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 go to what she regards as such a 'cold' place. I don't blame her!
But I don't think maths is cold; education manages to freeze it! In my attempt to unfreeze it, we had a wide-ranging conversation about tables, number bonds and Fibonacci numbers, illustrating it with fir-trees as we walked through the park. And the walking helped as we went through the series. Sitting people down at desks to do this stuff seems crazy... intellectual discovery comes with a discovery of the inter-relatedness of bodily movements and mental creativity.
It's interesting that I feel that I have to encourage her to improve. I can't quite rationalise my compulsion, beyond merely wanting to conform to normative expectations. But I also intuit that she has to love it; indeed, (and I'm not sure about this...) maybe she ought to love it.
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Posted by dasfseegdse
Selasa, 21 September 2010
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' from their perspective; sometimes of course, they might deliberately do the 'wrong thing'. Sometimes they might unintentionally do something harmful, but if they become aware of this, there will be some sort of corrective response. And of course, there's no reason to just talk about people: there is no reason to suppose that a cat doesn't have some sense of 'the right thing', whatever 'the right thing' might be to a cat. Certainly, pathological social behaviour in animals is much less common than it is in humans!
I'm fascinated at the moment by the extent to which a moral sense might underpin cognition. I want to know how this might work. I suspect it's got something to do with homeostatic biological relationships with material and social mechanisms. Agency (and morality) may simply be aspects that we see of things which are part of those mechanisms.
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Posted by dasfseegdse
Rabu, 15 September 2010
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 submission to forms of madness, but we can't say 'play' because it doesn't sound economically justifiable. The whole point of divine madness is that, providing it is controlled, it produces new things: idealism of prophecy makes us think the world can be better; ritual, worship, meditation can put us in a state where new creation can take shape; poetic thinking helps us to express new things in radical ways, and Freud would argue (rightly in my opinion) that erotic madness has probably lurked behind every significant scientific and artistic advance.
But we hide all this behind cold economic values like 'work' and 'innovation'? Why? because I think we don't have a grasp on how they work. I think we could get a better grasp on this sort of thing - but only by being honest about what's really going on... I wonder if the Greeks had a better grasp on it that we do....
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Posted by dasfseegdse
Selasa, 07 September 2010
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 the cost of values. training cost; morale cost; cultural cost; maintenance costs; control costs; etc...
The costs of our values are things which those values do. Might understanding the dimensions of cost help us understand the challenges of managing values within institutions?
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