Education: confronting the confusion of tongues
I’m sure that my Christian and Jewish friends see it differently, but from my secular and humanist perspective, the biblical story of the Tower of Babel i...
Category: Politics
Play, Neoteny & Convivial Learning
A number of years ago, I gave a talk entitled ‘The Joy of Learning’ to the Australian College of Educators in the impressive setting of Geelong Coll...
Jerome Bruner on Pedagogy
Pedagogical theory is not only technical but cultural, ideological and political. If it is to have any impact, it must be self-consciously all of these. So wrot...
Books That Made Me An Educator: a Forgotten Classic
This is the third in an occasional series of posts highlighting some of the books that led me into education or that have greatly influenced me as an educator o...
Hyperbole and Bad Faith
Each new week brings with it the publication of yet another book telling us how technological developments will damage, or are already damaging, humankind. We a...
PISA’s Passive Aggressive Assault on Education
Gary Younge wrote in a recent Guardian article about the global economy’s swift, and harsh, response to the election of President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva in B...
Scottish Open Education Declaration
Open education can promote knowledge transfer while at the same time enhancing quality and sustainability, supporting social inclusion, and creating a culture o...
Dissent and Disloyalty
The great American commentator, Edward Murrow, that country’s voice of integrity through the Second World War and beyond, wrote some words that come to m...
Directive Pedagogy: Freire’s Blind Spot?
In an old post (sadly, along with his great blog Borderland no longer available online, it seems), Doug Noon wrote about a short piece by Paulo Friere called Th...