The Common Good

I will be back to blogging here this winter and spring as I participate in the MOOC CCK11, continue to teach instructional technology at University of Maine and generally follow my path.  Steelemaley.net should also be shaping up with vestiges of my ple and some more bells and whistles to move this academicians "blog when time allows" (that is, when I am not developing programs, running them or assessing participants in them) to something more I  have wanted for years.  Stay tuned.

In the meantime I want to start this new episode of my blog with a view I share with the critical education community and so many in the eLearning community. The following is from Michael Apple in Ideology and Curriculum (1990).  Using Raskin's (1986) "common good" framework;  Apple writes:

"[A] program of criticism and renewal asserts the principle that 'no inhumane act should be used as a short cut to a better day,' and, especially, that at each step of the way any social program 'will be judged against the likelihood that it will result in linking equity, sharing, personal dignity, security, freedom, and caring.' This means that those pursuing such a program 'must....assure themselves that the course they follow, inquire into, [and] analyze....will dignify human life, recognize the playful and creative aspect of people,' and see others not as objects but as 'co-responsible' subjects involved in the process of democratically deliberating over the ends and means of all there institutions."

May this be a central message in the field of learning, learning design and our personal lives.