Not much to add for my part. This was the first true e-mail conference I've
participated in, and I found it a good experience, calling on a different
kind of attention and engagement than the normal list-serve flow. I found
it interesting to come at it from the perspective of an invited
commentator. I felt it gave me a different kind of permission to speak than
I might feel otherwise, especially as someone not really in the community
of discourse of phd-design in general.
I could only think of two comments to make on the conference, and both are
really more about style than substance. The first is a plea for conciseness
in posts. The old quote (I believe attributed to Benjamin Franklin) about
"if I had had more time I would've written less" is apt. Especially in a
forum like this, e-mail comes fast and furious. Posts that take up many
screenfuls, with long unbroken paragraphs containing many different sorts
of points, are very hard to digest in an on-line conference. We all have a
lot to say, so this is not a reflection on the quality of the thoughts
expressed in such posts, but this plea is more about the listening side of
things -- it's a lot easier to listen to you when you make an effort to be
succinct, to compress poetically, to make one point at a time. The other
point is related to this: for many of the same reasons, concreteness is
better than abstraction. E-mail as a writer's medium unfortunately seems to
lend itself to (dare I say windy) abstractions. They are easy to write, but
hard to read. I can read what you say, and pay attention to it, much better
when there is something to grab hold of: examples, direct references,
clarity. This also helps "embody" the posts -- when they are concrete I get
a better sense of the person behind the words, very helpful in a "virtual"
medium.
Other than this, I echo the many thanks to Ken and the list owners for
providing this opportunity for us all, and pulling it off so well.
Al
Commentator on session 5
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