A Future of Undergraduate Teaching

In various fora, I've been doing a lot of discussing and thinking about this lately and I think that this scenario is very likely.

 ... most teaching in the early years of an undergraduate degree will gradually cease to be via lectures and will instead take the form of online presentations produced by professionally trained presenters backed up by teams of academics. This online content will be paralleled by peer tuition (or teaching by questioning) which, when done well, is clearly effective (see here and here), and the associated growth of so-called learning analytics. Lectures may well become special occasions in which the best-known academics make their presence felt. Meanwhile, small group teaching will make a come-back in all years, especially in the best universities.

We've been saying for years that lectures are not a good way to learn except for a minority for whom it resonates with their learning style. And when we take on board the critique of our education system more generally that it is a huge university entrance system predicated on forming traditional research academics, then in GB it really is likely that the new fee regime is going to concentrate pedagogical minds on androgogical matters (though I prefer a term like mathetogogical). That is assuming that we are able to effect a culture change in British culture more widely to take away the prejudice that the only form of 'education' worth having is precisely invested in the system to produce research academics (even though simultaneously that is derided)

The fact is that HEI's will have to think hard about just what it is that they are 'selling'. I think that part of the answer will be 'accreditation' (largely about summative assessment and benchmarking) and another will be formative assessment and learning coaching.

The question in a barebones version of that future is about the way that those less able to access learning resources (including the human ones) of a traditional-ish form will be enabled to access it. Or will the 'total package' including access to counselling and other support services remain a kind of gold-standard?

The Future of Undergraduate Teaching - WorldWise - The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Pedestrianity at the lights

This is another of my pet peeves: traffic lights for pedestrians. They vary so much but I really find myself wondering about the way that the timing systems are designed. Sometimes it seems that there is a reasonable amount of thought involved in the system design, at others, and more often, it seems like pedestrians are definitely not really thought of except as another traffic flow. The difficulty with this latter matter is that pedestrians aren't cars and our psychology isn't the same as a driver's.

Concretely: I walk a lot in urban areas. I find it vexing to feel dutiful and so wait for a green man when it appears that there is no vehicle traffic moving, doubly so when it becomes apparent that there have been periods of time sufficient to let me cross when no vehicles moved. Triply vexing when it seems likely that this is because they haven't really considered pedestrians as such, merely as another element in the sequence; so our ability to get across need not be subject to quite the same timing constraints as for motorised traffic. (Though conversely, it is a bit concerning that the bleeping crossing indicators seem to assume that people walk at my high speed: they probably need about 5 seconds more for most people)

It actually becomes dangerous when this isn't attended to properly. Why? Because pedestrians move slower and so (relatively small) distances have greater significance to us. It may not seem as bad to wait for 30 seconds in a car, somehow, but knowing you could have crossed the road and be 30 yards nearer your destination as a walker is significant. So, having too long to wait at traffic lights breeds impatience and tends to nudge pedestrians to cross, sometimes at risky points in the cycle. I wonder if there is any research into this, and if there is, whether anyone has actually tried using it to design fitter-for-purpose traffic light systems for pedestrians.

What would help would be to design light sequences either to be more responsive to pedestrian presence or to allow more frequent crossing making waiting time never more than 30 seconds or to do what China and Japan seem to do and have countdowns telling you how much time you have to cross which gives you the autonomy to make the informed choice.

Hell is others in the sense, here, of having to suffer the unthinking design choices of others and what I shrewdly suspect is prejudice against non-motorised road users.

it is worth recalling that except on motorways, in GB pedestrians actually have right of way, I understand, so the red and green figures are advisory. (I may be wrong). In Germany, by contrast, they are mandatory and you could be fined for crossing when the red figure shows -so I was given to understand.

Self-refuting communication: medium versus message

I just got a phone call.
A recorded voice began: "This is an important message ..."
I put the phone down muttering, "If it's so important, why is it a recorded message?"

In an age of cheap reproduction of all kinds of messages, importance is marked by personal attention, time given and demonstrable consideration of ones personal circumstances and background. An effectively broadcast message just doesn't do that.

Of course, the age of googlised personalisation where targetted but automated messages are more and more accurately deployed to personal history may change that somewhat. But probably in a way that makes a real person more valuable in conveying the message "this is/you are important". Consider the value of a handwritten letter against a printed one against a leaflet.

A/theism: -isms are not the point

I like this because it's good to find an atheist who recognises that behind some of the crassness of the New Atheism there lie some methodological problems. But before looking at that, there's a look at what is faith is about, quoting Giles Fraser:

 “Theology is faith seeking understanding. Understanding is not the basis on which one has faith but it is what one does to try to understand the faith one has.”

I think that's pretty much where I'm at. I was introduced to the Latin tag fides quaerens intellectum when I was studying postgraduate theology under Dick McKinney in Nottingham. It's worth listening to Giles' bit on the podcast, because it helps to grasp what that might mean in a human life. It's an important starting place in the sense that it enables us to notice something that is fundamental, it seems, to human being; we all believe stuff and much of our beliefs are not directly empirically-based but there is a much more complex arrangement of assumptions, tested hypotheses, assessments of plausibility and implausibility, trust in coherences and lines of deduction and socially-recognised investment in the positions held. The problem is that too many New Atheists are too naive about this complex, deluded by thinking that the part of their world view that they think is empirically based is the whole or at least the most significant AND they do not notice how their own thinking has many beliefs entwined in it that are not empirically based (whatever that means -and not noticing that it is a problem is part of their issue).

Anyway, Dominic Lukes notes that in practice those who are becoming scientists operate rather similarly to religious believers:

... Graduate students are told to question everything but they soon learn that this questioning is only good as long as it doesn’t disrupt the research paradigm. Their careers and livelihoods depend on not questioning much of anything. In practice, this is not very different from the personal reading of the Bible

That at least recognises something of the complexity I mentioned above.
There is some useful noting of the way that stories function also for atheists and a note that, in effect,

John Gray can provide a useful perspective: “The ‘essence’ is an apologetic invention that someone comes up with later to try and preserve the core of an idea [like Christianity or Marxism] from criticism.”

What this is implying strongly, of course, is the epistemological, observation that for anyone to 'know' something, they first have to 'believe' something; everything we know is faith-based in the end.
Gray's bit of the conversation referred to, points out that the history of atheism is quite messy and convoluted in respect of relationship to political ideas and projects and even to humanism (which started out as a Christian project).

Who-knows-what-how stories: The scientific and religious knowledge paradox | Metaphor Hacker - Hacking Metaphors, Frames and Other Ideas

Israeli MP publically tore out NT

The fuller story is here: Israel MPs sent Bibles as gifts, one official publically tore out the New Testament. Apparently the Bible Society sent Hebrew Bibles with NT to all the members of the Israeli Knesset (that's the parliament, in case the word's new to you). One of the MK's, Ben-Ari, reportedly tore out the NT section and spoke about it in a way that even had the Anti-Defamation League backing away.

While Bible Society officials reportedly said they did not distribute the Bibles as a way to evangelize, Ben-Ari and other Knesset Members think they did.
"This horrible book caused the murder of millions of Jews in the Inquisition and the auto-da-fe's," said Ben-Ari, according to INN. He also said sending the book was "ugly, provocative missionizing," and while most of his government colleagues agree, they don't like the way he expressed his disapproval.

To be honest, I feel that he's way over-stated it and is arguably guilty of what in many parts of the world might be regarded as a hate crime. Fortunately he's dealing with Christians who -ironically because of the teachings of the book he maligned- are mostly likely to do some version of turning the other cheek. I'm not sure that some other faith communities would be quite so tolerant of their scriptures being treated in this way and spoken of thus. And even if Christians don't 'turn the other cheek', then they would be failing to live by the teaching of the NT. Teaching which, recall, includes 'Love your neighbour as yourself' and 'love is patient ... kind ... is not arrogant ... rude ... does not rejoice over wrong ...' and 'do not return evil for evil' etc. I find it perverse that the NT should be written off so glibly and referred to as 'horrible' (that's not to say it doesn't contain disturbing imagery and some passages that are difficult and needing glossing by reference to more mainstream themes and threads).

Doubly ironic is that the book concerned is a book about a Rabbi much of it by another rabbi, written by Jews for Jews, mostly.

I do take the point that the book concerned, does lie somewhere in the genealogy of the Inquisition and pogroms. However, we should recall that in order for those things to have happened, some quite vital pieces of its message were forgotten or ignored or casuistically circumvented for extrinsic political or inter-communal purposes. The reaction of Ben-Ari, in a further irony, is an additional reason why he should actually read it: it would provide him with a critique of sub-Christian behaviour and enable him to hold Christians accountable to their best lights.

But there is another issue lurking here: even if the Bible Society did have an evangelistic hope for their action, is that so terrible? Surely, provided people have a choice, can say 'no' and are not being harassed or bullied or pressured by extrinsic inducements why can Christians or any other group, not give up time, money and/or effort to encourage understanding and perhaps a change of heart and mind? I really cannot see, in principle, why that is wrong. I can understand that there may be sensitivities involved, but that is hardly the same thing.

University as corporation

In my university, Northumbria, the VC (who also bears, significantly, the title Chief Executive) has just completed a round of staff briefings to present 'Vision 2025'. I was intrigued to not that he and the governors have clearly been considering things in the kind of way that this article
Focusing a Corporate Lens on Global Universities - Planet Academe - The Chronicle of Higher Education envisages:

when universities overcome their natural resistance to comparing themselves to multinational corporations, they can think in new and useful ways. And learning to think differently is, after all, what universities are all about.

In particular these things from the article resonate:

Universities need to make it someone’s job to manage international partnerships, to sustain relationships, to make sure the institution and its partners are getting what they want from relationships

I think that 'we' can tick that box: over the last couple of years or so there have been appointments in this area in its various dimensions. Or at least so it seems to me.
And how about this? 

Universities, like companies, may need to make the transformation from being a national brand to being a global one.

This was, essentially, one of the big themes in the VC's briefing. Except that, perhaps, the leap is even bigger: from a regional to a global 'brand'. The demographics are a clear indicator of what needs to happen: today's 1-5 year olds will only number about 3.5 million in 2025, which is not a lot to share between 140 or so institutions as they exist today in GB. But look at the comparable figures for China, India, Indonesia and you'll see which are the big markets to reach for. Go figure...
And I think I discern the basis in the way that I hear university managers talking for this being taken seriously, especially as the university already has very good employability ratings and a big focus on professional education.

An organization, whether it is a company or a university, can identify two arrows. One is what people are looking for in jobs, and the other is what the institution has to offer. An organization that can find the intersection of those arrows can build powerful, long-term success.

And I suspect that the recent de-merging of Careers from Student Support and Wellbeing in the University -and it seems to be a very good careers service- may be about freeing them up to help in this process, but I may be over-interpretnig. If so, then it certainly won't harm the Uni to be doing this in the light of this remark.


Of course, the wider issue is how far we 'like' the idea of university as corporation, but it does seem that survival and thriving have a financial dimension and this does indicate that attention to matters that enable thriving in financial terms. The problems with the model are not at that level, but whether the mentality associated with the business model is compatible with or noxious to the main 'missions' of a university. I think that this is analogous to individual human beings experiencing some tension between various aims in life. We sometimes express this in phrases such as 'Am I eating to live or living to eat?" or 'Are we working to live or living to work?'. For a university, I suspect,  this may be something like 'Are we making money to learn and teach or are we teaching and learning to make money?' And, as with human individuals, it is easy to slip from the healthy  '-ing to live' to the soul-destroying 'living to -', so it may be be universities, I would suggest.


With human individuals we know or suspect that they/we have veered into the unhealthy relationship with work or money when relationships are damaged, physical health is compromised and mood falls into depression and irritability which may also show up in poor decision-making.


I would suggest that similarly with universities. Relationships with partners, employees, government and the environment are damaged (and this may involve fraudulent and abusive patterns of behaviour); organisational dysfunction becomes prevalent; employee satisfaction falls and morale plummets. Now those things need to be read off in terms of people being part of the enterprise of HE because they believe in something of the 'mission' of a university (and, theologically, I'd say that has something to do with the providential purposes 'under God' which is strongly related, I would suggest, to the vocation of an HEI) and that would have a relation to the issue of morale.


Hmmm. It'd be great if there were comments on what other uni's are doing, but I' don't know how many of my readers are likely to be in a position to do so...

Shaping, Being Shaped and Hypertextual argumentation

I've been considering that something I'm working on writing might be best produced in its primary form as an e-book with hypertextual intertextuality quite prominent. This is because it is attempting to bring together two or three normally separate disciplines and the nature of the argumentation is such that one could usefully start in several places and give more or less attention to certain parts according to what one already knows or where the primary interest might lie for any particular reader.

I happened upon something that seems to give a sense of this way of writing here: CMC Magazine: Shaping and Being Shaped. It starts with an introductiory statement with hypertext follow-throughs -the links aren't reproduced below but if you go to the link in the last sentence you'll see that this co-ordinating paragraph branches out to further resources:

Modern social scientists have widely critiqued technological determinism and have come to occupy four primary stances with respect to it. In this article, I examine the tone of technological determinism and the corresponding attitudes towards technology these stances imply.
I use a framework which is broadly applicable to both the macrosocial and microsocial levels. The selectivity of media shifts the purposes that a user originally had in using it. This transformation gives rise to resonances which can best be understood from a perspective which acknowledges interacting frames.

Art sculpts science ... and faith?

I find myself recently both helping to set up a Christians in Science group and to facilitate Christians working in the Arts who are in the University. I find myself, not unnaturally, considering matters that relate the two areas of endeavour. So, this article grabs interest, Can art shape scientific thought? : RSA blogs, in it the author says something intriguing:

What really fascinates me, though, is the idea that collaboration between artists and scientists might move to the level where it actually affects working practice. Scientific breakthroughs radically overhauling art are everywhere (the effect of photographic film on painting is a good example), but this relationship is largely seen as a one-way street. Imagine, instead, a scientific breakthrough that happened because of art.

And it seems to me that the science-to-art traffic has been at a more subtle level latterly: the discovery and popularisation of fractals  and chaos and complexity seemed to inspire art  which reflected those discoveries; organic, random and unpredictable forms became prominent.

But it's right that it'd be great if things could go the other way. However, I think that there is already a way in which the art-to-science dynamic occurs: it's a bit conceptual, but it is aesthetic. I'm talking about the elegance of the mathematics of sub-atomic particles which has inspired the discovery of particles that had been unknown but predicted by the symmetry of the equations. It seems to me that this aesthetic sense has been something of an art-to-science thing.

The author mentions the issue of religion, though somewhat unsatisfactorily. I have written and spoken  elsewhere of how it seems to me that Adam naming the animals helps me, at least, to see a certain commonality between the enterprises of art and science. Both involve 'naming' in the broader sense of conceptualising in order to give expression. In one case for purposes of technical understanding and application, in the other case for purposes of affective understanding and aesthetic appreciation. Both involve perceiving similarities and differences and representing them; in one case in theories and formulae and in the other through aesthetic media (for want of a better term).


The article mentions Kuhn's insight about paradigm shifts, and this is indeed relevant. To put it in terms of 'naming', a paradigm shift involves re-viewing things with a different set of similarities and differences picked out. The trick of an art-to-science influence would be, I suspect, in the presentation of information in such a way as to make plain the metaphoric bases of the thinking and to enable meta-thinking, or at least for new connections and re-constellations of data. For that, we need artists who can grasp something of the science and scientists who are able to mentor the artists so inclined.


I wonder whether this is the way being opened up by Information is Beautiful?

Linguistic prejudice in editing copy for publication

This is fascinating. Okay some of it is about housestyle and some of it is about readability, but some of it is sheer linguistic prejudice where recognition of a certain diversity in dialect or register should be given. Check out The Most Common Edits and note that while there are three or four fair-enough comments, there are also two or three well-dodgy ones.

In fact it's faintly amusing that the way this one is introduced actually needed editing by me and I'm still not sure it makes sense (phrase containing word 'petard' comes to mind).

the writer putsneither or not only before a verb, and then fails to supply a verb for the matching nor orbut also: “The investigation could neither account for the missing cupcakes nor for the fact that there was a secret door in the back of the manager’s office.” Some readers can skim right past a sentence like that; others will shudder

In fact, not only do I skim past it, I can't even see what the issue is. I think I'm a pretty good user of English, I therefore think that this level of pernickety-ness is OTT: the shudderers should get a life and learn that a vast swathe of English-speakers, natives at that, don't speak/write their variety and don't see why they should have to learn to. Give a little, guys.

Then there is this little gem:

pronouns sometimes fail to match the referent and its verb, especially when a collective noun is involved: “The restaurant continues to advertise their cupcakes.”

This is not a failure to match referent and verb: it's a variety of English usage whereby a third person singular following a gender-indefinite antecedent  may use 'their' or 'they'. It's perfectly respectable: Shakespeare and Jane Austen did it, it was only Victorian grammar Nazis who disallowed it on spurious pseudo-logical grounds.

People who edit: it's about time you recognised that you are ill served by some of this grammer Nazi prejudice: lighten up.
People who suck their teeth when someone uses, for example, 'their' for an indefinite though singular antecedant (sic): other people have to learn to recognise and put up with your English usage when it differs from theirs: do the decent thing and reciprocate.
People who write: by all means learn to shorten sentences, keep phrasing closer together and recognise that punctuation is to help your readers compensate for the lack of intonation and body language. But you are entitled to your own variety of English and to challenge the prejudices of those who claim they don't like any variety but their own. They need to loosen up; why should putting up with different varieties be a one way traffic in their favour.

Future church

I've blogged myself about what may need to happen with the dear old CofE as the next few decades unfold. Probably best to look at this one or this one, if you're interested in checking it out. So I had a sense of fellow feeling with Doug's post here; especially when I read this:

 There are now so few stipendiary clergy that it might be time to ask

• whether we should plan for non-stipendiary ministry being the normal exercise of a priestly vocation and see stipendiary ministry as more strategic, focused on big churches (e.g. minsters, church-planting and mission centres and cathedrals) as area deans, as some specialist ministries and so on

• whether that means seeing stipendiary and non-stipendiary ministries alike as something people can move in and out of (often from one to the other), and change the stipend to a salary which allows either the purchase of housing, or (as appropriate) the paying of rent for church owned property.

I'm also minded that some of this is not so dissimilar to the thrust of the Tiller report back in the early 1980's ... We know what we should do, we just haven't got the courage to do it until we're forced to. At best it's a triumph of hope (wishful thinking, more like) over sense.
Five conversations for a declining church � iconotype:

Rioting as ecstatic experience

A dimension that is often missing from discussions and accounts of violence and other forms of crime, is the way that involvement in such activities, especially where crowds or large groups are concerned, is actually a desirable experience in some way. From a Guardian report on a recent CofE report on the 2011 riots:

Austin Smith, a Passionist Catholic priest from Liverpool who died in 2011, who said such rioting could be "literally an ecstatic experience" after the Toxteth trouble in the 1980s.
"Something is released in the participants which takes them out of themselves as a kind of spiritual escape," Price said. "The tragedy of our times is that, once again, we have a large population of young people who are desperate to escape from the constrained lives to which they seem to be condemned.
"Where hope has been killed off, is it surprising that their energies erupt in antisocial and violent actions?"

Especially where such actions have this "ecstatic" quality where there is a joy in shared enterprise and in breaking boundaries and in the physical activity -not to mention in getting some 'goodies'. And then there may be the sense of 'sticking it' to a society that has been excluding and 'screwing' you. A potent and heady mixture indeed. And if we don't recognise this joy (I think Nietzsche did), we may be less able to deal with it.
Church report on riots warns about effects of cuts | UK news | The Guardian:

Could this be the next data privacy threat?

I'm all for doing sensible things in government, especially where they result in better stewardship of resources and promote the welfare of people generally. This proposal is that government 'works smarter' with regard to its collection and use of data:

"Across the public sector, extraordinary quantities of data are amassed in the course of running public services," said Chris Yiu, author of the report. "Finding ways to share or link this data together has the potential to save time for citizens and money for taxpayers. The government will need the capability to conduct analytics effectively, and the courage to pursue this agenda with integrity."

And part of me says 'amen'. However, another part of my puts up red flags, blows a whistle and cries 'big brother'. And I'm not sure which voice is right or how right each voice is. What I do know is that there is potentially an issue, depending on what data and the way that it is used.

So, an apparently acceptable idea is this

... suggestions from the Policy Exchange is to axe the 10-yearly census and instead gather data from the electoral roll, council tax registers and other sources to estimate the total population of the UK and its breakdown according to types and sizes of household, occupations, religion and other factors. Done this way, the government could save £500m for each census, and the information could be "acceptable quality and more up to date," says the thinktank.

This seems to be almost self-evidently a good idea -and I seem to recall that the like has already been suggested in the sense that some have pointed out that our census data are often out of date before they are published and that data that could tell us similar things are available by harvesting other sources.


Where I get a bit concerned is when I read:

Tax officers could also look at how much tax people pay to company accounts and other data to highlight individuals who are paying less than expected.

Now, I don't know what this means in practice, so it may be innocuous, but then again ... so is there devil in that detail? Certainly the report recognises that there could be an issue.

It also acknowledges the risk of angering individuals who feel – or fear – their privacy is being invaded, and suggests the government adopt a code of conduct called the Code for Responsible Analytics.

I'm a bit worried that there is a slightly dismissive tone about that and whether a Code is enough -unless it is tied firmly into legislation about data protection and does not, in effect, remove protections and rights we already have -which the which the Identity Card database threatened to do.


Better use of public data could save government �33bn | Politics | guardian.co.uk:

Matching meditation technique to people...

I'm thenking about now about how best to offer opportunities to learn meditation into the life of Northumbria University. So it was interesting to see this report Finding right meditation technique key to user satisfaction. The main thrust of it is this: "Because of the increase in both general and clinical use of meditation, you want to make sure you're finding the right method for each person,"

Basically, the research found that people stuck with it if they took to it. There's going to be more research needed to fine tune what's involved in preferences. Those us involved in spiritual direction and prayer guiding are -many of us- used to encouraging people to consider what works for them. I'm wondering whether patterns could be discerned that might work with different personality types or whether it would be cultural backgrounds ore something else that would prove to be the key factor in what 'works' for different people.


In the mean time, I'm thinking that it may be good to flag up to learners that there are a handful of different approaches and they might need to experiment a bit. I'd already been considering that there should be a short 'course' in which different things could be tried out. But if anyone would like to leave a comment about research or even informal observations of what kind of people take to which kind of approach, I'd be most interested.


I have suspicions or hunches in terms of MBTI types: S may prefer mindfulness as it involves giving attention to sensory experience; becoming immersed in it. I'm less sure, but I think that perhaps mantra-style approaches might work better for Ts. ... I've seen these things worked out in termss of prayer, but meditation is something that overlaps with prayer but not isomorphically. So I'm not quite sure how F and N types would relate.

Mutinying against Pirates

I've read the whole of the book and I've delayed writing a further post because two of the chapters, five and six, presented me with things I needed to think through further because I wasn't sure whether I could wholeheartedly affirm the arguments they make. I still like what I take to be the overall message about being aware of the reasons for piracy particularly in contexts of injustice, hypocrisy and cruelty which piracy may often be, in effect, an understandable and often justifiable protest.

But then we come to chapter 5, and I think it gets a bit murkier.
In chapter 5 we turn our attention to fiction and psychology: cue a consideration of Peter Pan. The Pan story is interpreted for its psychological dynamics of growing up: Wendy, on the cusp of the transition from girl to woman, temporarily 'abandoned' by her parents, especially her father, decides to take up the chance to prolong childhood with Pan though ironically she ends up being 'mother' to the lost boys. She has become "blocked". The  solution to this is piratical:  pirates unblock things when they have become jammed and stultifying. Kester encourages us to see the enclosures of the commons as a blocking process and the monopolising and slaving of 17th century maritime merchants similarly.


So the pirates come along and force a change, even though they are defeated by Pan. This allows Wendy to see that she needs to move forward. So far okay. Though I have a difficulty with the role of the pirates in Peter Pan which I will come to a bit later.


Kester then relates this to Jungian psychology. I have to say that this is where I really got lost, not because there isn't a logic to the argument, but simply because I don't find Jungian psychology convincing particularly when it comes to archetypal stuff. I just don't think that there's evidence in scientifically respectable terms for it, so I found myself wanting to go along but not quite able to. And that, combined with my difficulty relating to the way that the role of the pirates in Peter Pan is construed, made this an unsatisfying chapter for me.


So, what is the difficulty with the pirates? I think it is the sudden change from heroic pirates who could even be thought of as 'goodies' in disguise, to the Never-Neverland Pirates who quite clearly are baddies. In respect of this latter point, I kept finding myself thinking of the film Hook, (Dustin Hoffman playing the eponymous anti-hero). Where the pirates quite clearly are baddies -though Hook proves to be brutally honest at times.

Early in the film we learn that the character Peter Panning (played by Robin Williams) is actually Peter Pan grown up -after generations of wooing Darling girls away, he finally decided to settle down with one. His career is some kind of corporate whizz-kid in mergers and acquisitions. His roughly 8-year-old son describes his job in terms that make granny Wendy (guess who?!) exclaim "You've become a pirate, Peter".

It's that scene that keeps running through my head: clearly in this film, 'pirate' is more aligned with the kind of people that Kester is concerned about as . And to be frank, I don't see anything about them in the original story that draws me to consider them a good thing. They are self-absorbed, greedy and cruel. I think the film-Hook characterisation is a true trajectory from the original story.

So I find it hard to think of the Peter Pan pirates in the kind of way that Kester wants to employ them. In fact, I think that they would better serve an examination of the dark side of piracy where it has simply become villainous and bullying. So if Captain Hook is to serve the argument, it is in a more 'making the best of' way: they serve the good despite their own intentions and despite their malevolence. But then, if you're seeing them redemptively like that (that is that the ill they intend and do is somehow transformed to serve the good) then it is the agent or process of the conversion that is the real interest, not the pirates (in this case Wendy's own growth in insight, however inchoate). To pat these pirates on the back for "unblocking" seems to me to be dangerously close to proposing that we sin so 'that grace may abound'. It seems to me in the end that Barrie's pirates don't well serve Kester's main thesis, rather they muddy the waters.

I think it may have been better rather to have used Barrie's pirates -perhaps partly through the lens of the film Hook- to examine the difference between 'healthy' (or at least somewhat justifiable) piracy and mere criminal mafiosism which is actually the stark reproduction of the attitudes and actions of the predatory elites within oppressed communities: the abused become the abusers.  That's quite an important discussion which the book doesn't really get into, though I know that many of Kester's interlocutors have been keen to consider.

Kester sees Barrie's pirates as "more playful", yet it seems to me they are precisely not that: Hook has it right, I think: they are bullies and braggarts intent on their own satisfaction represent repression and blockage. As such they may stand for the adult world which chooses the way of 'childish' tantrums and egotism as against the childlikeness of supportive playfulness, loyalty and hopeful daring which Panning has to rediscover to win back his own (alienated) children: he has to de-pirate himself.

The problem that this outlines is that it depends what form of pirate is being employed. It makes a big difference whether the pirate figure stands for uncaring self-serving violent scary-ness or jolly freedom-loving adventure. I think that the problem in this chapter is that the two sorts are confused. And as cultural archetypes it makes some difference whether what emerges is someone like the godfather or someone like Han Solo. Both types of pirate exist in the cultural repertoire. One is emancipatory the other is far from it. Kester does (p104) contrast 'brutal juvenile villains' with 'bold and mature radicals'; but it seems to me that Pan's pirates are the former not the latter.

Next post on this book, I want to look at chapter 6 where we delve into 'playing pirate with the gods'.

'Man-sheep-dog': inter-species social skills

I started a tagline 'dog-ma' for posts (which have been few, as it happens) reflecting on the experience of having a dog in the household. In relation to that line of reflection I recently came across this interesting article about sheep-dogs and humans. Part of the article points out that this is not just about 2 but 3 species. And the dog seems to be able to 'mind read' sheep to some extent -and perhaps the sheep the dog?
'Man-sheep-dog': inter-species social skills | Neuroanthropology:

The dog was not simply a tool, or merely obedient to a guiding human intelligence; on some level, Whiskey grasped what needed to be done, and Damian had come to count on the dog’s ability to herd, including the dog’s perception of how stressed and liable to flight the sheep were. The key to being an expert dog trialer, then, included the ability, not just to train a dog to herd, but to perceive the dog’s intentions and perceptions, and to anticipate the animal’s next move (as well as those of the sheep).

What interests me in this is not so much the apparent fact that dogs and sheep can anticipate -'read'- the other species and change behaviour accordingly but that the degree of intersubjectivity involved seems to indicate creation is quite deeply community-oriented. This we need to keep in mind beside the 'red in tooth and claw' reading of nature. When we are in 'spacious places' where the stresses of fight, flight and hunger are at bay, there arises a spirit of co-operation and even play. Shades of Maslow's hierarchy? It may be that the right insight about Maslow's idea is actually more fundamentally about the way that creation is ... ?

A visual meditation on structured chaos

Also on at the Baltic is this exhibition by Mark Wallinger: 10000000000000000 2012
it "catalogues and compares 65,536 stones, each occupying its own square on a gargantuan checkerboard — the simplest binary device for implying order."

I went to see this with a friend and we had a conversation covering the nature of chance and the random in relation to chaos and the way that we tend to impose order and meaning on our experience. Alan is interested in science fiction as well and mentioned HP Lovecraft's universe where randomness is a keynote in a universe which is indifferent to our existence which gives rise to horror. This was far from horror though: ordered randomness. One of the interesting visual effects was the patches of shadow -was this a lighting effect of areas where the light from the spots was weaker or a kind of cumulative effect of an area of larger stones casting more shadow -or both? But again an illustration of the way that random can accumulate 'lumpiness' where things can accrete together rather than a randomly even distribution.

It was interesting to view the pebbles with a video in the background of men constructing what appeared to be a grid through which one could view the (North?) sea. This seemed resonant of the idea that the relative chaos of the see was being 'ordered' for the viewer into nine squares; contained and yet not contained; ordered yet not really. The nice thing about this, too, was that we see the construction. Of course, often, we don't realise the constructedness of the grids through which we view the world.

immersive music -this is the way to hear choral music

I experienced this at the Baltic today: really loved it. ...
Janet Cardiff ‹ Detail ‹ Exhibitions ‹ What's On ‹ BALTIC: A reworking of the renaissance choral work for forty voices Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui 1573 by Thomas Tallis, The Forty Part Motet consists of forty separately recorded voices played back through forty individual speakers grouped in eight choirs of five singers. The work allows the audience to get inside the music and experience it almost tangibly as the voices weave in and out of each other.�

The thing is I love Tallis' music; so that was a first 'good'. Then, I like to sing choral music; second good. But then this way to hear it is brilliant. Normally, I hear choral music either from a fixed point within the choir I'm singing in or from in front of a choir (or a speaker or two). But this is great: to be able to be in the middle of the 'choir' and to be able to wander around and to move towards or to move the head to listen more closely to a particular voice or group of voices -lovely.

I even like the way that the sequence starts with the clearing throats and small talk of the members of the choir before they are called together to sing together.

I think that music is often a more immersive art form anyway -but this ups that by allowing the listener to be 'inside' a ring of sound. I liked, too, the opportunity to tune into more particular parts and the greater sense that could give of closing in on a performer in a way that would be embarrassing or offputting if it were a live performance similarly arranged.

Nice.