wallpaper dinding

I've spent the weekend nursing a miserable cold. This improvisation reflects the mood I think. Interestingly though, the transformation in my mood (which was bleak) also was quite productive in terms of providing new perspectives on things. I 'broke down'; in Heideggerarian terms, as a result of the breakdown, the world became present-at-hand to me again. I re-found things through my state of suffering....

Walking to a fantastic exhibition at the Whitworth gallery with my daughter yesterday (where they've built an 'indoor forest'), we had a discussion about maths. She struggles with maths. The stress of having to get the right answer puts her in a spin and she can't think straight. She'd much rather be painting or writing. And she hasn't learnt her tables... perhaps because she just doesn't want to...

Is there an moral obligation to increase our skilled performances? An obligation to do more than just count on our fingers.. to learn multiplication tables, standard integrals, etc? Does this relate to 'right action'?I've been thinking about this with regard to technique in art and music. When I compose, I have tended to only count on my fingers. I never much liked the sort of mathematically abstract...

One of the key features of Activity Theory and Latour's Actor Network Theory is the belief that technology has agency. This is obviously more interesting if we look at 'intelligent' or 'learning' machines. I think this is a mistaken view of agency.I wonder if the agency of human beings always has a moral component. People usually act for reasons which are grounded in a sense of 'doing the right thing'...

On my way to talk to Sugata Mitra last week, I was trying to work out what curiosity was. There's definitely an interplay of systems, it seems to me... (Kant I think was probably the first to realise that). The question is, what are the mechanisms? I'm beginning to think that all engagement with the material world is in one way or another a process of modelling another human being, of engaging with...

I've been reading E.R.Dodds "The Greeks and the Irrational" about ancient approaches to madness, and particularly Socrates's 4 categories of "divine madness": prophetic madness, telestic (ritual) madness, poetic madness and erotic madness. I've been thinking about these in relation to a discussion we had today regarding 'innovation'. It strikes me that when we say 'innovation', we mean 'play' and...

Current addicted to Perotin: the composer, not the allergy-relief medication! (actually, that's Piriton.. but close enough!)It must have seemed like an extraordinary leap to go from plainchant to Perotin's exuberance, and possibly something 'not quite proper' about it for many of the people who heard it: Perotin is seriously sexy! Certainly not 'pious' music as we might conventionally conceive of...

It struck me in a session on the 'cost of e-learning' thinking about Marx's relationship between commodity, value and price that commodity values relate to price just as human values relate to cost.It's not e-learning that costs; it's the values that underpin the decisions to buy it. They cost, and not just in the finances of purchase. There's are many forms of human cost which are effected through...

In some ways it's true to say that the world we have created necessitates individuals making a rich variety of communicative acts in order to survive in it. To learn to do this it isn't necessary to go to University, but it's something University tends to produce in people. What is it about the world which requires this?Ulrich Beck identifies it as the 'risk society' where individuals constantly have...

Two days back at work and I'm already feeling the need for a holiday. Technically, I've got no desk at the moment - so decamped to the alternative office of the 'Sweet Green Tavern': we should have done that years ago! Wifi could be a bit better though.This is a year for moral arguments. Big things are happening in education, and there is a need to inspect consciences as to whether they are the right...