peter@yunexus.UUCP (Peter Roosen-Runge) (02/16/88)
From Ivan Illich's DESCHOOLING SOCIETY (Harper & Row: 1970), Chapter 6,
Learning Webs:
"A good educational system should have three purposes:
it should provide all who want to learn with access
to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share
what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and finally,
furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to
make their challenge known."
Could there be a more apt expression of the potential of Usenet?
While Illich has appeared more recently as a ranting 'computerphobe'
(CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1983), I suspect that his prophetic
concept of non-manipulative, spontaneously usable "convivial" tools
and institutions have had a subterranean influence on what we might call the
implicit ethos of Usenet, and perhaps of Unix as well.
Peter Roosen-Runge
Dept. of Computer Science
York University, Toronto, Canada
Bitnet: CS100006@YUSOLgilbert@hci.hw.ac.uk (Gilbert Cockton) (03/02/88)
In article <327@yunexus.UUCP> peter@yunexus.UUCP (Peter Roosen-Runge) writes: >From Ivan Illich's DESCHOOLING SOCIETY (Harper & Row: 1970), Chapter 6, > >"A good educational system should have three purposes: >it should provide all who want to learn with access >to available resources at any time in their lives; ... > >Could there be a more apt expression of the potential of Usenet? USENET does not cover Illich's first requirement - all available learning resources can not ever become available on USENET. For one, the nature of the medium will restrict what can be available, even though the 'requests for help/info etc.' mailings do allow net knowledge to be somewhat user-driven. However, we aren't representative, so many resources won't reach the net. -- Gilbert Cockton, Scottish HCI Centre, Heriot-Watt University, Chambers St., Edinburgh, EH1 1HX. JANET: gilbert@uk.ac.hw.hci ARPA: gilbert%hci.hw.ac.uk@cs.ucl.ac.uk UUCP: ..{backbone}!mcvax!ukc!hci!gilbert