Hello class, and thanks again for your latest round of blog
posts. Many of you have done a much better job of including quotations (and
analysis of them) to back up your points. Keep it up! Once again, many of your
points could be made even more convincing by the citation of a particular
example. In some cases, for instance, students said that the way Johnson used a
term like “emergence” or “complexity” changed, but didn’t cite representative
examples to illustrate the differences from different parts of the essay. This
brings me to my next point: connections. You all did an excellent job of making
connections within Johnson’s text and, in many cases, between Johnson’s text
and Davidson’s. For example, Amish mentions the possibility that the education
system could be understood in terms of “organized complexity,” however, I would
ask him to consider whether this is really a bottom-up organization, at least
as currently practiced. Also, Matthew makes
an excellent comparison between Johnson and Davidson in terms of the way she
and Johnson organize their articles to leave connections implicit. The next
skill to focus on (particularly in your papers!) will be to qualify
these connections, or in other words, to draw distinctions within the broader
connections you’re making. That is, it’s not just important to notice that the
two texts are doing similar things, it’s also important to think about the
limits of that similarity, because oftentimes the differences within them lead
you to a significant insight. For example, Max does an excellent job of
discussing the term “emergent” in its specialized, scientific context, which
seems to align with the way that Johnson uses the term, except, Max claims,
that people are different from ant colonies in that they have individual goals
that might not align with one another. He’s beginning to work through the
limitations of the connections that Johnson makes. Continue to work through the
logic of the connections you make as you begin work on your rough draft: where
do distinctions emerge? Why might these distinctions be important? What do they
tell us about the limitations of the concepts Davidson and Johnson are dealing
with? I look forward to reading your drafts!
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