Hypomnema

"Or is the term ‘input’ itself a non-starter? Isn’t it a relic of a mechanistic, computational metaphor of the mind that is giving way to a more ecological one? Shouldn’t we be thinking less of input as such, and more about the learning opportunities that become available in authentic language use – in other words, the affordances (for which see the previous post)?"

"En el caso de la gestión de los centros educativos, nuestros puntos de partida son los siguientes: 1) Todo lo que se haga en el ámbito de la formación continuada de los profesionales debe tener en cuenta la mejora del aprendizaje del alumnado. 2) El centro debe ser entendido como una organización que aprende, lo cual significa que hay que potenciar las aportaciones de sus miembros, facilitar la sistematización del intercambio mediante el pensamiento reflexivo guiado e intercambiar conocimientos de manera cooperativa. 3) La principal finalidad del asesor/a de un centro debe ser la de impulsar la autonomía del centro también en formación haciendo emerger los recursos de que dispone el propio centro, a través sobre todo de sus profesionales."

"Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” said Betsey Stevenson, the chief economist at the Labor Department until last September. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.” Companies and other economists say that notion is naïve. Though Americans are among the most educated workers in the world, the nation has stopped training enough people in the mid-level skills that factories need, executives say. To thrive, companies argue they need to move work where it can generate enough profits to keep paying for innovation. Doing otherwise risks losing even more American jobs over time, as evidenced by the legions of once-proud domestic manufacturers — including G.M. and others — that have shrunk as nimble competitors have emerged."

"One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day. “The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that."

"Verifiability (also known as Drill-Down) is the ability to discover the source of data or information. Who reported it, when, and where. Crudely it means footnotes, references, bibliography – the ability to check and verify for yourself the sources for whatever claims are being put forward."

"In a nutshell As you may have noticed this website is rather short of fancy graphics, animated dogs, bouncing balls, rollover icons etc. This is because our philosophy is that what is important is CONTENT. It is NOT about the fancy bells and whistles, the flash plug-ins, and all the other meretricious tartuffery of the modern web (All together now: ‘Oh for the days of Usenet/ When it was knowledge simple and pure/ … ).
Elaborated What is important? Information Access to information Reliability and Verifiability of information This is our philosophy: to provide reliable information simply and clearly, in a form that is well-documented and open. The internet and the web were created to promote these aims, to allow people to get at information. But steadily this purpose has been subverted by superficial glitz, meretricious tartuffery, and the rest, all the fancy graphics, animated dogs, bouncing balls and rollover icons. The surface has become the substance. The world of usenet has become the modern web – a medium now primarily used for shopping, pornography, and the worship of celebrity (It is significant that the verb coined for moving about the the net is ‘to surf’, connoting, as it does, rapid jumping from one place to the next, one bite of information to the next). And yet amongst the murky debris of the consumerist orgy huge amounts of real information still exist. This new technology is a two edged sword. We can use it to enslave ourselves further to all that is shallow in a shallow age. But we can also use it as a tool for good, above all in promoting democracy of knowledge, that is the opening to all of the information necessary to weigh arguments and make judgements — the web, just like the printing press, has radically expanded the accessibility and lowered the cost of information. Aside: This is another reason why the vast amount of graphics and glitz on the modern web is a bad thing: it makes the web less accessible rather than more accessible. For all those who only have access to dial-up or similar speed internet connections graphics laden sites are either painfully slow or simply inaccessible. They must endure an experience that is more akin to surfing mud. Thus, not only does this superabundance of glitz encourage a soundbite mentality but it also functions as an effective device of social exclusion for it will be the less well off countries and the less well off memebers of society that are unlikely to have access to high speed internet connections."

"The overlaps that I traced are related to one general idea popular within New Age as well as within hacker circles and relating to current transhumanist notions. This is the idea that humanity is involved in a process of ‘self-evolution’, leading to a future moment when all ‘intelligence’ in the world fuses into one holistic entity. Among others, this notion translates into practices whereby people seek to sensitize their bodies, making it ‘all-sensing’ and ‘all-knowing’ by means of high-tech and/or by practices such as meditation or ecstatic-dance. This idea is also married to a neoliberal image of the autonomous, individual self, who needs to ‘realize’ its true natural self by escaping social conditioning."

"The term New Edge fuses the notions ‘New Age’ and ‘edgy’, as in ‘edgy technologies’. In the late 1980s, founder of the ‘cyberpunk’ magazine Mondo 2000, Ken Goffman, used the term to refer both to the overlaps and the incompatibilities between the spiritual worldview of ‘New Agers’ and the ‘geeky’ worldview of the scientists and hackers of the San Francisco Bay Area. Such interactions were articulated in the overlapping scenes of Virtual Reality development, electronic dance, computer hacking and cyberpunk fiction. I borrowed the term New Edge to study the genealogy of cultural cross-overs between – simply put – the ‘hippies’ and the ‘hackers’ of the Bay Area, beginning with the 1960s and tracing it to the current (2008) moment."

"MITx is still part of that 19th Century hierarchical view of knowledge that means we have to feel honoured to access Old School privilege. Learning is a social process and content is less important than context. Trad unis love content because they can say, like Rupert Murdoch, what if Yo Yo Ma taught you music or Steven Hawking physics; Now That’s What I Call Education! It confuses status and brands (which MIT once was) with learning and relevance. I’m not a big fan of the MIT OCW stuff they pushed out either which put back open education as it redefined it as content-push, rather than open learning which needs to be context and purpose driven. And they sure havent solved the accreditation problem; they are scrabbling round for a cut price business model which doesnt “dilute the brand” That’s called greed; sounds like sub-prime education to me."

"las figuras actuales de la subjetividad. Con ellas debemos confrontar toda expectativa de emancipación. –¿Cuáles son esas figuras? –La primera es la del hombre endeudado, aquel trabajador precario que queda preso del crédito casi de por vida, reducido a una suerte de servidumbre por deudas. A esto corresponde la “renta” del capitalismo actual y la resistencia es decir “no pago”, como una forma multitudinaria del rechazo y, a la vez, de apropiación de la riqueza común. Luego, el hombre mediatizado, que reemplaza a la vieja noción de alienación para dar cuenta del sometimiento a los dispositivos de comunicación, que esconden la inteligencia humana, la verdad común de la comunicación, bajo formas nuevas de control. En tercer lugar, el hombre asegurado es aquel obsesionado por la seguridad de su propiedad, por el riesgo de su vida, por el miedo a la pobreza. Finalmente, el hombre representado, que podemos decir que es el núcleo del problema de la emancipación."