoubtedly touch on many of the questions in the course of the discussion so choosing one is not a life-or-death matter. When the question is chosen, its author is given the optional opportunity to say anything more about it. Then the question no longer belongs to that person who is not to be questioned about it. Any questions are now to be addressed to the group.
The seminar then proceeds by trying to find as many rich and varied ways as possible to answer the question. (This is the same basic format we use for subsequent class sessions.)
The Interventions
The task of the leader in a barn-raising seminar is to teach these new modes without putting down students. One thing that has helped us with this is to remind ourselves that the other ways of talking are deeply ingrained in the culture, that unlearning them requires some major resocialization, and that, for all our experience, we ourselves still talk in the old ways a good deal more than we wish we did. All of this tends to make us very tolerant. Thus we try hard never to imply there's a better way without suggesting what it might be.
There are several principles of intervening in this kind of seminar:
1. The instructor must intervene, and intervene a good deal at first. Eventually the leader can wither away, but until students have a considerable amount of experience with barn-raising they need an active, intervening leader. We have tried merely distributing the paper on barn-raising, but nothing changed, in spite of them all being very excited about the idea in principle. It isn't enough to read about a new behavior you wish to learn. We all need considerable guidance in learning these new behaviors.
2. The seminar leader has to keep her or his eye on the ball. This means remembering the original question and keeping track of how the conversation relates to it and when the tangents are getting too far from it. You can remind your seminar that they are building a coherent structure either by asking, "Could we take a moment here and see how this relates to the question?" or by actually doing some relating yourself: "We've been talking for some time about the price Oedipus pays for pursuing the truth. Our question is about the price Jocasta pays. I wonder if they're related."
3. Avoid battles by reminding the student that each remark belongs to the entire seminar and need not be defended by the person who voiced it. Suppose Jack is building a case for Marx's theory of history. Jill interjects, "How can you say that, when Weber showed that capitalism followed Protestantism rather than the other way around, as Marx would have said?" At that point you might say, "I would like to interrupt here. Before you answer, Jack, I would like you to consider, Jill, how it would work if you were to take responsibility for that question rather than putting the responsibility on Jack? Perhaps you could explain the Weber criticism to the group and see if we can somehow integrate it into Jack's ideas. Jack's support of Marx isn't his to defend once he's said it. It belongs to us all, yourself included."
Hopefully, this will short-circuit the attack and defense cycle of traditional seminars.
4. Watch for the chance to identify dilemmas. A very useful technique when two sides of a question square off for a debate is to suggest that the entire group build first one side and then the other. Whichever side a student was on originally, she joins with the others in building each side in turn. When both arguments have been well-built it is a fascinating exercise in group intelligence to try to build a superordinate picture which includes the best from both sides, i.e., to formulate the synthesis.
5. Try to keep the focus off you. It is usually enough to remind the group that you feel uncomfortable when most remarks are addressed to you instead of the group at large.
6. See if you can find ways of including the quiet people without increasing their discomfort. We sometimes say straight out, " Bill, I wonder how you're feeling about the discussion. We haven't heard from you." But at other times an approach that encourages without so directly putting the spotlight on the person is useful. ("Bill, you seem very engrossed in the discussion. I hope when you think it's appropriate, that you will jump in.")
7. As you approach the end of the allocated time in that class period, it is a good idea to spend the final minutes reviewing the content to see how the question was dealt with. This gives a final and often very useful chance to discover connections between the main question and what had previously looked like tangents. It also gives the seminar a chance to view the structure they have built, and, perhaps, to admire it. Then after that content review, it is useful to finish with a process review. How did this seminar work? How did we like it? What do we want to do differently next time? What did we discover that was particularly useful?
The barn-raising seminar is not merely a form of classroom learning. It can be a way of making every conversation an educational experience; a contributor to harmony and good feeling without leaving unwanted residues of frustration and irritation. And isn't that what learning in academia should be all about?
References
Kahn, M., "The Seminar." Unpublished paper, 1974.
Kahn, M., "The Seminar: An Experiment in Humanistic Education." Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 21(2), 119-127 Spring 1981.
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October 01, 2006
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