dave’s campfire analogy
from rhizo 14 week 5: community as curriculum and Dave Cormier
via http://blog.sloanconsortium.org/2014/02/11/moocs-as-a-gathering-place/
In my hometown the easiest way to start a gathering from amoungst those connections was to light a fire on the beach. We’d rustle together some driftwood, stack it up high and set a match to it. People saw it from further down the beach or from the road. At first, they gathered round the fire in order to find their bearings. Then they would look from face to face in the firelight, listen in on conversations and gradually gravitate to a group. As the evening wore on, the groups would start to separate a little more and standing away from each other.
The fire became less central. This was because the fire was not the purpose of the party; it was the catalyst for connection.
This massive potential for connection prompted by openness was what I meant by the word MOOC when I first used it.
They are people who would have probably never met, never run across each other, but for the fire on the beach, which is our course.
..We have, for years, created communities around passions and ideas. Communities are hard to join; they have exclusive histories that can make it difficult for new people to make connections. Sometimes you just need to light a match on the beach and invite everyone over.
ie:
massive vs massively.. course vs network vs community..
trying to measure/define it vs dave’s vision of fire open to anyone…
community as any one..
and everyone..
we just need to get it so that everyone has the luxury of seeing their fire.. 24/7… no?
from invited to exist page:
i knew i liked/resonated with being found/invited to exist.. per Gabor Mate‘s description of attachment. but i was struggling with the word invited. do i not exist unless i am invited? what if i don’t want to be invited to your party.. or any party.. (this brings to mind/heart the it is me ness)
during rhizo14 w2, for some reason, terry elliott’s post/kevin hodgson’s comment edged a synapse for me… so taking note of it here..
how intentional we were about inviting people to play, about how we were purposeful in making everyone feel part of the conversation – kevin hodgson on setting up clmooc
my unresolve had to do with the feel that (all of life really – but esp lately with tech and changes in ed ness) everyone is trying to create THE platform/party.. so they can invite everyone to it.
why are we doing that. why do we feel the urge to host. to be THE one. and to make sure everyone likes our party. (this also makes me think of an important element of play – the option to quit. which naturally/inherently makes the game more rich/fair/empathetic to all – if you want people to keep playing.)
rather than thinking we’re inviting everyone to a party.. perhaps the way to make us all free.. is more along the lines of inviting everyone to exist.. to be.. to be their own platform ish.. at my house/your house/alone/together/24/7/all of the above.. but always about you as a person .. being found/invited to exist – as you.. be you ..
pluralist ignorance keeps ringing in my ear as this unfolds. ie: how many don’t really like this situation.. but continue to go to inflate the notion of a party, of an invite.. of a missing piece..
so – perhaps – the more we perpetuate the idea that the only invitation that matters is the invitation to exist (discrimination as equity ness) – and that that invitation is unconditionally offered – (ie: are you human – ok – you’re in)… the less we’ll all be missing it – the it being life – aliveness.
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from hospitality page (wikipedia quote):
In the West today hospitality is rarely a matter of protection and survival and is more associated with etiquette and entertainment. However, it still involves showing respect for one’s guests, providing for their needs, and treating them as equals. Cultures and subcultures vary in the extent to which one is expected to show hospitality to strangers, as opposed to personal friends or members of one’s ingroup.
just making sure your campfire is the whole world and not the ingroup.. and that a person’s existence isn’t dependent on your invitation
and from host page:
Equity Unbound kicks off this week! Join us #unboundeq https://t.co/vjJvkQ25Ri via @unboundeq
Original Tweet: https://twitter.com/Bali_Maha/status/1039054725474385920
try an Unintroduction (inspired by clmooc)
What does it mean, what does it do, for the participation of some to be dependent on an invitation made by others?
invited vs invent ness
seeing participation and engaged ness as more of a voluntary compliance than of alive people.. ie: invited vs invented ness
when we seek participation or engagement.. generally means we have an agenda.. so not offering freedom.. even if it seems we are.. even if the (event/activity) seems good/friendly/nice.. like a host\ing a campfire
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via the new normal fb share – Mark Wigley and hospitality:
“New Babylon is an experiment in extreme hospitality. It’s not an architecture in which the whole world would be housed, but a piece of architecture in which the whole world would be able to house itself according to the way it wishes to, according to the life it would like to live. Hospitality is not easy. Hospitality is openness to the stranger. It is to embrace the risk of the other. It is to welcome somebody else into your house who you don’t know, and without knowing how they’re going to act.”
Read an excerpt from Mark Wigley’s essay reflecting on the work of Constant Nieuwenhuys and an architectural paradigm of free space and time afforded by automation.
https://strelkamag.com/en/article/mark-wigley-new-babylon
Can you draw a line that welcomes without also excluding?In Constant’s theory, every line is violent. Every line has to be undone. Every line has to be provisional, dotted, blurred, contested.. t How, then, do you operate as an architect? That is to say, a person who draws lines, while depowering the lines, by not allowing the line to be violent, to exert its violence? Miesian architecture may inspire hospitality, but it never strays too far away from the idea of authority. The room we are in is in every sense exclusive.
siddiqi border law: every border implies the violence of its maintenance – Ayesha Siddiqi
Real hospitality is a radical act. This invitation and embrace of the unknown guest necessarily undermines the designer and the design itself. In other words, a genuinely hospitable architecture that would welcome the other would welcome its own destruction. It would welcome the dissolution and blurring of the figure of the designer. The real generosity of a host is not to invite someone or something to occupy a space, but to invite a transformation of the space..t
hosting ie: a campfire et al
there’s got to be more to life than come to my thing. .come join my thing
New Babylon is the most extreme and invaluable example of extreme hospitality. Here, hospitality is extended to the whole species. It is a genuinely popular architecture for a world in which no one would be considered either ordinary or strange. This would be, to put it crudely, an architecture for the people, and nothing less.
Constant really tries to ask the question: how could we live together? What does it mean to be suspended within a networked world beyond labor? ..t
bishop freedom law: how do i have to be in order for you to be free – Orland Bishop
But the question Constant could not answer remains, this brutally important question: how will we live together when it would seem that one of the key characteristics of our species is its murderous relationship to itself?..t.. Our insensitivity and brutality towards others, our ability to anesthetize ourselves to the suffering of others, even to our own pains and pleasures. The repressive default setting reinforced by the new brains and body that we have become through the *technological adjustments to our own organism..t.. forces again a new generation of architects to ask, what is it that we could offer? What could hospitality be?
thurman interconnectedness law: when you understand interconnectedness it makes you more afraid of hating than of dying – Robert Thurman (@BobThurman)
*ie: supposed to’s.. of school/work
about fittingness rather than fitting in
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be you. 