I like your thoughts on the believing game, and I think your dead on about gender tendencies in this regard. I also agree that it’s not exactly new. Like you say, it’s only a slight twist on suspending judgment. As far as other articles, I only just heard the term at the conference, but if and when I run across anything, I’ll fire it your way.

Again, thanks for reading.

That said, I also enjoyed bragging. If that is all that is going on when admin asks for details, then shame on them, and me.

I think you already know this, though…

Please write that Po-Mo poem. Maybe you could even make words with all the acronyms, like TIOLI.

Your phrase “important conversation” caught my imagination. There seems to be a charge created when tossing around ideas and people can generate some electricity with talk. David says that the breaking of bread over a conversation makes the talk more powerful and action-inducing. I like to think that knitting over a conversation has the same effect.

Wiki? As in Wikipedia? We use wiki in Hawaii to mean hurry.

The idea of the Believing Game: I was intrigued by your notes and how your thoughts phased in and out of the thread as you processed the concepts. One of the things I love most about David is how he doesn’t think like most males that I have met. I think that the believing game might be one of the ways that he thinks: he defaults to why something that sounds wrong to him might be right. He pulls alongside the speaker and looks into their ideas from a parallel trajectory. I don’t meant to sound gender-biased, because I tend to the doubting game more than I wish. It’s just that my models for critical thinking have been very male, with the women just oozing, “That’s nice, dear.” and not thinking about verity or substance at all. Or, the flipside: “That’s not nice dear.” End of discussion.

The believing game sounds like an alternative to suspend judgment and still retain an intelligent approach. Can you say more about it? Google has one related article that I could find.

I had to google Peter Elbow to recall why he sounded familiar. We used his Writing for Power at a Volcano writing workshop. Too much of batting around ideas in his way gave me writer’s elbow. (I couldn’t resist.)

Perhaps the session you attended was a bit less cynical than this comment.

MSpace might spawn discussions about the sad state of literacy in the US. I can hear presenters lambasting the grammar, the acronyms, the emoticons. Fact is, though, language changes, and communication changes, always has. I would have killed to have this kind of connection growing up alone on the Rez…

I was also intrigued by this note: “Basically, she was arguing that student spaces are valuable (MySpace, Facebook). To understand them, we can’t ignore this cultural phenomenon. Regardless of our texts, we have to use pop culture as a text, too.” As a father of two HS students that spend hours on MySpace, I can attest to the value of that “cultural phenomenon.” Though I would characterize it, not as a cultural phenomenon, but a communication phenomenon.

An example: My son has known one of his best friends for about three years, even though she has been on the island only one. When she found out her family was moving from Florida to HI, she searched the MS blogs for kids in the school she would attend. That’s how she met her current group!

Another example: My daughter asserts that she never tells anyone anything–she keeps everything locked up inside…except for her blog, and her poems, and lyrics, and her song choices all on MS!