| | 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. | | | I wish to direct the curious to the "diffs" page. If the original author intended the note to "recent contributors" to be overheard by others, I won't stop him from restoring it. But it said "to recent contributors," and it names us.
-- AndrewGradman - 03 Feb 2008 | |
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Andrew, if you felt that you want to make "history" out of the part of my remarks that could be construed as critical, I understand, but what I wrote was intended to explain my intentions and objectives to others, as well as to explain my request to you to stop writing for a while, which is exactly what you now haven't done. Rather than eliminating what I wrote, had I not asked you to take a time out you could have edited my remarks to remove personal criticism (which would have been noted and understood for what it is) while leaving the rest of my ideas in place. That would have been the wiki way. But I had asked you for a period of silence and you shouldn't have done anything. Instead you decided the situation called for you to ignore the instruction you had been given, and make yet another decision for me by writing more and erasing my instructions. That was contempt of court. You are in a hole. Stop digging. Don't say anything. Just stop.
While you are sitting out this set and more to come, I'll do the editing for you.
-- EbenMoglen, 3 Feb 2008, 20:25 GMT
Note on Wiki Structure and Content
The Indexing approach proposed by AndrewGradman will do more harm than good. The right solution in wikis is to make each topic a Topic, with a page of its own, and a "Talk" page attached to the topic for discussion about its contents. That about which there is consensus remains on the main Topic page, and that for which more interaction is necessary to establish the content of the Topic remains on the Talk page for that topic. Those who want to see how and why it works can study the Wikipedia. Refactoring then is largely about moving conclusions from Talk to Topic, and revising Talk to maximize the productivity of future Talk. Ian and I have been planning the editorial interventions needed to reduce the clutter caused by such un-wiki behavior as Topic and Topic2 (which caused much levity and head-shaking among the wiki-theorists I showed it to). The AndrewGradman proposal would invert what experience has shown to be the best structure in order to make what could literally be called the anti-best structure.
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.
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.
-- EbenMoglen - 03 Feb 2008, 16:30 GMT
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