I’ve linked to The Big Ideas podcast before (see this post on Marshall McLuhan and this post on Hannah Arendt) and this time the podcast is discussing the remarkable work of German media philosopher Friedrich Kittler.
This is a really awesome series that condenses complex ideas into digestible chunks. I’d recommend taking 13 minutes out of your day to listen to this discussion about the man sometimes called the ‘Derrida of the digital age’.
Grading the digital schools
A great series of articles about education and technology in schools from the New York Times:
In recent years there has been a major push to equip classrooms with technology, including laptops, overhead projectors, interactive white boards and tablets. It has become big business. But there are questions about whether the investment is paying off. This series explores the push to digitize the American classroom and whether the promises are being fulfilled.
Anyone want to read these articles with me and then discuss them? Let me know in the comments.
We build the tool to change things, and then the tool changes us.
Interesting piece from the New York Times Bits blog by Quentin Hardy titled How the Internet is ruining everything.
I pulled this quotation out because it’s pithy and because it reminds me of a fantastic musing on this dialectic relationship between technology and humans - Raymond Williams’ Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974). It’s a must-read if you care about technology.
And as an extra bonus, if you have a spare 88 minutes, check out this video of David Weinberger talking about the thesis of his book in October at the University of Michigan School of Information (links to YouTube):
