I just read this article, “The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson From Auschwitz” even though it was published a few days ago, but I think it’s subject is intimately connected to the question I posed to you in the Google doc on Tuesday.

He began the show with the words, “One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an actual picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the 20th century has been to show that such an aim is unattainable.” For Dr. Bronowski, there was no absolute knowledge and anyone who claims it — whether a scientist, a politician or a religious believer — opens the door to tragedy. All scientific information is imperfect and we have to treat it with humility. Such, for him, was the human condition.

 

This is the condition for what we can know, but it is also, crucially, a moral lesson. It is the lesson of 20th-century painting from Cubism onwards, but also that of quantum physics. All we can do is to push deeper and deeper into better approximations of an ever-evasive reality. The goal of complete understanding seems to recede as we approach it.

 

There is no God’s eye view, Dr. Bronowski insisted, and the people who claim that there is and that they possess it are not just wrong, they are morally pernicious. Errors are inextricably bound up with pursuit of human knowledge, which requires not just mathematical calculation but insight, interpretation and a personal act of judgment for which we are responsible. The emphasis on the moral responsibility of knowledge was essential for all of Dr. Bronowski’s work. The acquisition of knowledge entails a responsibility for the integrity of what we are as ethical creatures.

Please try to read the article before class tomorrow (it’s an op-ed in the NYTimes, so not terribly long) and watch the 4-minute video clip embedded in it. Think about connections you see between this article and Maus. Let’s start our discussion tomorrow with the writing you did on Tuesday and this article.

• Read UC chpt 7 & Maus II chpts 3-4
• Write a long paragraph or so on your blog in which you reflect on the process of writing the collaborative essay in the Google doc in class today. What roles did you play in the process? How did you feel while you were working? What sorts of behaviors did you observe in your classmates or yourself that seem interesting?
• Start thinking about which pages you will choose to trace for your first project. I will bring tracing paper to class on Thursday.
• I’ve installed the Subscribe2 plugin, which allows me to automatically update you via email when new content is posted to the site. If you haven’t already replied to the information form to give me your gmail address, then do so now. (The twelve of you who have, I’ve signed you up to receive notifications via gmail. If you don’t want notifications, let me know.)

We’ll be working inside a Google document for today’s class. Here’s the link you will need to get into that document.

I Google hungout last night with the other folks involved in the collaborative writing project, which we have now officially named All Write. Here are links to a pair of Google docs that students put together in a somewhat similar experiment last spring: Environmental Education: A Vision Statement and Technology and Nature: A Discussion. Take a look at them, see if you can get a sense of how those students used the Google docs to carry on the discussion.

Participants will include a class from SUNY in upstate New York, another first year writing class working on graphic novel memoirs at Agnes Scott, a group of students in Taiwan, a first year writing class at SPSU on digital writing, a graduate class on digital literacies at the U of Pennsylvania, and some others.

• We’ll take our first run at the collaborative writing on Feb 12 or 13.  Janine’s students at SUNY-ESF will take the lead for that first document, which will be based around some sort of theme having to do with the food or education. We’ll talk about schedules post-snowpocalypse in class, but I had to reschedule my conference to Feb 13 & 14th, so won’t be in class on the 13th. I think I’ll require that your class time be spent working in the collaborative document that Janine’s students set up.
• Pete’s student will take the point the next week, with a document that takes up some issue of digital identity & social media.
• I’ve signed our class to take the lead on the following week, around Feb 25. You’ll have just finished your Maus projects and I said that we’ll do something on visual design and arguing with images. This kind of topic will lead really nicely into the other projects you’ll be completing this semester.
• On March 17 or 24, Jim Diedrick’s students at Agnes Scott will be the primary facilitators for a doc that revolves around graphic novel memoirs. He’s got some cool ideas about bringing in either Fun Home (which we will have just finished reading by then) or March, Book 1.

The SUNY students are running a photo contest through Twitter and would love it if some or all of you participated.

So, on Monday I’m going to have a Google hangout regarding the crazy collaborative writing thing we talked about yesterday. One class that will be involved is a writing and the environment group at SUNY-ESF, and they’ve been posting introductory tweets recently. Here they are, all collected into one Storify.

Posting that link for 2 reasons: a) you can see some of the other students we might be working with, but mainly b) you can see how they go about introducing themselves in 140 characters and with a single image. That’s not exactly what we’re doing with the badges, but might give you some inspiration as you work on them (and, not to give too much away, but you’ll be working on some “about me” text for your sites sometime soon, so …)