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"As a public school teacher, I've come to believe that good teaching comes down to six essential practices. I call them Inducement, Conveyance, Meta-Learning, Empowerment, Modeling, and Application. Just as when all eight amino acids must be present for a protein to form, all six of these activities must be present for Good Teaching (and Good Learning) to occur."
in list: For Teaching
"With all of the recent interest in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), it would be worth summarizing the two branches of MOOCs including recent posts or interviews by the founders of the concept."
"I was initially very annoyed by what I saw as a content-free overloading of the term, but the more I examined the various uses, the more I realized that there really is a common pattern to everything that is being subsumed by the term hacking. I now believe that the term hacking is not over-extended; it is actually under-extended. It should be applied to a much bigger range of activities, and to human endeavors on much larger scales, all the way up to human civilization."
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I’ll offer this rather dense definition that I think covers the phenomenology, and unpack it through the rest of the post.
Hacking is a pattern of local, opportunistic manipulation of a non-disposable complex system that causes a lowering of its conceptual integrity, creates systemic debt and moves intelligence from systems into human brains.
By this definition, hacking is anti-refinement. It is therefore a barbarian mode of production because it moves intelligence out of systems and into human brains, making those human brains less interchangeable. Yet, it is not the traditional barbarian mode of predatory destruction of a settled civilization from outside its periphery.
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This compounding rate is very high because the longer a system persists, the more tightly it integrates into everything around it, causing co-evolution. So eventually replacing even a small hack in a relatively isolated system with a better solution turns into a planet-wide exercise, as we learned during Y2K.
Isolated technologies also get increasingly situated over time, no matter how encapsulated they appear at conception, so that what looks like a “do-over” from the point of view of a single subsystem (say Linux) looks like a hack with respect to larger, subsuming systems (like the Internet). So debt accumulates at levels of the system that no individual agent is nominally responsible for. This is collective, public technical debt.
"Getting back to ideology, then, Geertz supposed that it was a template for understanding and action at times when existing templates had failed, “where institutionalized guides for behavior, thought, or feeling are weak or absent” (63). It could certainly be negative and pathological, but it might also be inevitable, and, indeed, positive in times of social and political uncertainty."
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Getting back to ideology, then, Geertz supposed that it was a template for understanding and action at times when existing templates had failed, “where institutionalized guides for behavior, thought, or feeling are weak or absent” (63). It could certainly be negative and pathological, but it might also be inevitable, and, indeed, positive in times of social and political uncertainty.
Ideology was definitively not the same as a world-view, because it only arose in situations where stable patterns and “unexamined prejudices” (63) were disrupted. But once these patterns were disrupted, it might be impossible to return to a non-ideological state, except through a long period of adjustment. Thus, in the wake of the French Revolution — “at least up to its time, the greatest incubator of extremist ideologies, ‘progressive and ‘reactionary’ alike” (64) — Edmund Burke’s appeal to “ancient opinions and rules of life” was an ideology, simply because it was no longer an unarticulated assumption. Ideology, then, was a response to “strain”, but the strain was cultural (when the meaning of words and concepts is threatened), at least as much as it was social and psychological.
"Geertz divided diagnostic accounts of ideology into the “interest” theory and the “strain” theory"
"After all, the core postulate of true SF is that children can sometimes learn from their parents mistakes... not that they will always do so! This is why genuine sci fi tragedies like On The Beach and Soylent Green are so powerful.
"This does not have to happen," say Huxley and Orwell and Slonczewski and Tiptree, in their masterful self-preventing prophecies. Be smarter, better people. Be a better people."
"The digital humanities is increasingly becoming a "buzzword", and there is more and more talk about a broadly conceived, inclusive digital humanities. The field is expanding and at the same time being negotiated, and this article explores the idea of a broadly conceived landscape of digital humanities in some depth. It is argued that awareness across this landscape is important to the future of the field. The study starts out from typologies of digital humanities, a "flythrough" of the landscape, and a discussion of what being a digital humanist entails. The second part is an exploration of four concrete encounters: ACTLab at University of Texas at Austin, the Humanities Arts Science Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC), the Humanities Computing Program at the University of Alberta, and Internet Studies. In the third part of the article, it is suggested that a model based on paradigmatic modes of engagement between the humanities and information technology can help chart and understand the digital humanities. The modes of engagement analyzed are technology as a tool, study object, expressive medium, exploratory laboratory and activist venue."
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Does that model increase the ambiguity of online relationships, changing the definition of "friend"? Not necessarily—as Baym says, the ambiguity has always been there, the internet just forces us to negotiate it. Instead, Google+ and the rest of the web are changing the definition of "stranger." In the past, a stranger was someone you'd never seen or spoken to. That's murkier now, which may not be such a bad thing. "Google+ kind of reduces the barrier," says Chesire. "You don’t have to approach the person you've kind of wanted to know because you can follow them on Google+ or Twitter, no harm done there. And that’s a sort of cool innovation."
"The hazardous character of technology—the word, the concept—is a consequence of the history just outlined. As I have argued, the generality of the word—its lack of specificity, the very aspect which evidently enabled it to supplant its more explicit and substantial precursors—also made it peculiarly susceptible to reification. Reification, as the philosopher George Lukacs famously explained, is what occurs when we endow a human activity with the characteristics of a thing or things. It thereby acquires, as he put it, “a ‘phantom-objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.”27 In contemporary discourse, private and public, technologies are habitually represented by “things”—by their most conspicuous artifactual embodiments: transportation technology by automobiles, airplanes, and railroads; nuclear technology by reactors, power plants, and bombs; information technology by computers, mobile telephones, and television; and so on. By consigning technologies to the realm of things, this well-established iconography distracts attention from the human—socioeconomic and political—relations which largely determine who uses them and for what purposes. Because most technologies in our corporate capitalist system have the legal status of private property, vital decisions about their use are made by the individual businessmen who own them or by the corporate managers and government officials who exercise the virtual rights of ownership. The complexity and obscurity of the legal relations governing the use of our technologies, abetted by the reification that assigns them to the realm of things—all of these help to create the aura of “phantom objectivity” that envelops them."
Differentiates some of the categories that connect social media and political change.
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