wallpaper dinding

Elsevier's somewhat Scrooge-like take-down notices sent to Academia.edu and Universities around the world, including Harvard and Stanford has woken us up to the rather dirty business of publishing and its interface with scholarship. It also makes us aware of the issue of academic labour and those who profit from it. When University lecturers are taking industrial action in their institutions about...

Are we emerging out of the crisis in our so-called knowledge economy? Are we starting to have ideas again? Are our Universities, having been marketised successfully (?!) now going to lead us to world emancipation?Without suggesting that we're 'out of the woods' in UK HE, things do seem to be a bit calmer in my institution at least. However, there is a strange unease hanging over the entire sector;...

The train-crash interview with the head of Universities UK, Nicola Dandridge on BBC Radio 4 this morning is symptomatic of the sheer confusion Universities find themselves in (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-25331877). Caught between temptation to capitalize of rich international pickings, and concern about their own financial viability, Universities have embedded themselves within countries...

If one wanted evidence of a particular kind of naivety in University management today, one wouldn't have to look much further than the University of London's knee-jerk policy-making regarding student protests (see http://www.channel4.com/news/university-of-london-student-protest-ban-senate-house-occupy) What's going on here? What's the calculation on the part of management that they think this...

To create a brand (whether you are Apple, Microsoft, Cambridge University or Manchester United) is to create the risk of not being associated with the brand. The level of risk created is to be measured against the communities within which individuals seek to maintain their identity and status. To children, the brand of trainers matters among their peers; the pressure to help children maintain status...

Following on from yesterday's post, what does a logic of multiple expectations in music look like?We have rhythm, harmony, tonality, melody, motif, structure, etc. Each is itself social, and the expectations with each in themselves is a social function. In the mutual redundancy of expectation generation within the social domain for each phenomenon, there is the hyper-incursive routine which creates...

Katherine Hayles has a wonderful definition of reflexivity:"Reflexivity is that moment by which that has been made to generate a system is made, by a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates." (in "How we became Posthuman", p8)I found myself having to re-read this a couple of times intuiting the truth in it without being entirely clear on its implications. After reflection (so...

Ivan Illich has been the godfather of the Personal Learning Environment (PLE). It was Illich who, in 'Deschooling Society', described the pathologies of the education system and appealed for a needs-based, self-organising approach (of 'learning webs' as he called them in 1972) as opposed to the institutionalising, dissempowering status-quo. But his argument was really another salvo in a lifelong commitment...

I'm having some powerful conversations at the moment. These are the conversations which open doors, not just to new external opportunities (although this can happen) but also which open doors on new areas of the imagination (which leads to new opportunities). A powerful conversation is where one can feel free to utter something which one has long thought about but not felt able to say; and having...

I find myself in a curious paradoxical situation - more about that in a minute. But first, I'm thinking we're currently in an "it's all been done" moment in technology: we've got the internet! social software! big data! mobile apps!... what more could we want? It's been done. Let's settle down and get used to it!But we've been here so many times before, as I pointed out here: http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.com/2013/10/towards-2023-education-rediscovered.html....

In the 1960s an optimistic spirit of exploration in the "white heat of technology" caught the imagination of British architects as they sought to imagine how we might live in the future.  One of the most iconic results of this was the collective of British architects who went by the name of "Archigram". Archigram created visually impressive designs of cities of the future... from cities that...

There appears to be general consensus that experiences within the Virtual Reality of the Oculus Rift are something new. The thing that stood out for me was the fact that this was a technologically-enhanced experience which felt relaxed, unhurried, stress-free - it genuinely felt like 'dwelling' - that key category that Heidegger created as the antithesis of technology. I wonder if he would have agreed...

Today I eavesdropped via Skype on a discussion in a conference 3000 miles away about informal learning. Being so remote made me particularly aware of the dynamics of the conversation - a dynamics which displayed a particular kind of circularity. Individuals took positions: usually these were "moral" positions - certain things were to be advocated, other things avoided (people got very excited/upset...

The next technological revolution will be about emotions. We have experienced in the last 20 years a transformation in our information environment. But in creating this transformation, we have neglected what it feels like to be immersed in this information environment. Marx recognised that the symbolic codification of exchange that is the essential nature of "money" was at the root of what he called...

I was involved in a project a few years ago to create a framework for Inquiry-based learning in my university. The idea was to create degree opportunities for those students who didn't fit the traditional academic route. Instead of studying a 'subject', students could study their work - whatever their work happened to be.It's a long story, but basically - despite similar programmes being successful...

One of the exciting things about playing with Ableton Live is the exploration of the effects of the generation of redundancy in music. I found that the repetitious sound generated by the computer stimulated me to make more sound. But the striking thing with Ableton was that it wasn't simply the idea of repeating things (which is perhaps most closely associated with the idea of 'redundant' information)...

There is a problem in thinking about learning: we can only see the outward signs of cognition: linguistic utterances, body movements, etc. Our understanding of what a person might be thinking, of what might be going on in the learning process is derived from the way in which people play particular language games. Focus on 'agency' in learning seems to condemn us to metaphysical conjecture: no judgements...

The ITEC project has one year to run. In the last 3 years, it has done many good things in stimulating technical engagement in schools across Europe. There have been some very heartening and enthusiastic engagements with the project coming from places ranging from Turkey and Portugal to Norway and Finland with talented teachers finding a voice and a platform for experimenting with technology and doing...