[KS] Subject: Re: Moderated classroom
Frank Hoffmann
hoffmann at iic.edu
Wed Oct 4 10:08:32 EDT 2000
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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much outdated in the year 2000?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
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