FOREIGN LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT: a newspaper blackout poem by Austin Kleon
July 25, 2010
May 24, 2010
All units at OpenLearn from the Open University
via @alun, who calls it “like being let loose in a sweet-shop”
May 1, 2010
from ‘Informal learning in the workplace: unmasking human resource development’ by John Garrick
March 17, 2010
1. THE DIALECTIC OF TAKING SIDES—RETHINKING THE TRADITIONS OF POLITICAL EDUCATION
Politicization
In order to arrive at such a deconstructive concept of education I would like to begin with the histories of its politicization within twentieth-century modernity. In fact, the movement to politicize pedagogy started in the 1930s, when artists of the Left started to appropriate educational techniques and turn them towards progressive tasks within their practice. Follow me to a theater in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic and a scene of Bertolt Brecht’s play The Mother. Onstage is a teacher in the middle of his own bourgeois living room, standing before a blackboard.3 A group of workers sits around a table, challenging the teacher in a debate about learning:
TEACHER (before a blackboard): All right, you want to learn to read. I cannot understand why you need it, in your situation; you are also rather old. But I will try, just as a favor for Mrs. Vlassova. Have you all something to write with? All right then, I will now write three easy words here: “Branch, nest, fish.” I repeat: “Branch, nest, fish.” (He writes.)
THE MOTHER (who sits at the table with three others): Must it really be “Branch, nest, fish”? Because we are old people we have to learn the words we need quickly!
TEACHER (smiles): I beg your pardon; but the reason you may have for learning to read is a matter of total indifference.
THE MOTHER: Why should it be? Tell me, for instance, how do you write the word “Worker”? That will be of interest to our Pavel Sostakovich.
SOSTAKOVICH: Who needs to know how to write “Branch”?
THE MOTHER: He is a metal worker.
TEACHER: But you will need the letters in the word.
WORKER: But the letters in the words “Class Struggle” are needed too!
TEACHER: Possibly; but we must begin with the simplest things and not at once with the hardest! “Branch” is simple.
SOSTAKOVICH: “Class Struggle” is much more simple.4
At the end of the scene the blackboard shows the words: “WORKERS. CLASS STRUGGLE. EXPLOITATION.” In this way, the learning workers in Brecht’s play have taught the teacher class struggle, while he has taught them to read.
from Unglamorous Tasks: What Can Education Learn from its Political Traditions?
March 17, 2010
Unglamorous Tasks: What Can Education Learn from its Political Traditions? > e-flux
“In this text I want to examine the traditional tasks of education as well as the possibility of thinking about the educational as something that overcomes the function of reproducing knowledge and becomes something else—something unpredictable and open to the possibility of a knowledge production that, in tones strident or subtle, would work to challenge the apparatus of value-coding. Our challenge is to imagine a form of education that would demand learners take a political stand, but without anticipating what that stand should be and thus effecting closure (in other words, always leaving an open space for other possibilities). Such an undertaking may provide, as we will see in this brief argument, further insight into our educational and curatorial practices, which are often quite tedious and not always glamorous.” via @mosabou
March 2, 2010
"It is hard not to be intimidated by New Left Review. At times, the journal can seem like an elaborate contrivance for making us feel inadequate."
—
Stefan Collini on New Left Review at 50 via @aldaily
very often, i feel that large swathes of useful intellectual labor come filled to the knee with contrivance…
give me a reason, don’t give me gestures.. or names.
“What other publication would take out a full-page advertisement in a national newspaper announcing its “quinquagenary issue”? NLR has been accused of many things, but never of populist dumbing-down.”
…or just stfu. (see also pikachu & deleuze via @naxos)
(also also, see @bradfidler’s now deleted post on spivak’s emancipatory jargon. it’s good, trust me.)
February 3, 2010
"..knowledge is not a result merely of filtering or algorithms. It results from a far more complex process that is social, goal-driven, contextual, and culturally-bound. We get to knowledge — especially “actionable” knowledge — by having desires and curiosity, through plotting and play, by being wrong more often than right, by talking with others and forming social bonds, by applying methods and then backing away from them, by calculation and serendipity, by rationality and intuition, by institutional processes and social roles. Most important in this regard, where the decisions are tough and knowledge is hard to come by, knowledge is not determined by information, for it is the knowing process that first decides which information is relevant, and how it is to be used."
— The Problem with the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review (via wildcat2030)
December 1, 2009
Noam Chomsky on Higher Education and Privatization
“I had a startling experience a few weeks ago. I travelled to Mexico City for talks at the National University, an enormous and very impressive institution with high standards of achievement and scholarship. Entrance is selective, but the university is virtually free. I then visited an even more remarkable institution, the college in Mexico City established by former mayor Lopez Obrador. Again, the facilities and standards are quite impressive. It is not only free, but has open admissions, though sometimes that requires some delay and sometimes assistance for students lacking adequate preparation. Shortly after I went to San Francisco for talks, and learned more about the California institutions of higher education. They have been at the very peak of the international higher education system. By now tuitions are quite high, even for in-state students, and cutbacks are affecting teaching, research, and staff. It would be no great surprise if the two major state universities, UC Berkeley and UC Los Angeles, will soon be privatized while the remainder of the state system is reduced considerably in scale and level. Needless to say, Mexico is a poor country with a struggling economy, and California should be one of the richest places in the world, with incomparable advantages. I mention these recent experiences only to emphasize that the recent cut-backs in higher education seen in much of the world cannot simply be traced to economic problems. Rather, they reflect fundamental choices about the nature of the society in which we will live. If it is to be designed for the wealthy and privileged, mostly engaged in management and finance while production is transferred abroad and most of the population is left to fend somehow for themselves at the fringes of decent and creative life, then these are good choices. If we have different aspirations for the world of our children and grandchildren, the choices are shameful and ruinous.” [via easternblocparty + newleft]
November 24, 2009
"What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."
—
via designtumblelog + delayprocrastinate + anin + libraryland + booklover + guerrillamamamedicine
November 24, 2009
How to Do Philosophy
“Curiously, however, the works they produced continued to attract new readers. Traditional philosophy occupies a kind of singularity in this respect. If you write in an unclear way about big ideas, you produce something that seems tantalizingly attractive to inexperienced but intellectually ambitious students. Till one knows better, it’s hard to distinguish something that’s hard to understand because the writer was unclear in his own mind from something like a mathematical proof that’s hard to understand because the ideas it represents are hard to understand. To someone who hasn’t learned the difference, traditional philosophy seems extremely attractive: as hard (and therefore impressive) as math, yet broader in scope. That was what lured me in as a high school student.
And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy’s claims. It’s supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.
Because philosophy’s flaws turned away the sort of people who might have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating. Bertrand Russell wrote in a letter in 1912:
This singularity is even more singular in having its own defense built in. When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they’re nonsense generally keep quiet. There’s no way to prove a text is meaningless. The closest you can get is to show that the official judges of some class of texts can’t distinguish them from placebos.
Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject.
His response was to launch Wittgenstein at it, with dramatic results.”
via wildcat2030 + xixidu
November 15, 2009
Outside in the Teaching Machine : Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak > Google Books
“As [the study of colonial discourse] begins to be absorbed into the discipline, the long-established but supple, heterogeneous, and hierarchical power-lines of the institutional “dissemination of knowledge” continue to determine and overdetermine its conditions of representability. It is at this moment of infiltration or insertion, sufficiently under threat by the custodians of a fantasmatic high Western culture, that the greatest caution must be exercised. The price of success must not compromise the enterprise irreparably. In that spirit of caution, it might not be inappropriate to notice that, as teachers, we are now involved in the construction of a new object of investigation—‘the third world,’ ‘the marginal’—for institutional validation and certification. One has only to analyze carefully the proliferating but exclusivist “Third World-ist” job descriptions to see the packaging at work. It is as if, in a certain way, we are becoming complicitous in the perpetration of a ‘new orientalism.”
via igather + lowendtheory + curate
November 12, 2009
November 8, 2009
"The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice."
November 7, 2009
"If you own a piano, you own a piano. If you own a camera you’re a photographer."
— David Bram in an interview on flash-flood (via photographyprison)
November 6, 2009
Learning Truth Telling Beyond Neoliberal Education > Radical Notes
[..] It not uncommon to hear in academic seminars, policy meetings and debates that the theoretical is anti-practical and theoretical discussions slow down the completion of projects. There is a tacit agreement that when a discussion gets into a deadlock on account of theory a decision can be taken on the basis of the practical. Often at meetings one hears “too much of democracy is not going to lead anywhere”. In other words, there is no time for discussion. Time constraints are imposed by financial considerations – ‘the work needs to be one within the time-frame for which the money has been sanctioned’.
There is a conflict between financial time and discussion time. In this conflict the discussion time shrinks and this obviously implies a shrinking of theoretical space.
Such conflict and shrinking has filtered down to other fields of social and political life. Debates on policy are short and snappy, what with political activists being averse to theory. They want action and have no time for reflection. In universities there are fewer students who opt for the social sciences for they do not get one a job. Such pressure has compelled the re-invention of more market-friendly syllabi in the social sciences.
The meaning of theory itself has changed. A good example is ‘theory for computer programs’ taught in schools and institutes. It refers to a list of terms and procedures to run the program and there is no space for asking the why how and what. Here theory itself has become the instrument.
In social sciences, theory is more often than not envisaged as the lens or the frame (legal, conceptual, experiential, religious…) through and within which we see the world. In the first instance, the world appears either smaller (as if viewed through a convex lens) or larger (seen through the concave) than what it is. In the case of theory being the frame, the world is viewed with the terms of reference specified by the task to be accomplished. In both instances, theory is the ally of fragmentation and encourages the exclusion of critical voices of people from diverse experiences and plural cultures.
The neoliberal economy has converted theory into an instrumentality for manufacturing consent. [..] ###
via @mosabou
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