Replying to LO30295 --
Dear Organlearners,
Leo Minnigh <minnigh@dds.nl> wrote:
>At, when I finished my contribution and pushed the send-button,
>I was doubting if LO´s are realy a rare species. Perhaps it is
>because I refuse to be pessimistic and think of only doom
>scenario´s. Perhaps LO´s have developed a mimicry so they are
>difficult to recognise as such.
Greetings dear Leo,
I have had the same thought as you -- that they are there and i see them,
but i cannot recognise them as LOs (Learning Organisation). This mimicry
is fascinating among desert plants. For example, Othona cacaloides, as the
name implies, looks just like the faeces of a baboon! Most Lithops species
look like the pebbels among which they grow. They have taught me not to
trust my observations blindly. That is why i talk only in terms of my
personal experiences within LOs. They are rare.
>Are most families in the world not small LO´s? I am not sure,
>since the divorce rate becomes incredably high, and there is
>even a more serious development here in Holland. What I see
>and hear from youngsters is that sex becomes more and more
>a deed of fun and not anymore a precious deed of love. I wonder
>how family life in the next generations will be. But nevertheless,
>most families seem to be small LO's.
I wonder. For example, here in South Africa sexual and emotional abuse in
families are getting out of hand. The statistics of known cases are
shocking. The growing number of suicides among youngsters is just as
shocking. Add to this the statistics of other dysfunctions of family life
and the figure becomes close to 30%. Many claim that is the legacy of
apartheid. Yes, apartheid had something to do with it, but i suspect that
cultural environment changes so rapidly because of globalisation that
families just cannot keep up with it.
More than 60% of matriculants will not get a job within the first year.
This place an immense burden on families. Already more than 20% of workers
become so ill as a result of AIDS that they have to quite their jobs. This
is another immense burden. Likewise is inflasion eating away at living
standards.
>You have sketched an interesting scenario, At. I agree fully
>with you that the influence of the information avalanche is one
>of the most serious disasters which happens right under our
>eyes and will change the environment dramatically.
Your metaphor "information avalanche" is striking. The worst for me having
a passion for teaching is that our educational institutions are at the
forefront of this avalanche.
A peculiar behaviour of students here at our university is that as soon as
they come out of a lecture hall, is that those who have cell phones to
call somebody else with whom they have close connections. How many of them
do it trying to rectify the "information avalanche" which they just have
been subjected to in that hall?
>A couple of weeks ago our dear host Rick was in Amsterdam.
>During that memorable meeting Rick asked each of us what
>our ideas were of the future of the world. My answer to him
>was simmilar to yours - 'deafening' effects of information. And
>I think that it will take some 15-20 years until the majority of
>humankind have learned how to cope with it.
What a foresight Rick has! I will come back to it later on.
I will agree with you, but on the assumption that our educational
instutions are aware of the problem and supply the means to solve it.
However, the far majority, at least in South Africa, are not so that we
have to think of a worser scenario for 2020 than the present.
>I think that the core of the problem is that most people think
>that thinking is not necessary anymore, or they even have not
>thought of their own thinking. Most pupils on schools learn
>how to trace the right information. But they are not learned
>to solve problems without the use of imported information, and
>onle on their own personal brain power.
I think it is not so much a case of "thinking is not necessary anymore" as
a case of "have not thought of their own thinking". Having not thought
about their own thinking is nothing else than blind thinking. Again i
think our educational institutions are at the core of the problem. They do
not teach students and pupils how to reflect on their own thinking and
what it involves. The core of thinking is creativity. However, they go for
the "information avalanche" rather than tracing the course of creativity
in thinking.
>At mentioned the Information Fatigue Syndrome or a virus
>like SARS as a possible dramatic disaster. Perhaps a more
>serious thread might be a computer virus, killing every PC
>in the world wide web. It means that not only Internet will be
>down, but it means also that there is no TV and newspaper
>anymore (printing machines are also linked to the web). In such
>situation the whole information flow stops immediately and not
>only that, also the financial markets are destroyed. Both,
>information and money as products of the increased enthropy
>production, will be wiped out.
Should it happen, it will have just as irreversibly disastrous
consequences of the library of Alexandria. It triggered the dark age which
took seven centuries to get thrown off with the beginning of the
universities.
I used to consider the growing attacks on the Microsoft OS (Operating
System) as a vengeance to this corporation's mentality. But recent clever
attacks on Sun and Linux made me wonder. It might just be a deep down
desire for some hackers to put an end to the web's contribution to the
"information avalanche".
I have met a few hackers through the years. It struck me how all of them
had a tired look around the eyes, but a burning fever within them. They
are not the usual anarchists because other than their hacking, they lead
very constructive lives.
>And then, the families will survive as true LO's.
I will put it slightly different, but i think you have meant the same.
Families acting as true LOs will survive. The same goes for all other
organisations.
Since our last dialogue exchange i have often thought about desert plants
and their fantastic strategies to survive in the harsh conditions of
desert. It made me wonder not only to present the LO as a survival
strategy, but also to explain how it can be accomplished.
Most of the surface of South Africa has changed vastly during the 20th
century. Many living plant species got eradicated in the increasing
aridness of some regions -- the "creeping desert". These plants species
could not adapt to it whereas desert plants can.
Is it not the same that LOs became rare because they did not expect such
a dramatic change in their cultural environment? If they did not expect it,
why? I think that two things are required:-
* A realistic observation of the developing course of events in the past
* An imaginative extrapolation of that course into the future
Should this be the case, what must we then do? Adapt our learning so that
we can cope with the imagined future rather than comply with the past. It
is only through such learning that we as individuals and organisations
will survive. Since Homo sapiens emerged among the animal species as
humankind, its survival became learning based. We will be plain stupid to
seek for any other basis as long as we stay humans.
>Have good dreams :-))
The same to you, day and night ;-)
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@postino.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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