Conviviality and the FLNW (un) Conference

Manovich asks “What kind of cinema is appropriate for the age of Google and blogging? Automatic surveillance and self-guided missiles? Consumer profiling and CNN? “ We have been asking much the same questions about learning (and teaching) in Dunedin this week.

When I think for a while I create a shadow map, an imagining of the “rivers north of the future” that helps me understand, what I am seeking, and begin to appreciate the poetry in its form. And it often takes an environment that fosters conviviality and the company of friends for me to tease out the mycchorhizal threads of my thinking.

I want to add The Albert Arms, to an Artichokean Google Map of places where  new thinkings are shaken out, smoothed flat with an elbow, and pinned at the corners with a beer glass or three.  Also I must add The Albert Arms as the place where we first explored the nuance of a folded Konrad. 

We talked into the night about what the future of learning in a networked world might be like and our conversations were “burdened with stone-engraved shadows,” the weight of all that has been.” (Charles Tayor in foreword of The Rivers North of the Future - Cayley 2005).

What I came to think in the early hours of this morning is that one issue that is central to our imaginings about learning in a networked world, one issue that represents the weight of all that has been, is how we understand “freedom”.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. E.M.Forster