Mike Mozart https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/29514263482

This post should be approached with caution because it was written several days after it was due and is therefore chronologically suspect and possibly dubious in other aspects too.

Life rather than lifestream has won over this penultimate week of the blog, rendering it driverless. I have, however, been thinking about philosophers, French ones in particular, as they appear so often in our readings. These influential thinkers are the rocks upon which arguments are draped and fitted to give them form and authority but also as foundations on which to base and measure new thoughts and ideas. This is the tradition of academia. I am thinking about this idea as part of my final assignment, so I don’t want to rehearse it here, but link to my poster of Expendables or Incomprehensibles instead (in my mooc we were encouraged to create an image of the philosopher heroes we were studying. Writing the word heroes makes me realise none were women 🙁 ). This enabled me to use a new web application, picmonkey.

I have also been musing about lifestream analogies and watching videos about Driverless Ed tech. Audrey Watter’s presentation was apposite to Gert Biesta’s journal article about the role of the teacher, another philosophy-based argument to get to grips with. Both countered the positioning of the teacher (as educator and expert) by the exigencies of efficiency, economics and control with arguments for understanding what teachers actually do and by debunking sometimes persuasive opinion that they may easily be replaced by automated means.