Month: June 2013

by Scott Freeman

I was recently at a bar and jokingly attacked by a couple of friends about non-quantitative data. Consultants love them some numbers. While their jests were well taken, the underlying point was also well taken. As Hervè Varenne addressed in his position paper on anthropology and education, students of anthropology often find themselves kowtowing to quantitative research, apologizing for ‘sampling limitations’. This is to say that the type of modernity that insists on brevity and a numerically constructed objectivity may be the current that we swim against most.…

Given the discussion of MOOCs that has been occurring in the blogosphere over the last year, I thought it might be helpful to get a longer perspective on technology and education. In that spirit, I have dug up this 30 minute conversation between Lawrence Cremin of Teachers College and Mara Mayor of the Annenberg CPB project on the role of technology in education.

The conversation is here.

The conversation demonstrates that the question surrounding the interplay of technology and education haven’t changed much in the last 25 years, or the last 50.…

I want take up Tony’s question about this Dennett quote:

There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination (Dennett 1995)

One way to answer this is through recourse to the literature on Science and Technology Studies (STS). We could weave our way through a dense web of philosophical and empirical work on scientific practice that demonstrates time and again that value-free inquiry is an illusion.…