I’m out of town this weekend, and the hotel is also hosting a huge Model UN competition. It’s been amazing to watch these kids, from around the world, glued to the television and argue passionately and creatively about the implications of the series of events around Jan. 25, and the broader unrest in the Middle East. (Though, if I understand things a-right, at least some of them are having to rapidly update their preparation in order to keep up with events on the ground.)
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I’m out of town this weekend, and the hotel is also hosting a huge Model UN competition. It’s been amazing to watch these kids, from around the world, glued to the television and argue passionately and creatively about the implications of the series of events around Jan. 25, and the broader unrest in the Middle East. (Though, if I understand things a-right, at least some of them are having to rapidly update their preparation in order to keep up with events on the ground.)
I myself have nothing directly to say about it, other than to defer to the excellent Aaron Bady.
On to the rest of the links:
As Egypt’s government struggles to turn off the internet (!), Zeynep Tufekci offers Seven Theses on Dictator’s Dilemma: Dissent is not just about knowing what you think but about the formation of a public. A public is not just about what you know. Publics form through knowing that other people know what you know; and also knowing that they know what you know.
Henry Giroux skewers the attack on higher education from soi-disant reformers such as the Gates and Lumina foundations: Never has this assault on the democratic polity been more obvious, if not more dangerous, than at the current moment when a battle is being waged under the rubric of neoliberal austerity measures on the autonomy of academic labor, the classroom as a site of critical pedagogy, the rights of students to high quality education, the democratic vitality of the university as a public sphere and the role played by the liberal arts and humanities in fostering an educational culture that is about the practice of freedom and mutual empowerment.(Related.)
David Wiley explains why openness isn’t necessarily socialist: When you pay (through the Department of Education) for a brand-name university in New England to produce simulation-based educational games that can help almost anyone learn basic physics, do you ever get to play that game? No. When you pay (through the NSF) for a brand-name university on the West Coast to conduct research that results in a groundbreaking article that significantly reinterprets the way the world works, do you ever get to read the article? No.
Tony Hirst shows how he produced an ego-graph of Open University faculty’s participation in the BBC’s In Our Time. Not really quotable, but a fascinating look at how to analyze free text, given the existence of naming conventions.
