wallpaper dinding

The problem with asking this question is that it is rarely seen as a matter of objective judgement, but instead one of subjective opinion. It is an ambitious question: it is closely related to 'What ought the role of government to be?' or 'how ought we to live?'. But is it really that subjective? In most social situations, there are actions which are generally acknowledged as 'the right thing to do',...

E-learning practitioners, managers and strategists have a higher profile within the University than they have ever had. That means their decisions and actions have a greater power to disrupt the practices of others. With every decision there will be losers as well as winners. Who has the right to decide what action should be taken? What procedures must be gone through in order to do the 'right thing'?...

A lot of the discussion at the New York cybernetics conference conference concerned play, madness and viability. It's good to talk about this stuff again - it's was the central concern of Ashby, Bateson, Laing and Pask. The role of play in opening channels of communication is I think very important. It's making me think that Freire's pedagogy is systemic in the same way that Piaget's is, but at a...

Ever since I got back from New York I have been thrown through the technical hell of creating a huge interactive questionnaire. I'm using XForms with server-side support from BetterForm - fascinating, and I think powerful architecture, but as with so many things like this, it doesn't *quite* work!More interesting is how I feel. Programming seems to suck the soul out of me. I feel 'instrumentalised',...

The discussion about the reality of causes on the cybernetics blog (http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/2010/?p=2893) continues to be fascinating.My views on this are slowly forming. I think that 2nd order cybernetics tries to set itself up as a way of thinking that doesn't exclude any other ways of thinking. In reality it fails to achieve this because it carries an implicit ontological position which...

Von Glasersfeld's assertion in the unreality of causes has got me thinking. I want to avoid the typical gain-saying of whether something is real or not, but I do worry that the radical view leaves out something important. Many things are contained in his Radical Constructivism: notably something which appears very similar to Harre's model of the self and positioning theory. The bit on communication...

I've been thinking about the obsession with constructivism after my trip to the cybernetics conference. There are issues with sensuality: laughter, tears, pain, sexual desire, etc. There seems to be some sort of 'order' to the reality of these things. Some seem more real than others. Pain, tears and laughter feel pretty real, biological - hardly a construct. Even to talk of them as being aspects of...

I did these two improvisations whilst in New York, after leaving the American Cybernetics Society conference. They are very contrasting impressions: one is quite bleak - I felt the force of the city rather dehumanising and it made me sad. The other is very energetic although strangely, this was produced after visiting the 9/11 site, which I found incredibly moving (I was surprised and slightly embarrassed by...