quoted section from:

St Augustine, Letters, trans. by Wilfrid Parsons, 5 vols. (Baltimore, MD: Catholic University of America Press, 1956), V, Letter 211, ‘To a Convent of Consecrated Virgins’, p. 43.

It can be easy to deprive a generation of important pieces of their cultural heritage by omitting any focus on it.

• shiboleth
• philology
• disinterest
• overwhelm

Compare the loss of classical education and cultural heritage by "internal decay" as described by Hutchins in the early 1900s and the forced loss of cultural heritage of Indigenous Americans by the U.S. Government in roughly the same period by re-education and stamping out Indigenous language.

Certainly one was loss through lack of exposure, but the other was outright erasure due to the natures of orality and literacy.

—Comenius (1592-1670) in Didactica magna

This is broadly similar to the spirit of much of Indigenous pedagogy, particularly in societies in which staged oral learning was a privilege.

Hence, researchers are very active at the present time, and their work has resulted in numerous new approaches to reading instruction. Among the more important new programs are the so-called eclectic approach, the individualized reading approach, the language-experience approach, the various approaches based on linguistic principles, and others based more or less closely on some kind of programmed instruction. In addition, new mediums such as the Initial Teaching Alphabet ( i.t.a. ) have been employed, and sometimes these involve new methods as well. Still other devices and programs are the "total immersion method," the "foreign-language-school

Have we ultimately come to the conclusion that neurodiversity means there is no one-size-fits all solution? Should we also be placing some focus on orality and memory methods to allow those to flourish as well? Where is the literature on "orality pedagogy"? Is it a thing? It should be...

What effect might this have on the learning process of purely oral cultures?

https://www.kpcc.org/show/airtalk/2022-08-31/californias-legislative-session-ends-tonight-what-bills-are-on-the-chopping-block-as-time-winds-down

Audio: https://traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/acc8cc57-ff7c-44c5-9bd6-ab0900fbdc43/39d4b39e-aa2d-40b1-bc07-ab2201235e43/fc58c5dd-b403-4747-a66c-af02013eab18/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=f9e7dcf5-d162-4723-b710-ab2201235e4c

Want to relisten to this. Caught the very end on interventions and it sounded very much like teaching "orality" rather than teaching literacy.

Perhaps teaching orality first helps to frame literacy? even acknowledging it could help certainly...

Cross reference LAist series: https://laist.com/news/education/dyslexia-california-teacher-preparation-training-structured-literacy

Timestamps 19:11 - 35:20

CA Senate Bill 488 2021; signed, in process,

Orton-Gillingham method (procedure/process) but can be implemented differently. Rigorous and works. Over 100 years old.

Wilson program uses pieces of OG. What's this? Not enough detail here.

Dyslexia training will be built into some parts of credentialling programs.

Each child is different.

This requires context knowledge on the part of the teacher and then a large tool bag of methods to help the widest variety of those differences.

In the box programs don't work because children are not one size fits all.

Magic wand ? What would you want?

Madhuri would like to have: - rigorous teaching in early grades - if we can teach structured literacy following a specific scope in sequence most simple to most complex - teaching with same familiar patterns over and over - cumulative (builds on itself) - multisensory - explicit - Strong transitional kindergarten through grade 3 instruction

Prevention trumps intervention.

Otherwise you're feeding into the school to prison pipeline.

Madhuri's call for teaching that is structured, cumulative, multisensory, and explicit sounds a lot like what I would imagine orality-based instruction looks like as well. The structure there particularly makes it easier to add pieces later on in a way that literacy doesn't necessarily.

https://news.yahoo.com/former-teacher-says-she-fired-171921981.html#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=16593976639480&csi=1&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.yahoo.com%2Fformer-teacher-says-she-fired-171921981.html

Tools which allow for flexibility and creativity are better for knowledge workers than those which attempt to crystalize their tasks into ruts. This may tend to force the outputs in a programmatic way and thereby dramatically decrease the potential for innovative outputs. If the tools force the automation of thought without a concurrent increase in creativity then one may as well rely on manual labor for their thinking.

This may be one of the major flaws of tools for thought in the educational technology space. They often attempt to facilitate the delivery of education in an automated way which dramatically decreases the creativity of the students and the value of the overall outputs. While attempting to automate education may suit the needs of institutions which are delivering the education, particularly with respect to the overall cost of delivery, the automation itself is dramatically at odds with the desire to expand upon ideas and continue innovation for all participants involved. Students also require diverse modes of input (seen/heard) as well as internal processing followed by subsequent outputs (written/drawn/sculpted/painted, spoken/sung, movement/dance). Many teachers don't excel at providing all of these neurodiverse modes and most educational technology tools are even less flexible, thus requiring an even larger panoply of them (often not interoperable because of corporate siloing for competitive reasons) to provide reasonable replacements. Given their ultimate costs, providing a variety of these tools may only serve to increase the overall costs of delivering education or risk diminishing the overall quality. Educators and institutions not watching out for these traps will tend to serve only a small portion of their intended audiences, and even those may be served poorly as they only receive a limited variety of modalities of inputs and outputs. As an example Western cultures' overreliance on primary literacy modes is their Achilles' heel.

Tools for thought should actively attempt to increase the potential solution spaces available to their users, while later still allowing for focusing of attention. How can we better allow for the divergence of ideas and later convergence? Better, how might we allow for regular and repeated cycles of divergence and convergence? Advanced zettelkasten note taking techniques (which also allow for drawing, visual, auditory and other modalities beyond just basic literacy) seem to allow for this sort of practice over long periods of time, particularly when coupled with outputs which are then published for public consumption and divergence/convergence cycles by others.

This may also point out some of the stagnation allowed by social media whose primary modes is neither convergence nor divergence. While they allow for the transmission/communication portion, they primarily don't actively encourage their users to closely evaluate the transmitted ideas, internalize them, or ultimately expand upon them. Their primary mode is for maximizing on time of attention (including base emotions including excitement and fear) and the lowest levels of interaction and engagement (likes, retweets, short gut reaction commentary).

One starts education with where the student is. But mustn't we also inventory what tools and attitudes the student brings? What tools beyond basic literacy do they have? (Usually we presume literacy, but rarely go beyond this and the lack of literacy is too often viewed as failure, particularly as students get older.) Do they have motion, orality, song, visualization, memory? How can we focus on also utilizing these tools and modalities for learning.

Link to the idea that Donald Trump, a person who managed to function as a business owner and president of the United States, was less than literate, yet still managed to function in modern life as an example. In fact, perhaps his focus on oral modes of communication, and the blurrable lines in oral communicative meaning (see [[technobabble]]) was a major strength in his communication style as a means of rising to power?

Just as the populace has lost non-literacy based learning and teaching techniques so that we now consider the illiterate dumb, stupid, or lesser than, Western culture has done this en masse for entire populations and cultures.

Even well-meaning educators in the edtech space that are trying to now center care and well-being are completely missing this piece of the picture. There are much older and specifically non-literate teaching methods that we have lost in our educational toolbelts that would seem wholly odd and out of place in a modern college classroom. How can we center these "missing tools" as educational technology in a modern age? How might we frame Indigenous pedagogical methods as part of the emerging third archive?

Link to: - educational article by Tyson Yunkaporta about medical school songlines - Scott Young article "You should pay for Tutors"

aside on serendipity

As I was writing this note I had a toaster pop up notification in my email client with the arrival of an email by Scott Young with the title "You should pay for Tutors" which prompted me to add a link to this note. It reminds me of a related idea that Indigenous cultures likely used information and knowledge transfer as a means of payment (Lynne Kelly, Knowledge and Power). I have commented previously on the serendipity of things like auto correct or sparks of ideas while reading as a means of interlinking knowledge, but I don't recall experiencing this sort of serendipity leading to combinatorial creativity as a means of linking ideas,

Sadly, we seem to have othered orality and cultural practices which don't fit into the Western literate cultural box. This prevents us from moving forward as a society and a diverse culture.

In the 90's rap was culturally appropriated by some because of its perception as "cool" within the culture. Can this coolness be leveraged as a reintroduction of oral methods in our culture without the baggage of the appropriation? Can it be added to enhance the evolving third archive? As a legitimate teaching tool?

Beyond Eric's words here, I'm struck by the fact that he's able to do this "feat" orally in a way that I certainly cannot. Perhaps he spent ages slowly building it up and writing it down in a literal fashion, but I suspect that part of it is not and that it is raw oral poetry in a way which requires culture and oral practice that I wholly lack, but wish I had.

How can we better teach this?! Center this.

Link to: - Eminem's stacking ammo

Face-to-face teaching and learning has been the majority default for nearly all of human existence. Obviously it was the case in oral cultures, and the tide has shifted a bit with the onset of literacy. However, with the advent of the Internet and the pressures of COVID-19, lots of learning has broken this mold.

How can the affordances of literacy-only modalities be leveraged for online learning that doesn't include significant fact-to-face interaction? How might the zettelkasten method of understanding, sense-making, note taking, and idea generation be leveraged in this process?

Pedagogical cultrues:

• cultures taught orally
• cultures taught to remember
• cultures taught to learn by rote
• cultures taught to forget

Is there a (linear) progression? How do they differ? How are they they same? Is there a 1-1 process that allows them to be equivalence classes?

It looks to me like Andy and Michael are grasping at recreating with modern technology and tools what many (most? all?) indigenous cultures around the world used to ritually learn and memorize their culture's knowledge. Mnemonics, spaced repetition, graded initiation, orality, dance, and song were all used as a cohesive whole to do this.

The best introduction to many of these methods and their pedagogic uses is best described by Lynne Kelly's book Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory, and the Transmission of Culture.

If they take her ideas as a basis and then layer on their own thinking, I think they'll get much further much quicker. Based on my reading of their work thus far, they're limiting themselves.