On the Importance of Names

My students often think it a bit odd when I take the time to make sure I'm pronouncing names correctly. I explain that names are important, they are part of who they are, whether they chose the names or not, and that it is important for me to recognize and acknowledge them on the terms they'd liked to be called by.

Pronunciation is important. A lesson our President might be wise to learn, especially since he butchered two very important ones--Olmert and Abbas.

On Digital and Global Ethos

I've been following coverage of the Annapolis meeting closely. I was encouraged by Gershon Baskin's cautiously optimistic editorial in JPost last week, and loosely following coverage here and there since.

Cruising through the NYTimes today, I came across this piece discussing the U.S. need for better global P.R. It got me thinking. What if we spent a chunk of money that we've thrown at the war in Iraq and used it to send those college aged soldiers to language immersion instead? What if, after they were able to fluently speak Arabic (in native dialects), we then sent them over in community service efforts inspired by Habitat for Humanity, Bustan L'shalom, PeaceCorps to make connections with the locals and build community-needed infrastructure--hosptials, schools, etc. that are environmentally friendly, sustainable, locally supported? I bet there would be a different kind of change brewing.

Using Cyberspace to Improve non-Cyberspace

I haven't really been in the habit of blogging, and honestly, after spending so much time online and explaining to my students how their public profile (whether on Myspace or Facebook or...) is so public, I find it hard to motivate to put my unformed thoughts out there in the public. I recognize that this desire to keep some unpolished thoughts private runs counter to my belief in what I've been terming an "open-source" pedagogy. For that terminology, I must thank Jim Brown. His own thinking on the issue deeply influenced my thoughts about about the Open Source movement as it relates to teaching. Consequently, both have influenced how I have been thinking about the teaching of writing, especially with technology.

I've been thinking a lot about the public/private divide as I've been writing various iterations of directions on how to use Wikimedia in an attempt to coax members of a Googlegroup into moving their discussion of ideas from the Google Group to the wiki.

The Google Group was started by Gershon Baskin, director of the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI), in an attempt to get people motivated to organize demonstrations in support of a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict. The events will take place simultaneously, around the world, on June 5th, marking 40 years since the 1967 War.

In some ways, the Google Group, though open to anyone who wants to subscribe to it, seems far less public (or at least it has the perception of being so), than the wiki, which actually "exists" on the World Wide Web. To a certain extent the Google Group also "exists" on the web, yet it seems less public. I wonder if that degree of "publicness" influences people's willingness to contribute to one or the other.

It's interesting, because people have been quite vocal on the email exhchange, but relatively few have taken the time to become familiar enough with the Wikimedia interface to post their comments on the wiki. Is it because of the interface? The unwillingness to put things "out there in the public sphere," or the fear that things on the wiki will be unintentionally deleted by other inexperienced users?

I hope that the cybercommunication will facilitate the success of "actual" events in non-cyberspace, a clunky expression I realize, but it's difficult to differentiate between what happens online and what happens offline without unintentionally privileging "offline" and suggesting it is somehow "more real" than online, which is not something that is always the case.