Talk:Main Page

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

Outtakes

As an emerging actuality, the digital campus has many instances, each a large, historical undertaking taking place through continuous metamorphosis. It has no mastermind, no genial inventor; the digital campus appears as an encompassing infrastructure within which the character, spectrum, and limit of a person's educational agency takes place. Let's grasp the changes in pedagogical possibility arising through the digital campus.

Many different participant-observers will contribute distinctive interpretations of these emerging developments. My personal experience and developed intellectual skills enable me to illuminate the advent of the digital campus, attuned to the historical implications of it for educational experience. I believe these historical implications are important and want to further their development in theory and practice as fully as I can.

I was born in 1939 in New York City. In retrospect, much of life seems to have moved quickly. Through childhood and youth, I shuffled for periods, long and short, back and forth, between a small farm in eastern Pennsylvania and the Upper East Side of New York City, throughout benefiting from formal education in elite schools—Buckley, Deerfield, Princeton (BA '61), and Columbia (PhD '68). I came of age came fast, as well, owing to a job market then so different from now. In 1965, I became an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, and in 1967, I joined the faculty at Columbia. Then I completed my PhD in 1968.

Substantively, by the start of my 30s, I had published extensively and launched a budding career as a public intellectual. I had read my way through Princeton, sparked by the work of the Spanish thinker, José Ortega y Gasset, an interest that developed into my dissertation and then into a large, well-received first book, Man and His Circumstances: Ortega as Educator, published in 1971. I interpreted Ortega as a many-sided educator, first aiming at the renovation of Spanish public life and then seeking Jacques Barzun, co-sponsor of the dissertation, observed that the work had a prophetic tone, not as a criticism to be corrected but as a caution to be wary for the vision in it would not come easily.with Lawrence engaged in the free-wheeling study of political and educational thinking from Rousseau forward and an exploration of how modes of communication and material life affected personal and collective self-formation.

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An Ignorant Life

Introducing what is to come

Hello. Thanks for coming by. I'm getting old, 85 as we begin, so I've got a lot to say. And I'll say it as I think and feel it. Lifelong, I've aspired to educate myself and others, and I'm not so sure how well I've done at that. In speaking of my life as an ignorant life, I'm recognizing that that doubt, that uncertainty, pervades all human action, everything a living creature does, everything that I've tried to do. I write to explore my ignorance, so to speak.

What's the point of doing that? Not a quick question. As things go along, we'll develop a response, doing it recursively, observing many repetitions performed with variatons that correct errors and omissions, revealing unexpected possibilities in thought and action. That's how education comes about. Recognize the pervasive actuality of ignorance in all we do; attend to error and omission; openly try possible corrections, over, and over. Perhaps this is what Friedrich Nietzsche meant by eternal recurrence.

I'm unabashedly over-educated, staying in school my whole life, usually not doing what was expected I would, but charting my path through the body of learning. Early on, I came to recognize the pevasive actuality of ignorance and to feel its usages were underappreciated throughout the sphere of cultural activity in which I participated. Consequently, what I and all others may have to say may involve significant and difficult departures from what we educators commonly say. Here's where things get a little tough.

Hello. Thanks for coming by. I'm old, so my story's rather long, but you can click "Add comment" to interject in many places—just keep it to the point. Also, I'm not here, rich and famous, trying to seem like an ordinary guy. I've accomplished some things under the radar, working the intersticies. They may or may not be worth your time, but for you to judge that, I'll say a little about them.

I'll start with the title above, two little words—"wagering" and "life." As I see it, life consists in a sentience, however rudimentary, making choices with respect to what is given to it. And the wagering enters into life because life's sentience cannot fully grasp the worth and the complexity of what's given relative to life's effecting any choice.

Humans live extended lives, like many other kinds of life.

As I see it, life encompasses everything. That proposition presents serious difficulties because what I intend it to mean differs from common, nearly universal usage.

My Studiolo

I come here, attentvely, to reflect on interests and uncertainties, feeling troubled yet curious, buffered from immediate cares, responsive to unexpected remembrance, speculative while (or because?) I'm imperfectly informed, eager to follow clues that point to something promising, to something that will support me in my ignorance.

My ignorance — alive, I am uncertain; I never know what will happen next. Were the stone thoughtfully sentient, it would be certain that nothing would happen until external force jolted it into action. Alive, I come to mystudiolo owing to my ignorance. My ignorance arises, and continues, because I live, situated in time and space like the stone, but able to some degree, tangible however faint, to act, to initiate and sustain acting force within the realm of forces all about me.

Ignorance emerges, not from failings, not from excessive wants or needs, but from vital activity. My ignorance is the price of my living, embodied in vast space and restless time. In living, nothing exists; all emergesable to discern prospects fully or surely Here, it's my space where I recognize the value of things about me, seen and unseen, raising this up, lowering that, then reversing, this down and that that up, judging worth as I see fit, its possibility and its lack.

• My lingo

The Point

(as in "What's the point?")

Arendt on Natality

There's a point to all acting by living beings. That's what distinguishes the activities in their lives from the churning about of lifeless matter and energy. We can say about what happened in the dead flux of lifeless stuff that it was the consequence of various forces on various objects, but all of that just takes place without any point.

Overcoming Identities

Seeking A Place to Study

Power and Pedagogy

The Cumulative Curriculum

The Dalton Technology Plan

The Eiffel Project

Smart Cities: New York

Formative Justice

On Not Defining Education

The Educators' Manifesto

Homeless in the House of Intellect

Enough

The Reflective Commons

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My worksite, a prototype of MyStudiolo

== Robbie McClintock == Robbie (talk) 08:44, 15 January 2025 (MST)