wallpaper dinding

...

Andrew McGettigan has been drawing attention to a worrying trend of disestablishing Higher Education Institutions recently. The first example of its kind was the effective dissolution of the City of Leeds College of Music (see http://andrewmcgettigan.org/2011/08/31/leeds-college-of-music-dissolved/), which was transformed into a private company called Leeds College of Music Ltd, a subsidiary...

I'm been thinking about Michael Tippett's opera "The Midsummer Marriage". Apart from the music being fantastic, it is a story heavily influenced by Jungian psychology - an allegorical rite of passage from darkness to light. Nearly 60 years after its first performance, it still resonates. It has the power to transform its audience. It is music of rebirth. Sorely needed right now. This continuing power...

History as an activity is a feedback system: the past feeds back into the present; the present becomes the past. But it does this through the reflexivity of people who think and write about history: that's another feedback system. The historian is in the present. But it is a present constituted partly by narratives of the past. The existence of the historian is situated in the 'history system' - the...

There's an excellent article in the New Statesman by T.G. Otte this week about the background behind World War 1. The coming centenary of the war in 2014 will be, no doubt, a very special occasion. We still feel the echoes of those terrible events now, and looking back and reflecting how it could happen is an opportunity to look at ourselves now.We are in a dangerous situation, as Otte argues. The...

Sticking #future in front of something makes it look great in shiny packaging and then kicks it into the long grass. In the real future (not the #future), when people come across the package, sodden and decayed, and wonder what it is, it is unlikely that any of the glitz of its original packaging will have any impact at all. The power of history lies in its reconstructing of narratives which account...

The relationship between government, universities and industry is of fundamental significance in a knowledge economy (see http://www.universal-publishers.com/book.php?method=ISBN&book=1581129378 for an excellent analysis of this using cybernetic theories). The regulation of education by government inevitably has knock-on effects throughout the rest of the economy.In industrial society, governmental...

Imagine an education system without failure. Could it work? Or is creating failure a necessary function of education?We would have to rethink what it is education is doing. Can it still be considered a 'filtering mechanism' or a means of judging who should get what job?Does an education system without failure necessitate a society without fear? Because people are fearful, so education addresses their...

Sometimes we meet someone and think "you're a bright young thing! Always quick witted, able to make some incisive comment that makes everyone sit up and think (and often laugh)." and then we might think "How did they get to be like that?" (secretly wishing "I wish I was like that"). The word we use for this is "intelligence". The behaviours we associate with intelligence include the ability to remember...

SOME FUNNY P...

My experience of History in school was that it was a strange beast: the art of recalling the rememberances of other people in order to gain appreciation by the education system! My first 'homework' I was ever given was to 'make notes' on a dusty textbook telling me something about ancient british tribes. I diligently set about reading this thing. It was so boring. But I struggled through the boredom...

I've just returned from Vienna, where (after my talk in Eisenstadt last week) I gave a paper on 'Animating Pathological Communications' as part of the GLODERS project (see http://www.gloders.eu/project) an EU STREP project organised by CRESS (Centre for Research in Social Simulation) at the University of Surrey. I'm not involved in the project, although it's good to see conferences being organised...

I visited Freud's apartment (now a museum) in the Bergasse, Vienna today. It's somewhat empty because all his books and many of his artifacts are now in Hampstead, but it was a moving visit because it emphasised the terrible effect of Nazi occupation on this beautiful city. A lifetime's work was hurriedly shipped-out via Paris to London.But what of the work itself? Psychoanalysis is about 50 years...

This is my presentation from the Eisenstadt E-learning conference where I discussed the theme of 'togetherness' in the context of emerging technologies including the ITEC WidgetStore, real-time technology and the classroom of the future.  My talk began by getting all the delegates to sing, using one of the techniques which I learnt from Pauline Oliveros's 'Deep Listening'. (I'm grateful to my...

Tomorrow I'm speaking at an e-learning conference in Eisenstadt, Austria (see http://homepage.bildungsserver.com/scms/content/index.php?kat_id=310&schul_id=1033&k_name=Conference+2012&aktuelles_seite=) Eisenstadt is etched in my musical knowledge as the home of Joseph Haydn, where he served at the Esterhazy court and struggled with a difficult domestic situation. Haydn's music is...

If the best we can do with constructivist learning theory is the MOOC, and if theory predicts that MOOCs will work, then it's time for a new theory! As I have been arguing recently, constructivist theory is essentially positivist: it reduces reality to actual posited mechanisms of the learning process, and that learning and knowledge is a process which can be accounted for by the action of these mechanisms....