S e b l o g g i n g

“Firs, it is always worthwhile to insist that people explain the words they have chosen to describe what they are doing, so that their purposes may be evaluated. Second, many people who use the word “science” do so in the hope that its prestige will attach to their work. Americans are peculiarly afflicted with science-adoration, which is why we must endure such abominations as the oxymorons Christian Science, Creation Science, Scientology, Policy Science, Decision Science, and Administrative Science, as well as Behavioral and Social Science. And third, when the study of human conduct is classified as science, there is a tendency to limit the kinds of inquiries that may be made: counters and “empiricists”- that is, pseudo-scientists- are apt to deprive others of the right to proceed in alternative ways, for example, by denying them tenure. The result is, of course, that they impoverish all of us and make it difficult for people with ideas to be heard.”

Neil Postman (1988) in Concentious Objections

“Dialogue like nirvana, like happiness, like love, like learning cannot be achieved by the direct desire to have a dialogue, to have nirvana, to have happiness, to have love, to have learning. In this sense, a dialogue, nirvana, happiness, and learning (and teaching) are not goal-directed activities. They cannot be designed… However, on the other hand, certain actions can increase possibility for engaging in dialogue, experiencing nirvana, love, learning and teaching. Similarly, some circumstances make dialogue, nirvana, love, learning, teaching more difficult, although never impossible. Thus, activity and design be used for promoting these phenomena as their by-products.”

Eugene Matusov (2009) in Journey into Dialogic Pedagogy

With the commoditization of instruction, teachers are drawn into a production process designed for the efficient creation of instructional commodities, and hence become subject to all the pressures that have befallen production workers in other industries undergoing rapid technological transformation from above. In this context faculty have much more in common with the historic plight of other skilled workers than they care to acknowlege. Like these others, their activity is being restructured, via the technology, in order to reduce their autonomy, independence, and control over their work and to place workplace knowledge and control as much as possible into the hands of the administration. As in other in other industries, the technology is being deployed by management primarily to discipline, de-skill, and displace labor.

David F. Noble (1998) in Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.

The conditions for convivial work are structural arrangements that make possible the just distribution of unprecedented power. A postindustrial society must and can be so constructed that no one person’s ability to express him- or herself in work will require as a condition the enforced labor or the enforced learning or the enforced consumption of another.

Ivan Illich (1975) in Tools for conviviality

“But science itself has been industrialized and commodified. It is increasingly organized into large research centers with intricate division of labor. Research operates with costly complex primary instruments, but secondary instruments (models and theories) seem to fall into a myriad of
disconnected micro-theories. The objects of science appear in the form of separate ‘problems’ or ‘tasks’ given from outside. Above all, science is tendentially reduced to its immediate products or results possessing exchange value in the ‘science market’ and being essentially known or fixed in advance (as ‘customer’s orders’ or promises from the researchers).”

Yrjö Engeström (1987) in Learning by Expanding

“When I was born, humanity was 95 per cent illiterate. Since I’ve been born, the population has doubled and that total population is now 65 per cent literate. That’s a gain of 130-fold of the literacy. When humanity is primarily illiterate, it needs leaders to understand and get the information and deal with it. When we are at the point where the majority of humans them-selves are literate, able to get the information, we’re in an entirely new relationship to Universe. We are at the point where the integrity of the individual counts and not what the political leadership or the religious leadership says to do.”

R. Buckminster Fuller, Excerpt from an interview on February 26, 1983

“Funeral by funeral, theory advances”

Paul A. Samuelson

“Every good cause is worth some inefficiency”

Paul A. Samuelson

“Distance does not guarantee objectivitiy; it merely guarantees distance”

Michael Q. Patton (2002) in Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods

“Complex problems have simple, easy to understand, wrong answers”

Henry Louis Mencken