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

 

Swooping descents? Not on this occasion.

At the end of March I spent a few days cross-country skiing at the North-Eastern end of Jotunheim in Norway. It was cold, sunny and windy.

Even high up there was lousy thin snow, with plenty of exposed rock, and abundant ice. But stunning views.

On 30 March we'd have needed ice-axes and crampons to reach the 2258m summit of Nautgardstinden (final picture below, with way barred by ice).

Holmenkollbakken in Oslo - April 2011

Last week I had the luck to be taken to the newly re-built Holmenkollbakken ski jump in Oslo, where I met a man who had last done the jump in 1940, aged 19. He said "you feel very lonely when the hooter has sounded, and you are at the top of the jump, and there are thousands of silent spectators down below." You will see what he means below, particularly in the fifth and final picture.

Wikipedia entry for Holmenkollbakken.

Bill Dutton's nine strategies for "bottom up" collaboration networks

Networking Distributed Public Expertise: Strategies for Citizen Sourcing Advice to Government is an interesting 38 page February 2011 paper by Bill Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute, aimed at policy makers.  The paper struck me as a thinking person's guide to crowd-sourcing, criticising the notion without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Dutton "challenges conventional notions of the wisdom of crowds, arguing that distributed intelligence must be well structured by technical platforms and management strategies", and analysing lessons learned from previous efforts in this field. The paper concludes with the following nine strategies for for fostering bottom up initiatives to harness distributed public expertise, with a paragraph of advice on each.

1. Do not reinvent the technology.
2. Focus on activities, not the tools.
3. Start small, but capable of scaling up.
4. Modularize.
5. Be open and flexible in finding and going to communities of experts.
6. Do not concentrate on one approach to all problems.
7. Cultivate the bottom-up development of multiple projects.
8. Experience networking and collaborating – be a networked individual.
9. Capture, reward, and publicize success.

The concluding summary is as follows.

Expertise is distributed geographically, institutionally and socially. It has become a cliché, but no less correct, that not every expert in any given field works for your government or any other single organization. In a multitude of cases across the public sector, expertise is often located closer to a local problem or across the globe - beyond the reach of government officials when, and where, advice is most needed. This paper explains how government can creatively harness the Internet to tap the wisdom of distributed public expertise, and points to a set of challenges, guidelines and strategies for realizing this potential for networking with citizens not only as constituents, but as advisors/experts.

There are many reasons that public officials will cite for not experimenting with innovations in distributed collaboration, but these concerns can be addressed and countered by a strong set of valid reasons for moving forward on initiatives. Success will be the best counter-argument. A wide-ranging set of small, but visible projects for tapping the wisdom of distributed civic intelligence could be an incremental step for radically transforming how governments connect with citizens as experts. To get these started, champions need to emerge that understand that their agency or department is supportive of their use of networking, and has a basic set of policies, procedures and guidelines that can be built upon and not reinvented by each initiative. Developing these policies and guidelines, and following nine general strategies, such as documenting existing success stories, provides a place to start in citizen sourcing advice to government.

Language development in a child - the birth of a word

Below is a Fortnightly Mailing post from four years ago. Now you can watch MIT researcher Deb Roy summarising what he and his team have discovered about language aqcuisition from their analysis of the vast amount of data recorded in the "human speechome project".

[December 2006] The 9 eerie images below are time-lapse pictures taken in the course of theHuman Speechome Project, "an effort to observe and computationally model the longitudinal course of language development for a single child". The project, run by the Cognitive Machines Group at the MIT Media Lab, led by Deb Roy (with his and Rupal Patel's child the subject of the study) is taking place in a single family home that has been wired with microphones and video cameras, with the intention of capturing "virtually everything the child sees and hears ..., 24 hours per day, for several years of continuous observation.  This excerpt from the paper referenced below explains the rationale:

"In general, many hypotheses regarding the fine-grained interactions between what a child observes and what the child learns to say cannot be investigated due to a lack of data. How are a child’s first words related to the order and frequency of words that the child heard? How does the specific context (who was present, where was the language used, what was the child doing at the time, etc.) affect acquisition dynamics? What specific sequence of grammatical constructions did a child hear that led her to revise her internal model of verb inflection? These questions are impossible to answer without far denser data recordings than those currently available."

During the planned 3 years of the project over 300 GB of data will be generated per day. For a detailed overview of the project, see The Human Speechome Project [775 kB PDF].

"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.]

Poincaré's "Mathematical Creation" - via a review by Jim Holt of Nicholas Carr's "The Shallows"

I did not enjoy Nicolas Carr's "The Shallows - How the Internet Is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember" (in the US the strapline is the much brasher "What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains".....), which seemed to veer between coherent scientific investigation and journalistic hyperbole.

There is an interesting review of The Shallows in the current issue of the LRB by science writer Jim Holt (who from his self-description comes across as someone who is not exactly an inveterate user of the Web). Holt's review gently and playfully points out several of the weaknesses in Carr's argument.

But this does not mean that Holt is calm about the impact of the Web on thought.

To cut a long story short, Holt argues that the connection between memory and creativity ought to make us wary of the web. What bothers Holt is the way that the Web allows you to avoid internalising facts and concepts, because you can look things up on demand, without needing to learn them, thereby denying your unconscious mind the chance to turn over learned facts and concepts to generate new ideas. This, Holt argues, is the process that is at the heart of creativity, which he illustrates with a short quotation from the French mathematician Henry Poincaré's essay "Mathematical Creation":

Having reached Coutances, we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea; I should not have had time, as, upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. On my return to Caen, for conscience’s sake, I verified the result at my leisure.

Digging on the Web led me to the February 2ooo issue of Resonance, an Indian journal of science education, and the whole accessibly written essay by Poincaré.

 

 

 

Dylan Wiliam - Formativeness as a potential property of an assessment

I heard "inside the black box" Dylan Wiliam speak at an LSIS event today for the current cohort of Research Development Fellows. Wiliam was fascinating as always. For example here is his definition of formative, which he sees as a property of (some, and only some) assessments:

"An assessment functions formatively to the extent that evidence about student achievement elicited by the assessment is interpreted and used to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions that would have been taken in the absence of that evidence."

Statistical literacy - ARTIST - a resources site

ARTIST - "Our goal is to help teachers assess statistical literacy, statistical reasoning, and statistical thinking in first courses of statistics. This Web site provides a variety of assessment resources for teaching first courses in Statistics."