Replying to LO26065 --
Dear Organlearners,
Arthur Battram <apb@cityplex.demon.co.uk> writes:
>Hello my fellow LOites
>
>(THIS FIRST BIT IS TOTALLY OFF THE POINT:
>I prefer to call you LOites [pronounced 'el-oh-ites',
>or 'low-ites'] because I've just realised why I hate the
> term 'organlearners', which was, I believe coined
>by the lovely At de Lange. It reminds me of 'organleggers',
>a term coined in the 60s by Larry Niven, an SF writer,
>to describe human organ bootleggers, and conjures up
>an image of body parts in jars of formaldehyde.
Greetings dear Arthur,
I love to react to "totally off the point bits". It is a powerful way to
break with the monotony of habit.
I created the name "organlearners" many years ago for a specific reason --
to let thinkers wonder why I use it! I use it because for me a Learning
Organisation (LO) is an organism. Complex organisms live by means of their
organs. Each organ (sometimes duplicated like the eyes or the family
jewels) not only has specific functions, but they also cooperate together
in a most harmonius manner. Such is every member of a LO too. I would very
much like our very LO-list to be also a LO. In that case each of you is an
organ of our LO-list as an LO=organism.
Some would say that the organs of an organism just have to cooperate
together simply because they cannot come and go as they wish. When
comparing this reason with an Ordinary Organistion in which its members
can come and go as they wish, an organisation can never be an organism.
But this leads exactly to what I say. Only when an OO emerge into a LO
will it become an organism.
Every nation has a few times its own Leonardo da Vinci. My own people had
early the 20th century its own Da Vinci, namely Eugene Marais. One of the
many unique things which he did, was to study ant colonies. He published
the outcome of this study in a book called "Die siel van die mier" (The
soul of the ant). One finding was that ants are fast learners. However,
the bottom line of all his findings was that each ant of the colony has a
soul which is the very colony itself. Said in another way, the ant colony
itself is an organism with a number of organs. These organs have many
copies and each copy (of whatever organ) is an ant. Each ant (not
organism, but organ) indeed comes and goes freely for the very reason to
sustain and maintain its soul -- the colony as organism.
Shall I begin, with Eugene Marais' insight. each contribution with "Dear
Ants"?
Eugene Marais taught me from the grave through his many unique works an
invaluable lesson:
. A language is free to come and go so as to serve the soul.
How I wish you fellow learners to learn that lesson too.
Let us play with your LOites to serve the soul.
The common use of the suffix "-ite" (plural "-ites) is to refer to the
decendants of a person like Israel-ite. What lovely way you have to
address the decendants of this LO-list. Should it not be Sengites?
Meanwhile, think what it means to be a UKite ;-)
Here are some novel uses
Many diseases end on "-itis" like meningitis. The last "i" in "-itis"
indicates singular. Should some of them have a common feature XYZ and we
want to speak of them together in terms of this feature, we will have to
give them the name XYZites where the "e" now indicates plural. Thus these
LOites seem to be a collection of diseases with the common property LO.
Poor Rick -- our host will have serious problems when the "health system"
for OOs gets one if its tentacles into our LO-list.
Many inorganic acids end in "-ous" like hydrochlorous acid HClO2. When
these acids react with a base like sodium hydroxide NaOH, they will form a
salt of which its name has to end in "-ite" like sodium chlorite NaClO2.
The CLO2- part of the acid was merely a spectator or lurker, the acid work
having been done by the H+ part. Chlorine, bromine, etc belomh to the
group of elements called hallogens. Thus, when refering to salts like
NaClO2and NaBrO2 we will speak of them as the halogen-ites.
Arthur, it seems that you address only the spectators or lurkers to the
LO-list with this LOites ;-) But wait, there is more to it. When that
spectator part ClO2- itself becomes active, it may become oxidised to
ClO3-. The name of the salt NaClO3 is now changed into sodium chlorate,
i.e. the "-ite" becomes an "-ate". You ought to have addressed our lurking
fellow learners as LOates because many of them are changing from LO-ites
to LO-ates through emergent learning! Furthermore, after emergent learning
comes digestive learning, exactly what LO-ates tells us !!!
In geology the suffix "-ite" have a powerful use in mineralogy. For
example at many places in and around Pretoria one can find dolomite. Bu I
will leave it to Leo Minnigh to explain its use in geology as well as
reinterpret it for LO thinking. Andrew, nature's most beautiful sculptures
in rocks you will find among dolomite outcrops!
The "-ite" is used in engineering sciences to refer to explosives. Think
of what LO-ites means -- a bunch of people, each with explosive power
related to whatever this acronym LO ought to mean.
Another powerful use of "-ite" is in the biological science. Here it is
used in the sense of "having a definite pattern similar to". For example,
dendrite mean something which has a pteern like a tree="dendron". So, when
you address the LO-ites, they all have a definite pattern for which the
acronym LO serve as the defining example. What will this pattern be.
Thinking of Marais and his work "The soul of the ant", all these people
have souls uniting in one soul, the LO
>So an 'organlearner' sounds like someone who learns
>from organs, which is the claim .....
Yes, we each (as an organ) learn from each other (as organs). It is called
Team Learning, one of the five LO-disciplines.
>HERESY ALERT!
>what's so great about being a learning organisation anyway?
>(There I've said it, I just know I'm going to get excommunicated
>now, Rick'll come round to my house and ...)
>STAND DOWN HERESY ALERT
For one thing, that one can use "one" name like LOites which have so
"many" meanings. Incredible thing, is it not, this "one-to-many-mapping"
which begins deep down with "entropy production" and ends high up with
"one-to-many-love".
>Forcing people to read things is an example of
>what I call the 'Beating People Up For Jesus'
>syndrome. Nice goal, shame about the tactics...
Think about education and its rampant rote learning -- putting some
written text in the hand of the learner which then must trigger learning.
What a syndrome!
>I for one am confused. I understand the notion of
>'double loop learning' or rather I understand the concept
>these words point at, but am I alone in finding the term
>mechanistic and static?
All terms are not merely mechanistic and static, but are actually
meaningless. It is up to each of us to give a living meaning to a term.
The term "double loop learning" has been created to avoid the seemingly
tautologous expression "learn to learn".
Using my imagination, I can think of many kinds of "double loops" like two
loops next to each other ( O O ), a single loop twisted into the figure
eight ( 8 ), two loops linked into each other to form a chain, ......
One of the most valuable lessons to learn in the first "learn" of "learn to
learn" is:
. Our imagination will always imbetter our knowledge.
>Learning is what you do of your own volition,
>training is done to you. As James Carse points
>out in his wondrous book 'Finite and Infinite Games',
>training is rooted in the past, the finished, the finite.
>Schools increasingly mainly train rather than 'support
>learning' or 'educate'.
What a sickening mess from primary schools to universities on a global
scale. To make our educational sytems healthy again, we need more midwives
for authentic learning.
>> OK. I'll ask. What did a certain CEO say when one
>> of his staff asked him at an open meeting whether he
>> wanted "his organisation" to be a learning organisation?
>
>OK, I'll tell, but first I want to set the scene.
(snip)
>so anyway he asks the question, and do you know
>what the Chief Executive says in response? He says:
>
>"No."
>
>Now I've got a theory as to why he said that, but I'd
>really like to hear your theories, dear LOites...
Say "NO" in a final manner and many daredevils will do "YES" just to
explore the other side of the "NO".
It is in the memes as in the genes. God said to Adam and Eve: "tree of
good and bad -- no". But Adam and Eve did "tree of good and bad -yes".
"Say-no-do-yes" is a most powerful entropy producing force flux pair.
Given the right conditions and heaven opens up. Given the wrong conditions
and hell awaits.
It is so sad that Adam and Eve first judged God to be spiteful before
doing "tree of good and bad -yes". Imagine what could have happened should
they asked God: "Why must we not eat the fruit of the tree of good and
bad?" Perhaps he would have told them what would happen so that they could
have avoided it while eating the fruit. But, in my mothertongue we have an
idiomatic saying: "Wie nie wil hoor nie, moet voel." (Who won't hear, must
feel.)
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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