wallpaper dinding

I was having a discussion yesterday along the lines of:"Have you noticed how when you visit a foreign country, all the women look beautiful? When we're at home, we discriminate more; we seem to pick up on so many signals which help to make distinctions which aren't available to us when people are speaking a different language..." (this was obviously a male-centric discussion, but I would guess there's...

What is the difference between the form of something and its structure? Much of my recent thinking has been about the form of knowledge, and I think this is distinct from the 'structure' of knowledge. Structure we might represent is 'maps', semantic graphs, etc... structure is a way of representing the content of something: it is merely a description. I think to describe a form, however, is to grapple...

In 2012 the major stakeholder for UK higher education will decisively shift from the government to the learner. What a government wants and expects from education and what a learner wants are not the same things. Governments tend to want accountability and evidence of effective control and management for how their money is spent. That tends to mean bureaucracy.Learners want a degree, inspiring experiences,...

What do you do? Teacher? Learner? Learning technologist? Administrator? ok... but what does that mean? What's the first thing you do in the morning? What do you really do? How do you go about doing it? How do others respond to you doing it? How does what you do relate to what they do? What's important to you in what you do? Do you enjoy what you do? I think we have a very one-dimensional view of what...

I had an interesting discussion yesterday about memory and constructivism. The locus of memory is something which I've been very interested in recently, particularly with my dad's alzheimers. I don't think remembering has a directly attributable mental cause; the role of the brain is probably more as a regulator of a complex process of interactions with the environment and state-monitoring of the...

I was struck by Coleridge's idea of 'individuation' as a life force which he articulates in his "Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life". Coleridge equates individuation and life:"I define life as 'the principle of individuation', or the power which unites a given 'all' into a 'whole' that is presupposed by all its parts. The link that combines the two, and acts throughout...

Coming to a University near you soon! Sign-up for "Degree Impossible!" - the degree you will never pass! With us, you will learn how to fail better... We're doing this because we are experts in failure. Unlike other Universities, we're not going to pretend life is a success. Because ultimately, you and we cannot escape defeat. Degree Impossible! sounds miserable, but that is not our intention. We...

Any religious conviction is an assertion of reality that exists outside subjective experience. But the assertion that there is only subjective experience and nothing beyond it is itself metaphysical conjecture. I suspect that this is why debate about reality can quickly turn ill-tempered. The heat in the debate rests at the interface between personal identity and its association with metaphysical...

Mezirow makes much of Popper's idea about the Horizon of Expectations. I'm wondering how a horizon of expectations maps onto a 'topology on being'. Here I am now, with all my dreams, all the things which are immediately responding to things happening around me, my sense of self... and the things I have to do. How do I decide what I have to do? How do I set about doing the things I have to do? Why...

I've been reading John Duffield's Relativity+ over the last few days. It's got me thinking (which I think is Duffield's intention, rather than providing a perfectly worked-out theory, which it clearly isn't). I notice how horrible the physics community have been to him, which is a bit sad. Not dissimilar to the treatment that Elinor Ostrom got from the economics community when she won the Nobel prize...

I've been exploring the remarkable one-man OER show of Salman Khan recently: http://www.khanacademy.org. I stumbled upon it because my Christmas project was to get to grips with topology, and the maths resources are fantastic (although he hasn't done anything on topology). But the experience has also set me thinking about why this is fantastic. After all, most of the resources out there are not that...

In Bunuel's last film, the lead female character is played by two actresses, with both the audience and the hapless hero (Fernando Rey) being none the wiser as to which is which. One teases and encourages him, the other pushes him away. The comedy revolves around the fact that he is the victim both of his passions, and of the unpredictability of his situation - an unpredictability underlined by the...