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the illusion of an open system that really guides you to a single choice. I'm not sure we should throw out that thinking completely.

from the perspective of an educator: let me push back hard on that one?
A couple of years ago, Eleanor Duckworth gave a workshop @ Bryn Mawr,
in which we were asked to explain to one another--without using numbers--that 3/4 is greater than 2/3. Her goal was to get us to think very deeply, to really understand--and really articulate to others--the fundamental concept of proportional thinking, without using any shorthands.

Eleanor Duckworth did ultimately function as the arbiter of when the problem was solved--and there was a challenge to her insistance that only one logic was appropriate. But, claiming that "given an answer, kids stop thinking," she did not, in the course of 1 1/2 hours, ever use her authority to stop the discussion. She observed that, if kids are really working, it's important to pay attention to what they are thinking, to invite them--as in the title of her book--to Tell Me More, because "the more you know of what's really going on in their minds, the better a teacher you can be." Eleanor Duckworth suggested that, although "there is not an hour in the school year to do something without immediate payoff," the most important way to deal with important problems is to make them important."

But the real problem here, as I saw it and experienced it, was that Eleanor Duckworth actually wanted us ultimately to come to a particular solution.

Of more interest to me would have been the possiblility that we can use the different ways that different people think not in order to arrive at consensus, but rather to encourage further inquiry (and so extend her claim that "given an answer, we stop thinking"). In this exercise about proportionality, for example, we could have

* kept the exercise going with different people offering a range of views, until the whole group is comfortable with a single solution
* tested the various predictions (that is, done some empirical science, made an observation: would that show that what is "numerically correct"--for instance--is relevant to how a proportional mixture tastes? would it raise a range of questions about the subjectivity of taste? concomitantly: about the ways in which math de-contextualizes questions, in order to arrive at right answers?)
* acknowledged that there are several different and verifiable logics for answering questions about proportionality, each of which apply in a different circumstance?

The reason I'm taking so long with this is to say that the value of community you celebrate is not one I want to buy into unconditionally. So when you say--

I tend to approach these things from the direction of community...Under that model, the most important thing to accomplish is participation...activities create shared experiences....Puzzles have one solution: the audience knows when they got it right, it isn't really an issue of interpretation or choice. That seems to have an important benefit...for the community....This can help produce a sense of achievement and advancement...

--I find myself wanting to say back, loudly and clearly, that I'm very much interested in community-buildiing, but not if it stops thinking, and the having of wonderful ideas. On that same score, when you say that you've

flippantly argued in the past that storytelling started getting messed up as soon scribes and writing got involved, each layer of technology after that has tried to mediate the reach of our voice with the intimacy of the oral tradition.

I find myself wanting to push back on that, too. Where I'm coming from is that the whole point of storytelling is to get some distance on experience, to shape and organize it into patterns that help us to make sense of it (and so provoke further exploration, further stories...). The optimum distance is always going to be debatable of course, but why do you think that the layers, per se, "mess it up"? Why valorize the experience itself? I'd say, rather, that the layers, per se, give us the traction we need to see what we can't see, when we're in the midst of it all...

Finally:
the community of practitioners need to make as many connections as possible to academics (and, sadly, in like a ton of different fields to cover all the strange wrinkles of the form

why is this range of connectivity, and the necessity of such a range, a *sad* thing? seems to me the fun and generative about the whole project...(back to your community-based approach, surely...)

And back again to you--