We’re back in the season of lecture fetishism. ‘Workshy’ lecturers are being ‘ordered’ back into the classroom to provide ‘proper’ value-for-money education rather than cut-price online stuff, while apparently the university life of a Times‘ columnist’s offspring would be ruined by having too much online learning. What’s striking is how far their conception of what should be restored is the sort of lecture that went out of fashion, at least outside basic introductory courses in the hard sciences, decades ago: to quote the old joke, the lecture as a means of transferring information from the lecturer’s notes to the student’s notes without passing through the brains of either. And, as I commented last week, some of the defences of the shift to online learning are equally ignorant of what actually happens in lecture rooms these days. It really feels like a debate about the current state of popular music between adherents of 7″ flexidiscs and proponents of cassette singles; not just total indifference to the content (hey, maybe someone should suggest to the Times that it’s easier to promote decolonisation and cultural Marxism in in-person classes where there are no recordings…) but utter ignorance of how technology and techniques have changed, and what the real issues are. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘technology’
Video Killed The Radio Star…
Posted in Musings, tagged coronavirus, higher education, teaching, technology on August 10, 2021| 15 Comments »
Can’t Get There From Here
Posted in Musings, tagged coronavirus, higher education, teaching, technology on September 25, 2020| 6 Comments »
It’s possible that some people reading this will remember the Grauniad‘s ‘Readers Recommend’ music blog. The set-up was simple; every week, the writer in charge of it would set a theme – ‘Songs About the Sea’, for example – and people would comment on the blog with their recommendations, arguing both from quality of music and relevance to theme (and occasionally sheer brass neck; I once got Roxy Music’s Avalon accepted as a pick for ‘Songs About Myth’ through an elaborate structuralist analysis that showed the lyrics really were a deep engagement with the Arthurian legend, references to samba notwithstanding), (more…)
The Outrage Machine
Posted in Musings, tagged fake news, technology, Thucydides on August 13, 2019| 1 Comment »
Victor Davis Hanson is at it again… “It’s fun to celebrate Sparta, but let’s look deeper,” he declares in The National Review. “There are so many lessons we can learn from the Greco-Roman city-state, especially from those who ran it.” So far so boilerplate – I’m not sure whether he’s directly responding to recent articles by Myke Cole and Nick Burns in The New Republic. Then it gets weird: “The main ideology of Sparta was that all men should be educated as scholars… Homer wrote that the culture wars are never ended. However, so long as our educational system leaves millions of young men without the basic technical know-how to wage war, the cult of arms continues to roam the Earth…”
Okay, it’s not actually VDH (more…)
Fables of the Reconstruction
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged archaeology, music, technology on February 9, 2019| Leave a Comment »
I’ve just published a piece in Epoiesen, the fantastic online journal for creative engagements with history and archaeology, on the Melian Dilemma game and some of the thinking behind it. I’ve been meaning to get round to this for ages – and I’ve been given extra reason to regret not getting my act together sooner, as my fate now is to be completely overshadowed by Assemblage Theory, the brilliant contribution by Andrew Reinhard, published a few days earlier, on his latest musical experiments: exploring different conceptions of the idea of ‘assemblage’ by producing new songs using ‘found sounds’. Go read, go listen. If this piece doesn’t single-handedly exemplify why a journal of wacky historical creativity is an absolute necessity, you are beyond saving. (more…)
Welcome to Tomorrow (?)
Posted in Events, Musings, tagged Berlin, capital, conferences, ESSHC, technology on April 15, 2018| 1 Comment »
Never mind the hover board, what I was really expecting by 2018 was that we’d all be projecting ourselves into overseas conferences as holograms. Sorry, Belfast, but while I did find some quite nice beer, I still would have preferred to experience the round table discussion of Walter Scheidel’s The Great Leveler and other delights of this year’s European Social Science History Conference without all the rain… (more…)
Return of the Slave Society
Posted in Musings, tagged automation, capitalism, Karl Marx, robots, slavery, technology on November 29, 2017| 2 Comments »
Aristotle dreamed of the robot revolution. A slave is a living tool that serves multiple purposes; likewise a craftsman’s assistant (Politics 1253b). This is demonstrated by the fact that, if every tool could perform its own work when ordered, or by seeing what to do in advance, like the statues of Daedalus or the self-moving tripods of Hephaestus, craftsmen would have no need of assistants or masters of slaves. Tools are an essential component of the state; workers, maybe not so much. (more…)
