wallpaper animals

i'm having one of those days....where instead on posing gracefully on this old truck, i would be the girl beating her head on it...and it's only 9:00 :)

On my way to the American Cybernetics Society conference in Troy, NY, I was reading Erich Fromm's "To have or to be?" What Fromm calls the 'having mode' is so clearly visible in the US. I was struck how beautiful the natural landscape of New York city is - how it must have seemed like Eden to the European settlers. The train ride up the Hudson to Albany was simply stunning. When the settler's arrived, the 'Having mode' was already well established in them - and they wanted to have this land. The natives were in the 'being mode' - we didn't listen to them. And the consequences of the possessing we are clearly reaping now. Which way now?

My encounters with distributed cognition are proving very fruitful. Andy Clark's work is particularly interesting - he has a take on the moral side of all this. However, I'm not so keen on the emphasis David Chalmers (who Clark has worked with) puts on the singularity nonsense, or whether whole brain emulation (brain uploading) is a sensible way to look at things. Anders Sandberg's 2nd life lecture is fascinating though and inspired me to sort out our Moodle-SLOODLE installation.

What we need is good models which can help us take useful practical action. Cognition sits behind human organisation, and the emergent issues of organisational intervention (including intervention with technology). I think a cybernetic model of distributed cognition might come in handy... like the one developed through the JISC SPLICE project (above). The strategic evidence for the efficacy of this is growing... which makes the whole area very exciting!

two of my bff's are in town for a couple of days and i couldn't be more excited...on our agenda: pool, pedicures, and lots of catching up and laughing. but right now, i'm off to make whole wheat pancakes w/ fresh fruit :)

I've been trying a few approaches to helping my daughter with her maths. One problem with maths is that the stress of finding the 'right answer' can induce a state of mind where it is harder to think. Instead of focusing on the answer, I've been trying to focus on the different possible methods. Some methods are easy, but long; others are quite hard, but very efficient. Choosing the best method is important. Much of the anxiety in my daughter seems to be based around "we weren't told to do it that way!" - as if there are ways of doing it that might get her into trouble.

I'm wondering about the extent to which a 'moral sense' is as much at the heart of knowing the right answer as it is in doing the right thing. If that is the case, what teaching approaches could be used to relate choosing (and learning) effective methods? In computer programming, there is clearly a link between the best method and doing the right thing (my predominant feeling when programming is often guilt!).

I'm finding that by emphasising the moral dimension and moral choice in finding the right answer (by contextualising the problem in a moral framework), some of the stress can be overcome. "If someone's life depended on this, which method would you choose?" To understand why, I think it's useful to see the stress as emerging from the 3-4 homeostat which gets itself into a double-bind situation. Morality sits at System 5, and so takes more of a direct control over the balancing between the two.

okay A LOT quieter, now that my biggest kiddo is off at camp for the week....