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Lévi-Strauss invites us to consider literary freedom (or, more generally, "book culture") as a spandrel in the sense that Stephen Jay Gould employed the term: something that evolves not towards its own end, but because it doesn't impede (and may in fact support) other forces. I think Lévi-Strauss's hypothesis is interesting to consider because it posits our present book culture as an exception, rather than something that naturally happens because of the flow of economic or historical forces.

For a piece entitled "This Progress," Sehgal emptied the spiral ramp of the Guggenheim of its art: the visitor ascending the ramp was met by a small child, who asks you to explain what you think progress is. You do this as best you can; there's a back and forth, and this conversation carries on up the spiral. At a certain point, you're met by a high school student, who continues the conversation; then a young adult; and finally an older adult, who walks with you to the top-most point in the Guggenheim. There's a great deal of careful choreography going on, so the conversation breaks and remakes itself across your offerent interlocutors – but what's centrally interesting about the piece is that the visitor is engaged in a sustained conversation with strangers about the idea of progress. There's something deeply strange about this: post-college, we so rarely engage in conversations about abstract ideas. It's equally odd to be engaging with people who aren't your age: the way on talks to a six-year-old is necessarily different from the way one talks to a sixty-year-old. This can be deeply engrossing: on a visit a few Mondays ago, my friend Nik and I went up (with others) and down (together) five times in four hours.

Going up the spiral with a friend doesn't work as well as you might expect: the dynamics of a conversation with a stranger are very different from a converstion with a stranger and a friend.

One quickly discovers that what happens when one ascends the spiral is different every time, though the structure is constant. Some conversations are interesting; some are less so. Some are over quickly; some carry on so long that you worry that you've fallen out of the piece entirely. While some of the rules can be easily understood

some aren't so obvious.

One quickly discovers the limitations of language: progress, we think, is the idea that things move forward, but that doesn't explain why something in front of something is naturally better: it's simply a structure of our thought that we construe things in front of us (or above us) as things we aspire to in some way. It's hard not to think in this way when ascending a ramp, though weirdly the ramp as metaphor doesn't seem to arise.

k wanted to know, were we essentially different from the Greeks?

Greek professor

The difference, the man finally confided, was that the Greeks didn't have our idea of progress. He thought they were probably happier because of that.

why was there the this in the piece's title "This Progress"? Perhaps it's because progress only exists as an idea when we lend credence to it: our own personal idea of progress rather than something that exists naturally. Awareness of this is important. We need to interrogate the idea of progress, both in terms of what we believe and what society around us believes. Too often we're simply swept along by the flow of time. The power of the idea – the power of the thought experiment, whether Lévi-Strauss's questioning of the goal of writing or Sehgal's questioning of progress – is that it allows reclamation of agency.

i.e. I remember it only until I've finished the test) transforms to internalized (and useful) memorization only when the information is RELEVANT to my life! That's why kids can remember Pokemon points and Blues Clues songs yet struggle with their times tables or history dates! Yes, we need to agree on what content is foundational - AND we need to learn to teach it to (or learn it with) our children in ways that are meaningful to THEM, not just to us!

I used to teach in an urban alternative school where many of my students were gang members.  These students were not successful in school though they did get an education.  I am sorry to say that the majority of their education did not come from school teachers nor was it an education sanctioned by the school district.  I also through the years have been involved in many online communities of interest.  Learning occurs there all the time.  Not all members of these communities were successful in school but within these communities were successful in becoming educated about certain things.  There is high quality education occurring in many places that we don't consider school:  boy and girl scouts, workplaces, church youth groups, 4H, Little League, gangs, internet chat rooms, YouTube, blogs, libraries, family interaction, etc.  In fact, the most relevant learnin for most people happens in one of hese other places of education and not in schools. 

If the goal for schools is to become the most relevant and useful place for education we need to harness the rhetorical draw of the gang, the personal significance of the family, the intrinsic nature of clubs and organizations like the Scouts and 4H, the relevance and applicability of the work place, and the openness of social media.  The only way to do this is to personalize the learning experience for each student.  This means that content will be as different from person to person as is the approach to teaching that content.

Students who behave, and learn, most like their teachers do the best in classrooms. Teachers see this reflection as proof of their own competence - "The best students are just like me." And thus all who are "different" in any way - race, class, ability, temperament, preferences - are left out of the success story.

Mobile phones, computers everywhere, hypertext, social networking, collaborative cognition (from Wikipedia on up), Google, text-messaging, Twitter, audiobooks, digital texts, text-to-speech, speech recognition, flexible formatting - these are not "add ons" to the world of education, they are the world of education. This is how humans in this century talk, read, communicate, learn. And learning to use these technologies effectively, efficiently, and intelligently must be at the heart of our educational strategies. These technologies do something else - by creating a flexibility and set of choices unprecedented in human communication - they "enable" a vast part of the population which earlier media forms disabled.

Back in Socrates' time it was all about the information you could remember. With this system very, very few could become "educated." In the ‘Gutenberg era' it was all about how many books you could read and how fast you could decode alphabetical text; this let a few more reach that ‘educated' status - about 35% if you trust all those standardized tests to measure "proficiency." But now it is all about how you learn to find information, how you build your professional and personal networks, how you learn, how to learn - because learning must be continuous. None of this eliminates the need for a base of knowledge - the ability to search, to ask questions, requires a knowledge base, but it dramatically alters both how that knowledge base is developed, and what you need to do with it. This paradigm opens up the ranks of the "educated" in ways inconceivable previously.

We must abandon the one-way classroom communication system, be it the lecture or use of the "clicker," and teach with conversation and through modeling learning itself. We must lose the idea that "attention" means students staring at a teacher, or that "attendance" means being in the room, and understand all the differing ways humans learn best. We must stop separating subjects rigidly and adopt the contemporary notion of following knowledge where it leads us.

According to Duncan, the great sin these colleges have committed in the past few decades is that they have focused too much on theory and not enough on clinical practice; and by theory he means critical pedagogy, or those theories that enable prospective teachers to situate school knowledges, practices and modes of governance within wider critical, historical, social, cultural, economic and political contexts. Duncan wants such colleges to focus on practical methods in order to prepare teachers for an outcome-based education system, which is code for pedagogical methods that are as anti-intellectual as they are politically conservative.

Rather than provide the best means for confronting "difficult truths about the inequality of America's political economy," such a pedagogy produces the swindle of "blaming inequalities on individuals and groups with low test scores."[7] This is a pedagogy that sabotages any attempt at self-reflection and quality education, all the while providing an excuse for producing moral comas and a flight from responsibility.

Duncan's insistence on banishing theory from teacher education programs in favor of promoting narrowly defined skills and practices foreshadows the preparation of teachers as a subaltern class who believe that the purpose of education is only to train students to compete successfully in a global economy. This model of teaching being celebrated here is one in which teachers are constructed as clerks and technicians who have no need for a public vision in which to imagine the democratic role and social responsibility that schools, teachers or pedagogy might assume for the world and future they offer to young people.

Duncan then goes on to praise Louisiana as a model for building longitudinal data systems that track the impact of new teachers on student achievement. For Duncan, Louisiana represents a beacon for how schools should be redefined, largely as sites of management and data collection, and advances the notion that teachers should be trained to operate proficiently in such sites.

the overuse of harsh discipline disproportionately affects some Louisiana school children over others. African American students make up 44% of the statewide public school population, but 68% of suspensions and 72.5% of expulsions. And in school districts with a larger percentage of African American and low-income students, there are higher rates of suspension and expulsion. These districts tend to have fewer resources for positive interventions.

Duncan's collusion with the growing corporatization and militarizing of public schools, along with the increased use of harsh disciplinary modes of punishment, surveillance, control and containment, especially in schools inhabited largely by poor minorities of color, reveals his unwillingness to address the degree to which many schools are dominated by a politics of fear, containment and authoritarianism, even as he advances reform as a civil rights issue.[12] Schools are not merely places where potential workers learn the marketable skills and abilities necessary to secure a decent job, they are also, as Martha C. Nussbaum pointed out, key institutions of the public good and are "crucial to both the health of democracy and to the creation of a decent world culture and a robust type of global citizenship."[13]

The diverse range of political, economic, racial and social forces that influence all aspects of schooling need to be critically engaged and rearticulated in the interest of justice, human development, freedom and equal opportunity. These are not merely political issues, they are also pedagogical concerns and the former cannot be separated from the latter, just as equity cannot be separated from matters of excellence. Defining schools exclusively in terms of mathematical coordinates and statistical formulas suggests that Duncan has no language for addressing schools as sites or teachers as engaged intellectuals that mediate, accommodate, reproduce and sometimes challenge the diverse and often anti-democratic forces that bear down on them.

What does it mean to ignore the increasing corporatization, privatization and militarization of schools at a time when all aspects of public life are under siege by corporate and market-driven forces? How can schools fulfill their democratic mission when they are shaped by a social order characterized by massive inequalities in wealth and power?

“The idea that you could put up open content at all was risky 10 years ago, and we decided to be very conservative,” he said. “Now the question is how do you move into something that is more interactive and collaborative, and we will see lots and lots of models over the next four or five years.”

We have an Access Centre dedicated to ensuring our disabled students are provided with whatever technical and practical support they need to study successfully. Support can mean anything from special computer software to sitting exams in their own home, having a personal assistant at day or residential school, and advice on available funding support.

We have developed a range of ways to include people from under-represented groups in higher education. Working in partnership with locally-based organisations we are able to offer programmes that reach out to potential students in their communities. And we are also working to make sure that these students receive the support they need to succeed in their studies.

As part of our mission we are making an increasing amount of Open University teaching and learning resources available free of charge to anyone with access to the internet, no matter where in the world they live.

Is the OU a real university?

However, as with annotations in paper books, sometimes the value of an annotation goes beyond its content. Marshall (1998) suggests that the very act of evaluating a handwritten annotation's relevance creates a level of critical engagement that would not happen while reading a clean copy of a book. Marshall studied university students' annotations in textbooks, and found that students preferred books that had been marked by previous readers, as long as the marks were intelligible.

Similarly, Sherman (2008) studied marginalia in English Renaissance texts and found that students of the time were routinely taught that simply reading a book was insufficient. In order to have a "fruitful interaction" (p. 4) with a text, marking it up with one's thoughts and reactions was considered essential. Marginalia and other signs of engagement and use – even such apparently content-neutral additions as food stains – Sherman sees as valuable evidence of reader reaction, and the place of the physical information object in people's lives.

In a study of flickr.com, Ames and Naaman (2007) created a taxonomy of motivations for annotation along two dimensions: sociality and function. The latter dimension echoes people's motivation to annotate printed textbooks: the function of making important or interesting passages more easily findable for later review. The sociality dimension is a component of the Web infrastructure – making photographs findable for others, and creating shared tagsets for people with similar interests, so they might collaborate more easily. In this sense, photographs are boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989), around which diverse individuals can interact and communities can build (Gal, Yoo and Boland 2006). Digital collection items can also be boundary objects, even if those conversations take place asynchronously.