The end effect of the Gulf Oil Spill disaster will not be known for many years. Some of the effects will be immediate and obvious, while others are far more mercurial and illusive. As with all disasters, a large contingent of people will be employed to distract and counter both the breadth and depth of the oil spill’s full impact. Many of these people will be scientists and perhaps even health experts who are willing to be paid to manufacture deception and degrade the integrity of their expertise. The media, as they so expertly do, will collectively create a bog of informational stench that serves only to confuse and add to the deception itself.
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[Exploring Life] Brad Stone’s NY Times article The Children of Cyberspace raises a number of poignant issues regarding our relationship with technology. Heralding in a new type of “generation” by some individual claiming “visionary” status seems like an all too common occurrence in mainstream media now. Apparently the so-called “Net Generation” is now giving way to a so-called “iGeneration.” Even though both of these generations are imaginary fodder, we still persist in reducing vast numbers of people to their technological avatar. It is as if McLuhan’s words have never been heard: “Our conventional response to all media, namely that it is how they are used that counts, is the numb stance of the technological idiot.” There is no possibility of “immigrating” to a new (technological) “world” – there is no such thing as a “citizen” of the web – except, that is, in the minds of the delusional.
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[Exploring Life] Can an individual or organization claim the right to own and profit from a natural resource that is essential to the preservation and well being of all life on our planet? The battle to claim ownership and control the world’s fresh water supply brings us to the particular nexus where money, the natural environment, and the vagaries of human culture intersect, often in a manner that painfully reveals the deeply rooted of human traditions of greed, want, and consumption. In other words, humanity has not yet learned to live in harmony and equanimity with the natural forces that are the basis of all life. The struggle and looming catastrophe surrounding the world’s fresh water supplies is a stark example of how immature and and inept our capacity for learning really is.
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[Exploring Life] The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice in response to the release of the commemorative edition of Strunk and White’s famous The Elements of Style.[1] The article condemns Strunk and White’s advice as being detrimental to the correct use of language as well as the development of a writing style. After reading the article it occurred to me that the tacit issue underneath the accurate criticisms of The Elements of Style are more basic questions that education systems struggle with” How do we learn a “writing style?” How do we write with “style?” Is there something we can call “a correct style?” What really is a “writing style?”
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[Exploring Life] The word technology can be an illusive term. Technology originates in the Greek technologia which combines craft (techne) and saying (logia). A common understanding of technology refers to the physical tools and hardware hardware of an object that is designed to make work easier. In this sense, technology is a label that describes a material object. There is another more expansive meaning of the word that refers to the knowledge and use of tools and crafts in order to control and adapt to an environment. Here technology refers to the application of human thought, perception, craft, creativity, invention and ingenuity in order to solve a problem or achieve a goal.[2]
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[Exploring Life] We spend the majority of our lives involved in some form of work. It is a means to contribute to and to be assimilated into society. In our childhood we are introduced to work in the form of schoolwork and homework. To not work in school often labels an individual as unmotivated, lazy, or if the outcome below standard, a failure. In our adult years we work in order to meet social expectations and acquire financial resources. To not work in our adult years is an immediate sentence to poverty, exclusion and prejudice. And throughout this life in time we quietly hope for the absence of work in our retirement years, if we are fortunate enough to live that long. It is easy to imagine many people who spend vast amounts of time wishing they were doing something else. Work in a society founded on consumerism and consumption becomes something less than survival of the fittest; it is the cultivation of greed, want and delusion. To dismiss the social norms and expectations that surround work and choose to live through a different set of assumptions results in physical hardship and psychological excommunication.
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[Exploring Life] The purpose of a curriculum is to impose a uniform scope of and sequence of knowledge and skills that are to be taught to a group of people. The presupposition of curriculum lies within the concept of the prerequisite. In other words, the design of education originates in the assumption that the imposition of a predetermined scope and sequence of knowledge and skills over time is the most efficient and effective way to organize and deliver the experience of education. Curriculum is a kind of technology since it represents an application of knowledge (i.e. – the scope and sequence of knowledge and skills) that is used to meet an objective or solve a problem (i.e. – to prepare people for participation in society).
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