Prof. Dr. Daniel Hromada
Digital Culture – Historical Context. Prolegomena to „Educatio Digitale”
Seminar, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Thursday, 10-12 h, weekly, starts 25.10.2018, Hardenbergstr. 33, room 110

In a digital world, the Machine seems to be omnipresent. But what is, in fact, “a symbol-manipulating machine“, what are its origins and how did it manage to penetrate into my, your, our common „Dasein“? Who were its parents, who was its Hebamme? Can we – artists, researchers, humans “thrown“ into the digital era – still influence the direction of the Machine‘s evolution or is such enterprise doomed to failure? Our quest for answers to such questions shall lead us from automata of antiquity through gardens of muslim architects, insights of the Age of Enlightment and steam-punk designs of Victorian England, all the way to Alan Turing, John von Neumann and Steve Jobs. We shall work with abacus and if time permits, we shall also do some calculation with strings and pullies. And there will be some crypto, too.

This seminar is a first from the Prolegomena to the „Educatio Digitale“ series which shall address historical (1st semester), cognitive (2nd semester), sociocultural (3rd semester) and didactic-artistic (4th semester) aspects of the digital revolution. During the whole series topics like “digital education”, “cognitive enhancement”, “man-machine interaction” and “digital fibel” project shall be visited, re-visited and developed.

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credit: regular and active participation. Each participant will be asked to choose one text and present it.

Schwerpunkte:
Ausrichtung der Veranstaltung: orientierend, kritisch
Kompetenz/Aktivität der Teilnehmenden: reflektieren/denken, aneignen

Daniel Devatman Hromada is since August 2018 UdK’s Juniorprofessor for Digital Education at Einstein Center Digital Future. Born in 1982 in Bratislava, he holds bachelor degrees in humanities from Charles University (Prague) and in linguistics from University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis;a master degree in artificial and natural cognition from Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Paris). In 2016, a successful defense of his thesis “Evolutionary modelis of ontogeny of linguistic categories”, entitled Hromada to carry a double doctorate from both Slovak Technical University (cybernetics) as well as University Paris 8 – Lumieres (psychology). Father of two children, he is a founder and first senator of the oldest Slovak digital community kyberia.sk.