hi gang,
interesting feedback from Jo here on Summit
s
Forwarded Message [ Download File ] Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2007 06:47:08 -0700
dear saul, all,
On Wed, May 30, 2007 at 12:55:13PM +0100, Saul Albert wrote: > > to do something UO-like here. But "Education" is a vague topic being used > > to facilitate talk of many other things, in this context; it may not > > be what we think. I guess SUMMIT must be expecting 100+ people.
> I'd like to hear what this event was like. > I'm struggling to cope with the ironies of it - which I understand the > organisers were fully aware of. Was the content good? Was the form > interesting? Who was there who was doing good stuff?
I found the summit to be a confusing experience. I remember in the past there being a joke about doing a grant-supported post-doc spinoff of the UO named the "Institute for Advanced Rhetoric". What i experienced of the summit felt like it was in convocation there. A lot of ungrounded words, a gesturing at Something New that is just taken over by the process of trying to articulate it. We spend a lot of time arguing about what we believe in ...
I had recently fallen in love, which state enhances one's resistance to discourse on the critical efficacy of migrant epistemologies, and so on. I enjoyed a couple of UO-friendly sessions; Armin talked of his research and played interviews with bmg and Graham Harwood; Andrew Paterson gave a fun talk about his adventures in public kilt-wearing in Latvia which brought back happy memories for me of the locative media workshops in Karosta several years ago. http://mlab.uiah.fi/~apaterso/projects/mapmyths/KarostaChapter.html
I dropped out for the last couple of days. Mary persisted, and i would be very interested to read about what she extracted from the whole. I include below the summing-up newsletter, noting its nervous tone. The closing session, on the failure to collaboratively produce a declaration, i heard became a small riot. No cars were burned, though.
[[ Why wasn't it possible to declare anything and what could
have been declared if it were possible? ]] ... loops ...
To: summit-newsletter@summit.kein.org From: florian schneider <fls@kein.org> Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 19:47:47 +0200 Subject: [summit-newsletter] summit without ending Precedence: list
Dear SUMMIT delegates, contributors, participants and guests!
After four days of intensive consultations in 82 sessions "SUMMIT non-aligned initiatives in education culture" closed on Monday, May 28 in Hebbeltheater Berlin. 450 registered delegates failed to produce a common declaration but started a process that will be continued online on the SUMMIT mailinglists, forums and websites.
We want to thank you very much for coming to Berlin, joining SUMMIT and contributing to it. The event has been characterized by an enormous amount of energy, creativity and emotions.
We are very aware of the fact that the limitations of time and space produced outputs and results of very different character that cannot be fully grasped or understood in the very moment. Some become valid only much later, some will be forgotten, turn out unexpectedly productive or need to be followed up and developed further on.
We are enormously grateful for the huge amount of support, encouragement and criticism we received over the past few days. Something has happened, a process has begun and we are sure that there is a great deal to learn from.
Non-alignment might also imply to leave a certain comfort zone. We had to realize how harsh and sometimes painful it can be to understand that a certain diversity and asynchronicity of experiences and practices does not necessarily resolve in happiness, peace and harmony.
Like we tried to stress many times, SUMMIT was neither designed as a conference nor congress that aims to properly represent the wide range of selforganized educational approaches in order of appearance or relevance; nor was it the right place to compensate for the injuries and frustrations caused by traditional educational systems.
An event like SUMMIT can only produce a snapshot of what might be at stake. It probably cannot offer solutions, but it can make theories urgent and (re-)consider practices.
With this message we want to open up and re-connect the processes of debriefing, reflection, planning and networking that have already started either during the event or right after it.
We want to ask you who have participated and those of you that have not been able to come and attend to use the various possibilities at the website to post proposals, remarks, comments and evaluations.
- Please submit your papers, presentations, manuscripts, notes and materials from the different sessions and make them available and debatable beyond the actual session. The default way to upload them is the blog that was created automatically as soon as you registered for SUMMIT. Please go to the website: http://summit.kein.org log in with your username and password and click on create content http://summit.kein.org/node/add/blog
- Please use the forums to further elaborate on your positions, experiences and suggestions: http://summit.kein.org/node/add/forum
- Please upload images, fotos, audio and video recordings you might have gathered during SUMMIT and publish them on the website. You can either publish them alone or attach them to any forum topic or blog entry you are creating.
- in order to start a joint debate we would ask you to reflect on SUMMIT by responding to the following two questions:
1. What has happened? 2. Why wasn't it possible to declare anything and what could have been declared if it were possible?
Video recordings of many sessions that took place during SUMMIT in the theatre hall will be available for download within the next few days. Right after the closing of SUMMIT a delegation of 15 SUMMIT participants are moving on to Rostock for a fieldtrip to the G-8 meeting. In the framework of the KEIN.TV project we will upload, screen, and remix the video recordings of the SUMMIT sessions.
The idea of KEIN.TV is to expand the SUMMIT experiences with a practical collaboration on a distributed video program that is supposed to be ready for download during the days of the G-8 meeting.
Through this newsletter you will be notified about the progress of the upload and the development of the program.
If you want to participate, contribute material, develop formats or add films to the KEIN.TV program please contact us as soon as possible!
All the very best!
Susanne Lang Florian Schneider