wallpaper dinding

On my way to the American Cybernetics Society conference in Troy, NY, I was reading Erich Fromm's "To have or to be?" What Fromm calls the 'having mode' is so clearly visible in the US. I was struck how beautiful the natural landscape of New York city is - how it must have seemed like Eden to the European settlers. The train ride up the Hudson to Albany was simply stunning. When the settler's arrived,...

My encounters with distributed cognition are proving very fruitful. Andy Clark's work is particularly interesting - he has a take on the moral side of all this. However, I'm not so keen on the emphasis David Chalmers (who Clark has worked with) puts on the singularity nonsense, or whether whole brain emulation (brain uploading) is a sensible way to look at things. Anders Sandberg's 2nd life lecture...

I've been trying a few approaches to helping my daughter with her maths. One problem with maths is that the stress of finding the 'right answer' can induce a state of mind where it is harder to think. Instead of focusing on the answer, I've been trying to focus on the different possible methods. Some methods are easy, but long; others are quite hard, but very efficient. Choosing the best method is...

Graduation ceremonies are peculiar affairs playing a key structural role in University life. How does it relate to Quality or Teaching? It would seem to contain aspects of both. The video is me thinking through some of this. My conclusion (for the moment) is that Graduation serves as a 'mop' to soak up the unmanaged variety/complexity from the interactions between the teaching machine and the quality...

I've been trying to think through the issues involved in the separation of the 'teaching machine' (T) from the 'quality machine'(Q). There's little doubt that the university maintains its capital value through the Q machine, but it's deeply entwined with the T machine, with teachers playing key roles in both mechanisms. Globalisation and the drive for efficiency will force us to separate the two mechanisms....

I went to my daughter's primary school play yesterday. She was very good, as was the production. The head talked very briefly at the end of the show that its purpose was to 'make memories'. I couldn't agree more. I attended another memory-making event today in the form of a graduation ceremony. Oleg Liber was receiving an Honorary Doctorate, along with ('Big!') Sam Allardyce. Memory plays such an...

The rug seems to be getting pulled from constructivism. “Knowledge exists in the head” – Does it? Where exactly? Edwin Hutchin’s work on a Navy warship points to knowledge existing between peoples’ heads and a material world. Andrew Pickering talks of scientific knowledge as performance (a ‘mangle’) which is constantly ‘tuning’ into the material world. My work on music similarly is looking at the...

The video for this improvisation is a (highly compressed) version of some videos I've prepared for a module on Educational Cybernetics we are preparing for some Chinese Universities. There are three main elements to it:1. The cybernetics of the person2. The cybernetics of communication and social structure3. The cybernetics of learning activityI touch on the idea of learning as emancipation, and the...

Went to a fantastic exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery on Outsider Art. If there's something challenging in these beautiful images and sculptures, it's that - following Kant's aesthetics - artistic beauty typically is associated with the concept of genius: that through engaging with the artwork, the 'grace' of genius is revealed. Yet, the same powerful feelings of recognition and grace are produced...

This music is Brittenesque. Britten used music as a playful activity to involve amateurs - particularly children. Few have done it so well or beautifully.. I've been reading Gadamer on Aesthetics in 'Truth and Method' where the aesthetic experience is always playful. But if it's play, what's the game? As a way of addressing this, I've just finished a paper for the American Society of Cybernetics on...

This improvisation creates a rippling effect by arpeggiating the same sort of harmonies as yesterday's improvisation. What's in the arpeggiation? It may the same sort of 'constant disruption' that we see on the surface of an expanse of water reflecting the sky, or the rustling of trees in the wind....

The romanticism of University is rarely discussed in board meetings. New universities cannot really compare in their romanticism to the old, and whilst there is a tendency to be more 'functional' in their view of themselves, the romanticism remains - perhaps in seeing themselves as a 'Bauhaus' to Oxford's 'dreaming spires'. Economic conditions can have a corrosive effect on this thinking, focusing...

This improvisation is a return to ethereal music which I haven't done for some time. I've actually got my head down in really concrete stuff at the moment - a crazily large and complex questionnaire which I'm coding in XForms (because QTI was crap). When doing something so prosaic and dull, I've always found a 'corrective' of some sort is required. So into the ethereal world of the uncertain and ineffable....

I was recommended 'The concept of Nature' by A.N. Whitehead this week. It's an extraordinary work. I'm always attracted to thinkers who turn all the conventional ways for understanding things upside down, and Whitehead is incredible. I haven't got to the bottom of it yet, but he seems to be saying something very interesting about the way we perceive dimensions. He's critical of Einstein's distinctions...