Past Talks

The Terribleness of Digital Locks

by Matt Harvey at the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, WAT

Digital Rights Management is a type of digital lock that companies put on the things they sell you. They’re terrible in many ways. They discourage innovation, they increase insecurity and they infringe on a person’s right of ownership. They’re also illegal to break, which is a huge injustice in our legal system. We really need laws to make digital locks illegal.

The Clusterfuck of Education

by Sean Aubin at the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, WAT

According to Kieran Egan, education is founded on three conflicting principles:

  • Societisation: Being educated on the values of your society and being given a ranking.
  • Acquisition of Platonic Knowledge: Ironic understanding of the ways the world works, via mathematics, physics and psychology etc…
  • Self-Actualisation and Personal Development: The growth of the student as a person and the progress towards their interests.

Any attempt to try and combine any of these principles ends up with them undermining each other.

A potential solution is to try and keep these ideas in seperate institutions. Societisation can be kept in traditional schools. Self-actualisation can be encouraged in hack-centre like groups. However, the platonic acquisition of knowledge is still a difficult problem to solve. Hopefully explorable explanations, as described in Seymourt Papert’s “Mindstorms: Children, Computer’s and Powerful Ideas” would be up to the task.