The Cycle of Life
Thoughts about life in Ireland, cycling and what I've learned along the way
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November 2010 Ireland in Turmoil – The Relevance of Habermas and the Theory of Communicative Action
It may seem odd to make a connection between the current upheavals – the political, economic and national identity crisis in Ireland – and the work of Jurgen Habermas, a German social philosopher and critical theorist born in 1929. However, I believe that insights from the work of Habermas have something to offer by way of explanation for the current predicament in which we now find ourselves and more enticingly, may also provide useful pointers for our emancipation through discourse and communicative action. Habermas is still a very active writer and he comments regularly on political and social issues of our time. You can keep up to date with his…
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SITE Conference
I recently attended the SITE Conference in San Diego, California. SITE stands for the Society for the Information Technology and Teacher Education and it is one of the biggest conferences in this field. Chip Bruce and I had submitted a paper based on the Digital Literacy in Primary Schools (DLIPS) project.I attended many other sessions and it was very useful to catch up with developments across the field. One thing that struck me is the use (perhaps overuse) of short abbreviations to describe areas of interest. Thus a session might be described as dealing with TPAC for SET in K-12 – decoded this means Mhisra and Koehler’s (2006) Technological, Pedagogical…
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Why We Blog
Yes! With some help from the marketing department of the best college in Ireland (click here to find out). I can proudly report that Leo’s Learning Blog has been nominated for the Irish Blog Awards in the category of Best Specialist Blog. Well, surely this is something to blog about! Yes! but before I get too carried away I note that there are many excellent blogs in this category including Eugene’s Blog, Deryk Thormy’s Blog and Jimmy Hill’s Blog. So what’s going on with blogging? What are we all doing and more importantly why do people blog? As you might expect I have a learning theory that might explain, in part, what…
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Lord Mayor’s Commission on Employment
The Lord Mayor of Dublin, Cllr. Emer Costello, is to be commended for establishing a Commission on Employment for Dublin. This is an inspired and necessary goal for the City Council and tackling unemployment or, to put it more positively, creating employment is essential for the future well-being of all who live and work in our city. The Lord Mayor’s Commission has set up working groups on a number of key areas: (1) Unemployment & Employment, (2) Business, Entrepreneurship & Finance, (3) Education, Skills and Training, and (4) Volunteering & the Social Economy. The commission have invited submissions and I have copied below my own contribution on the area of…
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Weekend in Rota d’Imagna
Maire and I and our Caoimhe (19) and Jim (16) decided to spend a short weekend away in Italy – we had spotted cheap flights to Bergamo on Ryanair and used Tripadvisor to scour the area nearby for cheap but good hotels. We came accross Hotel Miramonti which is about 40 minutes from Bergamo up in the mountains.The town was called Rota d’Imagna and it is very pleasently located high up in the alpine foothills. We also spent a day in Bergamo itself – this is a wonderful town especially the old city. This was a great weekend – really enjoyable with just the four of us. Maire and I…
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Our Digital World invades the Bicycle!
The Dublin bike scheme is a welcome addition to our city. It will be great for toursists and locals alike. Dublin is a relatively flat city and if you can brave the wind and the rain then cycling is a great way to get about. I had seen the new stands being constructed and looked forward to the inauguration of this new service for many months now. How practical! How green! How good of our city and government to, at last, offer something for ordinary people to use and to enjoy. So you can imagine my enthusium to read the practical details as they were published in the newspapers this…
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Learning Identity and Learning Italian
In previous posts I spoke about learning identity. I emphasised that we all carry many (often unquestioned) assumptions about who we are and who we can be as learners. The notion of learning identity is proposed as a component of one’s overall self-identity. I argued that learning identity is often framed in one’s school years and can remain fixed through life especially for non-participants in further formal learning. In my own research on participation in the digital world I came accross learning identity as an important influence on people’s decisions to enroll on basic computer courses. The recurrent theme is captured in the phrase “I was no good in school”.…
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NAMA – having a haircut or taking a bath!
This week experienced a turning point in the public consciousness regarding NAMA the National Asset Management Agency.People are asking questions – really fundamental questions – about the wisdom of the government’s strategy of using NAMA to buy up the bad loans from the banks. If ever we need a very public debate about what we should do – this is the time and this is the issue. The amount of money involved is staggering – decisions made in the next few months will have implications for generations to come. It is not good enough to say that we can’t understand what’s going on, each of us has a responsibility to…
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Slea Head
We decided to spend some days in Dingle, County Kerry.Why Dingle?Well this is a place that I’ve always had a fondness for and it has been many years since I visited. I made a documentary in the mid-1980s called Up Sraid Eoin (John Street) – it was the story of the Dingle wren boys. We filmed it one St Stephens Day and it was broadcast on RTE the following year. I had been introduced to Dingle while I was working in UCD’s Audio Visual Centre – we spent a whole summer recording stories and music for the Department of Irish Folklore/Irish Folklore Commission. The irony was that we were using…
