I enjoyed this, in part as analysis of the unique role of masterclasses as opposed to lessons or crits. Also, useful to think about the _many_ ways feedback can exist, and how 'changing it up' can sometimes just be useful.

"The truth is that if you say you want more children from deprived areas to be able to go to university, then don’t faff around with entry tariffs: invest in Sure Start centres, preschool groups, subsidised childcare and properly resourced primary schools. Make benefits genuinely accessible and life-supporting. Better still, stop whole sections of society being condemned to underpaid, vulnerable, soul-destroying labour while others cream off inordinate wealth from the profits of that labour." Stefan Collini talking a lot of sense about what universities are, and what the lurch towards consumerising them more than ever in the past ten years has led to. It is not pretty.

Simon Katan on teaching peripheral skills around computing, computation, and code. I agree wholeheartedly with his description of tools that shield users from complexities to the extent of hiding how things actually work. I also loved his idea of "flour babies for looking after code properly".

Filed away as a nice introduction to computational sensing, vision, and how computers don't see.

Excellent description of configuring OBS et al for streaming code/development.

"That demo got the attention of venture capitalists. And when a cool-looking magical thing gets the attention of venture capitalists, discourse tends to spiral out of control." Good, even-handed look at GPT3. It's both impressive and unexciting for me – there are so many underlying issues besides the 'magic', not to mention the relative failure rate, the complexity of any real-world deployment, and as ever, a lack of nuance in a lot of media about discussing text-generation. This lays out some of the points with the latter well.

A magical, brilliant teaching tool. Ableton's education/explanation team have always been top-notch, but this is great, and I am envious of it and them. I love how it starts with sound, and abstract explorations, before breaking those apart into components – amplitude, pitch, timbre – and only later mapping those to synthesizer components – all of which will work with a keyboard plugged in, thanks to webmidi. Grand stuff, and so great to see them investing in this sort of thing.

"…"there is no parallel here. Richter was a genius. He worked tirelessly for many years to perfect his piano playing. The lobster was some aberration. But what if it was not? What if the lobster was *essential*? What if every pianist needs a lobster? What if everyone needs a lobster for something?"

So much in this huge essay by Errol Morris – on anxiety, on performance, on the piano, on consciousness, and how we offload our consciousness to small advisors – what a programmer knows as rubberducking. There is so much in here to love, and I probably need to reread it at least once.

Long, and beautiful, and the kind of education I will fight and fight and fight for.

"The School of Noise runs workshops for young people and adults encouraging the exploration of noise, sound and music. Our aim is to provide creative and imaginative activities using sound in accessible, fun and educational ways.

Using a wide variety of analogue and digital equipment our activities include; sculpting sounds using small modular synthesisers, composing original experimental sound art, circuit bending, field recording, coding and programming, building cardboard record players, conducting orchestras of fruit and vegetables, creating and recording Foley sounds, preparing pianos, soundwalks, learning about acoustic ecology plus more."

Brilliant.

"Education should indeed be responsive to the needs of society. But this is not the same as regarding yourself as a service station for neocapitalism. In fact, you would tackle society’s needs a great deal more effectively were you to challenge this whole alienated model of learning. Medieval universities served the wider society superbly well, but they did so by producing pastors, lawyers, theologians, and administrative officials who helped to sustain church and state, not by frowning upon any form of intellectual activity that might fail to turn a quick buck." Terry Eagleton on good form.

"Some rapid prototyping later, alongside the expert developers from the R&D team, I had arrived at the below: an autonomous system capable of delving into the BBC’s media archive in search of certain foley effects, deconstructing the artifice of television back into its constituent parts. Pre-loaded with a particular search term, it spiders the archive, iterating backwards through time for instances of a particular kind of sound effect, downloading the relevant media, and extracting the specific timestamp referenced by the subtitle. It then re-composites them to create a generative collage, structured by chance based on when a particular kind of sound has appeared on-screen." Dan Jones programatically extracting Foley from the BBC archive.

"The printing press on its own did not create poetry, but by spreading poetry around it helped to create new poets. The steam engine on its own did not create the industrial revolution. Tools are made by people and when tools call out for revolution they will speak through people." Love this quotation – it's a good article, too.

Yeah, this is important: just learning to Do Stuff without reflecting, or exploring the world it fits into, or prior art, isn't necessarily helpful. Papert, Papert: tools to think with, not just tools to program with.