wallpaper dinding

A number of seemingly disparate topics have come up in my blog in recent weeks. I feel it's worth trying to fit things together, particularly in the light of my current project work and deeper thinking about education. The topic are:1. Sensuality and communicationI feel that feelings are not sufficiently appreciated in our understanding of communication and learning. Dealing with this means...2. A...

The majority of my time is currently taken up with a large-scale European project called iTEC (http://itec.eun.org). iTEC is interesting in a number of ways, but not least because it proposes to organise education in partner schools around 'scenarios' rather than curriculum topics, and to provide technologies which pertain to those scenarios which will support teachers and learners in realising scenarios.A...

Waves as oscillations and harmonic motion are fundamental to the world. But the use of the word 'wave' covers a range of phenomena, and not just from physics. I'm particularly interested in "waves of emotion", and the extent to which a "wave of emotion" relates to waves of the sea, or transverse waves in a slinky spring. But the real point about this is that we are not 'digital'. Human experience...

Seeing a concert performance of Otello in Manchester last night brought home to me the fundamental importance of those aspects of communication which we have no words to describe. I think more than in the play, the Verdi/Boito creation lets us peer into the latent passion behind Desdemona's pleas for Cassio (and how Otello might have interpreted them), together with the rabid mood-swings of Otello...

I saw an interesting keynote by Jabari Mahiri at #cal11 today which has set me thinking about the role of new media in teaching and learning - particularly the use of new media by kids. We talk in terms of "this is cool! Give them a camera and the kids can just express themselves..." and the results of the kids "expressing themselves" can be remarkable: new capabilities, new hope, escape from impoverishment....

Beck says of technological progress that "it is legitimated social change without democratic political legitimation." Looking at the Googles, Apples and Microsofts of this world and this observation would seem to be borne out. But in some ways, learning technology might be worse. The social change that Google et al want to create is one where they make bigger profits. They tend not to have 'well meaning'...

The world of underemployment means that the primary regulation of the relationship between workers and work is no longer maintained by employers. It must be actively maintained by individuals. For individuals this means a greater sense of insecurity and anxiety as they continually have to consider the possibility that their current employment might cease.I think that between a worker and their work...

There's no doubt that there's a degree of uncertainty bordering on panic setting into most UK universities at the moment: few would risk complacency wherever they find themselves in the pecking-order. That panic manifests itself in individuals' anxieties about their jobs, their futures, their families, the car and the mortgage. Scary stuff. But their response to this anxiety within many universities...

In my last post, I made a strong statement about innovation: "Innovation is always framed by inauthenticity". I want to  explore this.What I mean is that the instinct to make new stuff is part of a pathological process. Stafford Beer complained about this in his 'Platform for Change'. Beer identifies the maker of new stuff as 'homo faber', where homo faber has been the dominant figure in industrialised...

To imagine somebody watching the mushroom cloud rising over Hiroshima and saying "gosh! that's innovative!" seems an unlikely (and somewhat dark-humoured) scenario. But why? Clearly, it was innovative in the sense that we often think about innovation; and it 'caught-on' - it was diffused as 'early adopters' were rapidly joined by 'early majority' users. We may be beginning to see the 'late majority'...

In today's world, everyones' experiences and the actions that arise from them are hard-wired into the things that happen, which in turn feed into our experiences. I'm tempted to say (tentatively):Experience, maybe more than money, power or class structures, will be a key determining factor in the social transformations of the future (be they good or ill). This is why my primary concern is...