Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

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.

Effective instructional practice leads to increased language development and cultural understanding and meets the needs of all students in the language classroom. Integrating technology innovations into instruction is vital to a 21st century learning environment. Various program models and curriculum designs are featured in this category from elementary program dual language, immersion, and FLES, to higher education programs that focus on advanced language proficiency.

If you are a presenter as well as the person submitting the proposal, you must still list yourself as a presenter. As the submitter your name will be included as the “session organizer”, but you must also add your name as a presenter. This is very important otherwise your name will not show as being a presenter on the submission and your proposal may not be considered. Be sure that your presenter information is current – email address, affiliation (school/company), address, etc – in the database.

when Gutenberg (borrowing from the Chinese) perfected moveable type, he led the way to another and even broader form of cultural sharing; literacy became widespread in the aftermath of the printing press, and savants throughout the Europe published their insights, sharing their own expertise, producing the Enlightenment and igniting the Scientific Revolution. Peer-review, although portrayed today as a conservative force, initially acted as a radical intellectual accelerant, a mental hormone which again amplified the engines of human culture, leading directly to the Industrial Age.

Sociability has always been the cornerstone to human effectiveness. Being social has always been the best way to get ahead.

MT @anneperez: Someone asked me a qn-- does having students creating content for a course website count as dh? Cc @triproftri @briancroxall

@anneperez it's a good question. I think most dh-ers would say it would be dh if students were asked to reflect on the dig form+