TDC/Planning-Organization

• Digital campuses to visit
• PUP Draft Book Proposal
• My user page
• Notes to myself
• Current writing
• Forms for page setup

The Digital Campus

Planning & Organization

Develop the right tone & voice

What I have to say about the digital campus has a lot of personal meaning for me, and the urge to express it wells up from my current life intentions, not from extrinsic conditions. I've become advanced in years and feel privileged to still have health and vitality. I feel drawn to reflect on what I've thought and done during those years, partly to savor the meaning it has held for me in my life, and partly with the hope that some time, someplace, some other persons may find that meaning helpful in their thinking and acting in their so-different lives.

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To enable anyone to judge what I think about the digital campus, I must reveal myself as a thinking, living person. Somehow, I believe early in life, I must have recognized in some inarticulate fashion that both meaning and judgment were situated in the life I'm living. That's a problematic recognition that I'll use provisionally. I don't remember when or how it occurred to me, and I still can't make full sense of it. The recognition didn't come marked with some epiphany.

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Everything comes into my life shrouded in ignorance, which I paw away by thinking and acting, never sure or certain about what will happen.

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Things of great significance in our lives seem to reveal themselves from a fog of ignorance as contingent things, emerging imperfectly out of the ignorance with much behind them, still shrouded in an indefinite unknown that one can not make go away.

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To savor meaning in my life and to make good judgments in it, I need to tell stories about how emergent things appear in my life, to reflect, to bend back on them, to flex them again. But every life chatters with innumerable particulars, each different and distinct, here now, gone before the next. They rush upon us, left right up down, behind, in front, and all around. In the whirl of life, we easily lose our threads of meaning, attention overwhelmed. To cope with that, we use names to signify topics or themes, insubstantial abstractions, to buffer, provoke, guide, and sustain attention.

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The actuality of ignorance serves as the ground from which knowing and meaning enter into my life. As a general statement, let's take this as an abstraction applicable to many instances, drawing them together in a union full of meaning important in my thinking and acting. I'll use this phrase to anchor attention to many instances of it in an effort to develop my capacity to understand, to think and act, and to judge rightly in diverse vital occasions.

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To interpret it all, to assess significance, to anticipate what may transpire, and to grasp what's taking place, we postulate labels framing how we attend to forces and processes of one sort or another at work in the sphere of actuality within which we live—God, or the gods, Fate, Destiny, the Stars, natural substances and forces, gravitation and contagion, viruses and virtues, and character, culture, class, and on and on. Oh yes, technology, too.

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In postulating a label to frame attention, we create something more powerful than a mere sign. We actually identify a collection of meaningful matters, ones worthy of attention. Hence, the label must serve as a signifier that points out things of significance. Many problems of usage arise when familiarity whittles the signifier down to a sign, for a sign like technology actually serves in many different ways as a signifier, leading to much confusion in intensive use:l the sign gloms together many different signifiers.