Walter Hutchens’ Blog

Chinese authorities are interrupting CNN’s broadcast today. As I sit on my couch in Beijing watching the channel, the screen periodically goes black and the audio falls silent. After a moment the signal abruptly returns (meanwhile, all other channels continue to work normally).

The reason for this intermittent CNN censorship is obvious. The verboten item is the “news” that some people are being tortured in China according to the special rapporteur on torture of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, Manfred Novak.

He just completed a visit to China. He praised China for accepting his request to visit (after years of refusals). The Chinese press reported those remarks proudly, as seen in this Chinese news agency story.

Earlier this week a Chinese friend said to me, “Hey, did you hear that the U.N. torture inspector has been invited to China?” He said, “that shows China is opening up, really changing!” So the “good news” got out.

But when Novak left yesterday, he reported things that, however predictable, are intensely unwelcome by the Chinese government. The New York Times headline is, “Torture Is ‘Widespread’ in China, U.N. Investigator Says.” China doesn’t want that broadcast.

Somewhere a Chinese government agent has a finger on a button, watching CNN, hitting a kill switch whenever “bad” content is in the broadcast stream.

I’ve seen them do this before. I recall a commercial CNN produced to mark its twentieth anniversary. The spot included snippets of tape from historical moments CNN has covered. There was footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, various wars—and the famous image of a lone man standing in front of Chinese tanks in 1989 (during the time when protests in Tiananmen Square were violently suppressed). China blocked the few seconds of the commercial with that image, too.

That China physically tortures a tiny faction of its population the state regards as dissidents or criminals is despicable.

That China tries to keep its entire, vast population from hearing news the government doesn’t like is also revolting. I can think of nothing to qualify or soften this condemnation.

Reading about Drupal, an open-source content management system that I’m thinking about using for some classes I teach, I came across the following provocative quote:

Back in the day we thought that we should be able to produce “content” which would fit seamlessly into the “lesson” and the “course” - and the “brand” of the producer or client company.

Fact may well turn out to be that the concepts of “lesson” and “course” are the ones that inevitably must change, so that they can accommodate new media forms without these superficial signs of cohesion. [Link to source]

I found it on a site titled Thesis in Progress in a piece labeled “Popular Culture,” attributed to “ravi” (about whom no further information is given). The quoted part is ravi’s conclusion for the piece.

I liked this for a few reasons. First, the quote offers a pithy taxonomy of what we might call “organized education.” It posits the current hierarchy as: institutional brand/course/lessons. It is useful to lay bare the fundamental structure in complex systems. Perhaps an even more apt taxonomy for organized higher education is: institution/field of study/course/lesson.

I also liked the invitation (or challenge) to think about how new media will impact organized education, suggesting change at a radical level is possible.

But what will the “facts . . . turn out to be?” What degree of change is likely?

Surely courses should change “to accommodate” new media. There’s a vast amount of room for development there. Ravi’s essay has some interesting ideas about how new media and pop culture can help people learn foreign languages.

But will “courses” be done away with because they are “superficial signs of cohesion?” That strikes me as going way overboard.

I love auto-didactic surfing. Whatever happens in classrooms, it is clear that’s how lots of learning is occurring now. It makes obvious good sense to re-imagine how traditional courses operate in this world of disintermediation, new media and social technologies.

But I don’t think the idea of a “brand” in the sense of an institutional provider of educational will go away. Nor do I think the “artificial” segmentation of the world into digestible, focused segments called “courses” (with some occasional further segmentation into “lessons”) will be abandon, either. Change is likely within these traditional concepts; their overthrow is not.

Some cohesion is helpful and even necessary for learning, no? To take the extreme case: no cohesion, no language. Surfing lets me ignore narrow, imposed boundaries, but surfing requires the cohesion of search terms or and linked content. Much of what’s great about the web is the way it lets people create nearly immediate cohesion of what otherwise would be dispersed actors and points of information.

Education needs both cohesion and freedom. I enjoy making unexpected connections, but I find that often I learn the most when “grokking” on a particular topic–drilling down rather than surfing in a less focused way.

I like to study “subjects” or “topics” and expect us to continue to organize education into courses and lessons—not because we are slaves to imposed, false “signs of cohesion” but because relatedness helps us learn and digest fragments of the world.

Zhou Zhengqing, a former head of the CSRC who continues to be influential in terms of PRC financial policy, gave a speech in Shenzhen recently at a conference on funding small enterprises.

Zhou is a vice chairman of the Finance and Economics Committee of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC). The NPCSC is the entity which recently passed amended version of the PRC Company Law and PRC Securities Law.

The speech includes a useful summary of efforts to make PRC stock markets support high-tech enterprises in China. Zhou begins with a 1999 policy statement stressing the importance of high tech development, 《关于加强技术创新、发展高科技、实现产业化的决定》, followed shortly by amendment of the PRC Company Law to allow for regulators to adjust listing requirements for high tech companies. Subsequent rules allowed enterprises designated as “high tech” by both the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Science and Technology to be exempted from listing quotas.

The title of Zhou’s Shenzhen talk is “Fully unleash the functionality of capital markets, vigorously increase the development of high-tech enterprises, ceaselessly improve our capacity for innovation.” The full text in Chinese is available here.

I would translate the conference’s title as “SME Financing Forum, IV” (Di si jie zhong xiao qiye rongzi luntan). It began today in Shenzhen. It was jointly organized by the NDRC, MOST, SZSE and Shenzhen municipal government.