wallpaper dinding

I've been wondering if 'meaning' and 'emancipation' are the same. To consider this, there are obvious first questions:What do I mean by meaning?What do I mean by emancipation?I want to start with the concept that I believe links the two: possibility. I have been arguing for a conception of meaning recently as the 'structuring of expectations'. In day-to-day experience, I would explain this as the...

What sort of an industry is education? Behind that question is a question about industry in the first place. We tend to have a particular view of industry which manufactures or sells goods and services. In doing so, it creates employment and generates profits. The car industry makes cars; the banking industry sells financial services; the building industry builds houses; the supermarket industry sells...

Agreeing with Alison Wolf that "vocational education is a great idea for other peoples' children" won't make me popular since she's become Michael Gove's puppet. But I think on this, she's right. Vocational qualifications are dreamed up by the middle classes as a dewey-eyed guilt-driven solution to what even they can see as a tsunami of lost teenagers (God... there's a thought!) caught out in an employment...

Economic growth appears to be over. At least for the time being. Which is a good time to ask "exactly what is over?" For when we think of growth, we think of this:Over time, we are monetarily richer. Why does that convey meaning? Perhaps because over time we can see ourselves being able to acquire things which we weren't able to do before. But of course, what it is that we might choose to acquire...

Every now and then I get into a social situation where I feel uncomfortable. It may be that someone says something to me that upsets me, or I'm particularly nervous about saying something, or have my hopes dashed in an exchange with a colleague or a student. In such moments, I can feel exposed and vulnerable: letting show feelings which I'd prefer to be hidden. Over the years I've learnt to be more...

I'm going back to early academic enthusiasms - to some of the things that Ian Kemp pointed me towards when I studied music at Manchester. This was at a time when we were studying Tippett's (then quite recent) "Mask of Time". Why call it a mask? What was that all about? In looking for an answer to this my focus turned to the 17th century masque that Ben Johnson, Dryden and others were involved with...

If you could imagine a computer adventure game that was actually 'real' where virtual things on a screen become physical things: things would continually change shape according to the actions of people. Nobody would know where they were. Everything would change. The physical constraints of the environment would be so transitory that everybody's interpretation of "what's going on?" or "where are we?"...

I've had some fascinating discussions with Oleg over the last two days, discussing our book on "Educational Cybernetics" and negotiations with publishers (which are sometimes frustrating), but also dealing with new developments in cybernetics and their possible implications. The most significant of these is the emerging deep critique of 'information' coming from physics and biology. This is currently...

When thinking about marketing their education products Universities sometimes make the comparison to buying a car. After all, the cost of an undergraduate degree is now £28000 and for that, you could buy a BMW X1, an Audi Q5 or a Ford Mondeo (I'm not Jeremy Clarkson, but I guess that wouldn't be the popular choice)Of course, the only problem is that the government isn't offering you an attractive...

Although Post-Autistic Economics (PAE - see http://www.paecon.net/) now prefers to call itself 'Real-world economics', the 'autism' word is very useful in describing the kind of economic thinking which the PAE movement reacts against. It at least makes it easy to spot when economists find themselves pouring over graphs and formulae in isolation from the human realities around them.Critical...

Marx describes four forms of 'alienation':the alienation of the worker from the work he/she produces.alienation from working itself, where working becomes meaningless, mundane. alienation of the worker from him/herself as a producer.alienation of the worker from other workers.In the context of Marx's materialism, basically this revolves around who controls of means of production. More fundamentally,...

I feel a certain lassitude towards aspects of work at the moment. I have phases like this. Ironically, they're often times when I get important things done. But it's a struggle.I also have the feeling of growth at the moment. I don't know if it's connected, but what I'm reading currently (Hayek, Krippendorff, Lawson, Peakcocke, etc) is challenging me, changing me and exhausting me. The old certainties,...

This is the start of a big topic, which I have been stimulated to begin after reviewing an extraordinary book of scholarly essays on physics, information, biology and theology edited by Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregerson: see http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Nature-Reality-Physics-Metaphysics/dp/0521762251/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336574507&sr=8-1-spell. I'll post up my review...

The election of Francois Hollande has been a moment of revelation for a number of reasons. Of course, the hope is that it is a relief for France and perhaps for Europe, but I think that is unlikely in the short-term. The revelation I am most interested in is not actually something that is going to make anything better in the short-term, but may help us to think through the real challenges Europe faces...

I'm paraphrasing a paper given by Louis Kauffmann at the Heinz von Foerster congress in Vienna in 2011. His title was "What is an Object that a Person might know It, and a Person that She might know an Object?"  I believe a similar (and related) epistemological problem exists between people and education. Instead of 'knowing' something, I am concerned with something being meaningful. Indeed,...

This blog is about 'improvising'. That's because I can do improvising. I'd love to do composing, but I can do much more improvising. (I do a bit of musical composing, but more composing of papers - which are less interesting, I think). My writing on the blog is improvisatory rather than composed (on the whole) - although some pieces are more composed than others (depending on how much trouble I think...