Saturday, March 26, 2005


Useful Knowledge Posted by Hello

It Takes a Theory

Brown, J.S., Collins, A. & Duguid, P. (1989, Jan/Feb). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, 32-42.
Covi, L.M. (1999). Material mastery: Situating digital library use in university research practices. Information Processing & Management 35, 293-316.
Gross, M. (2004). Children's information seeking at school: Findings from a qualitative study. In M.K. Chelton & C. Cool (Eds.), Youth Information-Seeking Behavior: Theories, Models and Issues, 211-240. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow.

The unbelievable thing about the three readings about theory and practice and education, namely Lisa Covi's article, Material Mastery, Brown and Duguid
s ...Situated cognition... and Gross's Children's information seeking at school look at the footnotes soon reveals that the debate about education and its purposes has raged since Plato was a child, but more recently even with the brilliance of theories put forth by Alfred North Whitehead in 1929 in his earth-shaking essay, the philosophy of education, the institution of education keeps the best ideas imprisoned in mere rhetoric. Of course the concept of education being relevant and useful is still trying to have its day. I think it's fair to say that education will always be a forum for change and challenge. But as far as our readings, the debate is whether the classroom is really the proper place to prepare for professional practice. Certainly in the case of librarianship, the answer is still, "no." At least the MLIS curriculum in falling short of really becoming skilled practicioners offers the internship as a practical solution. Then again. The task of bettering education is a political and economic problem, not simply a theoretical one.

Memories, Dreams, and Reflections

So I've stolen my title from Carl Jung's journals, or at least his published ones. I am thinking that it is really crazy that someone can actually own the rights to publish someone else's memories and that permission may be withheld from anyone else. Anyway, this is my blog, and if anyone wants to simply cite me, I am happy enough. No fee. No blame. Promise.
This past week a lot happened. Class with Ross Todd touched on many topics, but began with his trip to work camps in Germany, notably Auschwitz and another one that starts with a "B" that I can't quite remember now. Ross decided that his mission to understand the holocaust, the most horrific human tragedy in human history, had to be abandoned during his actual visit. It was seeing the personal remains of flesh and blood people in the form of museum objects now -- shoes, combs, glasses-- that made the entire picture incomprehensible.
Although Ross thought that he abandoned his quest for understanding in the cognitive sense, my feeling is that he reached an emotional and personal understanding of the event, which is a deeper relationship with an event, even one that has not been experienced personally. We all yearn to feel the real thing. That is why when we read romantic poetry, we yearn to actually experience the feelings of the poets. Language alone is not the experience, at best a cultural construct, but sometimes it is so moving as to move us to tears or laughter or confusion.
This week I had a confrontation with two other pieces of memory, one minor and one major, that is, losing all the pictures I had taken that were stored on my phone camera; and, the loss of my mother's brother, Uncle Jack. The funeral is on Tuesday, and I am wondering what memories will do for reconstructing who he was. Others will come with their memories and all these memories will collide, but none will actually be able to rebuild the entity, Jack Marlan. This is my first small public memorial. They say that memories fade, but they do not know that sometimes memories make the past grow in size.
We have no choice about having memories or forgetting parts of the past, but when it came to Verizon choosing to replace my phone and not caring about the memories I had stored on my phone, I realized that the representation of memory, or memorials are important personal constructions. They mingle with the present, actually hold the present up in places, through tradition and ritual, but only the larger more commercial ones are universally recognized. For most of us fiction articulates the personal memories that are universal. Each of us carries our own information about the past. We all go on, sometimes connected by memories, dreams, and reflections.