A well earned study break and some annual leave gave me 10 days off from my responsibilities; 8 of which involved no course materials. I am eager to dive back in now I’m rested and continue into the second half of my master’s first semester.
There were a few things from the holiday I feel worthy of reflection:
I attended ConFest which is an event that has run since 1976 gathering alternative movements together to inhabit a space of workshops, celebration, and nature. I’m intrigued by how information functions in this space and other festivals. The transmission of tenets by oral culture and the spread of a literary canon of what to expect and prepare for in the form of written guides emailed to participants. There were also a small number of printed maps which were a valued resource indeed.
The main technology used at the festival to communicate what was on was blackboards. A couple of 10 meter long concertinaed fold out collections of blackboards which had both sides written on provided space for a day each of workshops. This meant you could only ever see what was happening today or tomorrow and provided great flexibility to add events to spaces and some camps even allowed anyone to add events as long as they checked in with the camp first. This time frame also brought people to the central camp multiple times where they were located allowing further messaging about volunteer requirements or weather information to be distributed.
In contrast to this evolved and resilient system our mainstream culture demands 24 hour access to all the information possible. It makes me wonder what is lost in the churn for encompassing as much as possible and what alternatives systems we know of and have discarded and how these may affect space, place, and persons.
I also did some reading outside the course curriculum contravening the directive to focus on the most up-to-date materials possible due to the fast changing nature of the technological aspects of the library. After following a rabbit hole on Quora I found the question ‘What was Dewey’s most important work?’ and a recent PhD graduate who had studied this claimed that his 1933 book How we Think was very significant. I then ordered it to be delivered to my house through the CSU library and read some of it during my break. In it Dewey claims the importance of reflective thinking and differentiates it from other ways of lower order thinking which he also defines. He also references some older theorists which I was less familiar with but found fascinating. This included Sir Francis Bacon and his concepts on where errors of thinking come from (mental idols in the flavour of: tribe, marketplace, den, and theater) as well as examples from John Hobbs who I had attempted to read in my undergraduate and found impenetrable but Dewey’s careful selection of quotes to illustrate his points made for much easier going albeit still not the smoothest of sailing requiring a couple of rereadings.
I am eagerly anticipating the return of my first marks for larger assignments so I can get an idea of how I am tracking in the formal assessment aspects of the course. I am satisfied that I am learning and exploring and am wanting to carefully move towards some kind of balance of self care, work, study, and assignments while preparing to spend 10 days at the national conference of the Australian Museums and Galleries Association in a couple of weeks.
I will spend the remainder of the holiday getting my studies up to where I feel they need to be and ideally that will be ahead of where I am scheduled to be up to in order to facilitate offsetting my time at the conference and the next 2 big simultaneously due assignments.