summarising

Summarising enforces closure

I was a member of an online course where the posting of summaries by tutors was strongly resented by some of the students. It was felt that summarising was indeed a way of holding up the big stop sign, and a very effective one too as the messages were then whisked away to an archive. The summaries themselves displayed the biases of the tutors point of view and appeared to invalidate some of the students ideas by leaving them out or distorting them.

So I ran around with a .sig which read "the revolution will not be summarised" until the practice changed.

Here, we are not in any kind of formal education institution and if there are any major teacher-pupil (or parent-child in transactional analysis terms) relationships going on then they would be too subtle for me to pick up on yet.