How do people make decisions in a participatory democracy? There may be formal rules. Major decisions are made by the group as a whole; when an issue is brought to the table, concerns are voiced until someone, formally designated or self-selected, asks whether people are in agreement on a line of action. In some systems, people can “stand aside” if they cannot commit fully to the group’s decision but do not want to block it. But formal rules by themselves provide insufficient guidance actually to deliberate. In any system, whether participatory, adversarial, or some nondemocratic form, countless issues are not covered by the formal rules: what kinds of concerns can be brought up, how they should be framed, what kinds and degree of emotions should be displayed in debates, how breaches in the formal rules should be dealt with, and so on. Every system thus depends on a sophisticated set of normative understandings that accompany the formal rules, a kind of etiquette of deliberation. Such an etiquette does more than keep things civil. By routinizing interaction and domesticating attendant emotions, it generates trust in the process, its outcomes, and its participants. Trust, in turn, is vital to the institution’s survival. Without it, say organizational theorists, decisionmaking is likely to become rigid, and the decisions that result are unlikely to be good ones.
same world together
The trouble with majority voting, say its critics, is that every decision made leaves losers in its wake. The next time a decision must be made, those who lost this time may forge the alliances and strike the bargains necessary to win, thus subordinating the aim of making a good decision to their own desire to gain position. Or they may withdraw altogether from an organization part of whose appeal has been the opportunity to act with common purpose. Groups that put a premium on the possibility of consensus help that not to happen, thus generating important solidarity benefits.
Elites are not conspiracies. Very seldom does a small group of people get together and deliberately try to take over a larger group for its own ends. Elites are nothing more, and nothing less, than groups of friends who also happen to participate in the same political activities. They would probably maintain their friendship whether or not they were involved in political activities; they would probably be involved in political activities whether or not they maintained their friendships. It is the coincidence of these two phenomena which creates elites in any group and makes them so difficult to break.
Today’s Teaching Rant
take one of each…
Some definitions:
phenomenon: A fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, esp. one whose cause is in question.
physical phenomenon: A “natural” phenomenon involving the physical properties of matter and energy.
<teaching rant>
Today we are beginning our exploration of electro-magnetism. In this overarching theme there are topics such as magnetic fields, charges in magnetic fields, magnetic flux, Faraday’s law, Lenz’s Law, electromotive force (EMF), generators and transformers. Don’t worry if you don’t know what these words mean. They are just words with vague connotations at this point. Our job is to understand the physical phenomena that relate to these words, and apply our understanding to answer quantitative problems (problems that have numbers in them) that are based on these physical phenomena.
To start this topic off, we are performing an exploratory activity where you will manipulate objects at your desk, such as metal, plastic, and magnets, and will answer a series of questions that will guide you through your observations. This will help you realize the myriad of physical processes that are happening right in front of you so that your understanding of magnetism is as strong as possible as we move through the next 3 weeks. The goal is to get a good set of observational and mental pictures of the basic nature of magnetism under your belt that you will use as the underpinning of all the subtopics mentioned above.
Most physics classes that you would take assume that you already have a strong set of “observational and mental pictures of basic nature”. The class usually jumps right into formalizing these observations into definitions, terminology, and relevant equations. If it does talk about the physical observances that underpin the phenomena, it is usually just a reminder of things you have already seen in your life. Or, there may be demonstrations shown in the front of class, which nicely shows the phenomenon. Or, there are statements of a set of progressing steps which connect the new topic (magnetism) to things previously learned in the class (static electricity, forces, etc.).
The problem with this instruction is that this is too mentally taxing within the speed that it is being given. There is usually too much need for a rapid assimilation of mental recall of prior life experiences, recall of things you learned recently learned in class, and new terminology and equations. Mind you, being able to perform this assimilation quickly is very valuable and is a skill to hone (especially when going into the field of medicine). But if you don’t have incredibly good recall of incredibly good observations of physical phenomena, you start to sink quite quickly.
I should say, about 10% of you can do this. You may have spent hours playing with magnets - just playing with them - while you were growing up. As easily as you spend hours playing with interacting with friends or playing a sport, you were just playing with something that shows the interesting physical phenomena that is magnetism. Maybe even by accident… in front of a refrigerator. And, you may have good recall of these memories, almost a picture perfect representation of what you observed when you were younger. For those 10% of people in the class, you have a much stronger underpinning to see the invisible, to visualize the problem better, to know which direction to “go” for each problem, to set up force diagrams with more ease, and to get the right answers on tests. You aren’t “smarter”, in the sense that you are quicker and have a higher capacity for learning. Rather you spent time playing with certain things when you were growing up and you have a huge head start.
So here we are in physics class, introducing a new concept, and one of my goals is to not just have 10% of you be comfortable and confident about this topic. You also need to know that you can be as quick and visualize things as good as the 10%, but it takes lots and lots and lots of training, observation, and thinking, in your spare time. There should not be a moment when you are not doing this in college.
Research has shown that a good amount of comfort and confidence of these topics can start by you just playing with magnets for hours and hours, feeling them in your hand, feeling their repulsion and attraction, seeing how they interact with each other and other things, see how their shape affects their interaction. etc. etc. But we do not have time. We are running out of time. So what is the next best thing? One answer is to intensify these experiences into a few hours - to see the phenomena happening in front of your eyes with a well informed teaching staff able to guide your observations to really make you think about what you are seeing.
exploring magnets with Tutorials in Introductory Physics
The Tutorials in Introductory Physics from the University of Washington Physics Department are the least flawed way for us to do this in the limited amount of time that we have. They are a way for you to attempt to hone all of the observational experiences that you have had about magnetism (and if you haven’t had any experiences, give you a crash course in the phenomena right in front of you), and to tease out the complexities of observation about magnetism that are necessary for you to be be successful and confident for the next 3 weeks. This is one of our major attempts to enable you to do more than just blindly apply equations to try to solve problems. This is not the end all of the instruction. Also, it is not perfect. But it is the best we can do with an hour or so of having experiences in the classroom. I should point out that a lot of good research has gone into making these tutorials as learning-rich as possible.
I also will give you magnets to just play with at home (similar to the wires and bulb and battery that I gave you when we were learning electricity). This is another way for us to catch up: just by you playing with something physically interesting while you are watching TV, or at the dining hall, or reading. WARNING: you shouldn’t put magnets near any electronic devices. For small magnets, keep them about 6” away from electronics. Here is another one of our challenges to really understanding things: in our current advanced world, things (like magnets, electricity, lasers, radioactivity, the list goes on and on) that could help us understand this wonderful world we live in better, can also break certain things or hurt us if we aren’t careful. They are therefore deemed dangerous, and we don’t usually have them to explore in our lives. This is a concept that chronically stifles many aspects of our development, and you should be mindful when it is happening to you.
With all of this said, here is the main point: These exploratory activities are not a touchy-feely, feel-good way to understand the material. Rather, these activities are possibly the ONLY way for a large majority of you to connect - in a very robust, enlightening, and empowering manner - the actual things that are happening in the REAL world to the equations and numbers and problems that are happening on the REAL test. Another major point: these activities are not a license to goof off and not have your brain work as hard, just because there are no equations. Don’t just use the fact that there aren’t numbers somewhere in a problem or activity to activate your logical awareness. That is a huge mistake. These activities are actually quite challenging and require all of your mental capacity, and even then we are going to fall short. So don’t skimp on anything related to them. In fact, you should be putting more effort and investment into answering these problems compared to any random question that has a numerical answer, because once you get these underpinnings down, your job of solving problems with numbers becomes much less overwhelming.
see you in class.
</teaching rant>
In recent years, analysts have been much more willing to credit participatory democrats with explicitly political purposes. Experiments with egalitarian and cooperative decision making are a kind of politics-just not the politics of parliamentary maneuver and bureaucratic manipulation. Rather, as sociologist Wini Breines put it in Community and Organization, her seminal study of the 1960s new left, by “prefiguring” within the current practices of the movement the values of freedom, equality, and community that they wanted on a grand scale, activists were helping bring them about. Their dilemma-and it was a dilemma, not a mistake-was that they wanted to effect political change without reproducing the structures that they opposed. To be “strategic” was to privilege organization over personhood and political reform over radical change, and this they would not do.
…the simple but difficult arts of paying attention, copying accurately, following an argument, detecting an ambiguity or a false inference, testing guesses by summoning up contrary instances, organizing one’s time and one’s thought for study - all these arts - which cannot be taught in the air but only through the difficulties of a defined subject, which cannot be taught in one course or one year… must be acquired gradually in dozens of connections…
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
Here is a first shot at a Intro/How-To Video for Wirite. We are currently changing the functionality of the site, so the functionality expressed in this video will certainly be different in the upcoming months. The old site is still up at the Wirite beta page to test out. Check it out and send any feedback you might have. There is also a written How-To here. Thanks so much to Mark Pare and Justin Almeida for making the video!
Settlers vs. Citizens
Recently, everything reminds me of Wirite: community organizations struggling to gather support for their causes; people in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen being left with the enormous task of replacing old ways with new better ways of living; anything on the news about a liberally minded person getting riled up by a conservatively minded person, or vice versa; news stories that show someone frustrated about something – not able to breathe about something in their life… some injustice; every time I hear someone saying that they are frustrated with the roles that our leaders are playing in our country, and throughout the world; every power struggle that just moves and moves around and around, and every time the people that should make the real decisions about things, since they are the ones most influenced, not feeling empowered to express themselves.
If I studied politics, government, or business, I would have a set of tools that would allow me to wrap my head around these things – to be more comfortable and level headed when talking about “the way the world is” and “the way we can help or do good”. It’s tough not having this set of tools. But therein lies what is so valuable: if you can be strong enough to be frustrated and struggle to understand something that makes absolutely no sense to you, you can come up with special ways to help.
In his book “Democracy in America”, Tocqueville seemed to capture a sense of what the United States was and is. What I gather from his writings is that townships in the United States were founded on a set of strong, clear, meaningful ideas (equality among all citizens, decentralized decision making, citizen ownership of the rule of law, and trust within communities and governments). I notice that the arguments being put forth by the current leaders in the United States are all loosely based on small remnants of these ideas, but the bigger picture of how all of them fit with each other is being lost.
Wiriting the Pillars
What is the best tool available, within current limitations of technology and communication, to allow a large number of people with disparate ideas and backgrounds to coherently interact with one another on a large scale when the need arises?
The purpose of Wirite is to search for an answer to that question. Its goal is to allow the editing by and contributions of people to a single document at a scale that is unsupportable by traditional document sharing platforms (such as Google Documents and wiki systems). The platform attempts to allow 2 people to 7 billion people edit, contribute, and feel a sense of ownership in a single document that could be as short as a paragraph or as long as a novel, thereby allowing more people to be invested in a collaborative treatise of shared interests and action.
We are most familiar with one person creating a document that expresses their ideas, thoughts, and proposed actions to the world:
The tools that allow a person to do this are numerous: a piece of paper, a typewriter, a word processing editor such as Microsoft Office, an Internet publishing tool such as a blog, an email account. Since a single person has complete control over the creation of the document, she can write the document in a way that she sees as valuable as possible for herself and the people that she wants to share it with. Many of the editing tools created have focused on one person creating content and sharing the content with the world.
So say hi to Wirite
Hi Wirite! Here is a FAQ/Introduction/HowTo that may be useful before I get a more official page together.
Wirite is a new type of editor that helps any number of people, anywhere in the world, speaking any languages, write anything together. Let’s see how it tries to do this.
Document Search
The first page is a list of documents that can be edited with the website. There is a search tool so that you can try to find a document that has already been started which discusses a topic that you are interested in.
