LTS: a Socratic Phenomenology

Questions on the initiative denominated:Learning and Teaching Support.

1. What did you expect from LTS initially?  I approached it rather open-mindedly, assuming that it would offer mostly bureaucratic instructions and commonplace instructions.
2. Having explored the LTS resources, were your expectations borne out or were you surprised? In what ways do you see this being useful for your own curriculum designs? The system certainly reflects--and thereby helps discern--institutional expectations in conformity with national criteria for social integration.  In this respect, LTS is helpful.  The "Student Feedback" was especially intriguing insofar as it begs the question as to where the demand for para-disciplinarian learning/activities converts into a distraction detrimental to substantive learning.  But in general the resources I explored gave me the impression of concealing an agenda (esp. pertaining to "learning" and "success" or so-called "material culture") behind a gloss of false transparency (cf. e.g. the promise of "authentic learning"). Eerie.
3. What would you like to see from the LTS initiative? A less (or not at all) instrumentalist approach to learning.  As a monitoring system (esp. via feedbacks and questionnaires...such as the one at hand), LTS might be more effective if it were introduced by a formal clarification of the raison d'être of LTS, including an exploration of the general problems that LTS was set up to respond to (vague intimations are given in various places, e.g., in the section on ancient-language learning).
4. How do you think about the model of peer-sourced support for curriculum designers? Is it comparable with other institutions you are familiar with? I know of no instances from other institutions, so I am not fit to make inter-institutional comparisons.  In general I remain weary of the project of abstracting means from ends so as to set up an aseptic system of pure means ready-at-hand to be applied to all disciplines of learning for the sake of realizing their respective ends.  The problem here is that once the means (viz., anything that may contribute positively to the success of a discipline of learning) are imposed back upon particular settings from without (e.g., from the alchemic laboratory of a "curriculum designer"), the ends they now point to are no longer "natural" or indigenous to the settings (i.e., to the particular field of investigation).  For means necessarily point to and presuppose ends that reflect the substantive background or immanent form (occasion/motive) of the means.  Once the means are cut off from their original occasion/context, they become means to a necessarily new end, no matter how closely it may resemble old ends.  Thereby the clinically "processed" means serve as Trojan horses for new ends to be injected surreptitiously in principle in every discipline of learning, leading to its radical subversion.  In order to avert this scenario, curricula should be shaped as much as possible from within disciplines themselves, in recognition of their inherent virtue (lest the disciplines be justified merely in function of social approval).  And wherever this were to prove a failure, i.e. where one discipline were to fail to discover its justification independently of foreign demands, then the discipline should be deemed plainly unjustified, instead of being justified ex machina and ad hoc.

Cloudworks: a Socratic phenomenology

Reflecting on the internet application <Cloudworks>.  As all technological tools,* Cloudworks serves the primary--hence underlying, hence tacit--aim, not merely of "connecting" users, but of "grounding" them, or rather of "re-grounding" them, i.e., of transporting/translating them from a defective or inadequate platform (viz. the uncontrolled arena of nature) onto an adequate (because systematically or clinically controlled) platform, which is as controlled as it is abstracted from the natural condition of man as man.  Only thus is it possible to set up a network of "pure tools" systematically concealing their essential aim or "inherent value." 

         The value of the tool is supposed to be assigned, not merely by the virtue of its user, but by the number of users or the degree to which the tool succeeds in connecting the greatest number of users (likewise, the "meaning" of the tool is supposed to be determined by the "power"--impact, relevance, etc.--of the audience, rather than by the "quality" or inherent worth of the audience).  What is crucial here is a mechanically quantifiable datum directly dependent upon the essential aim of technological tools simpliciter, namely the regrounding of mankind onto a purely quantifiable (ergo, controllable) platform.  

     Here art does not merely imitate nature (or the essential working of nature); art--the new "technological" art--replaces nature.  Or rather, wanting to replace nature, technology eclipses nature, which is to say, first of all, human nature.  Only thus could a "successful" blogger connected to Cloudworks invite "'Socratic Tooling' to solve your learning problems and issues" (http://zaidlearn.blogspot.com/2008/04/free-learning-tool-for-every-learning.html).  Here "Tooling" is a verb.  Its "user" does not appear to be aware that the proper import of his verb is essentially anti-Socratic; he does not appear to be aware that Socrates was not a Deweyan pragmatist--that Socratism was opposed by Dewey, no less than by Machiavelli, for an "essentialism" tying means back to their original ends ("the Ideas").  With respect to modern technology, there is hardly anyone less progressive (and thus at once less reactionary) or revolutionary than Socrates--that eminently untechnological concentric artist.

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* Modern "technology" is essentially distinct from mere "technique".  Antiquity has "tools" intended to solve solvable/definite empirical problems (sealing a leaking roof, crossing a river, building a house, etc.).  Modern technology in its very idea "expands" technique in function of a new guiding principle, namely that of "infinite progress," entailing the promise to overcome, not merely this or that particular obstacle to human survival, but the very natural horizon on which man's survival is threatened.  In this sense, technology is essentially the Way through which modern man hopes to overcome (via control) nature.  But, as such, technology is at once also the Aim of modern man qua modern: technology is intended in its ideal perfection as the self-realization of a world in which man--via collectivization--is absolute master of his destiny.  Conversely collectivized-man can be master of his destiny only where nature has been fully replaced by art, i.e. only with the consummate incorporation of nature (including human nature) into Technology.

Thing 1

Responding to:

1) what your experiences are with curriculum design, and 2) what you would like to get out of the programme.

Re. (1): No experiences aside from setting this blog up. 
Re. (2): I am here to discover what the programme has to offer, whilst exploring the possibility that a "blog" escape the fate of a blob.

Setting this blog up was a rather impersonal, tasteless matter, reminescent of some modern philosophers' attempt to ascend to political/human life by beginning from the pre-political life of cicadas (not to speak of Democritean atoms in the vortex/void).

The Honest Man

Of the honest man (honestum) or man of honor who is the true poet, Horace wrote: non fumum ex fulgore sed ex fumo dare lucem.