User:John Bessa/Scratch

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About me
I primarily work in the public domain, and support it so much that I often 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 has; 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 words "public domain," as it confuses people. I found my ideas well-illustrated by 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, Alan Mandell.

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

My recent goal for making a living was 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. I planned to take an "alternate route" to teaching specializing in project-based learning, but failed.

As I got deeper and deeper into issues of my own creation at Empire, I found I have strength in therapy topics, 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.

=Experience with Democracy in the Information Society: the Internet=

I founded and moderated two great groups on Care2: Katrina flood victim support group, and the empathy research group.

The Katrina group 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

The 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] article was intended as a template for action for the Empathy group, now named Empathy Action. The, wiki stands on its own now, and stands as "number one" on Google (last I checked) for "empathy neurology." One if its goals is to show that a lack of "emotional communication" is the causing all the problems in the World; it should really be named [Emotional Communication], as empathy is widely accepted as an intellectual option, and in some cases the implementation of empathetic ideas can be shown to countermand free communication.

And here is the discussion group on Care2. My degree work on the topic is presented on thinman.com.

As an extension of online empathy discussion I created a model for web communities based on the successes of the two groups, which were essentially action research groups. The paper covers so many other topics, though, that the activist component is minor. It is extremely thick, and I only got an A- for it, I think probably because the professor could not understand much of it:

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.


 * Middle school science ideas applied to hurricane learning for students who may face this kind of weather, and associated trauma.

Photography
Galleries Photography writing
 * | JohnBessa.com and Thinman > Photography
 * Flickr
 * Empathy and the photographers' finger is my case for the mechanically-released shutter, rather than the fully electronic shutter.

= 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.

=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.

Knowledge construction

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

Wiki page development

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

Wikimedia effects on page development

 * Effectively a technical document
 * Rendering

Defining the mission

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

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

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

PHP Programming

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

Other
--JohnBessatalk 17:36, 19 February 2009 (UTC)