Photos of Consumption
Photograph: Pablo Lopez Luz Overpopulation, overconsumption – in pictures is a really interesting photo essay in The Guardian.
art as work
on creating formative experiences with art and other media / a blog by Brian Hughes
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culture
17 posts
Living Versus Imagining
What if one of the make-or-break achievements in life is learning how to grapple with the following challenge: Live in the present, but imagine in the future. What if that is much easier said than done? What does it take to really imagine in the future? How does one really assess the "present"? What if the desire …
Collaborative Action
By Xavier Vergés As a optimistic skeptic of "collaborative design processes," I wonder if should instead approach such collaborations as "collaborative action" processes. What specifics would that change invoke? How could we re-tune our expectations for outcomes by shifting away from "design" as an outcome?
Meritocracy is a Joke
The term “meritocracy” was coined by sociologist Michael Young in his 1958 satire, The Rise of Meritocracy. Pro-tip: he was satirizing meritocracy, and was not happy that his work led to the popularization of the idea as a positive political philosophy. (I’ve recently run across this history in Edward Luce’s book, The Retreat of Western …
Progress and Imagination
Talk of racism in the U.S. has grown tremendously this year. I feel a key underlying issue of racism itself is a lack of imagination, or effort to use one's imagination in such a context. "Colin Kaepernick (7) and Eric Reid (35) Take a Knee" Why are some people racist? Do they feel superior to others? …
On Moral Leadership
NYTCREDIT: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times On this day, hundreds of thousands of people are marching together throughout the world to protest Donald Trump's inauguration yesterday. I write in sympathy with these marchers, with the hope of creating more understanding between the 63 million Americans who voted for Trump, and the 66 million who did not. (Yeah, it's …
Skeptically Optimistic
The hat. The slogan is deeply judgmental yet optimistic: "Make America Great Again." Until now, a week away from the inauguration, I've mostly turned a blind eye to it. But there it is, now firmly lodged in our collective imagination. There is some truth in it. K-12 education education in America isn't "great." But it never …
Techitecture, The Emergence of
My involvement in Teacher College's Learning Theater project makes me appreciate how fast-evolving audio/video technologies (or better: display/capture/collaboration technologies) challenge traditional architecture. Our project feels like "techitecture"—a combination of technology and architectural design and development. (And I'm curious that, having imagined this fanciful term, I have not found it used before in this way.) The fit and function of …
A Democratic Agency ☆
For me, the story about EdLab—its purpose, vision, and strategy—boils down to the goal of democracy. This post is a reflection on today's seminar by Gary Natriello, but I think it may also resonate with anyone who's a part of a similar organization. Gary articulated a vision of the future of the education sector that …
Strage Prize 2011: Christopher Emdin
Gerat video by the EdLab Team about a great teacher and scholar. I am proud to say I was a (small) part of this!
Programming as a New Literacy
I've just read Douglas Rushkoff's shortbook Program or Be Programmed, wherein he shares "Ten Commands for a Digital Age." Though his portrayal of various "biases" of digital technology (e.g., timelessness, abstraction, depersonalization) is polemical, he succinctly describes major challenges of new technologies in 144 pages. His main point is to describe a new literacy – …
Selling Magic, Not Technology
"Magical" seems to be the best way to describe technology products in 2010. Behold Apple's iPad: And now Google, upon launching Instant Search, claims that their search tool "should feel like magic" (0:16). Should technology feel like magic? According to the Oxford American Dictionary, magic is "the power of apparently influencing the course of events …
Taking responsibility for the impact of software
Here's Steve Jobs, from a recent email thread with Gawker's Ryan Tate: Do you create anything, or just criticize others (sic) work and belittle their motivations? This last missive from Job's is a nice rejoinder from a back-and-forth with Tate about Apple's iPad platform (and related technologies). And if you don't look too closely, you …
An irony of scholarly attribution
I have been thinking about the academic honesty issues for a while now. So far my best ideas are in my draft essay, Challenges on the Horizon for Scholarly Attribution (another Knol experiment). My interest in academic honesty came out of my exploration of the copyright wars, and my subsequent considerations of ownership in academic …
A Disney-related setback for e-learning?
"If you've spent money on an e-learning course in the last five years, you're entitled to a full refund. We now admit that our courses don't make you any smarter." OK, no one has said that yet, but if you've seen the recent news, then you know that Walt Disney has taken the bold step …
Cheating is the pedagogy of the internet
I ran across this fun and informative lecture by Jon Ippolito discussing various tensions between cultural production (in general) and the current culture of intellectual property law – where he introduces his idea that "cheating is the pedagogy of the internet." It's the written version of a lecture he gave at Columbia University a few …
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