[KS] Subject: Re: Moderated classroom

[Frank Hoffmann]

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Dear All:

In response to Richard Miller's post: I very much sympathize with 
some basic statements in that post. It seems to be a bad thing to 
moderate a discussion list, any discussion list, since it basically 
limits freedom of speech in that particular forum. So I don't think 
that we have to be "congratulated" having gone as far as to change 
the list policies. But I wasn't against this either, because we saw 
this list going down the drain *as an academic list*. The very 
problem seems to be the field itself -- Korean studies, Koreanistics, 
whatever you like to call it. Country studies, as we all know, is a 
concept comes from a 19th century interest and mood, mostly the 
colonizer's interest in knowledge about his colonies, helping him to 
implement better controls for his colonies ... but then also the 
booming enlightenment movement. Aren't those country studies pretty 
much outdated in the year 2000? Still, our list is a general Korean 
studies discussion list, and as such it attracts lots of comments and 
folks generally interested in Korea. Were this a list about, say 
Korean art & archaeology or Korean literature, I am sure we wouldn't 
need any moderation. But because there are so few specialists in each 
of those (and other) fields, we won't get a discussion going that 
easily .. just look at how little activity there is on the Korean 
Philosophy list: 
http://www.egroups.com/group/korean-philosophy/info.html . Then 
again, we ideally like to see this list as a conference-like forum of 
specialists and students of one or the other aspect of Korean 
culture, economics, society -- an inter-disciplinary list BUT not a 
list that repeats a late 19th century *approach*. In short, I see a 
somewhat schizophrenic situation but no good solution to it. Do you 
see other solutions?

Frank