First stone: We’re all a Bunch of Chickens

 "It is the circumstance, that several of the islands possess their own species of the tortoise...that strikes me with wonder." 

-Photo credit: Darwin's Secret Notebooks, National Geographic.com

Spirit of Pre-Contact Wonder

In the tenor of the Beagle notebooks, I titled my blog to capture the spirit of pre-contact enthusiasm as I enjoy not only reading about science but also Darwin's sense of wonder.

Writing a blog is a new exploration, and my first attempt left me feeling unsatisfied as I narrowly tried to constrain the experience for efficiency sake. I thought if I limited the experience to writing about the process of blogging, it might help me stay on track and not veer off on tangents. Yet that limitation effectively undermines the whole point of an evolving discussion. Plus it’s boring. More frankly, I was being a chicken.

So I’ll use this space in the way that I currently e-mail or forward ‘good reads’ to my sons away at college. (Just as my mother and grandparents used to clip articles and mail to family members as a way to stay connected.) With that said, here is my first stone...

I recently read a delightful article, “Pecking Order” by Peter Lenox in the Times Higher Education, on the value of watching chickens as a way to understand our human motivations and interactions. It is a funny and engaging read on chickens’ social behavior in relation to territory, personality, preference, and hierarchy that Lenox believes help us to understand ourselves.

I enjoyed his section on “Inquisitiveness, Teaching and Learning,” and I quote it here directly so that you might get a sense of Lenox’s style and encourage you to read his article in its entirety:

If I'm working in the garden, the chickens come, sit on the wall and watch. If I'm chopping logs, the tamer ones have a disconcerting tendency to hop on to the chopping block looking for tasty woodlice. They follow me into the shed and back out into the garage, through the side gate, tripping me up every time I turn, all the while murmuring and clucking softly. I think they may be reassuring me so I don't get spooked.

I've not heard of a functional magnetic resonance imaging study of mirror neurons in hens, but they do learn by copying each other. One hen makes a special, ungainly jump to get at the out-of-reach juicy berries - very comical. By the end of the week, they're all at it until the berries are gone. Next year, the technique is deployed straight away.

It's the same with finding out how to get over the fence in stages; a low wall, then on to the shed roof, along a bit then a short flight and a crash-landing in next door's garden. Once one does it, most of them can; the escape route will have to be sealed.

I just love that image of learning to jump over the fence. It just takes one to start doing it, and soon others are following along. That is what many of us are doing with this blogging experience, and I’m taking the leap, bumping and bruising along with the rest of you.

Part II: Often I Click It. Öffentlichkeit (Public Sphere)

I feel as if I’ve been on a post-modern walkabout swamping through text, and the more often I click it, the more often I’m caught in my own world of sticks. My apologies to all, but there was a click that I missed.

In response to Clancy Ratliff’s article, “Between Work and Play: Blogging and Community Knowledge-Making,” I thought the idea of using a Web log as a knowledge management tool to be particularly interesting. I have participated in an educational discussion board as a regular poster with an anonymous screen name since 2004. Though it is anonymous, you establish a posting history over time that reveals enough detail to construct an identity.

One of the issues with the discussion board is the cyclic nature of common questions and the cyclic community of responders. Members willingly respond to each new query or post links to past discussion or direct the posters to search through archives. Several members thought it would be a good idea to compile some of the best threads with enduring merit that were endanger of being lost to the community over time as new threads emerged. We created several archives of ‘must read’ threads, categorized by topic.

The management issue of ongoing discussions is relevant to Clancy Ratliff’s understanding of using the blog as a management tool for research. I do believe the more data we have available to us, the more we need to order and filter content. Personal blogging seems a useful way to act on our internet interests as active participants rather than passive consumers.

Jürgen Habermas' Public Sphere
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The other idea that I liked from one of the links on Ratliff’s article, Scribbling Woman is Jürgen Habermas' concept of the public sphere or Öffentlichkeit (Public Sphere)

The German term Öffentlichkeit (Public Sphere) encompasses a variety of meanings and it implies a spatial concept, the social sites or arenas where meanings are articulated, distributed, and negotiated, as well as the collective body constituted by, and in this process, "the public".[13]

Now the analogy is obvious, but I really loved the German term and how it looked like I was trying to say “Often I Click It,” sort of.

Beyond the fun of this idea, I still have reservations about how much I will be willing to share publicly. But I thought Carlton Clark’s article, “‘I Don't Really Want to Go into Personal Things in This Blog’: Risking Connection through Blogging,” did a nice job articulating the need for personal to build trust and open the dialogue. People tend to share with people who share. I will open up.