| | I’ve been having a hard time in this class, and would like others’ input. While this class is by far my favorite, it is also the most frustrating. I’m not sure how to look at what I consider to be stereotyping, judgmental views, and bifurcated ways of thinking: Good law versus bad law, pink skin versus non-pink skin, complacency and greed versus (what I assume is meant) altruism and righteousness. I’m probably not the most articulate person to be making the points I’m about to make, but please understand I mean no offense – I’m only trying to understand and be understood, and, through this classroom experience, to learn some non-academic things along the way.
Do I like money? You’re damned right I do. Why? Because, in this society, it opens up options and is the main instrument that one is forced to use in order to produce resources that one needs and prefers (in other words, those things that make life a heck of a lot easier). I don’t care about status, social position, or wealth per se (despite what may be unintentionally implied by the sentence about being a secretary as opposed to a lawyer in the profile at http://www.law.columbia.edu/media_inquiries/news_events/2007/December07/2010profiles.) The reason I applied to Columbia instead of law schools in my state is because I assumed (and I think rightly so) that on balance, there is too good a chance I will be unemployed after law school if I’m not able to tell prospective employers that I went to what this society considers a “top” law school. If I had chosen to go to a law school in my state (in my case, Indiana University), I would be paying $15,784 in tuition this year; at Columbia, I am paying $42,024. Yes, I’m paying up-front almost three times per year in tuition what I could be paying. But I, employers, and the law schools know that my chance of recouping that financial outlay is by far greater if I have the Latin equivalent of “Columbia” at the top of my diploma instead of “Indiana.” Frustrating, but real. | | | Has it occurred to all of you that one of the "hidden" objectives of the course (where, as Andrew says, Form and Content are indistinct) is to teach you how to use wikis to collaborate, because my work with my own lawyers in my firm and with others in the software industries around the world shows me that this is how you can learn to be more creative in your practices and more effective in your results? Don't try to take over the course mechanisms in the interests of "democracy" or "free speech" at least until you've learned what skilled craftsmen decades cannier and more experienced than you can teach you about how to use the tools. Makalika pointed this out last week and nobody listened to her, even after I pointed to her contribution so no one would miss it. | |
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< | The wiki--with the exception of the papers-- should be about the intellectual structure and content of our investigation. About the readings and what they mean, about the inferences and questions that come out of them, about the "and" (and not so much of the "but") of what we learn from what we read. Classroom discussion allows us to investigate what it means to who we are as often as it allows us to clear the obscurities identified in writing. There are many reasons for this, including the benefit of training in collaborative editing--it is hard to edit someone else's personal statement, but easy to edit someone's reading of a passage or question raised by a conclusion. That's what you're going to use collaborative media to do in practice, as you assemble documents from many hands and minds. More importantly, to write about the personal and speak face to face about the impersonal inverts the emotional structure for the benefit of psychic defenses--shows of virtue, avoidance of confrontation, levying of accusations--which deprives us of the reality of the way human beings actually talk. I use Lawyerland for a reason, too, which we haven't begun to exploit yet. Wikis do not necessarily work well for poetry. | >
> | The wiki--with the exception of the papers-- should be about the intellectual structure and content of our investigation. About the readings and what they mean, about the inferences and questions that come out of them, about the "and" (and not so much of the "but") of what we learn from what we read. Classroom discussion allows us to investigate what it means to who we are as often as it allows us to clear the obscurities identified in writing. There are many reasons for this, including the benefit of training in collaborative editing--it is hard to edit someone else's personal statement, but easy to edit someone's reading of a passage or question raised by a conclusion. That's what you're going to use collaborative media to do in practice, as you assemble documents from many hands and minds. More importantly, to write about the personal and speak face to face about the impersonal inverts the emotional structure for the benefit of psychic defenses--shows of virtue, avoidance of confrontation, levying of accusations--which deprives us of the reality of the way human beings actually talk. I use RobinsonsMetamorphosisTalk for a reason, too, which we haven't begun to exploit yet. Wikis do not necessarily work well for poetry. | | | -- EbenMoglen - 03 Feb 2008, 16:30 GMT
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