I just may be the only person writing about post-modern educational theory today declaring a bias based on the person i’m fortunate enough to share my life with. But I am. The paper i’m talking about today was the final, deciding factor in my side of the decision to spend the rest of my life with Bonnie. It took that little frightened place inside me that could tell that things were not as they seemed, but was too afraid to admit it, and gave it language it could be proud of. It gave me the language I needed to understand the capacity of uncertainty, the historicity of change, the power hierarchies of language and the hipocracy and fear that lie at the heart of many of the worlds ruling ideologies. It, in effect, changed the way I spoke about the world.
I was brought back there by the post on “the late age of print†over at weblogg-ed. I’d like to suggest the thesis that sent me down a similar road that Will seems to be going down now… It’s not what you’d call light reading, and the first few pages take a few readings until you get your mind around the language, but it’s more than worth the time.
Bonnie Stewart, Techknowledge: Literate Practice and Digital Worlds.
This is a quote from the introduction, to give you a taste of both the content and the style of the writing.
The primary question behind it [the paper] is “what will it mean to know in the 21st century; in the digital age?†And its primary aim is to offer a contribution to the cultural conversation predicated by that question; a foray into the broad realm of possibilities that the query opens. In its focus on practice, the thesis represents an effort to breach the boundaries within which questions of “knowledge†and “technology†are popularly taken up, and to formulate an approach to the conversation that allows these concepts and their relationships to be examined in the cultural context.
There’s a great description of the development of technology and how it changes knowledge inside (some of which i agree with, some not) and not a complete thesis she’d like to be held to now, but a great starting point for the conversation. And, as I say a great place to learn the language of one side of the debate. And, for me at least, an artifact both as an intellectual and as a partner to one very smart woman.
more details later.
