Symbiosis in LOs LO11126

Mnr AM de Lange (AMDELANGE@gold.up.ac.za)
Mon, 25 Nov 1996 12:19:22 GMT+2

Robert Bacal wrote in LO11097:
>
> This is curious timing since I am redesigning our web page, and was
> just writing the brief intro that explains why I post a lot of
> information free (and yes, I need to sell things to eat).
>
> My view is that I am willing to share a good deal of what I have
> already completed, provided that doing so will not send me to the
> poor house. But more important...I look at the materials I produce as
> having had an intended audience, and since it is written to help
> people learn, it would be somewhat odd for me not to make things
> available for free. We write so people will read.

We come from an era in which education was considered as something to be
upheld by taxing society. The moral reason for such taxation was based on
mutual symbiosis. However, we allowed the uneducated to get the notion
that we practised comensal symbiosis.

(See my reply to Michael McMaster for an explanantion of the terms mutual,
comensal and parasital symbiosis.)

Soon some of them saw the opportunity to practice parasital symbiosis in
education. In other words, education has become the holy cow to be
parasited to death to feed those who have only interest in themselves.

We are now shifting to a new era in which will again have to dicover the
high moral value of mutual symbiosis and apply it anew to the systems of
the new era. These systems have to follow the path of comensal symbiosis
because the old era does not provide for them. This is a precarious path
which can gain more resilience through mutual symbiosis.

> Second, I look at the articles we make available as grown-up
> children...I brought them up, and in a sense, they don't "belong" to
> me anymore (it's an analogy, not literal).
>
> Some of my "children" (books) I treat differently, partly because the
> effort to make them available in the virtual world would be high (and
> consequently expensive).
>
> Finally, there is one proviso...I do not think it appropriate for
> someone to profit monetarily at my expense (although this is an
> interesting issue), so I allow (upon request) reproduction of all
> posted material for learning purposes.

In other words, you also have great distaste for parasital symbiosis.

> I decided to approach this subject from the mundane to the
> theoretical, but I am sure that most of us can draw the philisophical
> implications. Not the least is the symbiosis.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This I have tried to do. If the terms mutual, comensal and parasital
symbiosis appear to be too abstract, then we will rather have to
reformulate the matter in terms of metaphors. I can use some woderful
metaphors coming from Africa, but the trouble is whether they will have
any meaning in a world less complex than Africa.

Best wishes

--

At de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre for Education University of Pretoria Pretoria, South Africa email: amdelange@gold.up.ac.za

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>