wallpaper dinding

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....

If we believed that the social aspects of learning demanded some sort of physical proximity between individuals, then we would never have thought that e-learning was a good idea. Given that the experience of e-learning is generally still terrible - solitary individuals hunched over computers, knots in the stomach as they try to work out "what am I meant to do?", "where do I click?", "why am I doing...

Amidst the attempts to fathom the "direction of Higher Education" in an environment of cuts, privatisation (see http://union-news.co.uk/2012/11/uclan-set-to-become-first-mainstream-privatised-university/), managerial hubris, ministerial expediency, redundancies and parodies (see http://uniserfs.wordpress.com/), the more obvious question is "what do we want university to be?" It rarely gets...

Amongst my fondest memories of my music professor Ian Kemp was his disarming way of poking fun at musicological seriousness. On receiving well-intentioned but jargon-filled explanations for musical moments, he would sometimes say, "yes, that's interesting.. but maybe it's just a nice noise". It stopped people in their tracks because the niceness of the noise was somehow absent in its technical descriptions....

Imagining a world without universities is difficult. Even for those who've never been, they're there, the places that their mates might have gone, but where they personally chose not to go. Certainly, everyone has an opinion about universities, as they do about education in general, from "waste of space!" to "fundamental to civilisation!".The first thing to say is that a world without universities...

Over-concern for one's own future is often an invitation to those who present themselves as the 'strong man/women' ready to save the country/institution/etc. As Hayek and others warned us a long time ago, these people are dangerous. Thinking of others needs to come before self-interest. Universities are currently rather over-concerned about their future, preferring to worry about that than the terrible...

I think if we'd written parodies of some of the e-learning projects we'd been involved in over the years we wouldn't have endlessly pursued dead-ends like Learning Design, Learning Objects or any of the other now-defunct initiatives we've been involved with. Humour is very powerful because it takes us out of our heads and back into our bodies. As I wrote the other day (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/body-society-and-learning-from.html)...

There's a fascinating story in the Guardian this morning. A statistical breakdown of university applications by regions of the country shows a statistically large drop in middle-class kids choosing to go to university: see http://gu.com/p/3bm8t/tw. I do not find this surprising. I think it is important to reflect on what it tells us about the re-alignment of  education and economy.I have...

My blogging practice is strategic in two principal ways. Firstly, I think aloud, and in posting my thoughts I am able to track my own personal development, the development of my ideas (which I would forget), and to create a resource which is readily to-hand which allows me to situate my current thinking with my previous development.  Those are the 'personal strategic' aspects of my practice.But...

Sometimes I have to get a little bit drunk to absorb anything new, to think, to solve a problem. The bodily change brought on by a little alcohol (but not too much, because getting too drunk is no good either), somehow puts me in a state where I become more receptive... maybe less fearful. I've also noted that difficult texts are often best read sitting on the loo, or in the bath. It may be a similar...

In the current crisis of Higher Education in the UK, where almost 60,000 students who were expected to attend university this year have decided not to go, many Universities are experiencing severe financial hardship as a direct result of the drop in their numbers. It's not just 'new' universities like UCLAN (who might have been expected to suffer having set their fee at the full £9000) and who are...

I've been playing recently with Webdoc (http://www.webdoc.com/), a social media platform where 'posts' are effectively mashups of tools, other posts, bits of text, pictures.. in fact, almost anything you want. Given that I have been concerned with the predominance of text in electronic communication, I'm interested in this as a way of communicating in a more 'connotative' way; text, after all is very...

Nigel Howard's 'Drama theory' has fascinated me in recent months. As a theory of political behaviour, and with some powerful mathematical reasoning to back it up, together with a critique of conventional game-theory and rational choice, I think there is something very important there.But I have been looking at a particular adaptation of it which brings in Luhmann's theory of communication and establishes...

Erich Fromm's analysis of Freedom begins with something of a warning:The battles for freedom were fought by the oppressed, those who wanted new liberties, against those who had privileges to defend. Whilst a class was fighting for it own liberation from domination, it believed itself to be fighting for human freedom as such and thus was able to appeal to an ideal, to the longing for freedom rooted...