wallpaper animals

i thought these images were a perfect way to start the weekend....

I went to my daughter's primary school play yesterday. She was very good, as was the production. The head talked very briefly at the end of the show that its purpose was to 'make memories'. I couldn't agree more.

I attended another memory-making event today in the form of a graduation ceremony. Oleg Liber was receiving an Honorary Doctorate, along with ('Big!') Sam Allardyce.

Memory plays such an important role in learning. We often say that something has been learnt if it is 'remembered' (spellings, tables, for example). But these memories are very interesting. If the distributed cognition crowd are right (and I'm beginning to think they are), then memories are not in the head, but dependent on the context within which people live their lives. Events like graduations and school plays are special contexts, and with special contexts come significant moments of 'personal bio-psychosocial organisation'. The 'memory' is in the organisation - particularly in relation to the context it occurs in.

When it is recalled, the essence of the event is important. (The essence may be the trigger...) And the essence of the event is usually something significant, dignified, maybe joyful: the triviality of learning, teaching and assessment leads directly to something more substantial, human and eternal.

i adore jadeite....the color totally has me smitten. my mom got me started on it. her collection is a lot better then mine. i only have a couple of pieces but i try to use them as often as possible b/c i think it makes my food taste better :)

The rug seems to be getting pulled from constructivism. “Knowledge exists in the head” – Does it? Where exactly? Edwin Hutchin’s work on a Navy warship points to knowledge existing between peoples’ heads and a material world. Andrew Pickering talks of scientific knowledge as performance (a ‘mangle’) which is constantly ‘tuning’ into the material world. My work on music similarly is looking at the feedback mechanisms between individuals and their environment of communications. The bottom line here is very simple and has to do with basic morals:
1. If you treat someone badly they will ‘know’ different things to what they might have ‘known’ if you treated them well. That means they will communicate differently.
2. The way you change the world changes the ways others will treat each other.
I've been experimenting with the synth sounds for the cybernetics conference. It sounds a bit like machines having sex to me! More seriously, some will hear it and think "that’s rubbish!" or "that’s not music!"; others (one or two) might like it. What might each person ‘know’? Will their opinions change the communications they have with one another?

The video for this improvisation is a (highly compressed) version of some videos I've prepared for a module on Educational Cybernetics we are preparing for some Chinese Universities. There are three main elements to it:
1. The cybernetics of the person
2. The cybernetics of communication and social structure
3. The cybernetics of learning activity
I touch on the idea of learning as emancipation, and the importance of free expression (drawing on Paulo Freire). The technologies to support this are explained as primarily addressing the two principle issues:
1. What sort of activities can we organise for our learners online
2. How can online activities be coordinated.

The technologies to support this are for (1) Wookie; and for (2) LAMS and IMS LD

Went to a fantastic exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery on Outsider Art. If there's something challenging in these beautiful images and sculptures, it's that - following Kant's aesthetics - artistic beauty typically is associated with the concept of genius: that through engaging with the artwork, the 'grace' of genius is revealed.

Yet, the same powerful feelings of recognition and grace are produced with these outsider artworks. But these aren't socially constructed 'geniuses' - they are (for the most part) ordinary people expressing themselves in extraordinary ways. Grace would therefore appear to be in the recognition of a shared human experience.

Does the social construct of 'genius' actually mean anything? It used to be used to say that certain artefacts, certain people were 'worthy' of appreciation. Seeing appreciation as a more dynamic, playful experience - as Gadamer does - means that appreciating the genius in things like outsider art is a transformative experience for the observer, and that valuable transformations can be effected both through the appreciation of so-called 'great' art as well as less socially-recognised forms of expression. Seeing 'grace' in everything effects a transformation on the observer.