Uncategorized
-
The Erosion of the Human
My daily use of technological communication has been shaping me into someone more likely to forget others. The flow of water carves rock, a little bit at a time. And our personhood is carved, too, by the flow of our habits. –Jonathan Safran Foer The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us…
-
Hacking at the Roots
Larry Lessig is always worth listening to:
-
Online Education and the Future of the University
We seem to think that education is a thing–like a vaccine–that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children. But as the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats said, "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire." Gov. Jerry Brown, State of the State, January 2013 Interesting…
-
Filibusted
Guess what? Harry Reid and the feckless Senate Democrats caved on fiibuster reform. A necessary move to un-paralyze government has been shrugged off. Who'd a thunk?Why? The excuse given is that Democrats will want it back when they are in the minority. Maybe that's about 10% of it. The other 90% is explained by Scott…
-
Newtown: Themes to Think On
From "I am Adam Lanza's Mother". A mother talks about her 13-year old son after having an argument about what color pants he needed to wear to school: The morning of the pants incident, Michael continued to argue with me on the drive. He would occasionally apologize and seem remorseful. Right before we turned into…
-
Mordor, the Shire, and Freedom in the Public Sphere
In response to the the “Neoliberalism” post I put up earlier this week, Jonathan took issue with me for talking about freedom as having a legitimate role in the public sphere. He wants to reserve for freedom a special status that should not be degraded by association with more vulgar uses of the word especially…
-
Video of the Day: Matthew Taylor
This video by RSA's chief executive, Matthew Taylor, interests and encourages me. Near the end he's asking if we can outgrow the limitations of the a world given to us by left-hemisphere dominant rationality that has been with us at least since the of Descartes. And he actually asks the old Aristotelian question that…
-
Quote of the Day: Karen Lewis
Quote of the Day: In an interview with Karen Lewis, President of the Chicago Teachers' Union: CF: In the just-published Steve Jobs biography, Walter Isaacson writes that Jobs met with President Obama and told him that the American education system was “crippled by union work rules. Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost…
-
Quote of the Day: Deborah Meier
Maybe the time has come to acknowledge that the changes we need can't be measured by the tools we've been using and that replicating by mandate in an "industry" like education has limits. Those who designed the instruments that measure us as failures admit they never intended them to be used for high-stakes purposes. There…