Thermal Binding

I can't believe how quickly time moves on. Forgetting I even have a blog I've gone and rediscovered an old world (bicycles) and actually discovered a whole new world of binding, thermal binding - think 'perfect bound' paperback books and you'll pretty much know what I mean. Thermal binding promises to sort out all my photocopy management needs into one discretely bound collection of papers.

I'm still scratching around with realism and relativism. I feel like its all there at my finger tips - the answers all slippery and wet, waiting to squit away. Hopefully I'll get there.

I've gained a major concept of understanding to the whole endeavour. I now think that constructivism per se creates things which appear to be objects but are fact just fictions. By this I mean that an object would be, for example, a person. A fiction or a 'thing' would be a certain characterisation about a person - locating them in some sort of grouping. So object equals person whilst thing equals (for example) 'refugee' or 'gifted youth' or what have you. Thus we can say that language can powerfully shape the identity of people but it does not create people. Rather, people can (and do) exist quite independently of our perceptions and characterisations of them. This will have powerful implcations for teaching and constructivist teaching pedagogy because a large part of teaching, an inherently social endeavour, revolves around perception. Separating things from the objects they are derived from may also be useful in helping us to answer such knotty questions as "who am I?" But more of that at another time.

So what does this all mean for me? Well it means that I can start to break down the problem and think about what it is that I'm looking at when I talk about education. I think that it means I can avoid certain problems such as:

Being stuck in the act of creating meaning - either as author or reader. I'm thinking here of the postmodern dilemma of there being nothing but the text. Sure , the meanings that we construct are important, up to a point, but if I can show them as being about 'things' and not 'objects' (and of course that objects can exist), then I may be able to sidestep a move into relativism and have some recourse to the more 'fixed', shall we say, ends of realism. I believe that there are some things that are certain and these things can be grasped - if only with difficulty - through the haze of our subjective existences.

This will somehow connect with constructivist teaching methodology - which seems to imply that there are certain things to be learned by students. Either from a Piagetian perspective that sees children having cognitive structures (and cognition implies that there are things to cognate about, things independent of existence) or the Vygotskian perspective which sees that children move through a zone of understanding about the world. Moving implies that some cognitive/language structures are more advanced than others.

Its all very jumbled and I'm just thinking aloud.