the GIT & the Pendulum effect (repost w/ mods from OER-Discuss)

Amber Thomas> So maybe I've fallen victim to my own observed
phenomena, for the sake of a pun. I live and learn.

If so, you made a very interesting choice of pun material. Consider
this quote from http://www.angelfire.com/me2/artgirl/alterton.html :

«In the case of the incident dealing with the pendulum Poe's following
of Llorente is even more exact. In both, a prisoner of the Inquisition
lies, tightly bound, in the path of a slowly descending pendulum. In
both, the prisoner endures mental agony, as he eyes the keen-cutting
edge, coming nearer and nearer. Both descriptions dwell on a
threatened slow-cutting process. In Llorente, the pendulum was to cut
"the skin of the nose and gradually" to cut on "until life is
extinct." In Poe the pendulum is to cut through the region of the
heart. In both, the prisoner is rescued from this particular torture.
Poe has here strictly adhered to the outline of horrors found in the
Llorente material. He, however, vivifies the bare outline by adding to
it painful sensations of sound, smell, taste, and color. For example,
he points the rod of the pendulum with a flashing steel crescent and
thus describes its descent as it "hisses through the air." [...] The
foregoing evidence shows Poe's manifest dependence on the Llorente
material for the opening and closing scenes in his story, as well as
for the horrible incident dealing with the pendulum.»

Moral: people have been "sharing" (borrowing, stealing, improving...
whatever you want to call it -- since forever). Indeed "simple tech
is all they need to get started" (Scott Leslie). But for huge
multitudes of reasons, it seems woefully inadequate to "just share"
without "understand[ing...] more about individuals' interconnecting
workflows" (Lorna Campbell).

Scott's rhetorical use of dichotomy is interesting: "We share with
people, they share with 'Institutions'" (etc.). The key quote:

«The institutional approach, in my experience, is driven by people who
will end up not being the ones doing the actual sharing nor producing
what is to be shared.»

That's the heart of what David Boud and Alison Lee term the
"provisionist" approach to higher education, in what I think to be a
really essential paper [1]. But as Scott continues, the notion of
"levels" (and thus dichotomies) starts "to get a bit woobly" when we
consider sharing as the *natural state* of humans, the question being
what is shared, and how.

Indeed, why should we think that "sharing" is in some way "special" or
"exceptional" or even interesting? Isn't it rather the opposite, that
any mechanisms that are in place to prevent sharing are the strange
and interesting exceptions (from the human point of view)?
Particularly since these mechanisms are often embodied in "simple
tech" (e.g. the classic examples are walls and fences; a contemporary
example would be copyright and licenses).

I would suggest to go beyond Lorna's call to understand
interconnecting workflows, but really to try and understand
interconnecting resource landscapes in a deep way (including for
example, play, waste, non-human factors, etc.). I think this can only
be done by the people "doing the sharing and producing" -- but, this
time, without dichotomizing. As Walt Kelly put it, we have met the
enemy, and he is us.

[1]: Boud, D. and Lee, A. (2005). 'Peer learning' as pedagogic
discourse for research education. Studies in Higher Education,
30(5):501–516.

PS. Happy Independence Day (US).

PPS. «[K]eel effect is the contribution of the side forces to dihedral
effect. [...] Dihedral effect is the amount of roll moment produced
per degree (or radian) of sideslip [...] The sideslip angle beta is
essentially the directional angle of attack of the airplane [...] Keel
effect is also called "Pendulum Effect" because a lower center of
gravity increases the effect of sideways forces (above the center of
gravity) in producing a rolling moment. This is because the moment arm
is longer, not because of gravitational forces. A low center of
gravity is like a pendulum (which has a very low center of gravity).»
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keel_effect and various.