Saturday, April 3, 2010

kevin kelly on the shirky principle

take a look at  this

embedded in it is this

in it is this:  i've inserted the grey words
TT public school, like most organizations, could not be good at the thing it was good at and good at the opposite thing at the same time. The web hosting business authentic testing, because it followed the “Simplicity first, quality later” model, didn’t just present a new market, it required new cultural imperatives.

and this:
Diller, Brill, and Murdoch standardized test pushers seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them we will have to take them —but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:
“Web users public school will have to pay for what they watch and use, will have to keep being driven by these costly tests, or else we will have to stop making content standardized tests in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it them. And we don’t know how to do that.”

and this:
The critical fact about this negotiation wasn’t about the mothers students, or their stories or their learning, or how those stories might be used or how new learning might make students indispensable . The critical fact was that the negotiation took place in the grid of the television industry in the grid of a political stance, between entities incorporated around a 20th century business logic, and entirely within invented constraints and entirely within invented constraints. At no point did the negotiation about audience student involvement learning hinge on the question “Would this be an interesting thing to try a way to create indispensable citizens?” 

and then this:
When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.


yes?

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