Know your digital rights

A battle over Wikipedia's use of images from the a London gallery's website has intensified. Read story

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Technology and Experience: revisiting Ivan Illich's tools for conviviality

Throughout the pandemic, scholars, administrators, and developers have been asking: which tools and practices from emergency education during the coronavirus pandemic may become part of established practice? Related to this question is how scholars have responded to the present event by turning to past pedagogies to inform current practices. I focus on the tools for conviviality initiated by Ivan Illich in  Deschooling Society  (1970); defined by Illich in  Tools for Conviviality  (1973); and refined by Illich in  Medical Nemesis  (1975). There is renewed interest in Illich as part of contemporary discussions of emancipatory education.  I historicise Illich’s tools for conviviality to make the point that remote learning and homeschooling during the pandemic has brought marginal pedagogies into mainstream focus. I divide this post into three parts: first, a brief explanation of Illich’s core idea of tools for conviviality using  Deschooling Society...
Read more

Archaeologies of learning spaces

My recent visits to Cambridge last September and to Oxford in April set me thinking about the role space plays in shaping teaching and learning. Gaston Bachelard , Michel Foucault , Paul Virilio and Alain De Botton have written about the ways buildings create and hold spatial "memory" and this "memory" serves as a cultural imprint. Architectural space as institutional "memory" Buildings are marked by "memories" of their performance and their making. Spaces affect perception. Alain De Botton succinctly expresses this as follows: “political and ethical ideas can be written into window frames and door handles” (De Botton, 2007, p. 93). Paul Virilio used the term "archaeology" to reveal a phenomenon of architectural space. For Michel Foucault, perceptions of space conditioned the discourse of postmodernity. This marked a clear departure from nineteenth century thought where concern lay in representation of time and history (Smethurst, ...
Read more

Education versus “learnification” what’s at stake?

Will the effects of pandemic pedagogy accelerate learnification?  Gert Biesta ,  Dutch-born education philosopher  who is associated with the reclaiming teaching movement,  highlights that the discourse of “education” has become disconnected from “learning.” This shift began during the 1980s, accelerated as a consequence of the proliferation of educational technology over the past twenty years, and is likely to increase with data-gathering and extended reality becoming ubiquitous within educational systems. Biesta makes the point that language constructs reality and that the language of learning has privileged process , but has excluded questions of purpose and content and relationships within dynamic human interrelationships that should define teaching and learning (Biesta, 2012). The sole concern of learnification becomes the individualistic process of learning, rather than the purpose , context , and relationships that are central to education as both a ...
Read more