wallpaper animals

This music is Brittenesque. Britten used music as a playful activity to involve amateurs - particularly children. Few have done it so well or beautifully..

I've been reading Gadamer on Aesthetics in 'Truth and Method' where the aesthetic experience is always playful. But if it's play, what's the game? As a way of addressing this, I've just finished a paper for the American Society of Cybernetics on Music, aesthetic experience and memory where I suggest a mechanism which brings out Gadamer's idea by relating memory to an ecological relationship between 'viable people' (represented by the viable system model) and social and material structures represented by an 'atmosphere of communication' (using Luhmann's communication theory). Things that we do to our environment may have a transforming effect on our cognition, memory and human experience. What's the politics of this?

If memory and aesthetic experience is related to the relationship between individuals and their environment as this model suggests, how should decisions which transform that environment be taken?

things are still chaotic....but these five minutes sitting here staring at pictures, listening to pandora (brandi carlile) is the BEST ever.

This improvisation creates a rippling effect by arpeggiating the same sort of harmonies as yesterday's improvisation. What's in the arpeggiation? It may the same sort of 'constant disruption' that we see on the surface of an expanse of water reflecting the sky, or the rustling of trees in the wind.

The romanticism of University is rarely discussed in board meetings. New universities cannot really compare in their romanticism to the old, and whilst there is a tendency to be more 'functional' in their view of themselves, the romanticism remains - perhaps in seeing themselves as a 'Bauhaus' to Oxford's 'dreaming spires'. Economic conditions can have a corrosive effect on this thinking, focusing the board on 'value for money', rather than the deeper values to which the romantic view is related.

But romanticism is important. It concerns dreaming, and dreaming is where ideas come from. If romanticism is eroded from the idea of a university, might the university cease to be the fount of ideas? What are we left with? And if students and staff live under the tyranny of economic necessity no-one is going to be in the mood for dreaming. The dangers of reproducing a narrow value structure which fails to recognise any values that are deeper than economic ones are very real right now. What can we do about it?

The improvisation is an attempt at a romantic 'cello' melody... my dreaming, from which these ideas sprang...

This improvisation is a return to ethereal music which I haven't done for some time. I've actually got my head down in really concrete stuff at the moment - a crazily large and complex questionnaire which I'm coding in XForms (because QTI was crap). When doing something so prosaic and dull, I've always found a 'corrective' of some sort is required. So into the ethereal world of the uncertain and ineffable. And out of this balancing new things arise...

Which does raise a serious question... particularly for the poor sods who are going to be answering my questionnaire. Will we encourage them to have a 'corrective'? Where's the balance in e-learning?

I was recommended 'The concept of Nature' by A.N. Whitehead this week. It's an extraordinary work. I'm always attracted to thinkers who turn all the conventional ways for understanding things upside down, and Whitehead is incredible. I haven't got to the bottom of it yet, but he seems to be saying something very interesting about the way we perceive dimensions. He's critical of Einstein's distinctions between space and time (and this was 1920!). His concept of this perception of dimension seems more like a multi-layer regulatory process (c.f. VSM). It may be confused (I may be confused!) but it's set me thinking.

What about the dimensions of learning that we take forgranted? The role of time in personal development, the role of memory, the role of experience, curriculum, knowledge, etc? In learning it's perhaps more easy to see some dimensions as regulatory in the way Whitehead sees them (and the regulatory perspective is at the root of educational cybernetics), but even then we can easily find ourselves dimensioning quantities of things (achievements, length of study, books read, etc) forgetting that everything is probably mutually contingent in a regulatory process.

I also found out the other day that Pask's term for e-learning is 'Applied Epistemology'. Bearing in mind these sort of issues, that seems very apt!

i do feel the need to try and keep it real at times on this blog....i love beautiful interiors but i am far from being surrounded by pretty spaces right now....