UCU Strike March 24th 2011

Dumbing down - a complaint from 1621

'Heretofore learning was graced by judicious scholars, but now noble sciences are vilified by base and illiterate scribblers that either write from vainglory, need, to get money, or as parasites to flatter and collogue with some great men.'
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Nothing new there then...

Improvisation

'There are days when no one should rely unduly on his 'competence'. Strength lies in improvisation. All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.'
Walter Benjamin, in One Way Street.

The courage of one's convictions

'A very popular error - having the courage of one's convictions: rather, it is a matter of having the courage for an attack upon one's convictions.'
Nietzsche

Walter Benjamin on Praxis, Knowledge and Education

'The slogan 'work and education' under which the patriotic associations of Schulze-Delitzsch had conducted workers' education, was countered by Social Democracy with the slogan 'Knowledge is Power'. But the party failed to perceive its double meaning. It thought the same knowledge that secured the rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat would enable the proletariat to free itself from that rule. In reality, knowledge with no outlet in praxis, knowledge that could teach the proletariat nothing about its situation as a class, was no danger to its oppressors. This was especially true of knowledge relating to the humanities. It lagged far behind economics, remaining untouched by the revolution in economic theory. It sought only to stimulate, to offer variety, to arouse interest.'

Walter Benjamin, in "Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian", in Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, Volume 3 1935-1938, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002, p260-302.

Making and teaching

After giving a lecture last week which explored the idea of teaching as craft, I am working on an article based on this theme for Adults Learning, which will also be posted here. As often happens when I am excited about a bundle of linked ideas, I seem to stumble across relevant work by other people all the time, without trying, by accident. Today I was catching up on some music programmes using Iplayer and I noticed a radio 3 talk given last week by Edmund de Waal, the author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, which is about the history of his collection of netsuke (see above for an example), on his enthusiasm for The Wrench, a novel by Primo Levi, a wonderful book I've been re-reading as part of my work on craft. A version of this talk was published in the Financial Times last week, at http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8f50d924-4b63-11e0-89d8-00144feab49a.html#axzz1H9ksDxWZ

There is an interesting commentary on de Waal's discussion at Annjrippin's blog at http://annjrippin.wordpress.com/ Ann Rippin is a quilter, but clearly language and concepts, perhaps what she calls 'embodied knowing' are shared. She notes that 'He describes the experience of reflecting on something that you have created and the surprises it can bring, as ‘the epiphany where you see what you have made is different from what you had conceived.’ Very often artists experience this as disappointment or failure, Turner’s famous gap between what was in his imagination and what he was able to put on the canvas and the sense of frustration that can bring, but de Waal sees it in a much more positive light. It is an epiphany, which suggests new beginnings, possibly the receiving of a gift, certainly a happy apparition.'

This realism, the recognition that perfection is an illusion and a distraction rather than a goal, combined with what de Waal describes bluntly as a 'contempt for shoddiness' is what we need to foster in our teachers - and this cannot be done by focussing solely on what they do, because ultimately it is an issue of character, about the kind of person they are. The craft attitude is about trying to lead what Montaigne would call 'a good life', understood in the moral sense. Craft is about morality...

More to come on this very rich seam.....

What I learned today from wikipaedia - this is meant to cheer you up

Variants of "LOL"

lolz: Occasionally used in place of LOL.[citation needed]

lulz: Often used to denote laughter at someone who is the victim of a prank, or a reason for performing an action. Can be used as a noun — e.g. "do it for the lulz." This variation is often used on the Encyclopedia Dramatica wiki and 4chan image boards. According to a New York Times article about Internet trolling, "lulz means the joy of disrupting another's emotional equilibrium."[26]

lolwut: lol + wut, used to indicate bemused laughter, or confusion.[citation needed]

Lawl or Lal: Pseudo-pronunciation of LOL. Saying "lawl" is sometimes meant in mockery of those who use the term LOL, and usually not meant as serious usage.[citation needed]

LOLOLOLOL: For added emphasis, LOL can be appended with any number of additional iterations of "OL". In cases such as these, the abbreviation is not to be read literally (i.e., "Laughing out loud out loud out loud out loud"), but is meant to suggest several "LOL"s in a row.[citation needed]

LEL: A variant sometimes construed as an acronym for "Laughing Extremely Loud" or "Laughing Even Louder."[citation needed]

Lolocaust

laf (pronounced like "laugh")

Translations in widespread use:
Most of these variants are usually found in lowercase.

mdr: French version, from the initials of "mort de rire" which roughly translated means "died of laughter", although many French people now use LOL instead as it is the most widely used on the internet.[citation needed]

חחח/ההה: Hebrew version of LOL. The letter ח is pronounced 'kh' and ה is pronounced 'h'. Putting them together (usually three or more in a row) makes the word khakhakha or hahaha (since vowels in Hebrew are generally not written), which is in many languages regarded as the sound of laughter.

555: The Thai variation of LOL. "5" in Thai is pronounced "ha", three of them being "hahaha".[citation needed]

asg: Swedish abbreviation of the term Asgarv, meaning intense laughter.[citation needed]

g: Danish abbreviation of the word griner, which means "laughing" in Danish.[27]
rs: in Brazil "rs" (being an abbreviation of "risos", the plural of "laugh") is often used in text based communications in situations where in English lol would be used, repeating it ("rsrsrsrsrs") is often done to express longer laughter or laughing harder.[citation needed]

Also popular is "kkk" (which can also be repeated indefinitely), due to the pronunciation of the letter k in Portuguese sounding similar to the ca in card, and therefore representing the laugh "cacacacaca" (also similar to the Hebrew version above).[citation needed]

mkm: in Afghanistan "mkm" (being an abbreviation of the phrase "ma khanda mikonom"). This is a Dari phrase that means "I am laughing".[citation needed]

In Chinese, although 大笑 (da xiao; "big laugh") is used, a more widespread usage is "哈哈哈" (ha ha ha) or "呵呵呵" (he he he) on internet forums.[citation needed]
هاها: The Arabic هـــا makes the sound "ha," and is strung together to create the sound "haha".[citation needed]

In some languages with a non-Latin script, the abbreviation "LOL" itself is also often transliterated. See for example Arabic لــول and Russian лол.[citation needed]
In Japanese, traditionally the kanji for laugh in parenthesis was used in the same way as lol; （笑）. It can be read as wara and so just w has taken over as the abbreviation.[citation needed]

In Korean, ㅋㅋㅋ ("kkk") and ㅎㅎㅎ ("hhh") are usually used to indicate laughter. 'ㅋ', is a Korean Jamo consonant representing a "k" sound, and 'ㅎ' represents an "h" sound. Both "ㅋㅋㅋ" and "ㅎㅎㅎ" represent laughter which is not very loud. However, if a vowel symbol is written, louder laughter is implied: 하하 "haha" 호호, "hoho."[citation needed]

jajaja, as the letter "j" is pronounced "h" in Spanish.:[citation needed]
Pre-dating the internet and phone texting by a century, the way to express laughter in morse code is "hi hi". The sound of this in morse, 'di-di-di-dit di-dit, di-di-di-dit di-dit', is thought to represent chuckling.[28][29]

ha3: Malaysian variation of LOL. ha3 means pronouncing ha three times, "hahaha".

Other languages: Lol is a Dutch word (not an acronym) which, coincidentally, means "fun" ("lollig" means "funny").

In Welsh, lol means "nonsense" – e.g., if a person wanted to say "utter nonsense" in Welsh, they would say "rwtsh lol".[30]

I particularly like Spanish morse code chuckling, the fact that the Japanese have been using a ideogram for the equivalent of LOL for centuries, and the cool Afghan version 'I am laughing', which sounds pretty threatening it's so understated. It's also great that LOL is a real welsh word. I am still working out 'lulz': can anyone help?

'Minimally Invasive Education'

Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall Project

In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who's now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it "minimally invasive education."

http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html

How to give the perfect TED talk

This is very funny and clever, but also has serious lessons for powerpoint users I think:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lies_damned_lies_and_statistics_about_tedtalks.html

Wisdom from the past # 436b - extracts from the longest book in the world

'If we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be called research' Einstein

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12733522

Knowledge is Power

Two linked sites I've just come across:

Knowledge is Power site
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Knowledge-is-Power/131853696871175

Takin' it to the Bank: an interesting new campaign aiming to get the banks to support unemployed young people in London
The site features a cheerful statement of the campaign's aims directed at the banks, in the form of a rap by Mystro! The ending is excellent....
http://www.tittb.org/

A helpful Venn Diagram

Found on Harold Jarche's blog Life in Perpetual Beta, at:
http://www.jarche.com/

The Wolf Report was published today

This report of an enquiry into 14-19 vocational education and qualifications, led by Alison Wolf, was published today. 4 of its 27 recommendations were immediately accepted by Michael Gove, and this was confirmed in a press release. One of these is that teachers with QTLS (Qualified Teacher in Learning and Skills status - ie in the post-compulsory sector) are now qualified to teach in schools, where hitherto only QTS (Qualified Teacher Status - ie in schools only) would do. QTS teachers have always been qualified to teach in colleges, but until today it didn't work the other way round. It's interesting that Gove announced this immediately, and I guess it won't be popular in some quarters, but there's no logic to the present arrangements (sorry, the old arrangements). My colleagues teaching in FE and teacher training in HE are somewhat dazed - it had been hoped for but not really expected.

Perhaps now teachers in the post-compulsory will be happier about joining the Institute for Learning, which is essential for them to get QTLS, and paying the fee of £63 for full-timers. UCU is arguing against this, saying that forcing teachers to join and then charging them, is unfair; but my view is that other professionals take it for granted that to be seen as professionals they must belong to a professional body that is wholly controlled and financed by the professionals themselves, and certainly not by the government. The £63 fee recently announced by IfL seems a shock because for the last two years it has been free, because it was subsidised by the government. But this couldn't have gone on, recession or not - the whole point of the IfL is that it is a teachers' professional organisation or it is nothing.

Anyway, today has been interesting, and the Wolf Report, which also recommends that funding in the post-compulsory sector should be on a student basis, as in schools, rather than by enrolments on qualifications, a system which has operated since the early 90s and is the envy of nerds all over the world because it is so complicated (does anyone remember the Dan Quayle guide to the FEFC Funding Methodology, published I think by Lewisham College in about 1995 - an invaluable document at the time, now sadly well out of date, but it would nowadays need to be 6 times as long) should start a lot of hares running.

One of Wolf's main arguments is against the plethora of low-level vocational qualifications which have sprung up and which have become very popular not because they are useful for students in the labour market (few are), but because they attract funding. This is certainly true of the raft of Skills for Life qualifications which I am familiar with: having a level 1 literacy certificate merely demonstrates to a prospective employer that you don't have a GCSE in English. Alison Wolf also states bluntly that Key Skills qualifications at level 2 are not equivalent to a GCSE in English - this has been the Emperor's new clothes for nearly a decade. More on this when I get more familiar with the report.

Full Report:
http://www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/The%20Wolf%20Report.pdf

Press release: http://www.education.gov.uk/inthenews/pressnotices/a0075181/wolf-review-proposes-major-reform-of-vocational-education

Conference on Remaking Adult Learning

March 14th 2011, 1 to 5pm, Institute of Education, 20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL.

A survey of adult learning at the present time, and a start on envisioning a renewed and strengthened tradition of adult education in the future. Come and get involved! Speakers include Alan Tuckett (NIACE), Bob Fryer (Campaign for Learning, former Principal of Northern College) Ursula Howard (former Director NRDC), Kathryn Ecclestone (University of Birmingham), Tom Schuller (Director Longview; former Director, Centre for Educational Research, OECD), John Bynner (Longview and Institute of Education), Fiona Aldridge (NIACE), Peter Templeton (WEA), Ken Spours (Institute of Education), Lee Davies (Institute For Learning), and me!

For the full programme, and to register, go to: http://www.niace.org.uk/campaigns-events/events/remaking-adult-learning

Bad logic

"Your brain is 80% water, you remember stuff. Water has a memory. Therefore homeopathy works" Twitter post from KerryHomeopath, quoted in the New Scientist 19-02-11

Sigh