wallpaper animals

i think i could crawl into these images and be super happy!!  speaking of being happy, i had such a wonderful time going back to charleston this weekend.  being at my old target and going to my old grocery store put a smile on my face.  and getting to see my charleston friends was an added bonus :)
hope you have a wonderful start to your week....

*images courtesy of lauren mofatt, apartment #34, dress design decor, flourish design + style

this post kind of reminds me of skittles....taste the rainbow :)
have a great weekend!!

*images courtesy of tokketok, haven and home, kml design, stephanie rausser, kunsten andere zaken

I had a thoughtful response from Graham Attwell (see http://www.pontydysgu.org/2010/11/learning-and-instiutions/) after yesterday's post. He said that I "seem to think institutions exist outside social, political and cultural forces in society". Of course I don't - in fact the very opposite. I ought to say, however, that I used to be more sympathetic to Graham's position than I am now, having done a lot of work on Personal Learning Environments - only to see learners and teachers struggle with the concepts and technologies and feel alienated by the process.

What are the ontological implications of the ultra-personalised anti-institutional model of education proposed by those advocates of learner-driven education? It is an individualistic model of a society of learners seeking to increase personal power (I want my learning and I want it now!), yet strangely unconcerned with the morphology of their collective agency and the institutional forms it takes. (Despite the fact that most advocates of this are employed by institutions!) Institutional overthrow is one thing (but be careful what you wish for!); but to suppose the individual is separable from those collective social forms which shape them (starting with their families) seems to me to be a category mistake: persons, it strikes me, are not singular entities, and learning is not an individual activity. To think otherwise is what I would call 'learning fetishism'.

My argument is that persons as agents reproduce and transform the social structures they inhabit, and in turn are conditioned and constrained by those social structures. Learning is tied up in the process; it is not an end in itself. This structure-agency ontology is well-known in sociology, being associated with Giddens, Bhaskar and Archer (although they disagree on the details!). Learning Fetishism wants to change the structural context of education as a way of changing the agency of individuals so that ideal 'learning' processes as ends in themselves emerge in those individuals. But this is to fail to see the symbiotic co-determination of agents and structure. Institutions and the learners are a single organism, making it very difficult to intervene in structure without addressing individual motivations which are shaped by structure and contribute to its existence. Usually, such structural interventions don't work because individuals don't see 'what's in it for me'. The extreme end of learning fetishism seeks to remove the institutions so as to remove the structural impediments to transforming agency. But this is like taking a scalpel to part of the organism without knowing what that part really does. The consequences (were there to be a realistic peaceful way of doing it) are likely to be terrible. These are the natural consequences of the mistaken belief that learning is an end in itself.

Learning fetishism I think is a form of utopian idealism which I now believe is quite pernicious. It is not that people with this view are not well-intentioned: clearly they are. But they leave the door open to those who aren't, who may seek to destroy institutions for their own purposes - and our current government, with its sharpened scalpels at the ready, is showing some worrying signs of wanting to do this. If we're not careful, we'll be back on Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" (see http://mises.org/books/TRTS/)

There is a misconception that pedagogy is about psychology (thanks to Oleg for this insight!). Learning concerns psychology; pedagogy is about the sociology of educational organisation, institutions, etc. For to teach on a one-to-one basis is entirely different than to teach 1 to 100. The pedagogy reflects the organisational situation. It occurs to me that this misconception has deep implications. For we persist in justifying everything we do in educational technology (which is fundamentally pedagogical) around the psychological benefits for ‘learning’ rather than considering its broader sociological implications – particularly those concerning the longevity of institutions.

Why do we make this mistake? Is it because to appeal to the ‘benefits to learning’ of using technology is virtually impossible to establish with any certainty? (.. and such impossibility is a useful defence in the face of scrutiny!?)

Is it because ‘learning’ is seen as the index of a person’s economic worth and the value they extract from education? Or indeed, the value which they demand from it as paying customers?

Maybe our adherence to ‘learning’ lies in the traditional definition of ‘learning’, where a person of 'great learning' was someone able to communicate in a wide range of registers, with reference to a wide range of reading, and whose analytical linguistic performances bear testimony to this preparation and consequent high social standing.

Whatever has happened psychologically is only available for inspection through what Wittgenstein calls ‘skilled performances’ – linguistic and technical. But such performances are necessarily social performances, and so the institutional context that nurtures and supports their development is as important as the individual minds that appear to produce them.

For all our talk of the technology impacting on the relatively short lives of learners, their economic effectiveness, their 'purchasing power', etc... how often do we talk of technology impacting on the much longer lives of institutions and the social life that embraces them?

Even work which purports to address the needs of institutional organisation, it is indirectly focused on the needs of learners, not institutions: CRM is a good example.

The lives of institutions are very long indeed. They remain fundamental building blocks of civil society, playing a role not just in the support of fashionable means of production, but in the peaceful development and emergence of new means of production (from feudalism to individualism for example). Their only enemies are those who seek to corrupt society for personal gain.

Human life is short. But in its passage of 80 years (in the West) or so, amongst the ends of an individual human life is its continued reproduction and transformation of the things that outlast it, that will continue to nurture civil society for centuries to come. This is a much bigger picture than the ‘learning’ picture: To focus on the individual at the expense of what can be sustained, on the ephemera of life rather than its ends may be a costly mistake.

i was super excited to receive this in the mail yesterday- a master bathroom i designed for a house on sullivan's island and BHG Kitchen and Bath published her.  i would be a very happy camper living in that tub...i am sure my clients would think that was a little weird though.

the other thing that makes me giddy is taylor's headboard.  we did actually make it this weekend....here's a sneak peek.  happy hump day!!

Rationality is probably all we've got. But in a world of confusing surface phenomena, where so much sparkles at us and demands our attention, critical rationality can sometimes find itself passed over in favour of a 'this is cool! live in the moment' philosophy. At its most pernicious, such a philosophy will ground itself in a gently or event delightfully confused relativist philosophy, which embrace multiple narratives as a way of escaping the challenge of seriously exploring the relationship between deep rational judgements and collective coordinated action.

Deep thinking means turning everything into questions. Ultimately, it results in taking a rationally justifiable position. If such a position is sufficiently warranted, and it is taught well (now there's the real challenge), then some sort of coordinated action is possible. This is my position.

Shallow thinking often involves thinking strategically. It works with simulacra of rational justifiability. It seeks to persuade others into coordinated action through guile and self-interest. Coordinated action is indeed possible - but those who coordinate it know deep down that it will only serve its own purpose (and possibly theirs). It cannot escape some hint of cynicism.

Most work in E-learning falls into the second category. Indeed, most work on social policy. Any branch of inquiry which cannot ask certain questions is inevitably heading this way. But I believe deep thinking is necessary. How can it be made more possible?

Isn't this the job of Universities??

i think that this letterpress poster from sycamore street press is about as cute as they come and something my household can relate to....

*images courtesy of sycamore street press, bottom of the ironing basket, kml design