Great to hear from you TG – and tail wagging as you know has always interested me.
I will admit that I like to imagine that I am living a Billy Collins "Dharma" like life "without encumbrance” - stepping out into “the material world” of school each morning followed only by “the plume” of a tail. Is certainly how I am trying to deal with next week.
The thing is that when we pause and look carefully at cj’s “L word” – (learning or learning process) there are so many tails, and so few dogs
But my concern is that although framing stuff through claims and counterclaims of “wagging”, or “being wagged” has intuitive appeal – and in the short term it can even seem insightful - it’s very simplicity creates a complicity that can obscure what is going on.
I think that the “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least” Goethe thing is probably given more credibility in argument than it deserves because “wagging” and "being wagged" always has a context. Who decides which are the things that matter most?
As Nietzsche more eloquently puts it “All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”
Am also made anxious by mental models designed for random error (Bell Curve thinking) being extrapolated to social phenomena like teacher behaviours wrt ICTs.
This needs its own post,
but even if we adopted the “mythical” Bell Curve as the right mental model for efficacy of technology delivery in that dangerous ursine technology of school – which I am not sure is smart thinking
then you only need to explore the Pareto 80:20 rule or read “The Long Tail”
Pareto Distribution or Long tail thinking - In many cases the infrequent or low-amplitude events—the long tail, can cumulatively outnumber or outweigh the initial portion of the graph, such that in aggregate they comprise the majority.
to appreciate that a reliance on the Bell Curve mental model, when we neglect to consider the long tail, may cause us to misrepresent the things that matter most. May cause us to misidentify the wagger and waggee in learning through ICT.
Am off to shove the cat aside and eat his food.
Billy Collins: Dharma
In Sailing Alone Around the Room
Dharma
The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.
Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance —
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?
Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.
If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she
would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.
-- Billy Collins
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