Fortnightly Mailing

The human brain while texting, tweeting, phoning, driving

As a cyclist I've developed a sixth sense about which vehicles will, when they get close, be driven by a phone user; along with a riskily combative approach to such drivers if I can engage with them....

The Economist's Andreas Kluth is rightly a bit obsessed with the same issue, and writes about it here.

Excerpt (which could equally well apply to people texting/tweeting etc whilst allegedly concentrating on the things around them):

The human brain cannot process communication (oral or written) with a person who is not physically present without drastically reallocating attention and thus compromising driving safety. This is a biological fact. All those who claim that they can call/text and drive are the modern equivalents of the people you might (if you’re older) recall bragging that “I can hold my liquor” before that started sounding ridiculous.

Note. The are links to references in the second comment to this post below.

The lecture must stand - Stephen Downes / Don't lecture me - Donald Clark

Updated 15/4/2011

I wish I had taken part in the session about the future of the lecture that Stephen Downes ran yesterday with Donald Clark during Follow the Sun, a 2 day "non-stop global e-learning conference" run jointly by the University of Southern Queensland (Australia) and the University of Leicester (UK).

Embedded below is Stephen's slideshare presentation (each slide's header has a helpful "gist-giving" pointer, though this is not a substitute from hearing/seeing the talk itself) and here is a link to the presentation used by Donald. 

 

The Lecture Must Stand

View more presentations from Stephen Downes

 

"Pseudoteaching" - brilliant lectures can (and often do) involve this, according to Frank Noschese

Frank Noschese writes incisively - with reference to Walter Lewin's gripping introductory physics lectures at MIT - about about why a lot of apparently excellent teaching is nothing of the sort:

"The key idea of pseudoteaching is that it looks like good teaching. In class, students feel like they are learning, and any observer who saw a teacher in the middle of pseudoteaching would feel like he’s watching a great lesson. The only problem is, very little learning is taking place."

Noschese has several pseudoteaching links on his blog, and a useful RSS feed that aggregates comments on his blog relating to pseudoteaching.

[With thanks to Eric Mazur for the link.]

Unplugged! The "Agile Learning" newspaper

Hats off to David Jennings and others for going for broke and producing Unplugged!, a one-off newspaper about Agile Learning, based on edited versions of the extensive and thought-provoking set of interviews David has been doing over the last few months.

Agile Learning Newspaper: Unplugged!

View fullscreen.

Anticipating the Web - information available "in amplitude in proportion to its degree of relevance"

Source

During a discussion about Open Access journal publishing Brian Whalley posed this "christmas quiz" question:

Who wrote the following and when?

"The kind of organization we wish to aim at is one where all relevant information should be available to each research worker and in amplitude in proportion to its degree of relevance. Further, that not only should the information be available, but that it should be to a large extent put at the disposal of the research worker without his having to take any special steps to get hold of it."

Google and Sheila Webber's interesting¹ 2003 Journal of Information Science article Information Science in 2003: A Critique led me to discover that this anticipation of the Web was by the UK-based Irish physicist JD Bernal, pictured above. In 1939.

¹ Webber's categorisation of disciplines, building on Becher, as "Hard pure", " Soft pure", "Hard applied" and " Soft applied" caught my eye.

Tim Berners-Lee's "Long Live the Web": a call to defend the Web

It is 20 years since the Web went live on Berners-Lee's desktop at CERN, with one web site and one web browser on the same PC.

This Scientific American article provides a non-technical and thorough overview of what sets the Web apart from most other technology infrastructures - principally its openness, simplicity, ubiquity, and the way in which the standards that shape its operation are governed.

Berners-Lee spells our clearly some of the emerging threats to the Web as a decentralised, egalitarian, open, and public resource. These threats include the "walling off" of information posted by users of social networking sites, interference by ISPs in which kinds of content get priority (i.e. absence of net-neutrality), and monopoly (when, say, one search engine, or one browser, or one social-networking site become overly dominant).

Berners-Lee does an important job as a figurehead in summarising the threats, but he is more-or-less silent on what to do about them. I can think of three reasons for this. 1. The Scientific American is probably not the place for a call to action. 2. What to do depends so much on where you live and what your role is.  3. The World Wide Web Consortium that Berners-Lee heads is complex (and I would guess sometimes uneasy) coalition of businesses and agencies which will not speak with one voice.

From a UK perspective, a key problem seems to be the Coalition Government's unwillingness to enforce net neutrality, evidenced by the disappointing "ISPs should be able to manage their networks to ensure a good service and have flexibility in business models" in this media release for a 17/11/2010 speech by Communications Minister Ed Vaizey.

One way for UK readers to "defend the Web" is through membership of and support for the Open Rights Group.

Cath Ellis: iconoclasm and lecturing as a normative discourse

Some weeks after the 2010 Association for Learning Technology conference, with the agreement of Donald Clark and Sugata Mitra, and with the help of Martin Hawksey, ALT published versions of the videos of Donald's and Sugata's keynotes with the Twitter back-channel superimposed as subtitles. (Apparently this is something of a first.) Cath Ellis, who is a lecturer in English at the University of Huddersfield, has written an admirable piece Tweckling, iconoclasm and lecturing as a normative discourse, which reflects on the two keynotes, taking account of the reactions that each generated.

Disclosure: I work half-time for ALT.

A varied crop of articles in the October 2010 ALT News Online

Here is a list of authors, titles and links from the current issue of ALT News Online. I think that Sean Duffy's piece about the design principles behind his excellent Excel Everest teach yourself Excel programme is particularly interesting, as is the Stuart Sutherland's and Ray Irving's article about CancerNursing.Org.

Sirin Soyoz - Identifying learning technologists – The key roles, activities and values of an emerging group.

John Stone - Technology revolution is the way for education to deliver through the cuts. 

Marion Walton - Deep thoughts or deep prejudices? 

Kevin McLaughlin -  When using technology makes a difference. 

Adam Blackwood - GPS:  What is the learning value of knowing where you are? 

Ray Irving and Stuart Sutherland - CancerNursing.org – A case study in international open educational resources. 

Sean Duffy - Make them struggle but keep them smiling – A set of design principles for interactive learning tools.

Bob Harrison - iStanford.

Bryony Taylor -  A Twitter experiment.

Meic Watkins and Liz Bennett - I don’t want any help!! - A survey of attitudes to help packages. 

Tom Browne, Roger Hewitt, Martin Jenkins, Julie Voce, Richard Walker and Hennie Yip - Key Findings from 2010 technology enhanced learning survey.

Adrian Perry - Instinct or reason – How education policy is made and how we might make it better.

 

Jaron Lanier asks "How can you be ambidextrous in the matter of technology and education?"

NB - Post from October 2010 - scroll down for much more recent stuff.

Earlier this year I read and greatly enjoyed Jaron Lanier's enigmatic You are not a gadget - a manifesto. , which gets to the heart of why I sometimes feel uncomfortable about the way the Web is going, and which challenges ideas that I hold dear about it (in particularly in relation to open content). Lanier himself puts it this way "The book is centered on the philosophy of consciousness, the nature of science in the proximity of big computation, recent musical culture, and other topics that all connect to the nature of network-age personhood. I think the book is actually about what might best be called "spirituality". See also this February 2010 interview with the Observer's Aleks Krotoski.

Just now, while writing a comment on Clive Shepherd's post about Nicholas Carr's interesting but annoying "The Shallows", I came across Does the digital classroom enfeeble the mind? a recent New York Times piece by Lanier.

To put Lanier's striking question in context here is an excerpt from the NYT piece, though the former is no substitute for Lanier's "You are not gadget", which anyone striving to be ambidextrous in the matter of technology and education should make a point of reading.

A career in computer science makes you see the world in its terms. You start to see money as a form of information display instead of as a store of value. Money flows are the computational output of a lot of people planning, promising, evaluating, hedging and scheming, and those behaviours start to look like a set of algorithms. You start to see the weather as a computer processing bits tweaked by the sun, and gravity as a cosmic calculation that keeps events in time and space consistent.

This way of seeing is becoming ever more common as people have experiences with computers. While it has its glorious moments, the computational perspective can at times be uniquely unromantic.

Nothing kills music for me as much as having some algorithm calculate what music I will want to hear. That seems to miss the whole point. Inventing your musical taste is the point, isn’t it? Bringing computers into the middle of that is like paying someone to program a robot to have sex on your behalf so you don’t have to.

And yet it seems we benefit from shining an objectifying digital light to disinfect our funky, lying selves once in a while. It’s heartless to have music chosen by digital algorithms. But at least there are fewer people held hostage to the tastes of bad radio D.J.’s than there once were. The trick is being ambidextrous, holding one hand to the heart while counting on the digits of the other.

How can you be ambidextrous in the matter of technology and education? Education — in the broadest sense — does what genes can’t do. It forever filters and bequeaths memories, ideas, identities, cultures and technologies. Humans compute and transfer non-genetic information between generations, creating a longitudinal intelligence that is unlike anything else on Earth. The data links that hold the structure together in time swell rhythmically to the frequency of human regeneration. This is education.

Now we have information machines. The future of education in the digital age will be determined by our judgement of which aspects of the information we pass between generations can be represented in computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd. If we romanticize information that shouldn’t be shielded from harsh calculations, we’ll suffer bad teachers and D.J.’s and their wares.

Sugata Mitra - "The hole in the wall": self organising systems in education

Here is the video recording of Sugata Mitra's 8 September keynote speech at the 2010 ALT Conference in Nottingham.