April 30, 2013
"Chávez recognises the shortcomings of the government, but says families can improve their lives by considering the long term. “Poor people need to eat today,” he says. “They don’t think about tomorrow’s problems. But learning music means you have to plan. It’s very challenging to explain to a child who lives in adverse conditions that if his dream is to play the piano he needs to sit on a stool for five hours a day."

— Jonathan Gilbert in The Guardian. Paraguayan landfill orchestra makes sweet music from rubbish

Children of recyclers at Cateura landfill form band playing instruments fashioned out of discarded oven trays and oil barrels

Landfill Harmonic Kickstarter.

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(Notes: 6)
  
Filed under: education how to get out of this mess trash 
April 25, 2013
"The brain – as synecdochic figure for intelligence – is not an organ that slum dwellers like Ram are ‘authorized to use.’"

— Richard Stamp at Panecastic. Of slumdogs and schoolmasters – new article on Jacques Rancière and Sugata Mitra

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Filed under: theory education philosophy 
April 25, 2013
"From his very start in Althusser’s Lesson, to Hatred of Democracy, to The Philosopher and his Poor, Ranciere is constantly accusing philosophers of proposing a capital T truth to reign down in a golden shower of truth onto ignorant masses. That makes a really compelling case for why I shouldn’t be reading Ranciere at all, and maybe just fucking up the police on my own terms."

— Eugene at Critical Theory. Who the Fuck is Jacques Ranciere?

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(Notes: 5)
  
Filed under: theorists education phliosophy 
March 19, 2013
"The core problem Harper faces is that their students are going to school in a war zone. That war zone is the product of social forces far beyond the control of the hardworking and brave people at Harper: the flood of handguns in the neighborhood, gang rivalries that began with the drug trade and now center on multi-year patterns of vengeance and revenge."

— Ethan Zuckerman at My Heart’s in Accra. Harper High School, and finding solutions to complex problems

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(Notes: 1)
  
Filed under: journalism media social problems education 
March 4, 2013
"Good design would instruct us in what we need and the terms of our existence on Earth. In other words, the systems we devise to provision ourselves with food, energy, materials, shelter, and health need to constitute a larger form of education. But if these systems are designed to educate they must give quick feedback about the consequences of our decisions and they must work at a comprehensible scale. They must be devised in ways that create competence and practical understanding. They must be resonant with our deeper needs for meaning embedded in ritual and celebration. And design intelligence and the practical competence necessary to maintain it must be faithfully transferred from one generation to the next."

—

David Orr at DesignShare. Loving Children: A Design Problem

I’m very bad about not doing a hat tip showing how I got pointed to things in the first place. I haven’t figured out a good system to remember how I get where I do.

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Filed under: design culture education learning 
February 26, 2013
"The vitality of our teaching derives not from the recitation of what is certain but from the explorations of questions that are still unsettled and raw."

— Gerry Canavan at his blog. SOME PRELIMINARY THESES ON MOOCS

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Filed under: MOOCS education learning higher education 
January 4, 2013
"But if we can see outside the frame of cultivation and pleasure, we can see that producing a mass population with all sorts of apparently superfluous skills—engineers that read novels and writers that know calculus—is a better society than one in which all human activity is reduced to pure utility, and bare recreation."

—

Aaron Bady at The New Inquiry. A moment of dreaming about higher education

What would a better system of higher education look like?

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Filed under: education learning society 
December 14, 2012
"[D]evising a framework for adult education outside the grip of the current American education industry is one of the most pressing needs of the decade or two right ahead of us."

— John Michael Greer in The Archdruid Report. Producing Democracy

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(Notes: 3)
  
Filed under: democracy public education 
December 11, 2012
"I am inclined to distrust people who expect me to work for love, or who need a sentimental mythology to gloss over the impossibilities of my job and the daily injustices it lays bare."

— Garret Keizer quoted by Hera Lindsay Bird in Eyelashroaming. Why I Am Not A Teacher

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Filed under: education teaching 
December 7, 2012
"Open vs. closed is a useful conceptual distinction, but when it comes down to specific cases, these kinds of grand narratives can mislead us. For one thing, far from the kind of siege mentality that characterized an industry watching its business model go up in smoke — an industry that was not interested in giving away its product for free — academics are delighted to give away their products for free, if they can figure out a way to do it. Just about every single public and nonprofit university in the country is working to develop digital platforms for education, or thinking hard about how they can. This doesn’t mean they are doing it successfully, or well; time will tell, and the proof will be in the pudding. But to imagine that Silicon Valley venture capitalists are the only people who see the potential of these technologies requires you to ignore the tremendous work that academics are currently doing to develop new ways of doing what they do. The most important predecessors to MOOCs, after all, were things like Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s OpenCourseWare, designed entirely in the spirit of openness and not in search of profit."

— Aaron Bady at Inside Higher Ed. Questioning Clay Shirky

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(Notes: 6)
  
Filed under: education MOOCs public higher education 
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