Wrapping up immersion month
Well, it’s been a wild ride. And whether anyone else found it fruitful or not, I know that I did.
That said, I do believe it’s a good thing that I set a one-month schedule up front. There are a lot of things I think need more discussion. I think that a lot of the discussions I got started in this month have barely gotten through the ‘getting on the same page’ stage and into the serious development stage.
Still, I definitely want to thank everyone who chimed in this month. Everyone who commented gave me something to think about, and a lot of it is stuff that I’m thinking about still.
But I think that, overall, this was an interesting experiment that didn’t work out as well as I had hoped. I was hoping that by spending an entire month on a single topic we could build some month-long conversations with major posts in the middle to provide some direction.
Unfortunately, I was unable to deliver on my end of that bargain. The way I usually operate this blog is to plan articles out months in advance, which is what I did here. But of course doing that is directly opposed to nimble responses. My articles weren’t able to build upon the discussions taking place in the comments of previous entries, and thus the articles were unable to take advantage of the expertise of other people. Which sort of defeated the purpose of the month-long discussion.
To everyone who participated, thank you. To everyone who participated expecting a nimble discussion, I apologize. I realize that it may appear that your comments fell upon deaf ears, seeing as how I didn’t modify any of my rhetoric based on them. But I did listen, and I am thinking about what you’ve said.
A couple of final notes: comments on any of the articles is welcome indefinitely. The end of immersion month doesn’t mean the end of discussion of immersion for me. It just means I’m going to talk about something else for a while. If you want to discuss anything in any of the articles feel free to comment or email me.
Finally, I’ve been frustrated with myself this month due in part to what I see as a mis-execution of the discussion, but mostly because I feel like I haven’t communicated myself well. It’s possible that this is pure personal bias, but I haven’t felt that any of the objections raised against my definition of immersion have been objections against what I’m actually thinking. My inability to either A) figure out what’s different about what I’m thinking, or B) explain what I’m thinking in such a way that people see that it’s not different from what they’re thinking. The fact that I’m not sure whether I need A or B only adds to the frustration.
All the negativity aside, I do feel like it was a productive month. I thought some cool thoughts, I feel I understand immersion better, and I like to think I’ve contributed at least a little something back to the community.
This coming Thursday we’ll be heading back to our usual semi-random topic selection method. I’ll be talking about why having too much information might be a good thing.
Thomas
August 1st, 2006 at 02:04
Thanks for the series. I enjoyed it.
Yehuda
August 1st, 2006 at 12:54
I really enjoyed following immersion month–not for any resolutions it brought, but because it helped kickstart braincells that I haven’t used in (honest-to-goodness) years.
It also makes me think about the whole tarbaby phenomenon–nothing new, but I realize more keenly how polyvalent the term is, like an atom with a lot of available electron orbits. It easily ‘attaches’ to a diversity of experiences, experiences which have not been terribly well-articulated outside of some obscure circles. And I think that may be one reason to keep the term, because until those different interactions are more clearly understood, we don’t want to draw hard distinctions between them too quickly.
Thanks for taking an entire month to shine a spotlight on this tangle!