Department of Technical Pedagogy

When analysing the new trends in the Higher Education Area one of the new challenges for the universities is to link the traditional learning and teaching methodologies to the newest didactical innovations. Nowdays, in the age of technology, the rethinking of education takes place where the new ICT and mobile communication determined (based) learning environment gives a chance to reshape methodologies of the higher education. Interdisciplinary approaches are increasingly acknowledged; however, we should note that fast changing methodology results in the continuous restructuring of educational content. As learning recently expanded into a worldwide classroom these developments may be foreseen as a new potentials way to activate students in terms of moving from the traditional curricula focusing on quantity to a new a contribution based approach.

The thesis according to which technologies of communication have implications not just for the form, but also for the content and indeed for the overall logic of what is being communicated rests on a set of general philosophical assumptions as regards the relation between thought and its medium. The paper shows that formulating these assumptions, and elaborating them, has been a characteristic concern of Austro-Hungarian philosophy; that between the philosophers who played a role in the relevant endeavours there obtained significant, sometimes mutual, influences; and that Austro-Hungarian realities - basically, the phenomenon of disturbed communication within the Habsburg Empire - had a marked effect on their thought.

Department of Technical Education, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary The year 2008 marked the 100-year anniversary of both McTaggart's essay on the unreality of time and Minkowski's famous lecture introducing the notion of a unified ...

The paper discusses the role of networks in cognition on two levels: on the level of the organization of ideas, and on the level of interpersonal communication. Any interesting system of ideas forms a network: ideas presented in a linear order (the order forced upon us by verbal expression) will necessarily convey a distorted picture of the underlying patterns of thought. Networks of ideas typically consist of a great number of nodes with just a few links, and a small number of hubs with very many links; that is, they are, to employ Albert-László Barabási’s term, “scale-free.” Barabási fits into a specific tradition: Hungarians had an early influence on the philosophy of networks, and on the philosophy of communication as developed at Marshall McLuhan’s Toronto Circle. In fact, this was the circle in which certain Hungarian and Austrian ideas on mediated collective thinking first came together—a telling testimony to the conditions of disturbed communication and idiosyncratic networking typical of East-Central Europe, past and present. The nodes-and-hubs pattern is characteristic, too, of social networks, in particular of scholarly and scientific networks. The paper analyses the role of “invisible colleges”—informal groups of scientific elites through whom the communication of information both within a field and across fields is channelled. By way of conclusion the notion of a new type of personality, the “network individual,” is discussed: the network individual is the person reintegrated, after centuries of relative isolation induced by the printing press, into the collective thinking of society—the individual whose mind is manifestly mediated, once again, by the minds of those forming his/her smaller or larger community.