Review of Ong’s Orality In chapter three Ong provides a list of the characteristics of the way people of a primary oral culture think and express themselves through narrative and discusses them in light of memory. The characteristics of thought and expression are as follows:

1. Expression is additive rather than subordinative.

2. It is aggregative rather than analytic.

3. It tends to be redundant or “copious.”

4. There is a tendency for it to be conservative.

5. Out of necessity, thought is conceptualized and then expressed with relatively close reference to the human lifeworld.

6. Expression is agonistically toned.

7. It is empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced.

8. It is Homeostatic.

9. It is situational rather than abstract.

All of the above characteristics contribute to the saliency and, consequently, enhance the memorability of an utterance. Ong explains that this would be especially important to those trying to memorize a poem or a tale because, whereas people from a liter ate society can always refer back to a written text, those from an oral society must be able to process and memorize bits of spoken, otherwise irretrievable information quickly.

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Slashdot | RMS Says Free Software Is Good Nowadays you see scientists act as if they’re in gangs at war with other little gangs of scientists … we’re all held back.” And not just scientists — of anyone who uses computers in the workplace, Stallman said that in the absence of a broad right to modify and improve the software they use, “Their lives and jobs are going to be frustrating — people protect themselves from frustration by deciding not to care. When this happens, it’s bad for those people and for society as a whole.”

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PowerPoint Invades the Classroom The teacher, Anna Rubio, had asked the students to use PowerPoint to create an electronic portfolio, describing and linking to digital projects that they had done during the year.

One by one, students lumbered up to a computer at the front of the dimly lighted room and opened their slides, which appeared on a screen behind them. They did not say a word or even look at their audience, but simply clicked the mouse button, drilling through their presentations in silence. Wild graphics, garish colors and bold titles flashed by. Their classmates paid almost no attention and, like bored employees stuck in a late-day board meeting, looked at their own computer screens instead.

“I asked them if they wanted to read it or show it,” Ms. Rubio said. “I guess no one wanted to read it.”

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PowerPoint Invades the Classroom PowerPoint’s most pernicious quality, critics say, is its potential for substituting presentation polish for thinking skills. The software is not merely a word processor with large fonts: it can also serve as a silent guide on the art of persuasion. Step-by-step instructions are offered by what Microsoft calls the Autocontent Wizard, a tool that provides a template for building an argument. The wizard never fails to offer instructions. Click to add Topic No. 1. Insert real-life examples here

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Bibliographical management Bibliographical management and note-taking

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Most persons are surprised, and many distressed, to learn that essentiaiiy the same objcctions commonly urged today against computers were urged by Plato in the Phaedrus (274-7) and in the Seventh Letter against writing. Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind. It is a thing, a manufactured product. The same of course is said of computers. Secondly, Plato’s Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind. Today, parents and others fear that pocket calculators provide an external resource for what ought to be the internal resource of memorized multiplication tables. Calculators weaken the mind, relieve it of the work that keeps it strong. Thirdly, a written text is basically unresponsive. If you ask a person to explain his or her statement, you can get an explanation, if you ask a text, you get back nothing except the same, often stupid, words which called for your question in the first place. In the modern critique of the computer, the same objection is put, ‘Garbage in, garbage out’.

There’s more, but I ran out of buffer. And I am still not letting my four year old play with the computer…yet…

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The Standard: Nouveau Niche Here’s how OpenCola works. Say you enjoy reading about rock climbing. You’d install an OpenCola program on your computer and feed it a couple of rock climbing articles, or simply type in some keywords, such as “flapper,” “hang-dogging” and “dirt me.” OpenCola will construct a software robot (sort of a single-purpose search engine) that goes onto the Net to dig up stuff that matches your criteria. It does two kinds of digging. First, it fetches files from the Web just like any other search spider. But the robot goes one step further by looking for other users’ OpenCola robots looking for the same kinds of things you are. Then, your robot grabs files the other users have fetched and found worthwhile. In other words, you benefit from the decision-making of the other like-minded OpenCola users. It’s like a Web-size version of Amazon.com (AMZN)’s “people who liked that book will like this book” service.

The guy who started this company, Cory Doctorow, is a total Disney obsessive, a feted science fiction writer, and just an all around Freak. I like it when interesting people do interesting things and aren’t kicked down by The Man.

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Test.

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Whole Earth: Discovery One lovely aspect of discovery is that the required human talents defy rankings, formal education, and professions. This next section will tell a few discoverer tales: of tour guide Ted Parker, a man who held 4,000 bird songs in his head; of novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s contribution to butterfly naturalist history; of parataxonomists changing from their lives as farmers to become sharp-eyed field collectors; of painter Audubon’s tricks on the true maniac, Rafinesque. Add to these every sort of “amateur” and “professional” naturalist, as well as the academic specialist (Miriam Rothschild and her love of fleas; E.O. Wilson on ants) and you cook up quite a wonderful dialog, tinged with competition, possessiveness, ego and cross-checking, but fundamentally honoring the pursuit of mysteries in life.

I’m always interested in amateur (read: untainted by petty disciplinary politics) scholarship and people following their scholary bliss.

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