Thoughts in Transit

Reading brain waves at the Mayo clinic (not!)

2012-01-08T19:11:00.001Z

I received ane-mail alert about the video on this page:

http://inside-the-brain.com/2012/01/08/typing-with-brain-waves/

and myinterest was immediately sparked. The idea of using brain waves to type or atleast to communicate with the shipboard computer was a staple of sciencefiction in my youth, and as more and more of the technology from that genrebecomes blasé (personnel communicator = mobile phone, Babel fish = Googletranslate…)it was interesting to see that this one is starting to fall.

It turnsout not to be the case.

In thisexperimental set up the simulated quadriplegic unable to communicate stares ata screen on which a pattern of flashing letters is formed. When the letter thatthey were staring at flashes, this is picked up by a series of electrodes monitoringtheir brainwave activity and this is deemed to reading the letters out of the person’sbrain.

It’snot. It is just detecting which flashinglight a person is looking at. In orderfor this to work, the person must be able to move their eyeballs to fixate on aparticular letter, and must be able to see.

However wealready have technology that can watch your eyeballs to see what you arelooking at, and its been around for a while.

Cannon usedthis in cameras to see what part of the image should be used for autofocussince the early 1990’s.

Moredetails are here.

http://www.diku.dk/hjemmesider/ansatte/panic/eyegaze/node22.html

and if youwant to play with a very similar application down load camera mouse here:

http://cameramouse.org/

This doesn’tdo eyeball tracking, but will allow you to control a computer even if your armsand legs don’t work in a consistent way.

Google Currents

2011-12-08T23:03:00.001Z

Google Currents: This is as another cool tool from the google stable. We are used to the sequence now. Some new piece of web wizadry comes out from google and after playing with it, you bookmark it to explore in detail later and by the time you get to it, google have already depreciated it and its. gone.(body, wave, code...)
I sincerly hope this doesn't happen with currents which hit the net a couple of hours ago. This is a verry nice new thing for Christmas.I want you to go play with it now so as to ensure that we get to keep this one.
On the face of it is simply an app for android or apple platforms which gathers together online magazine and blog subscriptions into one simple tool. This underwhelming description belies its genius.
Its like walking up to a newstand where all your favorite magizines are being displayed, and someone says take a free copy. Its hard to pin down what precisly is so cool about this except that the interface is exceptionaly well designed. Its like the magic of the iphone all over again.
Dont take my word for it, go play!
More here:
http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2011/12/google-currents-is-hot-off-press.html

Rethinking further education!

2011-09-30T17:20:00.002+01:00

The argument in favor ofgovernment funding of education, is that an educated population is for thegeneral benefit of the citizenry.

The argument in favor ofdoing this via a loan provision rather than by direct subsidy is that thisprovides a handle whereby market mechanisms can dictate subject choices.

The idea of a liberaleducation is a worthy one, and one of relevance to me where some of my adultcourses are offered to the long term unemployed via a back to educationinitiative.

On this program we have beeninstructed that it is no longer considered appropriate to enroll post retirementindividuals, as they are unlikely to re-enter the workforce.

This restriction arises because the money comesfrom the European Social Fund which was set up to reduce differences inprosperity and living standards across the EU and is devoted to promotingemployment.

The model here is clearly two fold.

1)Education impacts on society primarily by increasing the amount and quality ofemployment. This argument is suspect when you consider the high levels ofeducation and unemployment in some of the countries involved in the Arabspring.

2) Differences in prosperity in the EU can bereduced by making Germany pay for the rest of us. This may work, but may nothave been what the politicians were thinking of when they framed thelegislation.

It may be time to rethink this program as EU funding is getting tight.

itmay now be the right time to give all such students a good background in the Stiocphilosophy, rather than waving the chimera of "wonderful hi tech jobswaiting" in front of them.

Relativity and how we do science: Some first thoughts.

2011-09-26T00:21:00.000+01:00

Last Friday,I heard the tail end of a news item indicating that scientists had observedparticles travelling faster than light. This refutes Einstein’s theory of special relativity, and is not thefirst time that one or other piece of scientific work has come out punchingholes in this classic reformulation of how the universe works. The last time I read such claims it was AlKelly, who published something in an Irish engineering journal, and the timebefore that I think it was someone who had two box shaped areas deepunderground in Greenland where it was predicted to fail for about three millisecondstwice a year.

As someone claimingto be a scientist, we are used to such things, and treat them with the samesense of intelligent enquiry with which we approach a stage magician. We lookcarefully and try to work out what the trick is.

This ispart of our natural defences. Our belief in science builds in filters whichallow to concentrate on the significant changes which move theory forward andfiler out all the noise of magnets purifying water, anti gravity and alienvisitations.

Later thatmorning I heard that it was scientist from CERN, and that they had seensomething like 15,000 such particles.

This movesit from being a silly season story to something that needs more attention. I now started chasing up more information,read the preprint and noted that the author list seemed to have around 100scientists, who are operating within their field, and all of whom have a lot tolose if they have got this wrong. (Scientists are classily good at gettingthings wrong once they get away from their speciality, Pons and Fleischmann andPauling on mega doses of vitamin C being examples of this.) I go back and chaseup what I know of superluminal activity. Cherenkoff radiation happens whenparticles exceed the speed of light in a medium, Loci i.e. non material thingssuch as the point where a rotating light beam hits a wall if far enough awayfrom it, or the scan point of the electron beam hitting an oscilloscope screencan travel faster than the speed of light too. And there is a whole theory offaster than light particles, Tachyons, which come out of second solution set tothe equations, and which can be imagined as slowing down as you add energy tothem.

I’m notgoing to comment on the truth or otherwise of the claims. My physics is notsharp enough to punch holes in the paper as presented. What interests me is howI evaluate the claims. My initialreaction was a time worn and healthy scientific scepticism.

When theevidence was re presented with a powerful ad hominum argument (CERN) I then goto evaluate the argument on its internal consistency by examining the paper,and look to my network of knowledge to see where this new piece of evidencefits in.

This is, Ithink, how most of us do science.

Starting into a new MOOC I was pleased to encounter an old friend, who I never met, now dead, Richard Feynman.

2011-09-21T22:55:00.001+01:00

I’ve signedup for a MOOC on creativity or maybe connectionism (actually Creativityand Multicultural Communication) and one of the readings for this week was a memoir by Daniel Hill onRichard Feynman and The Connection Machine.

Richard Feynmanis one of my greats.

In this memoir we see him in what has to behis greatest role, as a communicator. Feynman diagrams for physicists are a way of making some very complicatedmathematics seem simple. This was Richards great gift: to communicate acrosscultural divides and explore strange areas of science, often showing thenatives things they were unaware of. Inexploring other territories he sometimes found the obvious, but he also oftensaw things that local practitioners were to close to see, such as the reductionof risk assessments as they went up the NASA management chain in the challengercrash, where he was a key player in discovering the cause of the disaster.

I thinkthis is probably why this reading was included, as an example of a practitionerof multicultural communication.

Education is not science!

2011-09-17T22:52:00.000+01:00

This piece evolved from a comment on a blog piece here

As some one moving from a background as a computational chemist into education there has been a very significant culture change.
Within science, we are used to a solution space with one of a few optimal solutions. We believe in the concept of an objective truth which can, in priciple, for the most part, be established by a series of reproducable experimental tests.
Education is different, its like art: There is no best picture, there are a load of different pictures, some of which need a lot of theory to make them work, some of which just look good. No picture appeals to every one, though some of them can be condemned by just about every one as being a load of crap. And, at the high end there's a specialized group of art critics and artists who practice in little specialized bubbles where they play glass bead games with each other.

Its not a science, and we don't have educational engineering as a specialty yet.

.

Practical aspects of the LMS

2011-05-31T08:44:00.000+01:00

A variable should be defined in one place in a program. It should be clear to the programmer where that should be. This makes it easy to change.

Now in Blackboard, a learning management system (LMS), say I want to set a mid term.

Where should the date for that reside? In the syllabus? in the online submission system? in the course calendar? In the course modules? In an announcement? In an email sent to all participants? on a discussion board?

Now there is a good case to be made for putting it in a number of these places, and most instructors will do so.

Now the fun comes when the course is bundled up and redeployed the following year. Ideally you change the date in one place and it propagates to all the target documents, but in practice.... dream on. These are issues which have been tackled in Computer Science. they are solved problems, but in LMS world we seem to be back at the point where RPGIII and Cobol ruled the world. Typically you have to track through your course and find every place where you placed a date and change it. This is fine until some student comes up and tells you that the missed the midterm because the date was wrong, and can show you one that you missed.

What I’d like would be a scheduler which would allow me to roll back the course to the start each time I present it, and then present me with a calendar of proposed changes, based on how I built the course last time, and allow me to customize these changes as they go in.

It doesn’t give me a unique point for inputting the mid term date, but it would prompt me with each of the places I inputted it the first time.

Make her play computer games!

2011-04-19T22:30:00.001+01:00

This post arose from an online discussion on the gender difference's in mental abilities, and its potential impact on online learning tools. I am arguing for a cultural explanation, but am faced with this article citing fMRI evidence for the existence of sex based difference's.

http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep03227254.pdf

Disclaimer: In reading this article I am trying not to let my predisposition not to believe in hardwired gender difference's get in the way of the facts.

Looking at Sarah L. Levin's article (2005), the link above, which is, to my mind, a nice piece of exploratory work, but no more than that. We have data for twelve subjects, We have twelve further subjects whose data was not included because of technical difficulties experienced with data collection software, and we have a further 6 subjects removed from the data because they gave the wrong answers.

In part 2 of the experiment the number of valid data sets came down to 11. So its a nice suggestive pilot study, but hardly conclusive.

We next (in the quick and dirty department) hit Google Scholar and look at the articles citing this one.

I come across this:

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/acsm/cagis/2008/00000035/00000003/art00003

Which is "Explaining Map reading performance"

Authors: Lloyd, Robert Earl; Bunch, Rick L.

This one is interesting because it says that the observed differences are are best explained by gender not sex differences, which is, to my mind, culture, not biology.

Where else is the research going? Well the next exhibit from the list of documents citing this research is this:

http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA529481

Again abstract only, but it seems as if this research may be used to support a test for choosing Naval Aviators.

The next reference was cool:

http://mnkors.ipower.com/files/1.pdf

This paper is Looking at the spatial task and musical thinking and looking for ability correlations. It claims there is something there, but the stats are weak. At best R values of around 0.3, and a key phrase, which I love "approaching significance".

Abandoning Levin, I cut to the chase and search for "mental rotation cultural differences" in Google scholar.

I find this abstract:

http://www.cortexjournal.net/article/S0010-9452%2808%2970206-5/abstract

Canada, Germany and Japan.

No work on culture in the abstract, but we find that Academic Program that the students are enrolled in is now a significant variable.

Finally a last abstract:

http://heldref-publications.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,2,9;journal,34,56;linkingpublicationresults,1:119924,1

The Journal of Genetic Psychology
	Issue:	Volume 163, Number 3 / September 2002
	Pages:	272 - 282
	URL:	Linking Options
	DOI:	10.1080/00221320209598683

Improving Children's Mental Rotation Accuracy With Computer Game Playing

Richard De Lisi ^A1 and Jennifer L. Wolford ^A1

The title says it all. Take a bunch of kids,24 boys 23 girls, Test them, The girls are not as good at mental rotation.

Make them play computer games involving mental rotation, test again and the difference goes away.

Educational conclusion. Ask your students if they play computer games and if they don't sign them up for an appropriate class.

Thoughts on Fukushima, 14th Mar.

2011-03-14T12:19:00.001Z

Comments on “Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors”

http://morgsatlarge.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/why-i-am-not-worried-about-japans-nuclear-reactors/

re-blogged at

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/03/13/fukushima-simple-explanation/

This very well written account of the possible causes and consequences of the nuclear accidents in Japan at fukushima has stormed to the top of Google search and has already garnered over 220,000 readers. The author is not a nuclear engineer, although he is clearly quite familiar with the technology involved and seems to have a very pragmatic approach to the risks involved.

The arguments and reassurances put forward are based in general on sound science, and do not need the backing of an appropriately qualified authority to back them up. The science is straight forward and is in general un-contentious.

There are a number of points in the account which I would like to comment on.

1) Fukushima reactor 1 does not have a core catcher assembly. This issue has come up in the comments to the post and means that if the core did melt the result would be less controlled than as described in the post. Having said that, this scenario seems unlikely as the core is cooling and is being moderated effectively by boron containing seawater.

2) It has been reported that radioactive Iodine and Caesium are contained in the released products. This is worrying as it may imply that the cladding on some of the fuel elements has been breached. Radioactive Iodine is taken up by the thyroid gland and can lead to cancer of the thyroid. Prompt Administration of Iodine to the affected population is an effective preventative measure at the levels which one would expect given current information. I don’t know about the health consequences of Caesium.

3) Some of the terminology used in the article is not standard. Thus as described in the article there are four levels of containment. It is more normal to describe the “stainless steel kettle” with its concrete surround as the primary containment.

Events have moved on, and we have seen what appears to be a further hydrogen explosion in Fukushima 3. Fukushima 3 is a later version of the same boiling water design and this version seems to have a “suppression pool” underneath the main reactor vessel.

My conclusion is be cautiously optimistic. The picture changes if it turns out that either of the reactors is leaking cooling water, or if significant amounts of the core becomes exposed and heat up in either reactor. One issue which has not been discussed extensively is the status of any spent or irradiated fuel which may be stored on site. Issues surround this have to potential to cause more widespread site contamination, jeopardising continuing operation of the other reactors present.

Selected references:

A trailmeme with some more technical documents is here

Through a glass darkly metrics and modalities

2011-03-03T10:56:00.004Z

Metrics for blogging.

Any form of measurement for which there is a preferred outcome creates distortions, whether its school completions, or listings of the best performing schools in terms of students proceeding to college or any other thing. For the two school based metrics mentioned above: in one case we retain students when their time might be better spent elsewhere, in the other case we teach to the interview or teach to the test depending on the college entry requirements in the country concerned. This distorts the system and moves us away from a well rounded education appropriate for the entire educational cohort concerned.

It’s the same in the blog-o-sphere. The search for traffic whether the numbers are important for cash or self esteem reasons distorts the medium.

Distortion is not all bad, the classic Haiku or the sonnet are literary forms where a very constricted format leads to great art.

Stephen Downes in this post http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=54933 describes describes many of the tricks Bloggers use to drive traffic to their sites. He is deeply critical. giving out that the result is neither deep, well aruged or authentic. These are all good points, but may misrepresent how many of us use blogs.

Often we are not looking for a long and deeply intellectual discourse which will leave us pondering for the rest of the day, we are looking for the short “edu bite”, fast food for thinkers on the run trying to clear the in-stack on their Google reader page.

A standard VLE for Ireland?

2011-02-20T23:17:00.001Z

We are at an interesting point in Irish education, where many secondary schools are moving their school systems towards VLE’s or content management systems.

Why do I use both terms, when these are clearly very different pieces of computer kit?

It’s how they are used. I’m listening to discussions in various teaching fora on the web, looking on as a parent, and for my sins trying to teach. And through all these channels I see many very different views of what computers have to do in the classroom.

At one end we have the apple tribe, with students making Imovies, engaging with apps and hitting each other over the head with ipads when they’re not texting on their iphones.

Its creative, anarchic and probably reflects a true vision of the future with these students lounging around as adults listening to their ipods and sending updates to their e-friends on facebook 2.3.

At the other end I see SCORM compliant transpositions of our traditional teaching modes “Listen to it, learn it, pass the exam and forget it”, where the computer turns into a vertically mounted examination paper with a slightly stricter method of enforcing the “Times up! Stop writing now" imperative moment.

The problem with making a national VLE recommendation as I see it is this.

We need a VLE where a class can have a discussion, where they can write a newspaper. Where they can collaborate on a movie. Where they can write a class blog, sit an exam or play serious games. We need somewhere where teachers can do everything from just putting up the homework for the class, to running a virtual classroom for housebound students whom they have never met in person.

Many teachers will be in the just put up the homework camp. They have been teaching their course for many years, are good at it and it works. These are the easy people to satisfy. The problem is with the rest. Moodler’s and Sakai’s BB’rs Frogs and angels. Together with the vast array of teachers who have found tools like Voki and Voice thread, Youtube an Vimeo. Trailmeme or eTwinning.

For these there may be only one real VLE, and its called the world wide web.

Refs

This piece was written after reading a truly excellent post on the history of the VLE which is linked from this blog page by Ray Tolley:

http://t.co/c2gr0OL,

http://efoliointheuk.blogspot.com/2011/02/evolution-of-vle.html

From the Irish Times:Free online course materials will revolutionise third-level education

2011-02-01T23:09:00.002Z

This is a reaction to the above article by Brian Mooney writing in the Irish times today, the First of February 2011. In the article he extolled the virtues of MIT opencourseware.
MIT is great, and I love the open course ware initiative, but its only one small shelf in a very big open-source learning bookstore! Have you looked at whats available through ItunesU? This has all of the MIT stuff + Berkley +Harvard, +....hundreds of universities, and Museums and other such. Its a great resource for the learner.
Here is another source of such materials, this came up on the CESI list in response to the Irish times article:
http://cnx.org/

The second interesting trend is the emergence of degree replacements such as "Microsoft Certified", where it doesn't matter where you get the learning, once you sit the exams and pass, you get the piece of paper. In this way we see the learning and the certification being de-coupled with the later being given the imprimatur of an internationally accepted (albeit commercial) standard.
City and Guilds in London used to do something like this, and The university of London also had a very early distance education program with a good reputation. This is a field where we will see more players entering in the near future.

Are we Scholars or Teachers?

2011-01-30T11:48:00.000Z

I have just finished reading this interesting piece
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/01/28/martin_gillen_time_to_create_a_market_for_excellent_college_teaching
written by Robert Martn and Andrew Gillen in "Inside higher Ed"
They raise the point that there is no efficient market for excellent teachers, rather there is an efficient market for scholars of higher education. Thus rather than training people to teach effectively, we train them to be effective scholars in the field of education.
This is not unique to education, and comes from the inbuilt reflexive bias in higher ed, whereby course givers are by and large working for academic institutions.
The article also identifies another source of this bias which is that in the hiring process employers have the external publishing record of the lecturer/researcher to go on, and that the reference mechanism is in many markets broke. (An excellent reference may indicate an employer’s unwillingness to be sued, or their enthusiasm for getting rid of the individual in question, rather than a deep-seated conviction that this is an individual of truly above average ability!)
When I think of the coursework in the course I am now pursuing, I find that much of it is aimed fairly and squarely at scholarly research, which is very valid considering that that is going to be a significant hiring criteria. It does however beg the question has this emphasis on scholarship led to less time being spent on delivering material pertinent to the development and delivery of content to students, which may be what teaching is about.

The semantic Web

2011-01-26T09:33:00.000Z

This is in response to a discussion in #LAK11
The semantic web is an umbrella term for an initiative to make the web richer by attempting to tag large data collections with tags conveying their meanings and knowledge content. In some sense I see it as being an outgrowth of the AI community's effort to encode knowledge into semantic maps.
I think its a wonderful project, but perhaps a little too ambitious, and I'll tell you why. Humans love to re-purpose things in unexpected ways, and I cant see a set of tags which would be broad enough to encompass all possible uses, yet retain enough specificity to be useful. As an example:
Once upon a time there was an astronomer who was looking at galaxies, and after two years of looking at galaxies everyday they asked for help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Zoo
and currently
http://www.zooniverse.org/projects
Whats interesting in all of this is that:
1) These are collections of big data which still need many thousands of people to generate knowledge, and
2) A specific tool for a specific task, (deciding whether galaxies were spirals or not) is now looking for space junk on the moon, examining solar storms, and reading old ships logs to find out about global warming.
This is a very human thing to do, other examples, a website set up for selling Pez dispensers turned into Ebay, and a piece of software set up to help an academic keep track of references, turned into Google.
This is human.
At our best we look above and beyond.
The second problem is the one alluded to in the old joke about the British and the Americans being two nations divided by a common language.
As a chemist I once studied a set of small molecules each containing 4 atoms.
I was talking to another computational chemist and they recommended a particular piece of software as being good for small molecules.
I tried it, and it failed.
When I met them again, I asked about it. It turned out that they were doing computational biochemistry, and small for them was around 10,000 or so atoms big.
Even in very closely related fields terms can have very different meanings.
My 2c.
Laurence Cuffe

Meta Analysis

2011-01-10T23:03:00.000Z

Great claims have been made for Meta analysis. The principle seems sound, that by combining the results of numerous smaller studies you can generate results which are both more authoritative and more general than any of the individual papers which go to make up the study.

Professor John Hattie is a practitioner (http://www.education.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/home/about/staff/j.hattie)

I remain to be convinced by Hattie's Meta analysis. For me its a purely numeric argument. I assume that for a study to make a valid contribution to a meta analysis, the author of the Meta analysis must have read the paper.

Hattie's meta analysis is claimed to be a synthesis of 50,000 previous studies (This number varies in some papers on his website its as high as 180,000). If the original papers were used that would be reading 50 papers a week for about twenty years.

However Hattie does not claim to have read these studies, but to have read a much smaller number of studies summarizing previous work. At this point one has to ask how it was possible to ensure that the literature used as input in those studies was distinct, i.e. that each of those studies did not include many of the same papers.

If you cant do this then determining just how many studies contributed to the eventual conclusion becomes problematic.

Just to make this reservation clear, I would like to state that this comment is based on over 100,000 research studies, because it is based on at least two reviews of Hattie's work, each of which were based on his work, which included the results of over 50,000....

Much of what Hattie says is very sensible, in particular his argument that as educationalist we must move away from "it works for me"(Hattie, 1999) and take a more objective approach to educational research and model building. Statistics can be one approach to such a project. However showing that two factors are correlated is a very long way from showing that there is a causal relationship between them, and its hard to see how Hatties approach of combining Meta analysis can drill down deeply enough into the nuts and bolts of what goes on in a classroom environment to provide us with reliable information as to what will work for us.

my 2c.

Hattie 1999 http://www.education.auckland.ac.nz/webdav/site/education/shared/hattie/docs/influences-on-student-learning.pdf

Game Based learning

2011-01-04T00:11:00.000Z

http://www.upsidelearning.com/blog/index.php/2011/01/03/game-based-learning-isnt-always-electronic/

This very brief article on game based learning highlights a game called the healing blade, where the lord of pestilence is pitted against the apothecary. This is a card based game for teaching medical students what does and what does not work in fighting infectious disease. The take home of this is that Game based learning does not necessarily involve computers, and the second take home is that profits from the game are used to support a pediatric charity.

This takes me back to “life and death 2” which was a video game in the eighties based on learning how to do brain surgery. I’ve played the game, but I’m not sure that I’m equipped with the skills needed for the task. However in this case its not me but thee subject matter which is likely to query my competence once I detail the source of my online training.

Now: Anyone for a game of Hangman?

Categories?

2010-12-06T09:35:00.002Z

This is probably Wittgenstein territory to be quite honest, but driving to work this morning there was someone giving out about the way that nouns are being turned into verbs in English today. We Google, we Flip Chart.

In principle, I am a champion of the Kings English, I own a number of style books grammars and writing guides. Not that my writing is perfect but I am optimistic that the fact of ownership will lead to a kind of osmosis of enlightenment if I keep these things hanging around.

However that’s not my point here.

I started thinking about nouns turning into verbs, and I started with a few simple examples.

I table a motion.

I chair a meeting.

I floor an opponent.

I wall up an opening.

I roof a cottage.

I pencil in a meeting date.

I pen my memoirs.

I paper a wall.

I dot my I’s

I cross my T’s.

I knife my opponent. (Mac the knife was playing on the radio this morning.)

I could go on, but the above examples will, I think, suffice. When we divide up and categorize words, just how real are our divisions, and how many words are there which wander into pens where they are not supposed to be? Educationally, we do a lot of boxing up knowledge and much of teaching is unwrapping these parcels and putting them back out into real life.

Whimsy

2010-11-12T17:06:00.002Z

Whimsy

Do you teach with whimsy? or is your teaching always serious and to the point. I’ve been doing a little research on teaching and humor, and I find it seems to be more common in subject areas where the content may be challenging or disturbing. Its major use seems to be to relieve tension or to discus difficult subjects. In this sense it seems more commonly used when training doctors or nurses, although this may be an artifact of the existence of therapeutic humor.

There are some very serious people considering humor, for instance, here “Educated Insolence”, or closer to home this paper on IHPT. As I’m sure you are aware IHPT is instructional humor processing theory. This paper seems to indicate that telling bad off topic jokes does not aid student learning, but telling on topic good jokes can help. My thinking would be that humor can break down the barrier between the teacher and the class, and particularly with adult learners, overcome their feelings of insecurity about being back in a learning situation. I also feel it can make your examples more memorable, and humorous examples can push your learning more towards a narrative form which can aid memory, but can also distract students from the true point of the exercise.

All thoughts on a postcard please...

Eharmony (tm) for professional relationships.

2010-11-04T22:20:00.000Z

At this point a survey of online users in 16 countries has indicated that 30% had used online services to initiate dating activity. This is in some sense a tipping point in the social sphere where we have tools such as Facebook which are used to support weak tie relationships.

As of yet there does not seem to be a professional equivalent that I’m aware of. Is this just me or is there a genuine gap? As I see it at this point we are still, professionally, going to events on the internet where we think people like us will hang out in the hope of meeting some one interesting. (Note I’m still within the social activity analogy here) Do we need a professional version of e-Harmony? If so what should our profile’s look like? Should they be like our C.V, which primarily shows off our accomplishments, or should they be more inspirational and forward looking, like the dating agency profile that cheerfully lists some-one who has just given up smoking as a non-smoker, because that is the person they aspire to be.

So two questions here

1) Do we need a “dating agency” for academic and learning interactions?

2) What information should be in the profile?

The network and the message

2010-10-26T23:55:00.001+01:00

In looking at phenomenology, one of the very distinct perceptions of the tradition is that in transforming it from its origins with Husserl into a French context with Merleau-Ponty, the movement was transformed not only by by reflection into the French philosophical culture, but also by translation into the French language. I find myself again looking at it after a double translation, as I see it through the lens of commentators in English on both aspects of the movement.

What is interesting is that the process of translation seemed to strengthen and clarify the core values of the movement. Thus an extension and amplification of a system of thought has appeared as an emergent property of its transmision through the network.

In education we take our understanding of the subject and translate it into terms which we expect our students to understand. There must be a translation, because if there was no translation then there would be no learning involved.

At times this translation is merely a communication, but at other times the translation is much more involved, involving paraphrase, analogy and simplification.

The question here is what new and more powerful concepts are going to emerge from this translation, and how can we maximize the potential of their engendering?

All links are to the current version of The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Principal Editor: Edward N. Zalta URL: http://plato.stanford.edu/,The Metaphysics Research Lab Center for the Study of Language and Information Stanford University, Stanford Ca.

Pre verbal thinking and the web

2010-10-23T00:27:00.000+01:00

Growing out of a discussion on critical thinking which has been taking place on #PLENK2010 I found my self considering preverbal thinking at a GradCAM seminar on Maurice Merleau-Ponty this afternoon.

Pre-verbal thinking is the first layer through which perception travels before it receives our attention, but it may also be involved in an artists interaction with their medium and it is also a way of thinking about an audiences interaction with a performance, when it has gone beyond just watching and is totally engaged.

Communicating over the web lends itself to verbal modalities and logical analysis, but the web has the potential to be a much richer medium. Academic analysis is historically biased towards the text and the spoken word. As the medium gets richer, are we moving beyond the affordances of our conventional academic analysis?

In this richer medium what do we do with the precept that you have not mastered a medium unless you can create in it?

Assessment and models of learning

2010-10-16T22:54:00.001+01:00

This is really more a thought experiment than a practical suggestion but please walk with me for a bit on this. What if we use the student at the end of their course as the input for an expert system? i.e. we queried their knowledge over an extended period until we felt it was captured within a rule set and a data store.
Now imagine we have evaluated the students, and we now have a set of expert systems, all encoded from separate students impressions and connections built while taking part in the course.
Now how do we compare these expert systems to verify that they are close enough to a canonical system to qualify as being fair copies?
Would such a comparison, if it were possible, be a valid assessment?
Would it preclude the possibility that the student had gone beyond the teacher and built a more valid learning network?

What’s interesting here is, as ever, the implied spaces.

Matters arising: The first issue is can an expert system, given sufficient time and resources, successfully capture the sum of the knowledge acquired by the student. If it can’t, what is it going to miss and how can that be assessed?

The second question is assuming such a thing is possible, should all such systems resemble each other? If the topic is flying a plane, we would appreciate it if they were similar, and bore some passing resemblance to the Airbus peoples model of the actions of an ideal pilot, but if the subject is creative writing, its less clear that this method will work. Here I would claim that the implied space, the part of the learning which cannot be captured in a set of rules, is the real learning on the course. #PLENK2010

What Does a theory do?

2010-10-14T21:40:00.003+01:00

This is coming from a discusion of "Theory" in week four of PLENK2010

A theory is a simplified model of some real world phenomena which tries to encode previous experience with a view to guiding future action.
A really good theory will make wild improbable predictions which turn out to be true. Think things which glow in the dark and the photoelectric effect leading to H bombs here.
A fun theory starts with minute observations of some trivial inconsistency in conventional explanation and replaces it with a much grander structure.
Many theories will cover the facts, few give you a totaly new vision of the existing landscape.

I would sugest
Conectivism
The school of Barbianna
Foucault's analysis of power in the classroom

as examples of theories which do.

Bereiter's Learning Paradox

2010-10-06T23:36:00.000+01:00

Existing theories of learning fail to account for the expansion and creation of knowledge (what Bereiter calls the learning paradox: “If learners construct their own knowledge, how is it possible for them to create a cognitive structure more complex than the own they already possess (cited in Cambridge Handbook of Learning Sciences, p. 103). Connectivism and networked learning, on the other hand, suggest a continual expansion of knowledge. New and novel connections open new worlds and create new knowledge. Source George Siemens, September 12, 2009 “what is conectivism” on Google Docs at
https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=anw8wkk6fjc_14gpbqc2dt
Bereiters Learning paradox as described above ignores two things.
1) The first is a fundamental principle of computer science, which is that once a computer language contains a few simple constructs it is possible to perform arbitrarily complex computations with it, given sufficient memory to store intermediate results,
2) The phenomena of emergent behavior whereby as systems get larger unexpected behaviors emerge (Conways game of life is an early example, as are many systems beloved of investigators in the field of Chaos theory.)
The word used to name conecitivism implies a vast preexisting web of potential knowledge onto which we sling our hammock of knowing. I think there is more to learning than that, and I like to think that there are processes at work which generate, in addition to a plethora of connections to existing knowledge sources and systems, new substrate in knowledge space through which we can “boldly go where no man has gone before”.

Are we doctors, artists or actors?

2010-10-04T16:31:00.001+01:00

Roger Neilson blogging at http://didactylos.posterous.com/ has a nice post where he draws an analogy between a doctor using 150 year old tools and a teacher using 150 year old methods and by analogy asks why we don’t throw such teachers out on their ears. However I think the analogy is an unfair one.

In medicine there is a clear goal: cure the patient, and very solid evidence that technology helps.

In education the goal is misty (what’s an educated student?) and there is less evidence that technology is an essential tool.

First I'd like to draw an analogy not to medicine but to art, considering the proposition that as educators we are artists. Some artists use technology to very good effect, some don’t. Its not clear that the low tech artists are “ipso facto” doing a worse job. This analogy works at a lot of levels, but it still doesn’t quite capture what educators do. This brings me to my final analogy which is with actors.

Here in some sense the core performance remains the same, but the role of technology although subservient, is stronger. A theatre performance without stage lighting and other technology would be an arcane thing which would require extra artistic justification to validate it. Maybe that’s how we should view teachers who haven’t moved on.

Social Media An extended response:

2010-10-03T23:50:00.001+01:00

To what appears to be a guest blog by Muireann O’Keeffe on socialbits

The ability to examine digital sources in terms of voice, agenda and authority are skills we have to give our students, and much of education in digital literacy allows students to read the meta language surrounding a webpage or site, however education is now as much about the pipes as the repositories. Social media is a pipe skill. In addition to the critical abilities above we need to make our students effective digital plumbers by giving them skills for improving the signal to noise ratio in their online data streams.

Most secondary teachers know that Youtube is a great educational resource, few would claim that unlimited access to it in the classroom would benefit their students educational goals.

Twitter is a great source for educational information (I came here from there) but unless tamed by an aggregator such as paper.li, it becomes an asynchronous source of distraction.

Social media present great opportunities for education within and beyond the classroom. We can crowd source information, participation and engagement; but unless focused and scaffolded there is a high risk that student classroom interaction with social media will be in a non educational social space which the new media have transported there.

Its easy to be critical and to gainsay, but we mustn’t forget that just as social media can bring the external world into the classroom as a distraction, it can equally well bring the classroom out and allow students to study any time, any where as the impulse strikes them.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin

2010-09-27T23:30:00.001+01:00

Bakhtin is a thinker who is well worth looking up, although how much of what you find out is going to be autobiographical mythology remains an open question. Russian, did philosophy and or literary criticism, lost a leg.
I’m not going to explore his life and times, but rather to describe two idea’s of his which seem as if they should be important in education. The first idea is a kind of human uncertainty principle, the idea that we can never truly describe or understand someone in their entirety, because a person is a mutable and ever changing target, evolving and changing as life goes on and aims and goals and abilities change.
The second is a concept of multiple versions of the truth. Here the notion is that our assumption that if two people have differing views about something this implies that one of them must be wrong is called into question. The thought being that just as there are many different viewpoints in life, there may also be many versions of the truth, which, although mutually inconsistent are not necessarily privileged with respect to each other.
Again I think this has clear educational implications, where there may be many differing narratives in a group activity and no clear reason for saying that one is better than the other
1. Deborah Haynes, “Universe Magazine - Reviewing Monet Story,” spring 1998, http://www.wsu.edu/NIS/Universe/ReviewSt.html.
2. wikipedia, “Mikhail Bakhtin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,” accesed sept 27 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin.

And I thought I was doing so well

2010-09-22T16:27:00.002+01:00

Your social circle as determined by Google is currently a blank slate.

You can create a rich social circle and start seeing social search results by following a few simple steps:

* Add new people to your social circle by adding them to the "Friends", "Family" or "Coworkers" group in your Google contacts
* Create a Google profile and add links to services where your friends create content
* If you would like to see more content from your Google contacts, encourage them to create a Google profile and add links to their content there

Note: this is a recent snapshot of your social circle. Changes you make to your connections will be reflected in the next snapshot. Learn more »
Source:Google Dashboard

So what does Google know anyway!

Whats a PLN for anyway?

2010-09-21T09:50:00.002+01:00

As a profesional you build up a set of tools which you use to face the chalenges of your job. In the old days your library was one such resource, and if stuck you would look up the information you needed.
The role of your PLE is similar, except now you are adding people into the equation. If we phrase the PLE as a PLN it makes it much clearer that this is a network of like minded individuals, facets of whose activities overlap, and who can aid each other like fellow travelers where this ocurs. For me the primary purpose of my PLE/PLN is to leverage on the experience of others and avoid re-inventing the wheel.

PLE's and Higher Ed.

2010-09-20T12:38:00.000+01:00

At the end of the day what is my purpose in setting up my Personal learning environment (PLE)? It’s simply this. I want to see further. I want to see things that others see. I want to know what’s around the corner, what’s up the road and what’s coming after me.
If my PLE gets too big it’s like the control room at three mile island, a hundred alarms going off and no one knowing what’s going on, and that brings me to my next thought.
Maybe the new role of higher educational institutions is going to be to act as a filter, removing the dross and passing on the paydirt This role may give Higher Ed a legitimate role in the PLE, though it’s not clear at this point how or where that interface would slot in.

Licking Alliens

2010-09-20T00:43:00.001+01:00

This is distinctly weird. ’ve just spent ten minutes sticking my tongue out and licking aliens off my computer screen.
And there actually is a serious purpose to all of this.
I’ve been trying out some free accessibility software, “Camera Eyes” ( here, a 5MB download), which uses the webcam built into your laptop to track your head movement, and allows you to use head movement as a mouse substitute. The software is designed to allow users with limited or no movement below the neck to use a computer. The program comes with a training video game where you just have to put the cursor on top of random images of aliens, and they blow up. This is where I got the aliens.
Finally, to explain myself, when you first start the software it finds your webcam and asks you to highlight some facial feature which it will then track. I started out using the crossbar of my glasses, which worked fine, but it then occurred to me to try using the tip of my tongue as the feature for the web cam to track. The tip of your tongue works very well, the camera picks it up easily, and my response time for the program came down by about 40% (that’s edu-speak for “I was killing the aliens on average about 0.5 seconds sooner”). Just don’t try this with your laptop on the way to work, or it might have unintended consequences.

Cybernetics feedback loops and education

2010-09-19T14:31:00.002+01:00

Arising from PLENK2010 there was a discussion on management cybernetics in the context of teaching. There are a couple of interesting notions arising here. The first overarching (there I’ve used it that means I’m an educationalist not just a teacher) idea is to view educational systems as a system of feedback loops and control mechanisms. For me this is an interesting perspective as it makes me think about signal paths and time constants in an educational setting. This is interesting because it allows us to consider the difference which the use of IT in an educational setting makes. Thus, for example, a program, which provides students with near instantaneous feedback as to whether their answer to a mathematics problem is correct, differs in a significant way from assigning the same exercise as homework. This difference can be characterised primarily as a time constant.
The second notion coming out of this is that of requisite complexity. This is a concept from cybernetics that for any model to accurately reflect the behaviour of a complex system it has to have a commensurate degree of complexity. Again I map this into the various educational models and theories to which I have been exposed and it generates the notion that in many cases to do justice to the educational setting under consideration we need an amalgamation of theories and understandings as the entity under observation is by its nature too complex for a simple system to do a good job.

Ideas here ultimately derive from the work of Dr Stafford Beer (organizational cybernetics) and Ross Ashby (the Law of requisite variety) There is more on their thinking here:

Thinking about PLE's

2010-09-16T23:06:00.001+01:00

This is in response to a post in PLENK2010 claiming that PLE's are a web 2 phenomena.

My PLE predates web two. One classic component is the personal library, and of course our network of experts from whom we get topic specific advice.
What seems to have changed is the time constants.
Book v.s. blog post, a week vs 3 minutes.

A second issue is authority. As we become more exposed to polarised data sources, we become more sophisticated at reading the side chanell information which can indicate that the author is a kook!

Back to the Idea of a university

2010-08-21T22:12:00.002+01:00

We encapsulate learning into courses and modules, quite often prescribed via SLO's etc. However if you look back to early universities, it was not courses but your accumulated learning experience which counted. Maybe with online learning and learning on demand we can move away from unitizing learning and get back to rewarding people for their time on task.

Simple learning

2010-08-18T17:45:00.002+01:00

Steps to varnishing a floor.
1) Open can of varnish.
2) Move lid of can to exit point of room.

Omitting 2) generates a simple example of experiential learning.

A side bar on Gardner

2010-05-30T17:34:00.001+01:00

Frames of mind: the theory of multiple intelligences (Gardner, 1983) The classic text on multiple intelligence’s. Where Gardner differed from previous authors who sought to develop multidimensional models of intelligence was in the precision with which he defined what constitutes intelligence. I particularly note his distinction that an intelligence should be an ability, which can be lost due to brain injury. Thus, to my mind, by establishing an organic differentiation Gardner enables us to bound the levels of distinction involved here.
This is actually quite a profound distinction, as we normally think of subject categories or areas of learning as being very clearly culturally determined. By collocating what we assume are cultural distinctions with biological functions, Gardner is making a quite interesting connection between culture and biological determinism.
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind : the theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.

Ethics in research on the internet

2010-05-09T21:56:00.004+01:00

This is a series of questions in an area where I'm trying to work out what my position should be. These questions arise from asking whether we should view the internet as a collection of public and private documents, or as a collection of interations between people when it comes to doing research with the material we find there.
First Question Can I use posts to an online comunity of practice as objects of research without the consent of all people concerned? Probably not. Unles all posts are pubicly visible and are made in the expectationnthat there is a large body of public lurkers following the postings, I dont think one can. In this circumastance I think there is an expectation that this is a shared but not nescescariy public conversation and that materail posted is for the purpose of contiuing the conversation.
Exceptions to this expectation of privacy, would be overwhelming public interest i.e. it is for the public good, or where respecting the privacy of the context would be tantamount to coluding in a criminal act.
An example of this type of interaction maght make this clearer. There exist online discusion boards for profesionals in the drilling industry, While members of the press might join such boards to get deep background on a drilling rig acident, it would be inapropriate to quote statements made in such a context with atribution. The public interest here is that profesionals need a forum for rapid and open discusion of technical issues, impeding such discusions is not in the general public interest.
Second Question Can I use material from a freely available newspaper article, displayed on the web for academic research? I think I'm on safe ground here in saying yes, and no further permision is required, unless there is an issue of either plaigarism or copyright. I.e. I cant misapropriate the ideas without atribution, and I cant quote the material to such an extent that it becomes tantamount to republishing. (This is the 10% editorial use rule).
Third question, and this involves the issue of informed consent. Supose I join a racist organization and become part of a private online discusion, the content of which I consider as being of acedemic interest. Here I think there is not a hard and fast line. If there are criminal matters invoved, then I think my duty to avoid colusion in crime alows me to break confidentiality. However I think as we move away from the criminal context, the distinction becomes less and less clear cut.In general here is where we get the distinction between thetwo modles. The "A collection of Documents" view point tending to allow, while the interations between individual people is significantly less liberal.
Any thoughts?

Too many Wrappers

2010-05-05T22:44:00.003+01:00

I'm checking out the online maths modules in the Blackboard VLE in DIT. I've just clicked on a module on integration, and I get to read the module about three lines at a time. Why? Well the first piece of wraping paper is my browser, Firefox. There is a top line with the page tittle, then a row of drop down menus, then the address bar, then the tab bar.
Next were in the VLE, Blackboard. Here many more menu's and buttons are used to wrap up a document viewer, which looks suspiciously like an adobe product in its look and feel. This also has menus, a little preview copy of the page in miniture on the left and more buttons. Finaly, in the lower right hand side of the page we get to the document on learning maths, which apears to be just a static text document.
This takes up, literaly 1/4 of the total page space.

I supose my point here is that my screen space on a laptop is limited, and on a mobile device it is even tighter. Most curent VLE's just dont know when its polite to get out of the way.

Games and education, whats the difference?

2010-04-21T17:07:00.001+01:00

The more I think about "Education" and "Games", the more ambiguous I find the distinction. Typically both are abstract systems with an imposed set of rules based loosely on some subset of reality. The number of players can vary from 1 to indeterminate, and we often have an abstract value system, which is used to rate players/students on their performance.
I’m just finding it hard to come up with a unique distinguishing feature for which I cannot find a counter example.

Game based learning: Risks and benefits.

2010-04-18T20:58:00.003+01:00

Game based learning
Risks and benefits.

In today’s Sunday times magazine there was quite a scary article on games addiction. It described, among other cases, gamers who ended up starving their child to death while looking after their virtual baby in an internet cafe, Gamers who stayed at their screens for days at a time with disgusting consequences, Gamers whose educational careers were destroyed by their adiction etc. It also described some of the rehab facilities which are starting to apear for these adicts, and identified gaming adiction as being a growing social problem. This provoked the following thoughts about using games as an educational tool.

The argument in favour of using games seems to be that games increase student engagement and mean that we are teaching within the space that students inhabit.

Considering Games as being akin to drug use, its worth quoting a former Harvard professor:
Leary argued that psychedelics, used with the right dosage, set and setting could, with the guidance of psychology professionals, alter behavior in unprecedented and beneficial ways. The goals of Leary's research included discovering better methods for treating alcoholism and to reform convicted criminals. Many of Leary's research participants reported profound mystical and spiritual experiences, which they claim permanently altered their lives in a very positive manner.

If I substitute “Games” for “psychodelics” I find many of these claims are now being made by the US Army, which is a major player in the adoption of games for achieving mission goals across the board from recruitment through training to rehab.
Games can be very useful. There is a role for limited scope simulations, i.e. what to do when you engine fails.
However, arguably, 9-11 would have been a less effective gesture without Microsoft flight simulator.
In more complex scenario’s there are two major problems,
1) how do we ensure that the learner has encountered all the learning scenario’s in the system, without breaking out of the immersive nature of the gaming encounter, which is its most cogent role, and
2) Authority. If, for instance in the flood control game I choose the alternative of planting trees and digging ditches as a flood control measure, and the game play says it worked, what level of credulity should I use in absorbing that learning?
Just some initial thoughts
Larry

Adopting new technology

2010-03-23T23:34:00.000Z

Thoughts on the development of education and barriers to the adoption of technology at third level.
The fundamental equation is cost benefit analysis. If it takes me three times as long to prepare a class, and my students only learn 10% more, then I don't make the effort.
If my students could potentially learn 40% more, but there's a 30% chance of me looking like an idiot, I don't take the risk.
So putting my notes on line is low effort, low risk and it gets done.
Putting up a selection of links to online resources is low risk and gets done.
Recording my class presentations so that my students can review what I did in class later, is low effort, with modest technology, but its higher risk (What if I make a mistake in class and they have a permanent record of this?), so it sometimes gets done.
Writing and deploying a fully online module, to students who I could equally well teach in a f2f session, is more work and significantly higher risk, (the computers went down for the final and every one got a “get out of tail free” card) so it rarely happens.
So we adopt incrementally and supplementarilly. We play it safe.

One page Summary of My Research Proposal

2010-03-16T10:04:00.001Z

One page Summary of My Research Proposal

Title
A text based examination of Introductory level Physics lab handouts using the methods of grounded Research.
Research question
What can Physics Lab handouts tell us?
Epistomology
Objective and Positivist for the physics, Subjective and constructivist for every thin else. I view lab handouts as being a social construction based in the culture of science.
Ontology
It is my belief that there exists a finite set of theories, explanations, interpretations and data which can emerge from an appropriate examination of these texts.
Methodology
Intensive text based examination of a wide corpus of texts will be followed by a more detailed cyclical coding exercise within the traditions of grounded research on a smaller subset of this corpus.
This will be supported by a trangulation motivated examination of additional documentary material together with a very small number of interviews to confirm the results.
Timescale
Phase 1 to will run until August, Phase 2will run until till October. Triangulation and interviews should be complete by the end December. Write up of the results will continue until done.
Results
A journal paper in narrative form.
Ethics.
In the initial phase texts will be harvested from the internet. For the second phase only those texts for which written permission for use has been secured will be included. The ethical model is as implied by the phrases “for the greatest Good” and “Do unto others”.

Thinking about big data

2010-03-08T10:24:00.002Z

After reading Scobleizer on big data I found my self thinking about how this could impact education. The most applicable idea I came up with was using it for assessment. If we transfer most of learning to some form of digitized mode then we could asses students on everything that they do rather than just assessing "home work" or "tests" or Mid Terms" or "exams". When I refer to digitized modes, this could be students doing very conventional work in a traditional classroom setting, but using laptops to write things down. The idea here is that their work would be accessible to data mining software.

Cooks and Chefs

2010-01-25T12:26:00.002Z

I've been asked to justify some of my practice in terms of the learning model adopted. This is a task I find unexpectedly hard, and I draw the following flawed analogy.

The culinary arts website http://www.culinaryprograms.com/cooks.htm indicates that the primary difference between Cooks and Chefs is that Cooks may also be expected to work on construction sites and in logging camps, however I would make the following distinction.

A cook will follow a recipe. We refer in chemistry to "cookbook chemistry" when we wish to imply that doing the experiment is just a purely routine matter of following the written instructions. Again, we expect technical texts such as the The IC op amp Cookbook, the Camera Cook book etc. to provide step by step instructions to achieve a given end.

A chef on the other hand is expected to be innovative, to bring together their knowledge of a wide variety of recipes to produce something new, something novel, something which is better than that which has gone before. Even if throwing together a simple omelet at the end of the night for what remains of the kitchen staff, the chef will not follow a recipe but will rather take whatever's there and produce an optimum result 90 seconds later.

I'm a chef. I serve up a succulent confection of androgogy confected with behaviorism and structuralism, with just a soupcon of teaching as drama.

If that doesn't work, then 90 seconds later I'm scouring the literature for more leftovers.

Learning objects: why its not quite as easy as “chunking”

2010-01-20T10:56:00.003Z

I stand in the gallery looking at a rather grey picture of a water fall. The artist William Turner has used his fingernail to cut through the pigment and provide the flashes of white from the foam at the top of the falls. I consider my plan to bring my children in to the gallery on a visit and imagine explaining to my daughter that these are the Reichenbach falls where Sherlock Holmes died, only to rise again by climbing up the rock ten years later when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave in to public pressure and resurrected his hero.
I’m also aware that this late in January time is running out on this plan as there is very little time left until the collection, under the direction of the bequest under which they were acquired, is locked away for another eleven months to protect it from the effects of sunlight.
I wonder if the rather drab palette in this picture is a result of such fading, or if this was the vision of the (now dead) artist.
All this takes but a moment and indicates the richness of the objects we encounter in everyday life. I could go on, relating this to the rest of turners art in this gallery, placing it within his body of work, or contrasting it with the similar landscape across the room which was not painted from life but which was painted using another artist’s sketch for a guide and from this I could end up discussing plagiarism in art, or I could relate this work to the Hudson river school in the states. I would do this because of the similarities I see in the philosophy which informs them, and is based on my personal juxtaposition of the two bodies of work, having seen the Wadsworth Atheneum exhibit of the Hudson river school two years before, and relating it to my recollection, (possibly faulty) of the four magnificent turner oil paintings in the Frick museum in new York.
In teaching a subject we often perform a spectacular filtering of the actual richness of everyday life, viewing it through the lens of one subject, and one stage in the development of that subject. Maybe we should take more care to look at the minor details as well as the major subject when we are teaching.

The heart of the matter

2010-01-03T07:50:00.001Z

The blogosphere has supplanted formal journalism as the movers and shakers of the world. This is because the cost of publishing ones thoughts to the masses has dropped precipitously, and the industries which were predicated on providing mass media access to the public are now struggling.

The enabling technology, the pusher on the street corner, is clearly the internet and the new cultural artifacts which it has bred (blogs, Wiki's Cops).

But this is the first shoe to fall. Still up there is most of academia. University is predicated on the rarity of good speakers with in depth professional knowledge of any subject you can take a course in. In the past, If you wanted to study quantum mechanics, you got to a university and started taking courses.

But this is no longer true. If I want quantum mechanics, its right here, one click away, coming from one of the greatest centers of scientific research in the western hemisphere, and it's the same with any other subject I care to name.

In the old days it was(in principle) the education that mattered, not the qualification, in the new regime, one of the few features universities can still offer to the student, which is not as clearly available via the internet, is certification for your learning, wherever you got it from.

So for long term survival, there are going to be some interesting moves by universities, towards being more research based institutions, towards being online repositories of course material accessed by the end users etc. At this point its hard to extrapolate, particularly with my educated academic bias on the issue.

Reflective Practice

2009-12-14T09:19:00.000Z

I’m working my way through “facilitating Reflective Learning in Higher Education”

and I’m still finding it hard to distinguish “reflective practice” from “think about what you are doing.”

Often in teaching mathematics I encounter students who are looking for a deeper understanding of some method which you have just run through with them. They have the sense that there is some great mystery of mysteries out there and when you say that that’s all there is to it, there is a palpable sense of let down and disappointment. For some there is a very real sense that they haven’t got it and this can be a barrier to their further progress.

I find I have this same uncomfortable feeling when it comes to reflective practice. I plan before I go into a class and work out what I’m going to do with a class that day. I do it and I will consider afterwards what worked out and what did not go over so well. This helps me decide what I’m going to do next time around.

Is this reflective practice? Is this going to have a transformative effect on my teaching and education? When I’m considering what my students might be thinking about, and then thinking further about what my students might be thinking that I’m thinking about them, and considering how their modeling of my modeling of their thinking about my actions in trying to modify their thinking about the subject about which I’ trying to convey my thoughts to them.... I think this is definitely reflective practice but I’m not convinced that the time I spend on this couldn’t be better spent doing corrections.

Humility in adult education

2009-12-10T23:18:00.001Z

In thinking further about a workshop on reflective teaching and development education, I have been examining a disquiet with the idea of education for change. In doing this I am helped by my subject matter (mathematics) as it is inherently less value laden that such subjects as history , political philosophy or religion.

My considered position is that I teach mathematics for what ever my students wish to use it for. They have made the decision to learn and unless I have specifically agreed a curriculum of change with them, then its is arrogant and presumptious of me to assume that they need re-education in the areas of social justice or world peace.

I'm not saying that I ignore such issues, or that I dont introduce them to my classes, on the contrary I do, but what I am saying is that in using such material I am not assuming that my students are ignorant of it or need to adapt my point of view on the issues raised. There is an unequal power relationship in the classroom as has been pointed out by such worthies as Foucault, which one must be both aware and wary of in order to avoid exploiting it to propagate a personal agenda which your students have not signed up for.

Feynman, models and e-Learning texts

2009-12-05T23:38:00.001Z

I’m reading “interactions in online education” by Charles Juwah, and so far it’s very good. However I am reminded of Richard Feynman’s account in “Surely you are joking” (online here) of how he listened to mathematicians in discussion. He said he always kept an example, like an orange, of whatever they were talking about in his head and when they were stretching it or subdividing it or whatever he would do the same with the orange. There’s a lot more to Feynman’s orange than we need to go into here, however I find it useful to keep a specific learning object in mind when I’m reading a text like this. So for instance when they say that two way communication is essential for learning to take place, my learning object is a book…
I’m still waiting for Aristotle to get back to me.

Assessment is the course, sometimes.

2009-12-03T23:19:00.002Z

I went on a visit to a school open day for parents of prospective students, and I took the opportunity to do a survey of the teachers present. I was asking about IT use in the main, but I asked the religion teacher how you teach religion. Well this obviously depends on the course, and as she said she is not looking to convert, but to inform and there is a lot of comparison religion material in the course. However one remark struck me: She said the students were generaly fine and interested in first and second year, but when they got to third year and realized that there was an exam at the end of it, teaching them became more up-hill work.
There is a nice distinction here between learning for the sake of it, typically associated with adult education, and the more usual paradigm that the assessment is the course.

The bad workman

2009-12-02T23:32:00.002Z

I'm starting to build prototypes for a project in articulate, a rapid prototyping tool, and I find that I'm modifying the design to accommodate the affordances of the program, and it struck me that in the old days craftsmanship meant knowing your tools and materials and extending your virtuosity to the limits of the medium defined by the combination.
Now we are advised to design without any particular tool in mind, as the constraints of a particular tool will limit your vision, and by the time you have developed mastery of the tool, that version will be out of date, and that company may already be out of business.

Power in the classroom

2009-11-22T00:13:00.001Z

I've been reading Stephen Brookfield "The Power of Critical Theory for Adult Learning…" which is not to be confused with critical thinking. The section I was reading was looking at Foucault's analysis of the social interaction in the classroom in terms of the power structures present and the micro managed control exercised by the teacher in managing class discussions, and enforcing classroom norms of behavior. The analysis seemed to imply that in some sense the role of the teacher as a constructor of the norms of civilized behavior is at the very least questionable in principle.

In teaching early school leavers I was very aware that in assessing their work "you are no good at multiplication" you were also projecting a message "you are no good". For students at the margins of society self worth may be the only thing they have so it was important to try and validate any other interests (self generated culture in Ziehe's(Ch.13) ) terms.

This led on to the thought of the importance of separating a class's educational goals and performance from the personal goals of its participants. Relating this to eLearning, we want to place ourselves within a person's domain of self value so that they personally take ownership of their learning. This may be a significant difference between F2F learning and classic eLearning.

You’ve got to start somewhere

2009-11-15T11:02:00.001Z

Thoughts on the design process for developing educational software.

Starting out one has an image of the user, an educational model for the learning, (which may or may not be enunciated) and an idea for the content, that is what is to be learnt.

We build by analogy, using what we have encountered before either as a model to be improved upon, or as an example of that which should be avoided.

It may be usefull to identify a number of exemplars of good and bad practice.

Most software development is iterative so we should think about the space within which our software/website will evolve.

What limitations are defined by our initial choices as to what and how to build?

We should think about what inputs will drive that iteration and what will shape its course.

Student feedback/Validation are good shaping factors, organic growth is probably not the best model for expansion.