wallpaper dinding

This is the last post from 2010. It's been a surprisingly good year. 2011 is going to be very tough for anyone working in any connection to a UK universi...

Being stuck in an airport (which Astrid, Izzy and I have been for the last day or so) makes me think about what goes on in people's minds as they are awaiting something together. The facial expressions and body language are all remarkably similar. What this is suggesting to me is that there are very clear patterns. With the metaphor of frequencies and regulation, resonance and topologies, I'm increasingly...

I'm not sure this post will make much sense. But I want to start putting things together..The things I'm putting together are a view of cognition which is consistent with positioning theory, inasmuch that it  emphasises relationships for thinking about cognition. The space between an illocutionary act and a perlocutionary effect is essentially a relational space. This means that we can abstract...

Time is the hidden factor in our thinking about learning; indeed, it is the hidden factor in our thinking about anything. I think the conception of time in learning processes is linear and individualistic and this is something that requires a deeper critique.Lineally thinking, we conceive of time as "we do one thing, we do the next thing". In essence, "we progress". Yet linearity does not I think...

I've been thinking about the examination and assessment of musical performances. Much depends on being 'convincing', 'correct', 'accurate', 'fluent' in the style and manner of performance. Indeed, in the rubric of music examinations will often use these sorts of words. But of course, these aren't (and can never be) objective assessments. It depends on creating a relationship with an examiner; it depends...

I've been wondering if educational institutions (maybe all institutions) develop a sort of 'cultural autism' where their internal conversations become incomprehensible to outsiders. With educational institutions, this is particularly problematic, because they are constantly seeking to 'engage' with learners, businesses, community leaders, etc, but these engagements are often framed by internal conversations...

I've recently spent some time helping struggling students to learn Java in my university. In the UK (as I guess elsewhere) many young people who struggle with the traditional academic curriculum find their way into studying technology courses: this is often driven by schools and colleges themselves, who see this as the best way the students can get 'a result', and consequently the league table score...

I was going to give this post a more pretentious title alluding to Luhmann's theory of intimacy, but I think it's better to be frank! My music professor once remarked that music is "all about sex really". It's easy to agree with him him when I'm listening to something like the 'liebestod' at the end of Tristan and Isolde (this performance with Isolde apparently bleeding to death!), or Scriabin's 'Prometheus'or...

Class divisions in society are often thought about as divisions between 'haves' and 'have nots', rich and poor, etc. This is too shallow a perspective. I think class is really a social dynamic where different sections of society, demarcated by the types of language game they play, do not look after each other. Their games become exclusive and detrimental to one another as they seek to continue to...

Ivan Illich remarks that "Education creates failure". When we consider the double-bind that students are in with regard to education, failure is rarely spoken about. Certainly not in the student prospectus. Not in the interview with tutors before admission. And yet failure is the principal risk that can render huge personal expense worse than useless ("it would have been better if I'd never gone to...

The government's proposals for funding higher education are ill-judged and will have a devastating effect on students. No one would invest £50k in something which is a leap of faith. Yet this is what will be demanded of the students by Universities if the legislation is passed. Universities will struggle to avoid being seen as shamanistic tricksters.A better policy would be to put learners in control....

In my video yesterday I tried to apply my thinking about value to understanding what's happening with the servitised economy. My conclusions from this are:that 'intrinsic value' of a commodity is intransitive (i.e. is objective) and when the intrinsic value is distibuted amongst the people, there is a greater share of individual control and empowerment since this intrinsic value can be passed around...

There is something mad about education. The madness is made more apparent when those who are part of the system which is to blame for the current crisis vocally support the student protests against the political response to that crisis.I think there is a problem with those who are part of the system "protesting". The students ought to be protesting against them too: "what do you do that's worth £9000...

Currently students are protesting in the UK at having their fees increased threefold and a burden of debt to last until they are in their 50s. Most people would put up a fight if someone lumped a £50k debt on them. The students are rightly angry, arguing that there's a principle at stake (more than their own personal loss) - but what is it? Their protest is unfortunately threatened by the inability...

I watched my daughter yesterday in a short show at her drama group: she had to put on accents, pretend to be different types of people, etc. She also demonstrated an acute sense of comic timing - something which has become more apparent in recent months, and which will no doubt grow as she gets older (she's 10). When she realises the laughs she gets in response to the things she does, how will that...

let's assume we perform the things we know...To what extent is performing the things we know related to revealing who we are? How does the type of performance relate to the artefacts we produce? How to artefacts relate to the performances that are created?What do we learn from a performance?Do we learn the knowledge, or do we learn how to perform the knowledge?What are the conditions for...

A musical interlude in my exploration of knowledge... In thinking about semiotics, I've been rethinking my interest  in semiotic approaches to music. The core of these approaches is a two-stage approach to looking at the notes: a syntagmatic analysis (which is basically looking at the distribution of regular patterns over time), and a paradigmatic analysis, which is identifying the higher-level...

Much of this thinking about knowledge has been drawn from Gregory Bateson's idea of 'double description': that 'two descriptions are better than one' (for example, binocular vision). The process of identifying the difference between descriptions was closely associated with a process of 'abduction' (a term he took from Peirce), where the significance of something (it's meaning) was connoted, not denoted....

There's something a bit unsatisfying about the concept of language games because clearly there are aspects of those games which are not linguistic in a formal sense. It strikes me that it is the 'game' that counts, and a term which sees language games in the same light as other games (for example, ping-pong) is useful. All utterances in a language game are forms of agency, just as hitting a ping-pong...

What happens to disciplines if we see them morphologically - that is, to see them as accounting for insight into structures and processes of change and development of forms, rather than seeing them as accretions of categorised phenomena? Categorised phenomena are fine - if we can agree on the categories. Then there can be some sort of coordinated activity. But in social science particularly (and very...

Looking now at the knowledge within the institution, lets see how the 4 forms of knowledge I have discussed map.Institutions produce knowledge in various content-forms: strategies, validation documents, personnel files, student records, etc. Such content-forms of knowledge have implicit within them some sort of 'purpose-form' - "we have a strategy because..." - some codification of institutional values....

Whilst all the stuff around inter-disciplinarity is interesting, we tend to study subjects: maths, physics, chemistry, music, geography, drama, etc. It's always struck me that different types of people are attracted to different types of subjects, and that the 'feel' of the study of different subjects is different too. The choice of subject may be biologically, psychologically or socially determined.Is...

Let's assume that the 'goodness' or 'badness' of teaching is objective (the opposing argument that it's relative gets lots of attention - and may be a bit pernicious!)The objection to bad teaching fundamentally must be ethical: there are good and bad ways of treating people - waterboarding is bad for example (whatever George Bush thinks). Indeed the 'simulated drowning' induced by waterboarding has...

Talking about different forms (or maybe dimensions?) of knowledge as 'person-form', 'content-form', 'tool-form' seems rather like Aristotelian causality, where cause has a material-aspect, a formal-aspect, an agency-aspect and a purpose-aspect. Do these relate? If they do, then there's a line of thinking we can go down...maybe:1. agency-aspect of causation   <==> person-form of knowledge...

I'm thinking about the ways knowledge exists in people and the material forms it takes: Educational resources (open or not) are examples of that material form. But we might say that technologies also carry knowledge as well. For example, a Greek vase carries knowledge - explicitly in this case because is contains images of people making music.What's the difference between the knowledge contained in...

Is there something that institutions do which directly relates to the nature of knowledge? Would we talk about physics, chemistry, philosophy, etc if it weren’t for the continued existence of institutions? Do institutions merely produce knowledge or are they tied up in the mechanisms of its existence? If institutions disappeared, would knowledge disappear?Grounds that might give us reason to think...

I remember by predominant desire and expectation of going to university was that I would be thrilled by insight and intelligence. I was lucky - I studied music (the most important discipline on the curriculum!) and I had a wonderful professor, Ian Kemp, whose biography of Michael Tippett I had read prior to going. "The only thing we expect of you is that you like music" he said in his welcome to us....

Engaging in a Learning Activity is a special type of concernful action. Rather in the way we might play a game, we submit to rules and constraints. In fact the game metaphor is useful with regard to learning activities. They demand the somewhat restricted exercise of particular skilled performances (linguistic, maybe technical) in a language game. At its most basic, a teacher asks a question and the...