BP#9

Questions for Ulmer

Heuretics:

When will the ISA fully adopt electracy?

I ask this because society has been operating between orality and literacy, with the merging of technology over the years. However, the ISA being family, church, school and media, hasn’t changed much to reflect the electracy pedagogy.  I would like to know if one day it will be the primary way of interacting or communicating, as the others become secondary.

Theopraxesis:

How will electracy’s defining axis (attraction and repulsion) be a method of learning?

I ask this question because with orality we learned what was right/wrong and with literacy what is true/false. However, with electracy being attraction/repulsion how can that be implemented as a teaching method when those things (attraction and repulsion) seem to be personal.

Wallace-Wells Response:

“There are now, trapped in Arctic ice, diseases that have not circulated in the air for millions of years—in some cases, since before humans were around to encounter them. Which means our immune systems would have no idea how to fight back when those prehistoric plagues emerge from the ice” (p. 5).

This quote was interesting in that it highlighted that there are viruses and disease hidden in the ice, and that if global warming is not addressed the ice would melt exposing us to disease we have never encountered before. I thought about Covid-19 and how the pandemic impacted us because it was a mutated virus that we were not prepared for. Even though we have found a way to vaccinate people to decrease the chances of death, there is still the fact that our immunity weakens overtime after catching it leaving us susceptible to other illnesses. This article, to me, was like sounding an alarm to what is happening in our environment currently and how imminent the disasters are. This quote was a reminder of how the last few years have been in a pandemic and that we need to make changes quickly.

Luu Response:

“Linguist Michael Halliday argues that inherent in the very anthropocentric grammar of our languages is the ideology that humans are special beings quite apart from the rest of the natural world, and that unlimited growth and human exploitation of natural resources are normal and remarkable.”

This quote made me think about the Hawaiian culture, where the Hawaiians had respect for the land, building a relationship through that respect as not to destroy it. I also understand this quote to mean that we as humans see ourselves as separate from nature, nature being something we can explore when we desire for entertainment but not as us living on Earth, among nature and respecting it. I think it brings awareness to the fact that humans can be self-absorbed sometimes, unless there is a natural disaster some of us aren’t thinking about what’s happening to our environment/ planet. That we should consider taking care of our environment instead of relying on our environment to always produce for us. I found this quote to be very reflective of the problems occurring in our environment/ planet and the reasons behind it.