User:John Bessa

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Trucking across the Poughkeepsie Bridge
 "Make friends with a few animals." Einstein

What's new:

  • I am creating sub-pages here as notes for photography education: "old school for new photogs." My experience with kids as a technology mentor, school bus driver, and homeless teen counselor is that kids are generally aware of the advanced nature of our own childhoods twenty to fifty years ago, and love to experience our experiences. Even prior to our recent childhoods some of us humans were exceptionally advanced; modern art and anthropology come to mind. Photography has not fundamentally improved since the late 1800s, it has just sped-up and miniaturized. (The same can be said for technology.)
  • The photog sub-pages will not be directly educational in of themselves but will notes I have been keeping mostly on Camerapedia, which is not photography-oriented, but seeks to document camera production purely factually. There may be an upcoming crisis. Some are guessing that film will dissappear because of digital, but the more immediate crisis is with the exceedingly important range finder cameras. New ones are exceedingly expensive and aimed towards collectors, and the old ones are likewise getting expensive and many are falling apart. (Fortunately there is still a plentiful supply of single lens reflex cameras.)
  • Bad news: I was rejected for an accelerated teaching certification program, and I cannot imagine why. I had high recent grades, educational studies, a successful technology career, and extensive mentoring experience. (Many people believe that the US government is attempting to destroy the US from within and without, and if so, this would have to be studied as mental and sociological illnesses.)

Contents

[edit] About me

I primarily work in the public domain, and support it so much that I usually do not attribute my work. I essentially grew up in the world of GNU and have applied the GPL in a liberal sense to my work, but not the GFDL. Correspondence with GNU's creator, Richard Stallman, has shown me that I may have a different concept of "free" than he; my concept springs from the idea of the Public Domain, the place where the public is, both intellectually and on the Earth. Stallman opposes this idea; he wrote me not to use the word as it confuses people. I found my ideas well illustrated in Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization, a classic I refer to for many things, including my opposition to wildlife hunting.

Most important of my writing is my page/site "Empathy: Spiritual Darwinism" that I wrote for my professor/mentor at the Empire State College.

Proudest, though, is my photography best of which I hope to upload to wv as time allows.

My present goal for making a living is to become a middle school science teacher. I spent the hey-day of technology on Wall Street (mostly) implementing free software, and after the ruinous American technology crash of 2000-2002, I successfully connected with North America as a long haul driver while finishing my degree at Empire.

As I got deeper and deeper into issues of my own creation at Empire, I found I have strength in therapy, and I saw the links between learning and therapy, and idea I hope to extend here as knowledge construction. Here is a document that started as a resume that evolved into a summary of my experiences with teaching and therapy. It is uncharacteristically positive for my writing, and has little if any critical analysis in it, which in a sense is a lie--I witnessed much abuse while working with disabled children and youth.

All along I have worked hard on the Internet, first on Wall Street and in the many open user groups of New York, and then through web communities such as Care2. At first we were simply building a highway just to build more highway, and then in the late 90s everything changed, and big money was introduced in the form of investment and credit card transactions (I, for one, was confused). We in "open systems" were very socially active in New York City at the time, grouping around the free software movement. The groups I organized in the New York open software community were PUNY, or Perl/Unix of NY, and the Linux Society, which still exists as a blog.

[edit] Experience with Democracy in the Information Society: the Internet

I had two great groups on Care2. One supported the Katrina flood victims and had a US Senator in the discussion, but as a lurker, Evan Bayh. We would get 24hr turn around time w/ acts of Congress with contributions coming from the ground. I wrote a paper for my degree on it (getting an A), which sums up the disaster and the experience of the group; it is unique is that nearly everything in it is eye-witness. Later on I tried to lure Bayh into the fray, but he got immediately attacked. I wrote about that too.

Writing: http://thinman.com/text/katrina_story.html

Group: http://www.care2.com/c2c/group/katrina_in_memoriam

My empathy group was a collection of my 100 or so friends from Care2 and we were supposed to go after China, but I hesitated, and got pressure from the group to give it direction. My final degree paper was on "Spiritual Darwinism" talking about the evolution of morality from its animal roots as Darwin's "natural affection," so I focused on that seeing I was becoming an expert on the topic. The discussion became an acid test for the empathic ideas starting with Aristotle going on to de Waal's experiments with Elephants, and much more. Unfortunately Care2 lost its viability as a genuine community because of the introduction of fascistic-level control; after all it is about advertising, so the group has languished. I put most of the significant discussions on permanent display for reference.

The "Empathy Model" wiki was originally created as a template for action for the Empathy group, which is now called Empathy Action. The wiki stands on its own now, number one on Google last I checked for "empathy neurology," and attempts to describe the lack of "emotional communication" as the problem both with the world.

Here is the wiki URL, and it is still growing: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Empathy_Model

And here is the group: http://www.care2.com/c2c/group/empathy

My degree work on the topic was presented as this web site: http://thinman.com/empathy

I wrote a very extensive paper on a model for web communities based on the action research model that would create "info bombs" to influence policy-makers, for instance Obama. This paper is thick, and I only got an A- for it, because I think my professor could not understand it:

http://thinman.com/text/new_model_design.html

[edit] My content

My writing is not the best, but for content value there may be no better!

[edit] Technology

  • Thinman site based on my desire to see fully open gaming-type boxes applied as workstations for the youth of the world, and those who are isolated, apparently deliberately, around the world such as in the African "bush."

[edit] Learning

  • Learning the "new" way gives a broad understanding of education during the critical middle school years, and promotes style that every Wikiversitan should adore.

[edit] Photography

Galleries

Photography writing

[edit] Wikiversity policy studies proposal

When my studies become complex, I like to put myself on a mono-diet of my ideas to create a pure test model. In a sense a wiki is a on a wiki mono-diet, because everything is a wiki article page, and the results of the information developed in the page fit the phenomena of the wiki model.

After looking over the pages suggested to me in the "what wikiversity is not" discussion, I concluded that Wikiversity is not on a wiki mono-diet, but should be. The policies seem to be defining Wikiversity in terms of everything except wiki-based learning.

A wiki by itself is an educational vehicle in the purest sense following the wiki phenomena, where an aggregate of wiki pages in a single wiki community should create a wiki-produced conceptual view of the world. I believe that such a conception should be nearly completely accurate. A wiki is not the only web community format to produce a nearly perfect conception, but it may be the best (so far). My personal experience with web-based information aggregation has been that, given contributor freedom, the knowledge created will be the best available.

I am seeing a lot of ideas in Wikiversity policy that do not support the Internet as the modern Information Society, let alone the wiki phenomena, but ideas that want to re-implement antiquated structure that has no place in the modern Information Society.

Going with the idea of a wiki mono-diet, we might want to create an aggregate study as a single article of exactly what is going on, and what should be going on with respect to our growth: Wikiversity studies.

The primary problem is this: I do not see that the policy structure is going to promote wiki-based studies, and those that are produce here seem to wander off to other wiki-communities. I think we need to work primarily towards wiki-retention, to fight wiki-attrition. To fight this we need to provide things that our scholars need, specifically support, and also we need to define what value we want add to the planet, how we want to help humanity. In other words, we need to define the Wikiversity in terms of six billion others rather than ourselves. Otherwise the good courses will simply move on to other wikis, as I am seeing.

Within that we need to define what server-type services we need to have to facilitate our scholars (I have a lot of ideas about this). And to do this we can simply study ourselves and our own needs. Such a study would be unique and would probably become famous because it could show how learning in a democratic environment can be the information source for policy making.

Ideally wv should generate ideas to be used in other wikis and similar study sites, but not necessarily the Wikiversity .

I think that this mission is valid and necessary, and that the "charity should start at home," should fully embrace the wiki phenomena. And hence my idea of wiki-education policy studies as a Wikiversity mono-diet. Unfortunately there is no place to post this idea... except to start a Wikiversity policies study article.

[edit] Grammar for World Democracy: Multi-Lingual Simplified English

This goes to multilingual awareness; I feel that American English has become the World's linguafranca, partly because of communications dominance, but mostly because of Hollywood. Everyone on the Earth is seeing American made movies with local langauge subtitles. Perhaps American English should change so that it can be more logically constructed for the benefit of all.

In order to master proper English writing, a lot of arcane rules must learned, and they all have seemingly meaningless names. Since language and writing are a key component of policy-making, to access policy-makers language has to be leveraged correctly. Recently I took beginning teachers' exams and scored very well on the English parts, but still I think my writing is weak in that I "do it by ear" not necessarily understanding the "rules."

I think it would help to create a course that redesigns grammar from a concept mapping perspective, giving constructs better names. Grammar was at one time taught using rudimentary concept mapping, and students who learned it had more powerful minds, according to an octogenarian that I know, despite the pain of learning it.

Extending this idea is what I think is a need to organize language better, especially with respect to meanings. An excellent example is the collection of words associated with Capital, such as capital construction. Capital may in fact be capital construction, where grow is necessary to fill the newly constructed capitals, where capitals are central locations of accumulated resources to form capital. And then there is capital punishment; might it also be associated with the concepts of capital?

Understandings like these are exceedingly important for democratic participation, yet hopelessly confusing. I see in economic commentary a common call for "trade reciprocity," or equal trade between nations, yet I believe only a tiny percentage of humanity knows what that is. If reciprocity were instead "reciprocy," a direct derivation of reciprocal, then possibly many more people would grock the concept, giving it a fighting chance in the capital arena.

[edit] Wiki and Wikiversity Studies

The Information Society, of which wikis are now a (if not the) key component, has two sides, the technical aspects, and the social effects, and the two sides are closely related we here on the wv operate on both sides.

[edit] Wiki Phenomena

[edit] Knowledge construction

  • Wiki effects on knowledge construction
    • Aggregation of information bits to form constructed knowledge

[edit] Wiki page development

  • Wiki format standardizes information structure
  • Wiki community rearranges information
  • Negative side: edit wars

[edit] Wikimedia effects on page development

  • Effectively a technical document
  • Rendering

[edit] Wikiversity effects on the Mediawiki

[edit] Defining the mission

  • Educators' needs
    • Protection
      • Academic freedom
    • Tenure
    • Publications

[edit] Wiki Technology

Ours is the most relevant, and I believe that it needs to be expanded, if not forked, for the education mission

[edit] MediaWiki

[edit] Editing pages

[edit] Advanced Components

Tables: how the technical and social aspects can interrelate in a single discussion

  • How to create a table
  • Effects of tables on information construction

[edit] PHP Programming

  • Bringing back Mediawiki programming
  • Building scholar's extensions
    • Editing
      • Increased power, such as the editor on [1] Ning.com

[edit] Other

--JohnBessa66.pngBessatalk 17:36, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

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