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Writing 2: A lesson in frugality, utility, and creativity
Think of this as a "writing with materials" exercise. You will provide a 250 word (1 page) write-up of this. Bring two copies of your write-up to class on Wednesday, Sept. 8th. We will have a look at them in class. You need two copies because we will exchange and comment on each others work twice. Two copies for two separate set of comments. Consider this part of your homework grade. I will check if you did it.
Let us call this an "object" lesson. Your task for this lesson will provide the foundations for option number 1 of your first paper. (You will be given two options for writing your first paper.)
1. Following on the example we tried in class, you will located your own piece of obtainium*. Obtainum here, refers to any found (discarded) object that is used for purposes other than originally intended or designed. (For example, a discarded couch used as a couch is not necessarily in the spirit of obtainium.)
2. You will put your piece of obtainium to use in the development of your own design. You should try to think of new possible uses for your obtainium. The design can be simple or it can be complex. The important thing is putting thought into the process.
If possible, please take pictures of the object before and after modification to include in your paper (if you choose this option).
a. There are two different ways to approach this. First, is to think of something you would like to design and seek out the necessary materials. Second, is to find something you want to figure out what to do with it.
b. Once you have gathered materials and have a design plan, go about implementing and testing the design.
3. Write up a 250-word description of your process and project.
Things to address in the write-up:
What is the obtainium? (possible original function, material, properties, useful qualities, ways in which it can be transformed)
What did you do with it?
What else could you have done with that object?
How did you come up with the idea?
What skills and materials did it take to make the object?
How much would a similar design cost if you were to buy something like it new?
Did you begin to notice where stashes of good obtainium can be found?
4. Print two copies of your write-up and bring to class.
5. Have fun and be creative!
Rules for obtainium:
a. You should NOT buy anything new or spend any money for this project. Finding more obtainium for implementing your design, however, is strongly encouraged.
b.Further, it should go without saying that you will NOT steal anything. Stealing is not in the spirit of obtainium. It needs to be obviously discarded.
c. You should NOT already own the object, or the object should not be something you borrow from a friend.
d. Stay away from things that could cause a risk to your health. Do not reuse things that are hazardous, toxic, rotting, or otherwise nasty.
Instructables is good website for inspirations: http://www.instructables.com/
*Obtainium - The word obtainium likely originated from but was most certainly popularized by SRL crew finding or liberating discarded or obsolete items and re-directing them from industry, science, and the military and re-purposing them for anarchic machine performances. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pauline and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_Research_Labs)
Let us call this an "object" lesson. Your task for this lesson will provide the foundations for option number 1 of your first paper. (You will be given two options for writing your first paper.)
1. Following on the example we tried in class, you will located your own piece of obtainium*. Obtainum here, refers to any found (discarded) object that is used for purposes other than originally intended or designed. (For example, a discarded couch used as a couch is not necessarily in the spirit of obtainium.)
2. You will put your piece of obtainium to use in the development of your own design. You should try to think of new possible uses for your obtainium. The design can be simple or it can be complex. The important thing is putting thought into the process.
If possible, please take pictures of the object before and after modification to include in your paper (if you choose this option).
a. There are two different ways to approach this. First, is to think of something you would like to design and seek out the necessary materials. Second, is to find something you want to figure out what to do with it.
b. Once you have gathered materials and have a design plan, go about implementing and testing the design.
3. Write up a 250-word description of your process and project.
Things to address in the write-up:
What is the obtainium? (possible original function, material, properties, useful qualities, ways in which it can be transformed)
What did you do with it?
What else could you have done with that object?
How did you come up with the idea?
What skills and materials did it take to make the object?
How much would a similar design cost if you were to buy something like it new?
Did you begin to notice where stashes of good obtainium can be found?
4. Print two copies of your write-up and bring to class.
5. Have fun and be creative!
Rules for obtainium:
a. You should NOT buy anything new or spend any money for this project. Finding more obtainium for implementing your design, however, is strongly encouraged.
b.Further, it should go without saying that you will NOT steal anything. Stealing is not in the spirit of obtainium. It needs to be obviously discarded.
c. You should NOT already own the object, or the object should not be something you borrow from a friend.
d. Stay away from things that could cause a risk to your health. Do not reuse things that are hazardous, toxic, rotting, or otherwise nasty.
Instructables is good website for inspirations: http://www.instructables.com/
*Obtainium - The word obtainium likely originated from but was most certainly popularized by SRL crew finding or liberating discarded or obsolete items and re-directing them from industry, science, and the military and re-purposing them for anarchic machine performances. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Pauline and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_Research_Labs)
Categories: Classes
SCSC 3
80 To repeat a point I made earlier, modern science adopts as otherworldly ideal of how we come to know nature: through mental constructions that are more intellectually tractable than material reality, and in particular amenable to mathematical representation.
According to Kant, a priori knowledge is transcendental, or based on the form of all possible experience, while a posteriori knowledge is empirical, based on the content of experience. Kant states, "... it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion)."
According to Kant, a priori knowledge is transcendental, or based on the form of all possible experience, while a posteriori knowledge is empirical, based on the content of experience. Kant states, "... it is quite possible that our empirical knowledge is a compound of that which we receive through impressions, and that which the faculty of cognition supplies from itself (sensuous impressions giving merely the occasion)."
The ordering of reality. Creating a picture of systems.
First off, what is the difference between a theoretical picture of the world and a tacit understanding of the world?
Here we will discuss the difference between parts and concepts. On one hand, some people see a machine as parts, discontinuous sets of things connected together that make up a whole. While others may see the machine as a set of concepts connected in a continuous function. Most of how you may look at it depends on the function of the description. What is the purpose of the description or discourse? Is the purpose to understand parts or anatomy of the system? Is the purpose to describe the function or physiology of the system.
- Aside:
- Which one of these produces a more accurate picture of reality?
- anatomy: The branch of science concerned with the bodily structure of humans, animals, and other living organisms, esp. as revealed by dissection and the separation of parts.
- physiology: The branch of biology that deals with the normal functions of living organisms and their parts.
- ecology: The branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. • (also human ecology) the study of the interaction of people with their environment.
Humans build hierarchies.
Humans are built by hierarchies.
What does the hierarchy demand of us?
Is the hierarchy what we can actually point to as the system?
Writing down the problem:
- Statement of the problem
- Hypothesis as to the cause of the problem
- Experiments designed to test each hypothesis
- Predicted results of the experiments
- Observed results of the experiments
- Conclusions from the results of the experiments
Why is it important to take care with nature? What is at stake when we venture into new knowledge? How we formulate or phrase a problem is a significant task. How we ask the question will immediately constrain the set of problems we will use to address said problem.
Categories: Classes
SCSC 2
II The Separation of Thinking from Doing
The production of scientific management.
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1880-90s developed this theory)
Efficiency in workflow processes. Waste reduction in movement and materials. Empirical methods of understanding what matters in a process. Workers as parts (replaceable).
Taylorism defines American Efficiency. It puts the control of all processes in the hand of a rational management structure. Shifts decision making from labor to manager groups. Optimizes work to a single critical path for production. Problem with this is that it stifles pathways for innovation. Trains workers in "best practices." Plan workflow for workers and eliminate interruptions. Provide economic incentives to workers for increasing output. (This is two sided, provide more wages, but provide more things for them to work towards.)
39 "Scattered craft knowledge is concentrated in the hands of the employer, then doled out again to workers in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some part of what is now a work process."
The crux, though, is that skilled workers can be replaced with unskilled workers at a lower pay rate. Economically, this is fine and well, but when you ask questions about what this does for education, reflections of self-worth, overall feelings of well-being, and livelihoods, you need to begin to seriously consider the experience of labor. To work as hard, with less pay, less to stimulate the individual creative mind, the innovative side of production (changing vonage sign), you have to wonder what the overall gain is, or for who the gain is for. This brings us to one of our first questions about justice... is this fair? People want jobs, but do the people providing jobs have a responsibility to those working in those positions?
Assembly line is introduced in 1913 by Henry Ford. Ford was seeing so many people leaving the line (963 hired, 100 stuck around). To keep people around, Ford increased the pay. However, people tended to only work less because they were paid more. Most people had fixed needs, so other incentives to spend their money were necessary. The car, for many, was one of the first examples. Consumption was key, stimulate imaginations, marketing... became the modus operendai.The management of desire... the field of marketing.
44 "Indebtedness (credit debt) could discipline workers, keeping them at routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in harness, meeting payments regularly."
We have now taken this same approach to education.
45 Standardized tests remove a teacher's discretion in the curriculum; strict sentencing guidelines prevent a judge from judging.
45 "extraordinary human ingenuity has been used to eliminate the need for human ingenuity."
46 It is other experts, and future experts, who are displaced as expertise is centralized.
What is cognitive stratification? Why is it a product of the modern economy? What would be meant by a "creative class" of individuals?
51 Identifying creativity with freedom harmonizes quite well with the culture of the new capitalism, in which the imperative of flexibility precludes dwelling in any task long enough to develop real competence.
Crawford argues for "work that engages the human capacities as full as possible". (Our video games attempt this, so why can't our jobs?)
How much do you feel your future has been mapped out for you by others? How much is your current situation has been mapped out by you?
III Being the Master of One's Own Stuff
55 Spiritedness, then, may be allied with a spirit of inquiry through a desire to be master of one's own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance.
Time is money. Granted, but when does one make the investment in time to learn how to do something versus going to an expert?
57 To be a master of your own stuff entails being mastered by it.
60 Technical proficiency and manual mastery "seems to require that the user of a machine have something at stake, an interest of the sort that arises through bodily immersion in some hard reality, the kind that kicks back. Corollary to such immersion is the development of what we might call a sub-ethical virtue: the user holds himself responsible to external reality, and opens himself to being schooled by it. His will is educated - both chastened and focused - so it no longer resembles that of a raging baby who knows only that he wants. Both as workers and as consumers, technical education seems to contribute to moral education."
63 Agency versus autonomy. "Grime-under-the-fingernails, bodily involement with the machines we use entails a kind of agency. Yet the decline of such involvement, through technological progress, is precisely the development that makes for an increase in autonomy. Is there a paradox here?"
64 Such an account might illuminate the appeal of manual work in a way that is neither romantic nor nostalgic, but rather simply gives credit to the practice of building things, fixing things, and routinely tending to things, as an element of human flourishing.
66 Borgmann's categories (things versus devices) help us to see that the tension between agency and autonomy can manifest in the meanings of things themselves, or rather in our relationship to them.
Instrumental rationality
68 "But what if we are inherently instrumental, or pragmatically oriented, all the way down, and the use of tools is a really fundamental way human beings inhabit the world?
69 For the early Heiddeger, "handiness" is the mode in which things in the world show up for us most originally: "the nearest kind of association is not mere perceptual cognition, but rather, a handling, using, and taking care of things which has its own kind of 'knowledge'. If these thinkers are right, then the problem of technology is almost opposite of how it is usually posed: the problem is not "instrumental rationality," it is rather that we have come to live in a world that precisely does not elicit our instrumentality, the embodies kind that is original to us. We have too few occasions to do anything, because of a certain predetermination of things from afar.
The production of scientific management.
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1880-90s developed this theory)
Efficiency in workflow processes. Waste reduction in movement and materials. Empirical methods of understanding what matters in a process. Workers as parts (replaceable).
Taylorism defines American Efficiency. It puts the control of all processes in the hand of a rational management structure. Shifts decision making from labor to manager groups. Optimizes work to a single critical path for production. Problem with this is that it stifles pathways for innovation. Trains workers in "best practices." Plan workflow for workers and eliminate interruptions. Provide economic incentives to workers for increasing output. (This is two sided, provide more wages, but provide more things for them to work towards.)
39 "Scattered craft knowledge is concentrated in the hands of the employer, then doled out again to workers in the form of minute instructions needed to perform some part of what is now a work process."
The crux, though, is that skilled workers can be replaced with unskilled workers at a lower pay rate. Economically, this is fine and well, but when you ask questions about what this does for education, reflections of self-worth, overall feelings of well-being, and livelihoods, you need to begin to seriously consider the experience of labor. To work as hard, with less pay, less to stimulate the individual creative mind, the innovative side of production (changing vonage sign), you have to wonder what the overall gain is, or for who the gain is for. This brings us to one of our first questions about justice... is this fair? People want jobs, but do the people providing jobs have a responsibility to those working in those positions?
Assembly line is introduced in 1913 by Henry Ford. Ford was seeing so many people leaving the line (963 hired, 100 stuck around). To keep people around, Ford increased the pay. However, people tended to only work less because they were paid more. Most people had fixed needs, so other incentives to spend their money were necessary. The car, for many, was one of the first examples. Consumption was key, stimulate imaginations, marketing... became the modus operendai.The management of desire... the field of marketing.
44 "Indebtedness (credit debt) could discipline workers, keeping them at routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in harness, meeting payments regularly."
We have now taken this same approach to education.
45 Standardized tests remove a teacher's discretion in the curriculum; strict sentencing guidelines prevent a judge from judging.
45 "extraordinary human ingenuity has been used to eliminate the need for human ingenuity."
46 It is other experts, and future experts, who are displaced as expertise is centralized.
What is cognitive stratification? Why is it a product of the modern economy? What would be meant by a "creative class" of individuals?
51 Identifying creativity with freedom harmonizes quite well with the culture of the new capitalism, in which the imperative of flexibility precludes dwelling in any task long enough to develop real competence.
Crawford argues for "work that engages the human capacities as full as possible". (Our video games attempt this, so why can't our jobs?)
How much do you feel your future has been mapped out for you by others? How much is your current situation has been mapped out by you?
III Being the Master of One's Own Stuff
55 Spiritedness, then, may be allied with a spirit of inquiry through a desire to be master of one's own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance.
Time is money. Granted, but when does one make the investment in time to learn how to do something versus going to an expert?
57 To be a master of your own stuff entails being mastered by it.
60 Technical proficiency and manual mastery "seems to require that the user of a machine have something at stake, an interest of the sort that arises through bodily immersion in some hard reality, the kind that kicks back. Corollary to such immersion is the development of what we might call a sub-ethical virtue: the user holds himself responsible to external reality, and opens himself to being schooled by it. His will is educated - both chastened and focused - so it no longer resembles that of a raging baby who knows only that he wants. Both as workers and as consumers, technical education seems to contribute to moral education."
63 Agency versus autonomy. "Grime-under-the-fingernails, bodily involement with the machines we use entails a kind of agency. Yet the decline of such involvement, through technological progress, is precisely the development that makes for an increase in autonomy. Is there a paradox here?"
64 Such an account might illuminate the appeal of manual work in a way that is neither romantic nor nostalgic, but rather simply gives credit to the practice of building things, fixing things, and routinely tending to things, as an element of human flourishing.
66 Borgmann's categories (things versus devices) help us to see that the tension between agency and autonomy can manifest in the meanings of things themselves, or rather in our relationship to them.
Instrumental rationality
68 "But what if we are inherently instrumental, or pragmatically oriented, all the way down, and the use of tools is a really fundamental way human beings inhabit the world?
69 For the early Heiddeger, "handiness" is the mode in which things in the world show up for us most originally: "the nearest kind of association is not mere perceptual cognition, but rather, a handling, using, and taking care of things which has its own kind of 'knowledge'. If these thinkers are right, then the problem of technology is almost opposite of how it is usually posed: the problem is not "instrumental rationality," it is rather that we have come to live in a world that precisely does not elicit our instrumentality, the embodies kind that is original to us. We have too few occasions to do anything, because of a certain predetermination of things from afar.
Categories: Classes
Writing Exercise 1: Free writing on maintenance
Exercise: I will describe to you a situation or thought. Once you have had a minute to think, I will tell you to begin and you will start what is called free writing. Free writing is where you write for the duration of the exercise, such as 5 minutes, and you do not stop writing. The pen never stops... even if you have to continue writing "I have nothing to write" for 5 minutes, you keep writing. Though, hopefully you will write on the topic at hand. It is important that you do not stop. Simply write what comes to mind.
Scenario: Think about one aspect of your life where you engage with the need to maintain something on a continuous basis. Think about what this is. How often you maintain something doesn't matter as much as that it is continuous. Example: Social network websites. These take regular maintenance and require your attention and participation. However, I want you to think about something material, physical, that requires your attention... as a thing as opposed to a device. We spoke about technology and being technical in the previous session. Think of technology as the materiality of the object and think of being technical as the process.
Borgmann quote: The stereo as a device contrasts with the instrument as a thing. A thing, in the sense which I want to use the term, has an intelligible and accessible character and calls forth skilled and active human engagement. A thing requires practice while a device invites consumption. Things constitute commanding reality, devices procure disposable reality.
- What is this thing or process? What are the parts or components?
- What does it do for you? Do you like this thing or process?
- What is your relationship to this material thing?
- What other people are attached to this thing?
- How did you learn how to take care of this thing ?
Each bullet is a different 5 minute writing block, followed by a 5 minute discussion.
Categories: Classes
Blog 2 - The common basis of religions
Blog a critical paragraph on "the common basis of religions". I would like one precise, accurate, well-written paragraph.
1. Who suggested a common basis?
2. What is the common basis?
3. What (effects) does it produce (in/on society)?
You will find it in your reading. Please be sure to pull your examples and definitions from the reading.
1. Who suggested a common basis?
2. What is the common basis?
3. What (effects) does it produce (in/on society)?
You will find it in your reading. Please be sure to pull your examples and definitions from the reading.
Setting up your blogs + entry # 1
Set up your blog on http://blogs.psu.edu/
Choose to develop a blog page (stand alone blog) or a profession site, which allows you to also develop a blog.
Once your site is up and running, create the first blog entry (create new entry) on how science and/or technology is part of your career path. Your future job may be directly related to science/technology. But if not, try to explain what you have to learn in terms of a science and/or technology to do the job you want to do.
Shop Class as Soul Craft (SCSC) - 1
Introduction:
(page number)(content or question)
3 What are you being educated for? What kind of job?
3 Virtualism. What does the author mean by this term? What does it mean to work in the virtual world?
3 Much skilled labor requires localization. "skilled labor is becoming one of the few sure paths to a good living." WSJ. So, why are you here? Why not become plumbers?
4 What does the author mean by full human flourishing?
4 Does the use of tools answer to some permenant requirement of our nature?
6 The author refers to an "ethics of maintenance." What is
6 Is the life of labor simpler? What are the relationships we can think of when we think of "labor" and "working class"?
7 Why is it that simplicity in interface requires increasing complexity of our technologies and devices?
7 What do you consider to be meaningful work?
7 How do you ensure a high degree of self-reliance? What is autonomy if not self-reliance?
7 Are we becoming stupider?
7 How are we able to control impersonal forces and influences coming from afar? What are some examples of impersonal forces? What does it mean to "move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces"?
8 How much of your own stuff do you feel you can take care of? What are some degrees of "taking care of"?
8 Can we take care of problems we don't understand very well? What does it take to make our world intelligible?
8 Teamwork... how many of you like teamwork? What is it that you don't like? What is it that you like?
9 What is the difference between knowledge and projection of confidence? Does knowing something make you confident? Does having an experience make you confident?
9 Productive labor as the foundation of all prosperity.... versus meta-work. What value is created in shuffling mortgages? What value is created in turning raw materials into tools?
10 How do you make yourself useful?
I. A Brief Case for the Useful Arts:
(page number)(content or question)
11 "We have a generation of students that can answer questions on standardized tests, know factoids, but they can't do anything." How do you feel about this statement? How does it compare with your experiences before getting to college? How does it compare with your experiences in college?
13 What is the "best job you can imagine?"
14 Why do something well, for its own sake?
14 In what ways can you tranform the world and the way to world works? What is this process of transformation?
15 "The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world..." Can you give me an example here?
15 What activities are worth pursuing? Should we only pursue the things that save us or make us money?
16 Things can be made to help us with our needs, but when something doesn't work, we are forced to ask what it needs.
17 To get outside of one's head and to notice things, looking carefully and paying attention.
18 "Being able to think materially about material goods, hence critically, gives one some idependence from the manipulations of marketing, which as Sennett points out typically divert attention from what a thing is to a backstory intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor differences between brands."
18 More utilitarian in approach, and more independent. Independent of what here?
19 "Such a strong ontology is somewhat at odds with the cutting-edge institutions of th enew capitalism, and with the education regime that aims to supply those institutions with suitable workers- pliable generalists unfettered by any single set of skills."
19 How do your skills determine your possibilities? How does your skillset limit you? Do you feel as though your future is already determined? Or do you feel it is open?
20 Taking pride in being good at something specific comes from experience it took get get good.
21 Linking hand and brain. (Reference to Mind at Work)
21 "Manual labor entails a systematic encounter with the material world..." What is a systematic encounter? What is it about manual labor that entails systematic encounters? "...precisely the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science."
21 "Sophia" greek for wisdom, but also for skill. What is it about skill that relates to wisdom?
22 Technological developments typically preceed and even give rise to scientific understanding. Why would this be the case? How do the two opperate differently?
22 In science, wisdom remained connected to nature, yet science adopted assumptions and "esoteric" concepts to adhere to a mathematical reality.
24 What does it mean to produce a "realistic" solution to a given problem? The origami? Why can we not reduce all aspects of mechanical work to rule following?
26 "...the attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand, but a strong pragmatic bearing on it."
27 The author discusses having a feeling of a place in society. What is this place/feeling he is talking about?
27 Given the richness of manual work, cognitively and socially, why is it so routinely undervalued?
28 Stepping back a bit, we are now concerned with the idea of the assembly line. What is the idea of the assembly line? Who invented it? What did it do?
31 Two-tracked scheme for training industrial education in this country, labor versus gentleman craftsman,
32 What do you think of in terms of "the knowledge economy"? Is this what you think you are being trained for? Are we "postindustrial"? Yes/no? What are the signs of being "post-industrial"?
33 What kind of jobs require high levels of education? Why?
33 What sort of jobs cannot be off-shored?
34 Architects can be offshored, but can builders?
34 Not whether it is a service industry job, but if it is rule-based / procedure-based.
35 What is the difference between problem solving and problem finding? Or, defining the problem?
(page number)(content or question)
3 What are you being educated for? What kind of job?
3 Virtualism. What does the author mean by this term? What does it mean to work in the virtual world?
3 Much skilled labor requires localization. "skilled labor is becoming one of the few sure paths to a good living." WSJ. So, why are you here? Why not become plumbers?
4 What does the author mean by full human flourishing?
4 Does the use of tools answer to some permenant requirement of our nature?
6 The author refers to an "ethics of maintenance." What is
6 Is the life of labor simpler? What are the relationships we can think of when we think of "labor" and "working class"?
7 Why is it that simplicity in interface requires increasing complexity of our technologies and devices?
7 What do you consider to be meaningful work?
7 How do you ensure a high degree of self-reliance? What is autonomy if not self-reliance?
7 Are we becoming stupider?
7 How are we able to control impersonal forces and influences coming from afar? What are some examples of impersonal forces? What does it mean to "move in channels that have been projected from afar by vast impersonal forces"?
8 How much of your own stuff do you feel you can take care of? What are some degrees of "taking care of"?
8 Can we take care of problems we don't understand very well? What does it take to make our world intelligible?
8 Teamwork... how many of you like teamwork? What is it that you don't like? What is it that you like?
9 What is the difference between knowledge and projection of confidence? Does knowing something make you confident? Does having an experience make you confident?
9 Productive labor as the foundation of all prosperity.... versus meta-work. What value is created in shuffling mortgages? What value is created in turning raw materials into tools?
10 How do you make yourself useful?
I. A Brief Case for the Useful Arts:
(page number)(content or question)
11 "We have a generation of students that can answer questions on standardized tests, know factoids, but they can't do anything." How do you feel about this statement? How does it compare with your experiences before getting to college? How does it compare with your experiences in college?
13 What is the "best job you can imagine?"
14 Why do something well, for its own sake?
14 In what ways can you tranform the world and the way to world works? What is this process of transformation?
15 "The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world..." Can you give me an example here?
15 What activities are worth pursuing? Should we only pursue the things that save us or make us money?
16 Things can be made to help us with our needs, but when something doesn't work, we are forced to ask what it needs.
17 To get outside of one's head and to notice things, looking carefully and paying attention.
18 "Being able to think materially about material goods, hence critically, gives one some idependence from the manipulations of marketing, which as Sennett points out typically divert attention from what a thing is to a backstory intimated through associations, the point of which is to exaggerate minor differences between brands."
18 More utilitarian in approach, and more independent. Independent of what here?
19 "Such a strong ontology is somewhat at odds with the cutting-edge institutions of th enew capitalism, and with the education regime that aims to supply those institutions with suitable workers- pliable generalists unfettered by any single set of skills."
19 How do your skills determine your possibilities? How does your skillset limit you? Do you feel as though your future is already determined? Or do you feel it is open?
20 Taking pride in being good at something specific comes from experience it took get get good.
21 Linking hand and brain. (Reference to Mind at Work)
21 "Manual labor entails a systematic encounter with the material world..." What is a systematic encounter? What is it about manual labor that entails systematic encounters? "...precisely the kind of encounter that gives rise to natural science."
21 "Sophia" greek for wisdom, but also for skill. What is it about skill that relates to wisdom?
22 Technological developments typically preceed and even give rise to scientific understanding. Why would this be the case? How do the two opperate differently?
22 In science, wisdom remained connected to nature, yet science adopted assumptions and "esoteric" concepts to adhere to a mathematical reality.
24 What does it mean to produce a "realistic" solution to a given problem? The origami? Why can we not reduce all aspects of mechanical work to rule following?
26 "...the attractiveness of any hypothesis is determined in part by physical circumstances that have no logical connection to the diagnostic problem at hand, but a strong pragmatic bearing on it."
27 The author discusses having a feeling of a place in society. What is this place/feeling he is talking about?
27 Given the richness of manual work, cognitively and socially, why is it so routinely undervalued?
28 Stepping back a bit, we are now concerned with the idea of the assembly line. What is the idea of the assembly line? Who invented it? What did it do?
31 Two-tracked scheme for training industrial education in this country, labor versus gentleman craftsman,
32 What do you think of in terms of "the knowledge economy"? Is this what you think you are being trained for? Are we "postindustrial"? Yes/no? What are the signs of being "post-industrial"?
33 What kind of jobs require high levels of education? Why?
33 What sort of jobs cannot be off-shored?
34 Architects can be offshored, but can builders?
34 Not whether it is a service industry job, but if it is rule-based / procedure-based.
35 What is the difference between problem solving and problem finding? Or, defining the problem?
Categories: Classes
