– Hey Vodçek — is that Abbé Boulah sitting out there on the Tavern deck — is he hiding?
– Bog-Hubert, good morning! Yes it’s him — he must be tired from the trip to the rig, hasn’t said much at all this morning, just sitting there, scribbling in his notebook. Well, I guess he did see you, or his coffee is getting cold. Coming in for a refill, AbbeBoulah?
– Yes, I could use that. Hey, Bog-Hubert. Good morning Sophie: joining us for coffee?
– Hi. I wasn’t sure it was you hiding out there behind the stack of chairs, deep in thought. What’s on your mind? Good news or bad?
– That’s the problem: I’m not sure.
– Huh. Well, can we help you sort it out? As long as it isn’t election politics…
– In a way it is, out on the rigs. But nothing like …
– Wait — are you saying there may be good news even in part of that? That calls for some explanation.
– Good point, But things are really different out on the rigs, you know. I am surprised every time I go out there.
– So what’s the good news then, that surprised you?
– Well, Sophie, it’s actually a whole bundle of things — long story.
– Okay, the fog is thick, customers have lost their way: is the day long enough for the story?
– I’ll try to keep it preprocrustified.
– Stuff the weird references, even though I admit it sounds better than ‘short’.
– Okay, I’ll try to behave. So, remember, I told you about the weird kinds of societies all those refugees are hobbling together out there on the abandoned oil rigs. They were put out there — temporarily but voluntarily — because there wasn’t enough housing available on the mainland. Allegedlly. To learn enough of the language and rules and habits of the places where they hoped to end up to get a job and so on.
– So what big issues are there to decide — if they are all getting off the rigs?
– Well, it turned out that some of them decided to stay out there. I guess they had become friends, felt safer out there than in any foreign country, or got intrigued by the opportunity of figuring out a better way of organizing society, They were actually using some of the ideas of our crazy friend over at the university.
– Yes, I remember. The notion of making collective decisions based on the merit of the discourse they had to organize to reach agreements. The problems of figuring out that merit, and of making sure the agreements were kept, and so on, wasn’t it?
– Good, Renfroe! I see not everything we talked about here is already down the river of oblivion.
– What are the bigger issues they have to decide upon out there, then?
– Well, besides the simple task of basic rules for living together in a kind of cramped environment, for one, there was the question of what they’d do for living if they stay. Some people like the notion of fust turning the rigs into tourist entertainent destinations for cruise ships, like they tried at first, besides the everyday education activities. Then they realized that there is a lot of ocean and weather-related research that could be done out there, and thought they should focus on that. The idea of the rigs as venues of research conferences grew out of that. Others were intent on sticking with the issues of making the rigs self-supporting, even for food and some stuff they could export, actually the start of large floating settlements.
– Ah: getting ahead of the rise of ocean levels when all the polar ice has melted?
– Not sure if they are that ambitious. But each of those development ideas would call for different changes to the original design of the rigs,
– Okay. I get it.
– So now, while they were they were discussing and working on these issues, the kids —remember, there are entire families out there — were asking what the grownups were doing, and wanted to start games at doing that. They didn’’t even know what to call that, like the traditional oppupations like baker, fireman, fisherman, police officers.
– I can see that — I guess there aren’t many children’s books with stories about such places when they were actually working oil rigs.
– Of course, Bog-hubert, But they all wanted to be astronauts, star war fighters. Oil rig work just wasn’t that glamorous…
– Well there’s that. If the kids had actually gotten used to TV, movies, internet; many of of them didn’t. So out there, they just tried to imitate whatever they saw their parents were doing. And one of them, an old refugee from a small village in Turkey that got destroyed in the earthquake, he made a kind of game out of the argumentative planning discourse idea, with basic paper markers and wall display tools. ‘Templates’ of good discourse play elements — problems, plan proposals, the different kinds of questions and answers and arguments, even ’systems’ and ‘decision rules’ — the works. To have fun as well as actuallty teaching them this new way of working on issues that need collective decisions.
– Sonds interesting. Have mainland toy companies gotten wind of that yet?
– I don’t know. maybe just because the kids got so excited about this that they started to expand and mess with the basic concepts and patterns, there’s no clear picture yet. The kids are inventing new names for these patterns, some of which hadn’t even been recognized before, like the planning argument pattern and its variations, that weren’t in the old logic textbooks yet. And fallacies. They started inventing funny trolls and demons, gnomes that obstruct discussions, drew pictures of them and gave them names: Wonderful names like ‘happendash’ or ’noheadreason’ (for arguments with the main premise missing or ‘taken for granted’), ‘wishiwashi’, ‘wikinokeniker’ (for fancy definitions from the wikipedia or dictionary; I don’t remember them all.
– Sounds like they’re having fun.
– They do: you should see them at play. But one really clever thing that one of the old refugee built into the game was this: The ‘cards’ with those patterns, that kids could call out (and win points for) would have the fungly — get it — ugly but funny — face of the gnome on one side, and the kid calling it out if they recognized it in somebody’s comment would win points for ‘rescuing the discussion from that troll. But on the other side of the card would be a drawing showing how that fungly face could turn into a happyface — if the kid could suggest a way to help its author to turn it into a valid, valuable or even just ‘better’ contributions. In which case both of then would ‘earn’ a much higher number of merit points. And those transformation actions would be accompanied by much noise, applause, songs and instant rewards (a hug, a cookie or dried fruit, and fireworks — like lightning effects)…
– I get the sneaky ruse! Inserting adrenaline-rush triggers into cooperative activities? Instead of getting their highs of ‘beating’ others, like all our competitive games that makes everybody losers except the one winner…
– You got the idea, Sophie. But that’s not all.
– There was more? I can’t wait to hear it!
– Well, it turned out that the grownups began to use some of the things they’s learned from the kid’s game in their ‘serious’ discussions. And that started a whole flurry of new adaptations and experiments.
– But that’s really interesting and encouraging, isn’t it?
– Sure. Needs a lot of work though.
– So that’s the bad news? It sounds like an exciting project!
– No, the bad news is: they asked me to find some programmer or outfit to develop the code to program those things into their online protocols…
— ooo —
Abbe Boulah's Weblog 