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Vanessa Vaile

Oral Tradition - 0 views

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    Founded in 1986, the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition stands as a national and international focus for interdisciplinary research and scholarship on the world's oral traditions. Our long-term mission is to facilitate communication across disciplinary boundaries by creating linkages among specialists in different fields. Through our various activities we try to foster conversations and exchanges about oral tradition that would not otherwise take place. CSOT publications include the journal Oral Tradition (http://www.oraltradition.org/ot/, 1986-) and three series of books: the Albert Bates Lord Studies in Oral Tradition (1987-96; 17 volumes); Voices in Performance and Text (1995-97; 3 volumes); and, Poetics of Orality and Literacy (2 volumes to date; 2004-). CSOT projects include: ISSOT, International Society for Studies in Oral Tradition, http://issot.org/, and The Pathways Project, http://www.pathwaysproject.org/ Pathways
Terry Elliott

Rhizomatic learning, knowledge and books | Jenny Connected - 0 views

  • don’t throw out your books
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Perhaps it is not the books themselves but the power we grant them just because they are books. There are lots of reasons why we did this: they were the best technology available for carrying information, they are the tools of power for status quo and revolutionary alike, they have are now the traditional, default method. Yet we are at the beginning of an age which has other methods that are even more ubiquitous. The mobile device is becoming preeminent because it not only carries words but also images, moving and static, and sounds, ours and others. It is immediate and easily reproducible.
  • Are we going to ignore or throw away our books and so throw away our history? Doesn’t our past inform our present and future?
    • Terry Elliott
       
      No, we are not going to do that, however we are going to put them in their place. To situate them in the power context, into their new community alongside images and sounds and the digital hierarchy of tools.
  • Iain MacGilchrist’s book – The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I am a real fanboy of MacGilchrist's book. If you hadn't brought him up, I would have. ;-)
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  • he traces how the left hemisphere has grabbed more than its fair share of power
    • Terry Elliott
       
      Yes and what has been the instrument of that power grab--books. Cormier's distrust comes from the valorization of yet another master of the holist part of our mind. Books are colonizers aren't they?
  • We need books, but we also need to engage with them critically. We need text, but we also need to be able to see its limitations. We need abstraction, but we also need embodied learning. We need to exercise both the left and right hemispheres of our brains.
    • Terry Elliott
       
      I say give books the comeuppance they deserve. Who is the boss of the mind? Mine is reactionary sloganeering here, so let me be less molotov. I, meaning my whole self, am the boss, the master. I am weary of being told and of accepting as writ (holy irony that) that the written word is supreme. I find myself revolting (please no Henny Youngman jokes) against words by my frail attempts to use tools that are decidedly not books--zeega, vine, photography, video, soundcloud, augmented reality--to wrestle control from literacy and return to orality.
    • Terry Elliott
    • Terry Elliott
       
      On your side Scott would agree that it is not books who are at fault. Please let us not shoot the messenger. It is our use of books and our abdication to their organization, to their legibility that is our downfall.
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    Reader Response theory comes to mind here too. I see where this is both coming from and headed but my own attitude is, like anyone else's, still very much influenced by my personal reading history. I was an only child and, in a time when families moved much less than now, we moved often because of my father's work with a geophysical crew. I didn't spend entire school year in one place or even the same state until the 5th grade -- did not fall behind because my mother taught me to read early and my father made maths fun with cards, dice and dominoes. Add that all that up -- books spoke to me, were my family and friends. FYI Terry, my father was a storyteller and master punster
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