wallpaper dinding

Widening Participation is usually presented as a good thing - particularly by people who, like me, work for institutions whose mission it is to provide higher education opportunities to those who would otherwise be excluded from the system. I continue to care about this deeply, and I have found that working with this group of students is at once more challenging and potentially more rewarding than...

I've just ordered an Oculus Rift development kit (see http://www.oculusvr.com/) Why? Because there's something exciting about it, and at a time of pretty deep depression, we need exciting things (which aren't too expensive). And I've a feeling that, whilst Virtual Reality has been around for a long time, suddenly it will become accessible and desirable for everyone. That, I think will change...

Heinz Von Foerster articulated his ethical position as "I always act so as to increase the number of choices." This is presented as a core principle of ethical behaviour within second-order cybernetics, which Von Foerster more eloquently described in the context of Wittgenstein's position on Ethics (from the Tractatus) [Von Foerster's paper on ethics is available here: http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/foerster.html]In...

I've written before about musical climaxes - particularly the Liebestod at the end of Tristan and Isolde (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/musical-climax-and-musical-essentialism.html and http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2010/12/in-what-way-is-it-all-about-sex.html). What's interesting is that at these extraordinary moments, there is a feeling (in me at least - and I don't...

I wonder what future historians will make of our current ideas about education. I wouldn't be surprised if they pay particular attention to our obsession with 'learning outcomes'. It is this rather ill-grounded innovation which has dominated the educational landscape in most institutions,  underpinning regimes of quality, consistency, management, and assessment. Indeed, without learning outcomes,...

I'm in the process of writing a number of papers about the TRAILER project. TRAILER is an attempt to relate thinking about self-certified competencies and informal learning with the organisational needs and reflexive processes of businesses. It's an ambitious project because there is so much conceptual and technological territory to cover. Unsurprisingly for a relatively small-scale Lifelong Learning...

As academics, we have a tendency to think too much. There are pathologies of thought - the main one manifesting itself as a lack of humour, where all the earnestness and seriousness becomes a form of narcissism. The only defense is to pop our own bubble. That moment of revolt is a moment of freedom. It is where we step outside our abstractions (or someone else's abstraction that we got caught up in)...

Pask's conversation theory is a rich and rather dense piece of work that few people outside the cybernetics community - within which he was a central figure - know. Thanks to Diana Laurillard however, most people know about the 'conversation model' - that model which situates learning as a coordination of communications between the teacher and the learner, where teachers judge their actions according...

Text Mining tools and algorithms are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Most people are unaware of what can be revealed from the data that they post to Facebook, or the data they submit to Google through searching and using Gmail. We are now in a position where the global internet corporations know more about each of us that those closest to us; indeed, with their analytic tools, they may know more...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...