RISULTATI RICERCA

Il volume traccia un bilancio di trent’anni di Europa, sottolineando, con rammarico, come per l’Italia si sia trattata di un’altra “occasione mancata”. Quando lo Stato imprenditore si è ritirato lasciando un’importante eredità (le imprese pubbliche), “gli eredi” delle privatizzazioni non si sono rivelati all’altezza del compito: ne è uscita compromessa la capacità di crescita del Paese, si sono aggravati gli squilibri territoriali e sociali, è andato colpevolmente disperso un solido patrimonio industriale e di competenze.

Distance learning in Italy is currently widespread both in terms of course numbers and participants. From the end of the 1980s the Laboratorio di Pedagogia sperimentale (Roma Tre University) offered ongoing distance 131 learning courses and on line postgraduate courses for teachers and individuals engaged in cultural activities. This article considers this twenty-year experience setting out courses features, their evolution over the years, the different types of student and the introduction of new technologies on interactive teaching. It will also aim at demonstrating the most recent lines of research on adaptive learning. Distance education, teacher training, technologies in education, Italy, adaptive learning.

Globalization is at the same time label, metaphor, ideology, utopia and distopia, paradigm, empirically controllable ordering concept, and general and generic descriptive notion, by which we want, or profess, or need to give a meaning (the weberian subjektiv gemeinte Sinn), positive or negative, to the situation and contemporaneous human condition; the first and sometime only way to confirm such an intention or pretension or need of meaning is communication, especially in the form of NICT, the new information and communication technologies, in economy, culture, politics, war, entertainment. If we want to avoid philosophies of history, ideologies, utopias and distopias, which inevitably bring to meta-social and anti-sociological categories (Good against Evil, the unification of the human race, the end of the history and similar), trying to really explore the conditions where the intention, pretension or need of giving a meaning to the global society take a form, seems to be appropriate. To such a hard exploration, a help can come from some concepts let known by Cornelius Castoriadis thirty years ago: legein (from which logos, logic, though, telling) and teuchein (from which techné, technique, construction, making) and above all the relationship between instituting society and instituted society, where the social imagery, individual and collective, makes possible the representation of the meanings of the social-historical, that is creates the passage, never completely ended and exhaustible (a sort of simmelian endless fecundity of the life), between what is instituting and what is instituted. The (always) central position of the imagery in the formation and representation of the social-historical, that is of the instituted society, is simply crucial for the so said global society, really because it has been forming under our eyes (and from our hands_): we are living, and can observe, the instituting society; living, observing and analysing the social-historical while it is forming, is not the last challenge and most irrelevant opportunity that globalization and communication propose and, at the same time, offer to sociology, not to get an orthopaedic technique.

L'Autore ripercorre la storia dell’istituto podestarile a Torino tra il 1926 e il 1945, proponendo anche un confronto con altre situazioni locali italiane. Nel capoluogo piemontese, dove il fascismo si era affermato con una certa difficoltà e lo squadrismo era stato un fenomeno meno radicato che altrove, i podestà furono spesso fedeli alla monarchia, mentre solo nella seconda metà degli anni Trenta vennero alla ribalta, alla guida dell’amministrazione cittadina, fascisti della "prima ora" e rappresentanti della media borghesia produttiva e finanziaria.