Tag: english

Towards digital disconnection

The emergence of the field of digital disconnection studies could offer novel approaches to understanding the relationship between education and technology. Our hypothesis is that digital disconnection literature…

Found to achieve less

This paper analyses the associations between computer use in schools and at home and test scores by using TIMSS data covering over 900,000 children in fourth grade. When…

Policies are not reality

Obviously, policies cannot encapsulate all organization members’ full and nuanced understanding of a focal phenomenon such as social media. Policies are therefore not ‘‘reality’’ and may not capture…

Faster pace of innovation

As education becomes increasingly digitized, educators can experiment and track alternative approaches, measure and identify what works, share their findings, and replicate the best approaches in other subjects…

Tech literacy a euphemism for addictive behaviors

‘Tech Literacy’ is a euphemism for shopping, gaming, binge watching and other monetized and addictive behaviors. Wealthy, cynical power brokers like Nicolas Negroponte, founder of MIT Media Lab,…

Caution is advised

Based on current evidence, it seems reasonable to conclude that internet use can have both positive and negative effects. Nevertheless, caution is advised before giving children extensive access…

Soylent-like solutions

Meaningful, impactful education is like this, too. It’s not just a matter of rote learning, of memorizing facts, or of internalizing certain routines. If anything, it’s also about…

Opportunities for industry

Companies and designers should recognize and explore children’s understanding of their well-being further in their own local contexts and design play experiences (content, stories, tasks) that reflect children’s…

A decade of unmet expectations

From 2010 to 2020, EdTech exploited two key educational myths to perfection. First, advocates for one-to-one initiatives confused learning engagement with learning gains. Sponsors of whole-school deployments of…

The Ambivalences of the Digital

The educational policy and educational science discourse on teaching, learning, and digitization is largely dominated by media education, IT (learning media) development, and quantitatively oriented empirical educational research….

Could feminist scholarship?

Feminist scholarship could make a crucial contribution to the (until now) predominantly male computer culture by promoting recognition of the diverse ways that people think about and appropriate…

Technically precocious boy

We examine the work that these imaginaries do for projects such as OLPC by evoking deeply held feelings about the value of (certain types of) play, creativity, and…

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…

Solving the 2-sigma problem

Adaptive technologies seek to provide equal opportunities and fulfill student needs through hyperpersonalization (McRae, 2013). A complete mapping of student data creates complete transparency of the learner and…

10 Trillion

Since 2007, the rise of markets for teaching and learning has turned education into one of the fastest growing markets worldwide, with recent prophecies suggesting a staggering $10…

Restriction as low-cost policy

We find that student performance in high stakes exams significantly increases post ban, by about 0.07 standard deviations on average. These increases in performance are driven by the lowest-achieving…

Analog communication tended to fail

Of the different communication channels assessed, higher frequencies of communication via ordinary mail and deposit and pick-up at school in particular were negatively associated with the outcome variables suggesting that…

Teachology

Software and social robots that are fed constant streams of data have the greatest disruption potential for teaching and learning: it’s not just technology, it’s teachology. While we…

Cannot replace personal interactions

Within a developmentally appropriate framework, digital technologies may support a range of interactions in early education settings, including those among children and those between children and teachers, their…

In principle great promise

In principle, the use of digital technology in universities holds great promise, including transforming teaching and learning practices; widening access to non-traditional learners; reducing instructional costs; improving opportunities…

Why unguided learning does not work

While unguided or minimally-guided learning approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, the point is made that evidence from empirical studies over the past half century consistently indicates…

Unreliability of autoinstructional aids

The introduction of computers, systems analysis, and various new media into education has been heralded as a panecea for for all the problems now facing our schools. The…

Creative resistance

…social and emotional capabilities and creativity stand out as most resistant to machine-based competition. Bjarne Corydon et al. Corydon, B., Staun, J., Bughin, J., Andersen, J. R., Lüneburg,…

Political symbols of policy

Laptops for students reveal a number of important ways that private technology companies have become increasingly integral parts of education systems during Covid-19. They are the recipients of…

No impact of mobile phone bans

The influential (and only quantitative) evaluation by Beland and Murphy (2016), suggests that this is a very low-cost but effective policy to improve student performance. In particular, it…

Student performance increases post ban

By surveying schools in four English cities regarding their mobile phone policies and combining it with administrative data, we find that student performance in high stakes exams significantly…

The younger generation’s views

Drawing from the results of all participating European countries, it is important to emphasise that the variety of digital applications used for teaching is wide (among and within…

Homeschooling in Norway

Our key findings are that digital home schooling to a large degree consisted of students doing individual tasks, with limited support from their teachers, especially in the lowest…

There are no two cultures

When you go to a conference or a talk on humanities and technology, you always hear people quoting C.P. Snow’s thesis that in modern society there has been…

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…

Great moment

“It’s a great moment” for learning, says Andreas Schleicher, head of education at the OECD. “All the red tape that keeps things away is gone and people are looking for…

The wheels of education

Despite heavy national investments and transnational advocacy, the promises of the innovative potentials of a digital transition in education have, with a few notable exceptions, remained exactly that:…

Passive attitudes, boredom, poor engagement

On the one hand, high levels of demotivation, passive attitudes, boredom, poor engagement and frustration among the students are specifically identified in this category. Examples of studies that…

Froebel’s Gifts for the 21st century

I view Mindstorms and Crickets as Froebel’s Gifts for the 21st century, using new technologies to extend the kindergarten approach to learners of all ages. Unfortunately, they are the…

Do not encourage critical thinking

Most of the teachers regard digital platforms for teaching as highly instrumental due to their instructional design. Instrumental teaching means that students know precisely what is expected of…

Post-abundance

This points toward drastically curtailing the energy and resource demands associated with the production and consumption of digital technologies in the pursuit of lifelong learning. The environmental costs…

Lower levels of well-being

High school students who attended school remotely reported lower levels of social, emotional, and academic well-being (ES = 0.10, 0.08, and 0.07 standard deviations, respectively) than classmates who…

Technology’s origins

Skinner is such a fascinating person … a fascinating/terrifying person.  I’ve spent the last couple of years spending way too much time thinking about behaviourism and thinking about Skinner’s…

Managed against checklists

Children without schools were risks to their own and the world’s future. The power of this knowledge to discursively render children as objects in their communities, assets to…

Always too late

…given the rapid pace of technological change, it seems shortsighted to base the education of the entire 21st century on the tools available today! Kereluik, K., Mishra, P., Fahnoe,…

Higher Ed’s Dark Secret

The proof of that is in the pudding. In general, completely online programs, especially those in the for-profit sector, have had poor earnings outcomes.11 In 2019, research by George…

When deployed skillfully […] can

Digital technology, when deployed skillfully, equitably and effectively by educators, can fully support the agenda of high quality and inclusive education and training for all learners. It can…

Solution-centered Edtech

In an age in which EdTech has been incorporated into the circuits of capitalism, the argument that somehow public education has failed in its mission and that it…

No progress learning from home

Despite favorable conditions, we find that students made little or no progress while learning from home. Learning loss was most pronounced among students from disadvantaged homes. Per Engzell,…

Lack of motivation

This lack of motivation was linked to contextual issues which included: family obligations, e.g., looking after siblings or helping out at home or on the farm; distractions like…

Turning on mobile learning in europe

The second barrier to mobile learning is negative social attitudes held by policy-makers, parents and teachers about the use of mobile phones in schools. Mobile phones are widely…

The shortcomings of educators

Neoliberal commentators place primary blame on the shortcomings of educators [9]. They emphasize that teachers have relatively high rates of absenteeism [10], often fail to cover their curriculum over the…

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,…

Computers to generate human capital

This article has identified that the OECD elected to deal with educational technology on account of its predominant styles of reasoning, namely, that the world was increasingly beginning…

Computing the nordic way

The societal desire for a computerised future intensified after the Second World War (and has effectively not diminished since). This desire, and the related imaginary, is often based…

Scottish reformation

In this paper we want to show how today’s trust or faith in statistical data acting as guiding instances of policy and (re-)ordering society – which thereby obviously…

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…

Ready-made remedy

We have no wish to denigrate or criticize online distance education, but rather, the aim of this brief editorial is twofold. First, we want to raise a series…

Algorithmic world view

The rapid shift to online teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the penetration of an algorithmic world view into education systems around the world. Promoted…

Chaperone in the iPhone

Paper presented at a master class with Evan Selinger at the university of Roskilde in 2019. For the last four decades, political institutions have made a dramatic push…

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…

Unplugged approaches

In today’s highly digitalized world, we often associate computational problem-solving processes with the use of computers. Yet, solving problems computationally by designing solutions and processing data is not…

Emperor’s new clothes

Our core message is that when we look at both the past and present, the technology has been a great deal like the emperor’s new clothes—while the gadgetry…

Decline in teaching quality

The majority of educators report that the COVID-19 lockdown has caused a decline in the teaching quality and in students’ performances. At the same time, educators have spent…

A Rational Theory Of Miracles

If you add up the numbers and the objective data about the situation of the planet, there’s no chance that it or the human race can survive: there…

Report on on education in the digital era: challenges, opportunities and lessons for EU policy design

…whereas basic education in cyber hygiene, cyber safety, data protection and media literacy must be age- and development-oriented in order to help children become critical learners, active citizens,…

Our review of the evidence

…clearly demonstrates that, on average:– Online education is the fastest-growing segment of higher education and its growth is overrepresented in the for-profit sector.– A wide range of audiences…

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…

Anticipated outcomes

The last twenty years of research have shown that under appropriate conditions, information and communication technologies (ICT) can make a valuable contribution to improve educational outputs. Some of…

Music industry as potential model

New this year to the NMC Horizon Project and to the list of top challenges facing Scandinavian education is the focus on how schools can learn from the…

New pedagogies for deep learning

Global education stakeholders are working together in partnership to address a key education challenge: how educators can design and practice teaching and learning that leads to more successful…

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…

We suggest blended learning etc

We suggest setting up a nationwide workforce plan in which expected needs are broken down in detail and expected necessary skills forecast. In Denmark, the public debate indicates…

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…

Blossom to enrich our cultures

In short, we are in a position to discover learning methods and experiences that are deeply engaging, and that I am going to say easier to accomplish because…

Hidden strategies

By making an implicit demarcation between the two concepts (your) ‘data’ and (collected) ‘information’ Google can disguise the presence of a business model for online marketing and, at…

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;…

Siloed knowledge

It is concluded that studies on flipped classrooms are dominated by studies in higher education sector and are relatively local in character. The research tends not to interact…

Material cultures in a lifeworld

…the third step towards a postphenomenology. It is the step away from generalizations about technologies überhaupt and a step into the examination of technologies in their particularities. It…

Potential for increased motivation

Current education reform strategies are inadequate or failing. ACOT2 assumes as its starting point that time-honored yet outmoded approaches to education and education reform must be replaced with…

Difficult to draw clear conclusions

In reviewing the included studies, it becomes clear that educational technology is not a single homogenous intervention but a broad variety of modalities, tools, and strategies for influencing…

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…

Assessment Experiences (Brazil)

These seven dimensions of results clearly show the wide potential and diversity of the impact that digital technologies may have in the school universe. Theassessment must back projects…

Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning

How does the effectiveness of online learning compare with that of face to-face instruction? Looking only at the 27 Category 1 effects that compared a purely online condition…

Finger paint

Like finger paint, blocks, and beads, computers can also be used as a “material” for making things—and not just by children, but by everyone. Indeed, the computer is…

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…

Digital Labor

Digital labor designates value-adding activities performed by humans on Internet platforms. As a field of study, it focuses on circumstances where employer–employee relationships and modes of remuneration are…

Unesco and new techniques in education

The present crisis in education shows that attempts to meet the demand by linear expansion are financially illusory and pedagogically outdated. In the years to come the human…

Where is the theory?

Critics often characterise the study of educational technology as under-theorised. To test this assertion and to determine the extent of this criticism, the present paper reports an in-depth…

20 years of EdTech

…edtech has frequently failed to address the social impact of advocating for or implementing a technology beyond the higher education sector. MOOCs, learning analytics, AI, social media—the widespread…

Towards the learning society

The information society, notwithstanding the new knowledge techniques it heralds, raises the question of whether the educational content it carries will enhance or, on the contrary, diminish the…

Well-established potential

Mobile devices are often banned from schools and other centres of education, despite considerable and, in many instances, well-established potential to enhance learning. Such bans project a view…

Mobile learning

Mobile technologies, by virtue of being highly portable and relatively inexpensive, have enormously expanded the potential and practicability of personalized learning. […] Cumulatively, intelligent mobile devices, many of…

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

Lagging behind the promise

This analysis shows that the reality in our schools lags considerably behind the promise of technology. In 2012, 96% of 15-year-old students in OECD countries reported that they…

Assessing the effects of ICT in education

Despite the fact that education systems have been heavily investing in technology since the early 1980s, international indicators on technology uptake and use in education are missing. This…

Fair amount of uncertainty

It is generally believed that ICTs can empower teachers and learners and that their overall impact is positive. There is, however, little scientific evidence of the concrete contribution…

Promissory data

As I realized that there was a lack of empirical support for The Graphic, I took the opportunity during a conference break to remark to a speechwriter for…

Three common myths about digital ICT in education

Myth 1: Providing schools with ICT is enough to improve education There is little evidence to sustain that investments in digital technologies have significant returns in teachers transforming…

What’s the matter with ‘Technology Enhanced Learning’?

In most instances, when we speak of ‘technology enhanced learning’ we are in fact referring to technology enhanced teaching, and to institutional goals, rather than to the aims…

Media literacy or media addiction?

As more and more new technologies get introduced into educational institutions at an earlier age, today’s research efforts indeed fail to meet a number of sound research criteria:…

ICT in education: fundamental problems and practical recommendations

 This paper critically explores the intended and unintended consequences of ICT in education. Research across the sciences has found that ICT is neither benign nor neutral in its…

Critical reflections on the benefits of ICT in education

While there are many reasons to remain optimistic about new initiatives to transform the learning process, it must be acknowledged that, first, traditional exam results and, indeed, possession…

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…

A Resource for Future Pedagogies

This review shows that much of the literature supports the use of the IWBs, but does so on very flimsy evidence. The more rigorous studies that have been…

Selling tech to teachers: education trade shows as policy events

Digital technology is an expanding area of education policy. There is growing interest, therefore, in how networks of corporate and state policy actors implicit in the formation of…

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…

Realising the potential of technology in education

Yet all too often technology initiatives have failed to deliver value for money and, crucially, failed to have a positive impact. We know that not all education settings…

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…

Evidence of a potential, Ph.D. thesis

Abstract: Along with the popularization of digital technologies in education from the early 1980s, there has been a practice of evaluating the effects of educational technology on educational…

Fuck Nuance

When faced with a problem that is hard to solve, or a line of thinking that requires us to commit to some defeasible claim, or a logical dilemma…

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….

Language and Power

Notes: “Being critical means looking for explanations”.“The subject matter of the human sciences includes both social objects and beliefs about those subjects.”“Discourse and practice are both the products…

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…

Reticence bordering on fear

Controversial impact

How should policy-makers decide whether computer education will achieve the particular objectives they have in mind? This study reviews a number of analyses that have already been done…

Human dignity

The same problem arises in relation to the information society. The ‘information highways’ to which young people and even children will have increasingly easier access, could well find…

The Digital Competence Framework 2.0

DigComp 2.0 identifies the key components of digital competence in 5 areas which can be summarised as below: Information and data literacy: To articulate information needs, to locate and…

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…

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…

Between yes and no

Not making oneself free from power, as an autonomous subject, was the central aim, but engaging in a free relation with these powers, by understanding their workings and…

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…

Those who cannot remember the past

To paraphrase the dictum of George Santayana: those who cannot remember the past, should definitely consider the opportunities in educational technology. Langdon winner Winner, L. (2009). Information technology…

Educational amnesia

An accomplice for the continuing amnesia about the history of education is, surprisingly enough, educational research itself. Instead of asking – What do children need? What are our…

Novel and controversial proposals

One of the most fascinating yet elusive aspects of cultural change is the way certain ideals and arguments acquire an almost self-evident power at particular periods, just as…

Anti-professionalism

What all this makes clear is that, in some significant respects, the evidence-based practice movement is anti-professional: it challenges the claims of professional practitioners – whether doctors, teachers,…

Triple-contingency!

There is promising evidence that digital tools can, where effectively used, build skills in interactivity and collaboration, critical thinking and leadership for secondary age learners.

Verbal danger-signals

We shall take, then, for our first examples some utterances which can fall into no hitherto recognized grammatical category save that of ‘statement’, which are not nonsense, and…

Agnotology

The literature that discusses this feature of public discourse travels under the rubric of agnotology. It is not the study of ignorance and doubt under all their manifestations,…

Incuriosity

On the other hand, while this is a field that likes to talk continuously about learning, it is striking how little of substance is said on the topic….

Grit

Deliberate practice, operationally defined as studying and memorizing words while alone, better predicted performance in the National Spelling Bee than being quizzed by others or reading for pleasure….

Cognitive governance

Cognitive governance, according to Woodward, functions through the agreed values held by member nations and is a distinctive mode of influence of the OECD, as it does not…

Real life survey

More importantly still, the deeper issue of the actual feasibility of representing ‘real life’ problems in a survey format whilst retaining and not modifying the essential problem-setting characteristics…

Startled animals

I repeatedly noticed how hard it was for me to observe absence-in-class during group work: As soon as I left my position at the back of the classroom…

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…

Re-engineering humanity

We could focus on some specific intelligence-related characteristics that have often been identified in the definitional debates about what makes us human. Here is a short list of…

Introduction to phenomenology

Phenomenology is best understood as a radical anti-traditional style of philosophising, which emphasises to get to the truth of matters, to describe phenomena, in the broadest sense as…

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…

Debris of theories

Science is no more immune to conceptual error and confusion than any other forms of intellectual endeavour. The history of science is littered with the debris of theories…

Alphabet

By taking this meta-view of the entire history, we can see that what promotes the development of intellectual thought in human history is not the first alphabet or…

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…

Inscriptions

…curriculum reform programs, including reports, curriculum and pedagogical guidance, manifestoes, pamphlets, articles, and essays, as well as websites, infographics, diagrams, interactive devices, and other multimedia. These ‘inscriptions’ are…

7 undesirable consequences of algorithms

Counterserendipity Hyperfocus Self-amplifying cascades Skill erosion Perverse feedback Date deluge Monoculture Tenner, E. (2018). The Efficiency Paradox. Alfred A. Knopf

Edu-business

This chapter moves on from where the last left off. Here we look again into the world of multinational edu-business and begin to explore the buying and selling…

Distribution costs

Distribution costs include the need to constantly post new content, since the volume of new content is a large factor for stickiness. Distribution costs include site design, and…

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…

The Rhythm of the Infosphere

The fragmentation and acceleration of the flow of info-stimulation, the multitasking effect and the competitive pressure that is tied to the ability to follow the rhythm of the…

Dark matter

Thus a crucial difficulty in anticipating futures lies in long-term shifts in structures of feeling, of thought as felt and feeling as thought. So when I argue for…

Baumols cost disease

Baumol’s Cost Disease is the inevitable escalation of the real costs that occur in labour-intensive industries like the arts, health care and education. The labour costs in these…

Certainty trough

One way of approaching this might be in terms of the relationships between trust in the future and different actors’ proximity to the actual scientific work. In other…

Philosophical design

Abstract submitted to the “The Grammar of Things” conference in Darmstadt 2017.

Suckers for change

Even though every innovation is judged on economic grounds, at least to some degree, by its potential adopters, every innovation also has at least some degree of status…

Cybernetic pedagogy?

I’m pretty happy to have gotten this website up and running. It has become a cognitive prosthetic of great value to me – first of all because I…

To know an object is to act on it

To understand the development of knowledge we must start with an idea which seems central to me – the idea of an operation. Knowledge is not a copy…

World class

While the discourse of myth is about the denial or destruction of the past, the discourse of meaninglessness is about the ultimate in collateral damage: the destruction of…

Passivity

This disregard for ‘passivity’ is, in my view, a philosophical deficiency. In Gerd Biesta’s work, for instance, we find a recent emphasis on passivity. Biesta writes that learning…

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…

[Grund]

Thus one must quite systematically inquire back into those things taken for granted which, not only for Kant but for all philosophers, all scientists, make up an unspoken…

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…

Technophilia

I’d like to think that computers are neutral, a tool like any other, a hammer that can build a house or smash a skull. But there is something…

Scientism

The problem isn’t the scientific description or analysis of presence-at-hand per se; Heidegger is not anti-science. The problem is scientism, the view that science gives us the whole…

This-worldly conception

Phenomenology endorses a this-worldly conception of objectivity and reality and seeks to overcome the scepticism that argues that the way the world appears to us is compatible with…

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…

Commoditization of scholarship

One of the strangest projects of privatization and commodification in the early twentieth-first century has been the movement to commoditize scholarship. Two versions have been surprisingly powerful. In…

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…

It cannot play the piano

Well, of course I am not my brain – for my brain is certainly not married, not a psychiatrist, and it has no children. Even worse, it does…

What our brain wants

We are right to assert that the formation of each identity is a kind of resilience, in other words, a kind of contradictory construction, a synthesis of memory…

Man a Machine, 1748

Man is so complicated a machine that it is impossible to get a clear idea of the machine beforehand, and hence impossible to define it. For this reason,…

Unlikely

The implications from these findings suggest that we should not expect large positive (or negative) impacts from ICT investments in schools or computers at home. Schools should not…

Alien belief systems

Reason is a great naturalizer, and public reason naturalizes much that seems arbitrary in politics. Once we are persuaded of the reasonableness of an argument or action, it…

AIed

Based on the combination of these models with data analytics and machine learning processes, Pearson’s proposed vision of AIed includes the development of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) which…

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…

That’s interesting!

QUESTION: How do theories which are generally considered interesting differ from theories which are generally considered non-interesting? ANSWER: Interesting theories are those which deny certain assumptions of their…

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…

Invisible technologies, 1994

Low oedipal energy

Incapable of renewal or overcoming, the stupid subject has low oedipal energy: he has held onto the ideas, the relics and dogmas transmitted in his youth by his…

Impact on learning

Yet achieving any degree of confidence or certainty over a discernable ‘cause-and-effect’ relationship between technology and learning is nigh on impossible. Put simply, it has proved tremendously difficult…

Institutional isomorphism

We ask, instead, why there is such startling homogeneity of organizational forms and practices; and we seek to explain homogeneity, not variation. In the initial stages of their…

Heideggerian AI

“The best model of the world is the world itself.” rodney Brooks (quoted by hubert l. dreyfus) Dreyfus, H. L. (2013). Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing…

Misunderstanding toll

I have learned, from a now forty-plus-year history of published books, that if one accepts the title of ‘phenomenologist’ prices have to be paid, as previously noted. These…

Double bind

The necessary ingredients for a double bind situation, as we see it, are: 1. Two or more persons. Of these, we designate one, for purposes of our definition,…

Curious rituals

The smartness mandate

The demo is a form of temporal management that through its practices and discourses evacuates the historical and contextual specificity of individual catastrophes and evades ever having to…

Blindness in seeing

Should one have the ambition of scanning learning processes in situ and in actu in a school class for just one hour, it would not be enough to…

We must ask of technology

…whether it 1. Promotes justice2. Restores reciprocity3. Confers divisible or indivisible benefits4. Favours people over machines5. Whether its strategy maximises gains og minimises disaster6. Whether conservation is favoured…

Criticality

Over time, the selfsame ideologies become “hegemonic,” not because they change, but because circumstances change while the ideology becomes more and more concerned with its own preservation. What…

Goodhart’s law

Goodhart’s law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart, which has been phrased by Marilyn Strathern as “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”[1]One way…

Idealistic resilience

One curiosity about a cycle of disruptive fixation is that many of the people who take part in it manage to repair and maintain their idealism, at least…

Surviving in the modern world

To survive in the modern world, men and women must become diviners of inscrutable others, interpret the moods of secretaries of deans and CEOs, and shake-ups in the…

Inclusive AI Resources

A list compiled by the CITRIS Policy Lab at CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, UC Berkeley.

Creativity

The creative person is one who succeeds in displacing the quest for the forbidden knowledge into permissible curiosity. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity (1st ed.). Harper Perennial.

Poptimism

Hyper-ecstasy

When I was working as a computer scientist, I was sometimes astonished by how fast we have been moving, especially when you listened to the grant rhetorics of…

Self-propelling choice

On the one hand we encounter the idea that technological development goes forward virtually of it’s own inertia, resists any limitation, and has the character of a self-propelling,…

No amount of technology will make a dent

I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had…