With the August bank holiday weekend coming up soon, the end of summer looms large ahead and I for one shall be welcoming it with open arms. Just a few years ago at this time of year I would have been sitting in a tent in a field somewhere like North Wales enjoying the outdoor life but for the past two years the traditional holiday month of August has been a washout and it has been just as well to stay at home and get some work done.

The real summer of course invariably takes place in June and early July and this year was no exception so why are the school children, parents, students and education workers forced to take their annual rest time in August, the damp chilly fag-end of the season? Well legend has it that it all goes back to a time when the youth of nation were required on the land to help with bringing in the harvest. I was even involved in that particular agricultural tradition myself as a lad, picking up potatoes in the fields of Shortlanesend near Truro.

John Richards had a small mixed arable farm, a couple of old Massey Ferguson tractors, a hay barn and two daughters. So labour intensive was the work required at specific times of the year that small armies of child workers were recruited, happy to be exploited for a small pittance per hour in the name of doing some real, grownup work, passing the endless boring long days of summer and earning a bit of pocket money. In order to join in I had to cycle a small pushbike down the hill into town and steeply up the other side for a couple of miles just to get there. Upon arrival at the proper start time there was always a lot of waiting around to be done before you even knew what was happening. Some crucial piece of machinery would be waiting to come back from a neighbouring farm, or the key to the diesel pump shed had gone missing, we were waiting for a field inspection or somesuch holdup. Eventually perhaps just before lunchtime  we might actually get out onto the field and do some potato picking. The old red tractor chugged down the length of the field for once row at a time, pulling an attachment called a spinner which was like a big circular rake. It dug through the soil, scooped up the densely grown ripe potatoes and flung them up into the air. What happened to them next? They fell back onto the ground of course, and our job was to bend down and pick them up and put them into buckets. It was back breaking work in the summer sun, hour after hour. The buckets of potatoes were tipped into sacks, then the full sacks tied up with twisted wires and loaded onto a trailer. At the end of a good day, the trailer would be stacked full of half hundred weight sacks of good quality clean potatoes, but only if conditions were perfect. There was one thing that was guaranteed to scupper the whole process and that thing was rain.

A little bit of light rain and we would carry on harvesting the potatoes. Never mind if we all got a bit damp, it’s was Cornwall so we were used to that. A sudden shower and we’d take cover hoping it would pass over. If the shower eased up we’d be back out again, even if only for a quarter of an hour before it got worse. But once the serious , persistent rain started up that was it. You can’t harvest potatoes out from muddy fields, at least not with the equipment available to a small family farm in those days. If it rained overnight there would be no work the next morning, then maybe not for the next week if it kept up. Maybe even a fortnight! Eventually in a bad year the potatoes would be left in for so long after they were ready that they’d just rot in the soggy ground, abandoned until it was time to plough them back in again, a breeding ground for blight and other fungal diseases.

So there’s nothing new about rainy, washout weeks in August, that’s quite normal and yet so often we feel cheated when the sun doesn’t shine endlessly through the summer season like in Portugal or the Mediterranean. Where does that expectation come from I wonder?

Posted by Andy Roberts

August Rain and The Harvest

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After a bit of a gap, the two-way interview between Cormac Lawler and myself continues. This post continues the discussion about distributed action research and wikiversity from previous episodes:

• DARnet-interview-part 1
• DARnet interview part two
• Part 3: Questions About Wikiversity

Andy Roberts asked:

I’d be very interested to hear to what extent parts of Wikiversity have managed to break away from the idea of the “course”, the expert, and the content. If you have people transfering across from the Wikipedia culture then it’s going to cause problems, but you could always fork a minority project for the more revolutionary work if it seems to be getting defeated.

Cormac Lawler replies:

There’s a real challenge in allowing for different models of education to take place in the same space. As you point out (and as has JWSchmidt in the page I linked to), Wikipedians will inevitably bring a particular culture with them in the development of what they think Wikiversity to be. (Although I’d be hesitant to make a grand generalisation on that point.) So one of the major challenges Wikiversity faces is to allow different communities develop microcultures of learning that are appropriate for them. However this itself raises a challenge around whether a microcommunity might develop that has questionable practices (like, say, Nazi apologists - to take an extreme example) - and what then could be done in order to subject a community, resource or statement to educational critique - or indeed, whether someone could be banned or their resources deleted. This brings us to the heart of the question you asked of what this institution is and who it is intended to serve.

Some examples of ‘different’ types of learning projects/communities would include things like the reading groups and podcasting and filmmaking initiatives (both long in decline). I would also regard some of the research activities to be exploring different means of using wikis educationally - including my own, and the Bloom clock (a means of logging what plants are in bloom, but also of learning about plants). There is also a recent initiative to question ethical practices within Wikipedia, which is purportedly an action research initiative, but which seems to be running in different directions at once, including a fairly traditional one (which could well be the participants constraining themselves to conform to what *they think* Wikiversity is supposed to be, ie an educational content creation mechanism).

However, having said this, I’m still slightly disappointed in the breadth of initiatives on Wikiversity that seek to challenge, expand or break the mould of more traditional models. I still think that this process needs more time, but I had hoped for more examples of what was possible at this stage, two years into its autonomous development. However, of course, I regard myself as very much culpable in this respect!

Andy again:

Ten years ago you could find out just about anything by tracking down
the right bulletin board or newsgroup, asking a carefully explained
question, and coming back later to view responses or ask a
supplementary. Within a few days you’d have the best the net could
come up with. Now we have Google search, with all its limitations and
gaming, and google scholar for some of the hidden internet, but you
can still usually track down the author of particularly pertinent
idea, find out their online presence with a bit of luck and chance a
speculative email. So the backbone infrastructure of having
connections between devices all over the world will always find a way
to serve people who know a little bit about how to seek and connect,
no matter what infrastructure is built on top of it all, and I’m still
pretty optimistic about that regardless of whether we lose some
battles along the way such as net neutrality or the health of the
regime in charge of Wikipedia.

Yes, and for the health of the “regime”, see the ethical questioning project I linked to above (which generated quite a bit of unease and hostility in its beginning, and which may itself have ethical questions around it). I think you’re right to say that people will be able to find someone else to ask questions of - but it does seem to favour people who, as you say, already “know a little bit” about how to do so. I’d like to also help people who start from a lower base of social confidence or net-savviness - and this might partly be addressed through network, connectivist initiatives you mentioned in your subsequent mail. I think I’ll answer that one now, separately.

Cheers,

Cormac

Posted by Andy Roberts

Cormac interview: Wikiversity and Wikipedia

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