Category: Technology

Using apps to audit their students’ moods

Their practice is very Silicon Valley–like. They preach data transparency but have none themselves,” says Jesper Balslev, a research consultant at the Copenhagen School of Design and Technology,…

Rotting brains & square eyes

This paper will explore some of the pressing issues regarding children’s use of technology. For example, do outcomes depend on the quality of media consumed, or is all…

Adolescent loneliness

School loneliness increased 2012–2018 in 36 out of 37 countries. Worldwide, nearly twice as many adolescents in 2018 (vs. 2012) had elevated levels of school loneliness. Increases in…

Forstå fremtiden

Begrebet “singularitet” er i sig selv en lidt mystisk størrelse: Det har sine rødder i matematik og astronomi og bruges kort sagt til at beskrive tilstande, der ikke…

Technology Assessment in Techno-Anthropological Perspective

Article out: The Digital Potential: A Monstrous Composite? – with Søren Riis (p. 128). For 30 years or more, national governments worldwide have invested substantial funds in digital,…

Engines of social order

For any sufficiently complex dataset, the idea that ‘the data speak for themselves’ is implausible; developers and analysts select from a wide variety of mathematical and visual methods…

A more convincing base

My primary objective is to provide a more convincing base from which such discussions could be better pursued. However, it is clear that the dramatic skills shifts I…

From fake news to junk news

The creation of a standardised market for online publics and its expansion to the long tail of the Web; the quantification of engagement through metrics of clicking and…

Where are we going?

Regardless of the lack of a term for phronesis in our modern vocabulary, the principal objective for social research with a phronetic approach is to perform analyses and…

Sleep disorders, anxiety, depression

Some of the benefits identified by researchers regarding the use of ICT are as follows (Taylor, 2012), (Shirky, 2010):  – Improves visual skills and spatial capabilities– Boosts multitasking…

Fordrer en mere åben didaktik

Lærerne må håndtere mangfoldigheden af teksttyper i deres undervisning, hvilket gør det vanskeligt at forberede sig på en måde, hvor man kan have fuldt kontrol over stoffet. Dette…

Læser ligegodt sammen eller alene om computer

Internationalt og i Sverige ser vi en positiv sammenhæng mellem skolelederens vurdering af, at digital ressourcemangel Ingen indflydelse har på undervisningen og elevernes onlinelæsescore. Derimod klarer eleverne i…

Wrong drivers

I hate to sound like a broken twitter but no other successful country became good through using technology at the front end. Without pedagogy in the driver’s seat…

Technology and metaphysics

The positivist philosophy that drives most of modern science and technology (and much of contemporary philosophy) takes “metaphysics” to be a meaningless quest for answers to unanswerable questions;…

Klasseværelset som eksperimentarium

Nye teknologier deler en række grundlæggende fællestræk med teknologi, der ikke fungerer. […] Ved nærmere eftertanke indser man dog let, at selve potentialet for en teknologi kan være…

The onlife manifesto

We believe that societies must protect, cherish and nurture humans’ attentional capabilities. This does not mean giving up searching for improvements: that shall always be useful. Rather, we…

What’s not to like?

Antallet af likes handler ofte om mere end, hvor mange der egentlig ’synes godt om’ nogen eller noget. Mange likes er et kraftigt signal til algoritmer om, at…

Amplify/reduce

Phenomenology has become a viable approach to conducting qualitative research in education. Established and popular methods include descriptive and hermeneutic phenomenology. Based on critiques of the essentialism and…

Is it any different this time?

Enter information and communication technologies: compact discs and CD-ROMs, videodiscs, microcomputer-based laboratories, the Internet, virtual reality, local and wide area networks, instructional software, Macs, PCs, laptops, notebooks, educational…

Issues/Concerns

From a lecture by Wendell Wallach at the Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law (2019): https://vums-web.villanova.edu/Mediasite/Play/398be2773c1b47d29919dbc4a72544ed1d

Digital Dividends

Tracing back growth to a single, new technology suffers from severe measurement problems The limited number of observations relative to the seemingly open-ended list of other potential growth…

Knowledge is like light

Weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere. Yet billions of people still live in the darkness of poverty—unnecessarily. Knowledge about…

Video-conferencing fatigue

A friend made me aware of these two articles that try to explain reasons for the very special, and peculiar fatigue one can feel after video-conferencing. A Theory…

What are teachers worried about?

What are teachers worried about in students? • 84% believe that digital technologies are a growing distraction in the learning environment. More than nine of ten educators think…

Acting on the belief

The meaningful question isn’t whether these technologies work as advertised. It’s whether someone believes that they do, and acts on that belief. Adam Greenfield Quoted in Selwyn, N….

On reflection

What this eclectic selection of passages essentially conveys is a conceptualization of reflection as a mode of thought that entails mulling over ideas that have no necessary connection…

Les Weblogs

Les Weblogs, Jesper Balslev & Jens Winther. Compétences Micro (2004)

Digital Literacy

Recalling key tenets of theoretical debates about the term, I traced a gradual expansion of the concept’s range of address from reading and writing skills via communication in…

Disruption

Silicon Valley is famous for ‘disrupting’ business models and whole industries through innovative technology: this language – of technological disruption – is also a coded way of saying…

Not born to read

Let’s begin with a deceptively simple fact that has inspired my work on the reading brain over the last decade and move from there: human beings were never…

Børn og iPads

Opdatering: Dorte Ågård har gjort det her. Debatten om børn og iPads raser. For at prøve at forstå den, har jeg lavet oversigten nedenfor. Den er ufuldstændig, men…

Kranzbergs six laws of technology

First Law: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” Second Law: Invention is the mother of necessity. “Every technical innovation seems to require additional technical advances in order…

Behind the Screen

At this point in our conversation, Melinda’s partner dipped back into the darkened living room in which we were meeting and chimed in with her own summation, based…

Assembly lines for the spirit

Contrary to the expectations of the Italian autonomist theorists—who foresaw the coming of emancipatory futuristic feudalism, with its cognitive workers reclaiming the means of production while watching capitalists…

Normalisant, miniaturisant, commercialisant

L’incidence de ces transformations technologiques sur le savoir semble être considérable. Il s’en trouve ou s’en trouvera affecté dans ses deux principales fonctions: la recherche et la transmission…

L’orgueil des décideurs

En ce sens, le système se présente comme la machine avant-gardiste qui tire l’humanité après elle, en la déshumanisant pour la réhumaniser à un autre niveau de capacité…

Le prolétariat du clic

Si ces analyses semblent encore pertinentes, c’est parce que le capitalisme des plateformes a abondamment recours à la même vieille ruse qu’utilisaient les propriétaires manufacturiers du siècle passé:…

The stuff of bits

A spreadsheet organizes and displays data items. there is no inherent reason that these should be aligned on a grid. A database doesn’t employ a grid, nor does…

The knowledge we have lost in information

It is important to understand how this refracted the very notion of radical ignorance as a natural state of being for humankind in the later political economy of…

Human-Focused Turing Tests

Four central themes of the broader project of which this article is a part are: – when does technology (automated systems) replace or diminish our humanity?– can we…

Inadaptation

L’éducation, l’instruction n’ont plus aucune “gratuité”, doivent servir efficacement. Et toutes les critiques dirigées envers l’enseignement tournent toujours autour de ceci: “On apprend des quantités de choses inutiles….

Addiction by design

I undertake what the philosopher of technology Don Ihde has alternately called a “phenomenology of human-technology” and “materialist phenomenology”. Such an approach avoids the tendency of strict materialism…

Megaprojects paradox

Our basic, and first, proposal is that risk and accountablity should be much more centrally placed in megaproject decision making than is currently the case. We see good…

Logic of Digital Utopianism

Utopias consider a given situation in the light of possible alternatives; as a result, observed reality first is subjected to an explicit or implicit critique and secondly depicted…

Protean character of volition

The protean character of volition is implicit in many philosophies of technology. Technologies have been associated with diverse types of will, drive, motivation, aspiration, intention, and choice. For…

Fuzzy semantics

In this article I have suggested that the grammatical ambiguity and logical fallacies entailed in the concept of technology are linked with a fetishistic perception of modern artefacts….

Ways in which it has not

From desktop computers to laptops to digital assistants, not to mention bank teller machines, microwave ovens, cellular telephones, and ticket machines, we encounter computers in all aspects of…

Singularismen

Som filosofisk antropologi er singularismen et eksempel på samme antihumanisme som stod stærkt i det 20. århundrede. Det er marxismens og Homo Fabers ide om mennesket som produkt…

Cognitive detour

Perhaps modern science has succeeded to well. It has become difficult for us to recognize that much of our being does not have a cognitive and representational aspect….

Crude criteria

There is thus a strong methodological case for emphasizing the need to assign explicitly evaluative weights to different components of quality of life (or of well-being) and then…

Computational thinking

Computational thinking has triumphed because it has first seduced us with its power, then befuddled us with its complexity, and finally settled into our cortexes as self-evident. Its…

Late lessons from early warnings

There is something profoundly wrong with the way we are living today. There are corrosive pathologies of inequality all around us — be they access to a safe…

Sociology of expectations

While necessary to raising the profile and attract allies, disappointments are also likely because of the specific structure of the expectations. Early technological expectations are in many cases…

Invisible technologies, 1994

Mémoire de la machine vs. mémoire humaine

La mémoire de la machine triomphe dans la multitude et dans le désordre; la mémoire humaine triomphe dans l’unité des formes et dans l’ordre. Gilbert simondon Simondon, G….