Words from Oliviero Toscani

“La scuola dovrebbe essere come il cinema. Dovrebbe attirare chi ci va, non respingerlo. Dovrebbe incuriosire. Invece si andava a scuola come si sarebbe andati a pagare le tasse o a fare la coda alle poste.”

“Sarebbe interessante poter leggere il giornale di domani; quello che è uscito oggi è già vecchio.”

Oliviero Toscani, Ciao mamma

A word for learning

“Why is there no word in Engish for the art or learning? Webster says that the word pedagogy means the art of teaching. What is missing is the parallel word for learning.” “I would use the noun mathetics for a course on the art of learning.” “My mathetic point is simply that spending relaxed time with a problem leads to getting to know it, and through this, to improving one’s ability to deal with other problems like it. It is not using the rule that solves the problem; it is thinking about the problem that fosters learning”

Seymour Papert, The Children’s Machine

Good definitions of emotion

Lazarus, 1991: Emotions are organized psychophysiological reactions to news about ongoing relationships with the environment.

Ekman, 1992:  Each emotion has unique features: signal, physiology, and antecedent events. Each emotion also has characteristics in common with other emotions: rapid onset, short duration, unbidden occurrence, automatic appraisal, and coherence among responses.

Evolutionary approach: emotions serve funtions.

• emotions enable rapid orientation to events in the environment (e.g. threats or opportunities)
• emotions coordinate bodily response to events
• human emotions evolved to become the bases of social relationships

Cultural approach: emotions are shaped by dynamic cultural processes.

Batja Mesquita (2001) contends that cultural approaches focus on the “practice” of emotion, in contrast to the “potential for emotion.

Oatley, Keltner, Jenkins (2006).

Difference between error and failure

In an uncertain situation and without a  defined process, you try to set up new processes in order to achieve the desired results. The processes can fail, but you can’t consider it a failure or an error. You can only use the term ‘error’ when there are clearly defined processes and controllable situations.

Milton Erickson, when asked about his failures with his clients, answered:
“There is no failure, only feedback.”

Thoughts on epistemology

Scientific texts are defined by two components: the content and the system of relationhips the author has among the information stakeholders socially perceived in a cultural context.

Watzlawick’s 5 axioms

• One Cannot Not Communicate

• Every communication has a content and relationship aspect such that the latter classifies the former and is therefore a metacommunication.

• The nature of a relationship is dependent on the punctuation of the partners communication procedures: Both the talker and the receiver of information structure the communication flow differently and therefore interpret their own behaviour during communicating as merely a reaction on the other’s behaviour (i.e. every partner thinks the other one is the cause of a specific behaviour). Human communication cannot be desolved into plain causation and reaction strings, communication rather appears to be cyclic.

• Human communication involves both digital and analog modalities: Communication does not involve the merely spoken words (digital communication), but non-verbal and analog-verbal communication as well.

• Inter-human communication procedures are either symmetric or complementary, depending on whether the relationship of the partners is based on differences or parity.

The last words of Ansel Adams

As Chris Rainer recalls, these were the last words of Ansel Adams, 82: “Where did all the time go? I’ve just begun”.

Conversations from the Edge: Vanishing Cultures and the Ethnosphere Project at Stanford.

Arti e culture digitali

Here you can download my lessons for the Arti e culture digitali Course at La Sapienza University, Rome:

Lesson 1, lesson 2.

Enjoy and drop me a line in case you want to discuss it.