Projectories

Two interesting invitiations for conferences have arrived in my mailbox.

Sharing Knowlegde? Exploring
the interfaces between science & society and
the role of science communication
1-2 November 2004, Amsterdam

This conference will explore interfaces between science and society, including
science communication and multi-domain problem solving.

Key issues are:
What are the new roads for science communication: science centres, TV, internet?
How can we incorporate different types of knowledge in the research process?
What are the risks of public communication about science and technology for the public and for politics?
Why should and how can we organise interaction between science and policy?

From the Conference Homepage

Advancing Science and Society Interactions
3-5 February 2005, Seville

This international conference will provide a forum where information on community
based research, carried out in both community and academic settings, can be
shared and developed. It will reflect the social impact and scientific and
democratic value of research from a range of disciplines including social,
natural, physical and technological sciences. This conference will be of interest
to people who are active in, or interested in, the field of community-based
research. Practitioners from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), research
institutes, universities (both academics/faculty and students) and science
and society policy makers are invited to share their experiences.

From the Conference Invitation

Today I’m leaving for the 4S/EASST Conference in Paris. Registration starts on Wednesday and I’m presenting on Saturday. My session is called The Online, Virtual and “Mobile” University (S117) and is held in Room C058 in the Lycée Saint Louis.

I’ll sum up the goodies when I get back. In the mean time you can read my presentation online.

Read the rest of this entry »

This paper, which I found via Kairosnews, makes some similar arguments about testing that I do about technology. The educational setting, as everything else I guess, seems very susceptible to influence from materiality. Maybe it is the organized and structured nature of education that makes it so responsive? Maybe it is the organized nature of education that makes us notice material influence?

In any case materiality seems to play a large part in education. How would we organize education without a blackboard, lectern, overhead, powerpoint, posters etc? We can make the list endless, and all these artifacts intervene and shape our educational system. I guess that if we remove the artifacts - we will have no school.

Large-scale testing cannot assure that all students have learned the same material in the same way; still, teachers who want to keep their jobs react by “teaching to the test” as best they can. In this environment, all the scholarship that suggests teachers should employ multiple learning styles, intelligences and authentic assessment is discarded in favor of preparing for a pencil-n-paper exam that no one, not even the teacher, sees before it is given. From his Diagram, English accurately points out: “When standardized tests become the tool for assessment and “accountability” is applied like a monkey wrench to teachers and students, that tool becomes the determiner of every lesson plan, every discussion, every subject of study in the classroom–every turn of the pipe.”

Kairosnews - Patricia Roy’s blog

Bryan Pfaffenberger is an assistant associate professor (sorry about that mixup Bryan) in the STS department at the University of Viriginia. He is presenting at the 4S/EASST conference in Paris next week and he also has an interesting blog.

My interests include the social analysis of electronic voting, computer security, and U.S. science policy. My views on subjects that range beyond my scholarly focus, including politics, human rights, and social justice, are expressed off-site in a weblog called The Pink Bunny of Battle

Bryan Pfaffenberger

Here are a couple of links from an old issue of Red Rock Eater News Service that I found interesting. You can find old issues of RRE here: RRE Yahoo Archive.

» Introduction to Chuck Bazerman’s “Shaping Written Knowledge”

» A Possible Contribution of Science Studies to the Social Sciences

» Memory in the Universal Discipline of Cybernetics

» introduction to Gideon Kunda’s “Engineering Culture”

» Borderline Issues: Social and Material Aspects of Design

» Rethinking the Meaning of Genetic Determinism

Red Rock Eater News Service

The last couple of months I have been analyzing the rhetorics in a governmental report on correspondence education. The report was published in 1961, and is really a fascinating time machine.

I find it very intriguing that discourses in the texts from the 1950’s use the same arguments to support correspondence education in the 1950’s that are used today to advocate broadband access and computers in every home. Naturally there are differences in language and in ways of expression - but you tell me - is this the type of argument that you thought was used in the 1950’s?

Increased education and research is a requirement for a continued significant increase of our standard of living in the widest sense. Both the development of our businesses and our society’s adaptation to changing conditions is dependant on it. For people to be able to master in an increasingly complex society, an increased level of education and knowledgeability is a requirement.

Korrespondensundervisningen i skolväsendet, 1962, p. 74

The main strands of argument goes like this: education –> knowledge –> development. Development is the goal of society. Development is good. Not developing is bad. Not developing means falling behind, scientifically, economically and socially. Knowledge is the key to development. In order for development we must have knowledge - preferably scientific, objective knowledge. To create knowledge we must educate the people. But not once and for all. We must educate the people continuously, rapidly and in the right type of knowledge.

On the individual level there is a similar argumentation both today and in the 1950’s, this rhetoric is focused on the concept of lifelong learning, and is really just an instantiation of the larger “knowledge society” discourse above on an individual plane: education -> knowledge -> development. If you get an education, you will know stuff. If you know stuff you’ll get a good job.

The rapid pace of development in our society demands expeditive roads to education as well as educational forms that effortlessly can be adapted to shifting needs. Correspondence education has proven a completely satisfactory and inexpensive method in the service of education. An education that builds on correspondence education combined with concentrated oral studies makes it possible for students to deepen their insights into a subject or to acquire merit for another position, alongside their regular employment.

Korrespondensundervisningen, 1962, p.73

Jeez if there is somebody out there watching, s/he must be a little tired of the reiterations.

A really great exhibit i found called Visionary Designs in Transportation Engineering that has great pictures of how the future of transportation could look. It really reminds me of the evolution of the bicycle — which is such a popular topic when it comes to the social shaping of technology. But, most of all there are really cool pictures on the page.

What is transportation futuristics? Many of us are familiar with covers from Popular Science that depict commuters buzzing around in tiny aircraft and landing on rooftops, or fanciful drawings of vehicles that run on roads, float on water and also take to the air. The basic problem many of us face each day — how to get from Point A to Point B in the least amount of time with the least amount of trouble — has inspired many to dream of marvelous ways to solve that problem.

Transportation Futuristics

During this fall the research program that I am part of, Technology and Learning, will host a series of seminars relating to our research.

You can find more information on the seminar series and the research program here.

During the 20th century the use of technology has often been combined with expectations on technology as a rejuvenating force in pedagogics - these modernizations have more often than not been arduous to fulfill. Implementation of technology often takes longer than expected due to inertia emanating from disregard of social, cultural and economic factors. The trust that technology advocates put in educational technology has generally met with resistance from both students and teachers. The split between educational reality and vision is also noticeable in contemporary belief in different online educational schemes in higher education, both nationally and internationally.

In the research program Technology and Learning we investigate the relation between technology and learning from techno-sociological and pedagogical perspectives. The educational system is one of the social fields where the encounter between new technology and social inertia is made apparent.

Technology & Learning

I found an interesting blogpost in Boing Boing (Boing Boing: What does Atkins *mean*?) that referenced an article titled The Great Neurotic Art about food and dietary control in history. The article is written by the science historian Steven Shapin.

At the same time, it was widely, if not universally, acknowledged between traditional physicians and their patients that appetite was a pretty good guide to the healthfulness of foods. If you liked it, it probably liked you: the Renaissance and early modern maxim was ‘you should eat what you are.’ If you had a hot and moist complexion, then the foods that suited you best also tended to the hot and moist. (This was one reason cannibalism proved so interesting to dietary writers, since, in theory, no meat better suited to the human constitution could exist. Pork was a distant second.) That is, there were cosmological grounds for concluding that a little of what you fancy does you good.

The Great Neurotic Art

My first academic conference is coming up (25th Aug). I just checked the schedule. My session is the last session of the last day. And it actually looks like I’m the last person in that session. I don’t know if I should think it’s nice or horrible.

I’m going to present an analysis of the discourse in a Swedish government report on correspondence education. I have found some quite interesting rhetorics in it, which point (circumstantially) to a “correspondence education bubble” in Sweden in the 1950’s. It seems like lots of people bought courses, but that few finished them. Maybe one could compare it to buying a gym card nowadays? A purchase of good intentions?

4S-EASST