rElearn

The future of War

2011-08-25T03:22:00.000-07:00

Sam Pullara puts it well by referring to one of the advantages of static-typing as that the language can act as a metadata database i.e. an information source that can be systematically exploited by developers and tools (and not just IDEs).

However, I think the debate about the value of the (alleged!) overhead of static typing is sometimes a red herring. If you widen the issue to other overheads such as Java's thrall to OO and Patterns then the debate gets different. These to me are bigger conceptual overheads than typing. Bruce Eckel makes an interesting argument by looking at the difference in opening a file in Java versus python. Basically, the latter needs one memorable line of code, whilst Java requires a lot of invocation and boilerplate code that is difficult to remember. I do think patterns and OO are overdone, or at least unquestioned as paradigms. Everything has to pay its way, and in this sense the argument the Eckel makes doesn't really have anything to with data typing (but everything to do with finger-typing!).

Of course language is not just lines of code. Really what we are talking about are wholes suites of technologies that play nice together. A language is generally part of a whole technological stack that includes development tools, web servers, databases, operating systems, even hardware. And of course you have to have people in that stack too - so a company may choose a language because of the number or the quality of the developers who are skilled in it for example.

All in all I think this means that the situation will become more complex and more languages will arise and gain traction but big languages will persist with huge market share. So the good news is that language wars are here to stay!

Recoding Variables in R: An Example

2011-04-07T08:42:00.000-07:00

Recoding is pretty easy in R. You can use a control structure such as an if statement for binary factors e.g.

mnew$Assignable <- ifelse(mnew$Assignable == T, c("Assignee"), c("Non-assignee"))

In this example I am replacing True False values with "Assignee", "Non-assignee". T is shorthand for TRUE which is an R type. The messy part about this is the c() vector that you have to create as a wrapper around the new factor value.

The computer scientist in me wants to keep the boolean values in there but whenever I try to do a graph or a table using this column of the data frame I end up with FALSE or TRUE as a label or a column heading.

R you Ready for Input Regime Change?

2011-04-01T01:22:00.000-07:00

I'm learning R. It's brilliant. End of.

Ok not quite end-of. I tried Excel and SPSS first. I love Excel. In fact we have a long-standing co-dependant relationship. But it is time for cold turkey and here is why.

With all the hoopla about tablets and touchscreens I am suddenly back thinking about plain-old-typing. Sure it is slow, error prone and requires a large surface area to run your hands over to do it any way efficiently, but there are some things that GUI-driven modes are just terrible for. Working with data is one of them.

I have a big Excel file with 25,315 rows and about 27 columns. I am doing lots of stuff with it like averaging, summing, counting, filtering etc and matter how I layout the file, including using various tables, new tabs etc. sooner or later I find myself faced with...

The scroll of death^TM

There are neat tricks around this in Excel for instance you can select (highlight) a swathe of spreadsheet by using calliug Ctrl-G, typing the reference of the cell you wish to extend the selection to, then pressing shift and then Enter. TA-DA! This allows you for instance to select thousands of specific cells anywhere in your spreadsheet where dragging using the mouse would have taken days if not minutes.

But eventually you end up scrolling in a spreadsheet and you end up with some of your data in one place and the rest in another. It's horrible because scrolling is painful. Scrolling is not a good solution to anything.

Enter R. With a program like R the metaphor is different. There are no scroll bars. You cannot organise your data as you would in Excel, where the temptation is always to be able to "see" as much data as possible. Rather you don't care where the data is and you summon it as you need it. These incantations of the data are nor performed with palaeolithic scrollbars or mouse pointers. Instead we use the neolithic earthcrushing, shapeshifting technology that is the keyboard. The mighty artefact that puts the digit back into digital. Long live keys.

Learning is not the problem

2010-03-05T07:33:00.000-08:00

Graduation versus Learning. People don't want to learn they wan't to graduate. This isn't their fault. In fact its ours. If we wanted people to learn we'd tell them to go read wikipedia, read the bible, read the works of shakespeare, read Jung, Popper, Knuth, Shirkey, Taleb, Buddah, Confuscius, Kawasaki, Seuss, Ellroy, Dawkins, Poe, De Mello, Buffet, Baudrillard, Diamond, de Chardin, Herbert, Tolkien, Milton ; Listen to Bach, Tool, Domino, Earl, Dylan, Credence, Coltraine, White, Porter; get a job, get a life, make a friend, make an enemy, open your eyes close your eyes, watch tv, watch the wind, shout out loud, say nothing. The degree to which we confuse and conflate learning and graduation, that is to say idealisied learning (platonic) and institutional learning (socialisation) is clear when we consider turning the question "how can we learn better?" on its head and instead ask the ludicrious question "how can we learn worse?". It is clear that no matter what we do we learn. We can't help it. It's just how we're wired. Learning is clearly not the problem.

Screen Capture: All your lectures are belong to us!

2010-02-10T07:20:00.000-08:00

Below are the slides and abstract of my talk for IT Sligo today:

There is a also a an archived version of my talk

Astract:

In a nutshell screen capture is the art of developing educational materials by capturing a video of what is happening on a computer screen. This simple process can allow rapid creation of rich-media instructional aides. In this talk I will present some experiences of mine and of my colleagues in developing these resources for students of Oscail in Dublin City University who are studying a Bsc. in Information Technology by distance education.

I will look at some tips I wrote two years ago on this topic and examine their continued relevance. The take-home message of this talk will be “publish or perish”, an exhortation to the educator to focus not on fancy production or editing of screen captures but rather on a process that involves a minimum of time and technical effort to create videos and get them to students. To finish I will give an overview of how we are using Camtasia Studio with Google Video as part of DCU’s roll out of Google Apps for Education and demonstrate some interesting aspects of this elearning platform.

Screen Capture All Your Lectures

View more presentations from Eamon_Costello.

Social Constructivism for Moodle (at last)

2009-09-23T08:25:00.000-07:00

Moodle has been claimed to be based be a Social Constructivist pedagogy. It aint. Niall Sclater summed it up, when talking about the OU's adoption of the eLearning platform, by pointing out that "It can also be argued that LMSs are relatively pedagogy-neutral and and are merely shells in which to place content and activities". I used to think that to argue whether one LMS or VLE is more learner-centric than another was a bit daft - no to mention that it feels suspiciously like using students as footballs in some elaborate game. But I change my mind. I'm very excited by the latest announcement from the OU that they have now baked in the very tools that Moodle should support if is to lay claim to a Social Constructivism that includes the studentStudents can build and develop their own communities using the power of Moodle outside of their prescribed virtual classrooms. . I'm really stoked by this idea. It also reminds me of Mahara and the social networking functions of that platform which I've recently seen hooked up to a DSpace repository. Social Constructivism is here, or to translate, fun times ahead!

Victorian Learning Environment (VLE)

2009-09-22T04:57:00.000-07:00

Today (while editing a student handbook) I am listening to Curtis Bonk author of the World is Open talking about the open movement and its potential impact on Education. He mentioned an alternative to Wikipedia (for wikipediaphobics) the Wikisource project. Actually it is a sister project (all part of the Wikimedia foundation). It aims to be a repository for primary sources, in contrast to Wikipedia which is a secondary source collection.

I took a quick look. Not knowing where to start I searched for Moodle (as I had just been writing a guide to Moodle for students). I found something unexpected. A reference to the word Moodle from the 19th century from one of my favourite (though neglected) authors, Charles Dickens. Wikisource does seem something pretty great. And so, without further ado, for your delectation, after extensive scholarly research, I give you the Victorian Learning Environment:

Then there is my Lord Boodle, of considerable reputation with his party, who has known what office is and who tells Sir Leicester Dedlock with much gravity, after dinner, that he really does not see to what the present age is tending. A debate is not what a debate used to be; the House is not what the House used to be; even a Cabinet is not what it formerly was. He perceives with astonishment that supposing the present government to be overthrown, the limited choice of the Crown, in the formation of a new ministry, would lie between Lord Coodle and Sir Thomas Doodle—supposing it to be impossible for the Duke of Foodle to act with Goodle, which may be assumed to be the case in consequence of the breach arising out of that affair with Hoodle. Then, giving the Home Department and the leadership of the House of Commons to Joodle, the Exchequer to Koodle, the Colonies to Loodle, and the Foreign Office to Moodle, what are you to do with Noodle? You can’t offer him the Presidency of the Council; that is reserved for Poodle. You can’t put him in the Woods and Forests; that is hardly good enough for Quoodle. What follows? That the country is shipwrecked, lost, and gone to pieces (as is made manifest to the patriotism of Sir Leicester Dedlock) because you can’t provide for Noodle!

Scientific Choices

2009-08-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

Around this time in Ireland there is usually a lot of discussion of how people are ignoring careers in Science, where our Knowledge Economy will come from, and a lamentation of a lack secondary students doing well in higher Maths.

There was a heart-felt letter in the Irish Times yesterday from a Science PhD in the context of this perennial debate:

Madam, – Prof Garret A FitzGerald seeks to address the depressing depictions of a career in science (Opinion, August 13th) but he presents a rose-tinted view of the life of a researcher that is unrealistic when applied to early-career scientists.

The practical side of being a contract post-doctoral researcher, with years of experience but no short-term prospect of a permanent job, became clear to me recently on learning that getting approval for a mortgage will rely solely on my (non-scientist) partner’s salary. My eight years of third- and fourth-level education plus years of post-doctoral research experience are worth nothing in the real world.

I agree wholeheartedly with many of the positive points Prof FitzGerald makes about a research career, such as the opportunities to travel, to contribute to greater good and to find intellectual fulfilment. However, intellectual fulfilment is not enough to pay the rent, or the mortgage if you can get one. Prof FitzGerald states that as a scientist “every day you can do something different. You can’t imagine what you will be working on in a year’s time”.

Many of us also have to wonder where we will be working in a year’s time, due to the nature of post-doctoral research contract positions. It is an oversimplification to say that to conduct independent research all you have to do is “convince a group of your peers that what you want to do is worthwhile”.

In Ireland, to qualify for most of the research funding schemes that allow this independence you must also have a permanent position at a university. With the current public sector hiring freeze and the constraints on university finances, permanent positions for young researchers are looking ever more scarce.

I love what I do and my research has been successful and is internationally competitive, but when I was a young and optimistic school-leaver I chose a career that interested me and I did not envision that when I would reach my 30s I might not qualify for a mortgage or that I would be uncertain of what I would be doing in a year’s time.

In a week when much is being said about the need to encourage students to follow careers in science, I was prompted to write this letter to stress to students that they should give careful consideration to the practicalities of a career that requires long years of study, hard work and discipline, and will quite likely lead you to emigrate. In addition there is no guarantee of generous financial reward and no job security. If this sounds depressing, it’s just how I see it from where I stand. – Yours, etc,

Dr SARAH HARNEY,

Department of Physiology,

Trinity College Dublin,

Dublin 2.
Irish Times, August 17th http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2009/0817/1224252678097.html

This letter seems to fit with the CAO points required for Computing courses across Irish third level institutions again this year, which is an indication of their relative unpopularity. It is not necessarily an indication of their difficulty however which is a problem for some entrants to these courses. The 480 points required for primary teaching on one particular course is well in excess of those for most IT courses. In one Institute of Technology you can do an IT degree or a degree in IT management for little over 200 points. Some great students may take and eventually graduate IT programmes around the country. Certainly however, a great many will not complete.

How does this square with another big CAO story of recent days - that of teen entrepreneur John Collison who scored eight A1s in his leaving (600 points)? Collison and his brother have made, on paper, millions from IT having founded and then sold their own successful IT company. They must surely be poster-boys for the Knowledge Economy. Not only that but unlike almost all other students who will score 600 points this year, or last year, or next year, John Collison has not chosen to study medicine but rather Science. He has been accepted to study Science in Harvard. Sadly we do not seem yet have Science or Technology courses in Ireland that would attract world class candidates. Something to ponder for the architects of our Knowledge Economy.

Twitter is Completely Stupid

2009-07-24T04:35:00.000-07:00

: Image by Dustin Diaz via Flickr

Twitter is completely stupid. Celebrities use it so you know its very, very stupid. Numerous studies in the respected scienticifc journal Celebrity Cerebrums have noted the inverse correlation between ego and brain size. Scientists have proved that certain celebrities are not actually alive according to their projected brain size and can only truly be considered as plants. And they can use Twitter.

Now think how stupid your students are. Completly thick. And what about lecturers? Well we know their ego-sizes so... you do the Math (I can't I'm too stupid). So the moral of the stoy is it is safe to assume we can all use Twitter. That is how media should be before we consider using it - completely stupid.

Political Portacabins: Democracy in Action

2009-07-06T12:51:00.000-07:00

Dear international reader, let me give you some background into the Irish Education system. Best practice for new (and some not-so-new) primary schools during the last two decades in Ireland has been to house them in ~~temporary~~ wooden cabins known as portacabins. These huts are rented for roughly the equivalent price of a mortgage on a bricks and mortar school which would be owned by the state. Once the portacabins have been rented the parents then must engage on a decades long campaign for the government to even to commit to permanent buildings. Eventually a commitment is secured and the parents enter phase two where they campaign for the building to actually take place. So far pretty straight forward. Phase three your local elected representative gives you a spiteful kick in the teeth. Expect to see a lot more political suicide like this over the next year:

From this week's Sunday Tribue:

Row after Cork TD said portacabin school good enough for town that doesn't support him

Conor McMorrow

FIANNA Fáil TD Ned O'Keefe is at the centre of a major row in his Cork East constituency after he said he would not help a community to obtain new school buildings because he does not get any votes in the area.

The row erupted on local radio station C103 on Friday morning after O'Keefe claimed that Rathcormac national school should not be a priority for government funding because it has "a wonderful layout of portacabins".

O'Keefe made his controversial comments on Patricia Messinger's Cork Today programme, on which he said, "I'll prioritise as a politician for my own area the areas that I think are right and necessary and where I get my support from."

Messinger asked O'Keefe if he only looked after people who gave him their vote. The Cork TD replied: "Equals being equals, I'll defend my own people. I have never been top of the list in Rathcormac so if Rathcormac wants me to support them, they can support me."

His comments sparked outrage on the airwaves and the local radio station was swamped with calls from angry parents in the area.

O'Keefe's comments on portacabins fuelled the row when he complimented the "architectural work" of the portacabins as they have a "wonderful layout" and are "well-engineered".

He continued: "There is no stigma attached to being taught in a portacabin. Many people in offices and administration across the country work in portacabins and they are delighted to have them."

Defending himself, the 66-year-old former junior minister said, "I have been right in many of the things I have said in the last five to seven years, even on the economy, so I am not prepared to stand back and listen to people abusing me and telling me this, that and the other thing."

Claire Flynn, chairwoman of Rathcormac Parents' Association, came on the radio and said: "I want to ask Ned O'Keefe, how come our children go in there and they are passing out with the heat during the summer and in winter we have to put coats on our kids to keep them warm in the portacabins?"

But O'Keefe stood his ground and said that "you get the tallies and you will see I was never very welcome in Rathcormac".

July 5, 2009

Tools for classroom and online polling and voting

2009-05-07T07:48:00.000-07:00

Image by Enrico Fuente

Clickers are great for adding interactivity to the classroom. The best thing is they allow some interactivity but not too much. They scale. Like Twitter does. However they cost lost and can be fiddly to set up and annoying to mind and maintain. What are the alternatives?

Online polling: Most famously the free system Doodle which has been taking the web by storm over the past year. Highly recommended for sheduling meetings but can also be used to run polls.

TwtPoll or PollDaddy for Twitter. I just Googled these and have never set up a twitter poll but Twitter is a natural environment for polling. In fact why not just use twitter altogether as a classroom participation medium? You need devices and you need rules but the technology is free and simple to use if you can crack the hardware nut and get something into the hands of your learners.

If you use Moodle simply add a "Choice" activity type or check out the Q&A forum which you can configure so that users can only see other contributions once they make one themselves. What has that got to do with polls? Its about making people contribute. And they only need to contribute in a small way.

SMS polls: I mentioned these previously and I wrote some software for Nokia NSeries phones that effectively turns your phone into a router and would allow you to run Twitter-style interactions in a classroom using SMS only i.e. no web or special software required on the phones. This would be perfect say for a conference to allow listeners to spontaneously interact and hopefully I will demo this some day at a conference (invite me please!). Hopefully I will also get around to polishing this software and releasing it to anyone who wants it. Or it would make great student project...

The Pencil Metaphor

2009-03-17T11:43:00.000-07:00

: Image via Wikipedia

I smiled when I read the title of Jon Dron's paper "Any Color you like as long as its Blackboard" which is about Virtual Learning Environments. Blackboard, TopClass, FirstClass - it's interesting how we use metaphors from our existing practice to brand eLearning Platforms.

Within the field of technology acceptance models however there is one researcher who stands head and shoulders above all others. Be aware you may laugh out loud when you read The Pencil Metaphor by Lindy McKeown,

Student Opinions on VLEs

2009-03-10T07:28:00.000-07:00

There is a certain type of data you never get from academic surveys. Or at least that you never hear about in the published results.

Now, with the advent of realtime web serach, you can find out what student's are thinking about VLEs right now

Innovation FTW!

2009-03-05T03:36:00.000-08:00

: Image by Ko:(char *)hook via Flickr

By definition not everyone can be an innovator. If everyone were being innovative innovation would be the norm. Innovation will always be aberrant. Because we cannot predict the future we cannot say whether a given innovation is good or bad, only that it is different from the norm. In the research literature and in strategy and policy speak, innovation is almost exclusively seen as desirable and positive. Although innovation may be necessary can it ever be considered wholly positive? After all the past is littered with technological dead-ends into which excessive amounts of effort were diverted. Not only that but some innovations, such as recent financial ones, are now considered to have been very harmful.

Food for thought for the architects of the "knowledge economy" perhaps.

Bugs: The Currency of Order

2009-03-04T02:49:00.000-08:00

Image by aussiegall via Flickr

The growth of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is a classic example of Institutional Learning. The size of the the feature set of VLEs, taking Moodle as an example, is explosive. The complexity and growth of Moodle occurs at many levels. From hardware right up to software through an application stack. Consider just the core Moodle code base itself: Between August 20th 2002 and October 15th 2008 there were 62 new releases (versions). Of these nine were major version releases and many minor release versions contained significant new or amended features (i.e not just bug fixes). Are teachers aware of the full feature set of Moodle, of what it can do? Could they keep up with its growth? Are teachers aware that important pedagogical decisions are being made by software developers in Australia that will shape the online classroom for years to come?

Even the coders of Moodle are not the sole "designers" of an Institutional Environment for online learning. At least not as much as you (or even they) might suppose. There are currently 17,767 bugs recorded in Moodle's bug tracker. An increasing amount of Moodle's development is dedicated to finding and then tracking the fixing of bugs. What are bugs? Can we consider them in any way analogous to the mutations in genes that drive biological evolution? We can certainly say that bugs are unexpected and unintended. They were not designed and are generally considered harmful. Bugs show that software, once it becomes sufficiently complex, cannot be easily designed and planned in a predicable fashion. Development becomes more akin to trial and error as developers can never be sure exactly what effects a given change will have. Software is evolved.

What if bugs could be avoided? What if software developers could completely and successfully implement a designed feature? Even in this case there is would be no certainty that students and teachers would use a given feature as it was intended to be used. We are creative tool-users and like to adapt things to our needs in ways for which those thing were never designed. For instance Google was always intended to be a search tool. However many people now use it as a navigational device, ignoring the browser address bar which is the "proper" way to go somewhere.

So we have a process as follows:

- Moodle's developers try to build features into the system
- These features will not be realised exactly as they were conceived
- Teachers and students (via teachers) will not use many of these features
- The small subset of Moodle features that are actually used will be used in unpredictable ways

The chain that leads from design to student use is a long one. Hence we need to be wary when we use the term "design". Institutional Learning is complex and not predictable. Learning is not designed.

Bugs tell us something else. As systems become more complex and more embedded within our lives their stability becomes more important to us. Up-time and stability become more important than some new innovative pedagogical feature. There is more to risk. Systems become more conservative, more concerned with preserving themselves. It is natural to be experimental when there is little as stake. Then, as an organisation becomes reliant on a system, change is considered more costly. In computing this phenomenon is well illustrated in the concept of "backward-compatibility" where progress and growth must be balanced with existing standards or metaphors that people are already productively using.

Bugs may seem wholly negative and unintended, but they aren't. How many bugs are we willing to gamble to gain something new? When do we cross the threshold between trying to gain something new and trying to protect what we have? Bugs are the currency of order.

Two Boring Tools

2009-02-24T08:03:00.000-08:00

These tools are not sexy. They do not integrate with Twitter or Facebook. They will not transform the way we teach, learn, think or live. They are only useful for some of the small tedious tasks that go on behind the scenes of e-learning:

pdf to html convert a PDF document to html. Incredibly useful. Free. Builds a clickable index in separate frame.

Rename Master - batch rename files. Add something to the start or end of filenames; replace spaces, auto_numbering, change to sentence case, preview and undo your changes

Be aware these tools are boring. They will not make you a better person.

Two Types of Learning

2009-02-22T11:26:00.000-08:00

image by Arash Behshadpoor

There are two types of learning: Institutional Learning and Idealised Learning.

Idealised Learning is eternal and unchanging. It has an idealised learner and an idealised teacher. The idealised teacher:

Wants to teach

Is capable of teaching

Knows more than the learner

The idealised learner:

Wants to learn

Is capable of learning

Knows less than the teacher

Idealised Learning is simple and seductive. It pervades our thinking. Debates about education always use it in some way as a reference point. The way things are and the way things should be are always approximations of Idealised Learning.

Institutional Learning is complex and changing. It contains lecturers, tutors, students, buildings, Virtual Learning Environments, Degrees, Diplomas, Doctorates, grades, plagiarism, pens, blackboards, human resource managers, teaching and learning policies, university strategic plans, best practice, Re-usable Learning Objects, careers, costs, collaboration, collusion, research, anonymous marking, incompetence, bullies, genius, disability, talent, industries, job markets, peer-review, peer pressure, Contracts of Indefinite Duration, suicide, pregnancy, email, twitter, Google, copyright, timetables, progression, Learning Outcomes, libraries and lunch-time projects.

Institutional Learning was different yesterday and will be exponentially different tomorrow. It is comlexifying at an increasing rate. Each successive generation wakes up to an increasingly complex culture, awakes surrounded by ever more accretions from the past, in the same way that coral reefs build up slowly over time into beautiful multi-coloured jungles of the sea.

Because we are creative and irrational beings we always attempt to reconcile Idealised Learning with Institutional Learning. Our compulsion is to map the idealised models of learner and teacher onto the incomprehensibility of Institutional Learning, to simplify and abstract a massively multivariate phenomenon. We have built it, now we must understand it.

Institutional Learning is not just something we have created, it is also something that is creating us. As Winston Churchill put it: “We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us”. We exist in a recursive relationship to our environment. Our Institutional Learning environment has a life greater than the sum of its individual participants. Althusser said it was obvious that “a social formation which did not reproduce the conditions of production at the same time as it produced would not last a year.” Institutional Learning wishes to preserve and propagate itself.

Is Institutional Learning a monstrous system that attempts to defend and grow itself? Do we define it or does it define us? Does it contain inexorable centralising tendencies that attempt to:

define and then replicate “best practice”?

merge faculties and departments?

increase the ratio of admin, technical, HR and accounting staff to teachers and students?

standardise curricula via qualification frameworks within programs then institutions then countries and then ultimately supra-national organisations?

homogenise the delivery of education via standardised course formats in VLEs?

Institutional Learning might be all these things. It can also be benevolent. It can still nurture and protect people and provide a sufficient buffer so that industrial skills are not simply grafted onto individuals. Anything that grows and complexifys can look scary to us – perhaps our minds can't contemplate any human system more complex than an average size family. Our instinct is always to turn to try to reinterpret or change Institutional Learning through Idealised Learning.

However Idealised Learning can never explain Institutional Learning. The institutions we have did not happen overnight. They were not the product of one mind. They are too complex for us to understand and explain with our very simple Idealised Learning model. Institutional Learning was not created at all. It is too complex to have been designed or predicted. Institutional Learning has been evolved.

False Advertising

2009-02-11T04:11:00.000-08:00

You might expect it from a small cowboy operator but some young marketing genius in Dell no less UPDATE: Actually this is not Dell but there is definitely someting dodgey going on. Loook at this site and tell me it does not look like Dell:http://dell-ireland.electronicoffers.co.uk/?tracking=Computer-11&curlid=100172

[Some genius in some dodgey company that is NOT Dell] decided it was a good and legal idea to place a Google Ad for Acer Aspire One - Offers which would dupe people into visiting the Dell something that looks like the Dell website. Dell do not sell the Acer Aspire One which is a product from a rival company. Try googling Acer Aspire One before its too late.

The Top Ten Reasons to Have top Ten Reasons

2009-01-29T04:36:00.000-08:00

They are better than reasons 11-20. That's why they are the top reasons

We have 10 fingers

10 toes

10 cigarettes in a pack

The Romans used decimal to organise their armies and then conquered the known world before going on to party themselves to death and trash their empire - legends.

People will bookmark your post in delicious without actually reading it

Any reason after seven is usually rubbish but people have already stopped reading by this stage anyway

blah blah snore

We'll be too busy tomorrow to tell that today's top trends turned to trash and that there's twenty ts in this sentence

The crap two reasons doesn't have the same ring to it

Bazaar or Bizarre?

2009-01-28T05:55:00.000-08:00

Open Source VLE Moodle is an example of Bazzar architecture.

Consider a simple yet crucial feature of Moodle: Notifying participants about new postings.
In early versions of Moodle the choice was simple - email. As of Moodle 1.9 however the following are the ways you can be notified of new forum postings:

Get alerts via email

Track unread posts (puts a link beside each forum to unread messages)

The Recent Activity block

The Latest News block

RSS feed

The MyMoodle panel

Each of these six mechanisms duplciate the functionality of telling the user that there are new forum messages. Moreover in themselves these mechanisms may have configurable options. For instance a user can choose to subscribe to forum email alerts. Upon subscription he/she can choose to recieve a daily digest, weekly alerts or by the minute emails. This is of course if a teacher has not taken away this option and made email alerts mandatory for this forum. Mandatory that is until the student figures out that they can disable the email address in their profile to stop recieving any email alerts at all!

Is this a sympom of Moodle's development model? Does the left hand know what the right one is doing? Bazaar just plain bizzare?

Intelligence theory stolen by magpie

2009-01-23T08:36:00.000-08:00

: Image via Wikipedia

Theories of idealized learning (as opposed to institutional learning) often focus on neurology and biology. Big cortexes are big thinkers was one such theory. Because the avian brain so different to the mammalian one, particularly the development of the cortex, it was assumed that this accounted for the (alleged) superiority of mammal intelligence. Crows however have challenged everything about this theory.

Last year (2008) the magpie joined human children (above a certain age), four types of ape, dolphins and asian elephants in passing the mirror self-recognition (MSR) test - which is thought to indicate self-awareness.

In the test a subject must recognize itself in the mirror by trying to reach for something on its body that is only visible in the mirror (i.e. out of their line of vision otherwise). This test has been performed on hundreds of animals for decades since its inception and magpies have just been found to pass. Dogs for instance cannot do this.

What this really tells us is that we know much less than we think we do. We may assume that we can make inferences from the research to date and hence develop a theory. However there is often vast amounts of silent evidence. Vast numbers of factors that have not yet been tested. There is always a black swan looming

Writing and Reading

2009-01-12T08:11:00.000-08:00

When I mentioned that I write a blog to someone recently they asked me: What kind of person writes a blog? And they didn't mean this in a good way.

What kind of person asks a blogger what kind of person writes a blog? Let's just say a 'forthright' person.

It is alleged that blogging is like poetry - more people writing than reading. That may be but here is a something that bloggers maybe haven't told you: It is more fun to write than read.

what is technology?

2009-01-08T08:50:00.000-08:00

John says blogger is not really a "technology" but a product. I confess I do not know what technology is so I consulted a sophisticated academic research tool (a little something called Google).

For a word that is used so much it is very interesting to see what it means to different people (my comments in yellow)

Definitions of technology on the Web:

Human innovation in action that involves the generation of knowledge and processes to develop systems that solve problems and extend human ...
home.comcast.net/~pm1963/grade8/vocab.htm

knowledge about the means and methods of producing goods and services.
www.esa.int/esaMI/Lessons_online/SEMIBLPR4CF_0.html

Technology in its narrower sense is nothing more than process engineering. However, in a wider sense, it is understood to be a product in itself, which in addition to machinery and equipment, advance concessions, patents, trademarks, instructions, descriptions and experience of specialist ...
www.lineadecreditoambiental.org/html/glossary.html

Any specific information and know-how (whether in tangible form, such as models, prototypes, drawings, sketches, diagrams, blueprints, manuals ...
www.esri.com/legal/export/export-definitions.html

A piece of equipment or a technique for performing a particular activity.
www.gcrio.org/ipcc/techrepI/appendixe.html

This is probabaly closest to the everyday definition of technology that most ordinary people would agree on. In fact a lot of people may not be aware (or do not consider) techniques to be technology. Technology is often only associated with hardware and software and computer hardware at that.
There is some conflation of tools with technology in everyday speech.

A body of knowledge used to create tools, develop skills, and extract or collect materials; the application of science (the combination of the scientific method and material) to meet an objective or solve a problem.
science.education.nih.gov/supplements/nih4/technology/other/glossary.htm

"A body of knowledge used to create tools[...]" is a useful phrase. Technology as meta-tool

The complete set of knowledge about how to produce in an economy at a point in time, including techniques of production that are available but not economically viable. 2. The set of production functions available to an economy. 3. ...
www-personal.umich.edu/~alandear/glossary/t.html

"...set of knowledge about how to produce..." - this is where we get that *great* phrase "knowledge economy" from

the means by which human societies interact directly with and adapt to the environment. Technology can also refer to the steps taken, or manufacturing process used, to produce an artifact.
darkwing.uoregon.edu/~mmoss/GLOSSARY.HTM

Use of science to develop new products or new methods for producing and distributing goods and services.
www.turnerlearning.com/efts/bball/econglos.htm

"Use of science [...]" - a common theme is the application of science. Maybe it could be argued that technology preceded Science.

For users interested in examples of a specific technology in use, such as the" Internet" or "Decision Support Systems."
ccs.mit.edu/21c/iokey.html

Tools such as calculator, computer, or personal data assistant (PDA) used to help represent/solve a problem.
www.numbernut.com/glossary/t.shtm

technology = tool

is the process of applying established knowledge to meet identified market and social needs.
www.ee.wits.ac.za/~ecsa/gen/g-04.htm

technology = process

The practical applications in the physical and social worlds.
arroweducation.org/Glossary.htm

The study and/or application of the mechanical arts and applied sciences. Telemetry The act of transmitting readings to a distant receiving ...
www.spaceforspecies.ca/glossary/t_u.htm

the practical application of science to commerce or industry

engineering: the discipline dealing with the art or science of applying scientific knowledge to practical problems; "he had trouble deciding which branch of engineering to study"
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Technology is a broad concept that deals with a species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts, and how it affects a species' ability to control and adapt to its environment. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology

"a species' usage and knowledge of tools and crafts" - This interesting because many of the other definitions confine technology to humans. Crows, for example, are sophisticated tool-users and they convey knowledge about tool use to each other.

Techology is the first album of the Melodic death metal band Crimson Death. It was recorded in 2001, but due to financial problems of the record label it was released in 2004 by Mythic Metal Productions.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology (album)

the study of or a collection of techniques; a particular technological concept; the body of tools and other implements produced by a given society
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/technology

Snakes on a Phone

2009-01-07T05:38:00.000-08:00

Today the mail server is down so I started tinkering with (i.e. breaking) my phone. I'd been thinking about modding my phone so that I could forward texts from my inbox to a twitter account. This has obvious applications e.g. use mobiles as powerful classroom SMS voting devices. I managed to programatically send SMS from my phone to different numbers. Now I just need to monitor the inbox and forward any SMSes to a Twitter account. I hope to have a prototype of this working soon. If anyone would like to help me test it please let me know.

I used psy60 to do this. It allows a powerful but easy-to-use programming language called Python to be used on modern Nokia phones (such as my N95). The amazing thing is that Python gives you access to all the features of the handset. Just browsing the APIs (i.e the documentation) I can see how you could have a lot of fun with it. Your phone could access your GPS and update your twitter or facebook status whenever you were in a specific location for instance. You could have a "honey I'm on the way" SMS be triggered when you leave the office in the direction of home. You could create a shopping list reminder trigger when you are near the shop. You could have an alarm go off when you are stray too near the fridge or the wine wrack during detox January.

import messaging, appuifw

nbr = "1234" # the mobile number
sms_text =u"hello world" # your message
messaging.sms_send(nbr, sms_text)

#How Simple is Python!

One interesting way of looking at your phone with this capability is as computer you can remote control via SMS. You could send an SMS to your phone (from a second phone obviously or a PC) and have your phone do something - take a photo, record audio, take a GPS reading, connect to the web etc.

I predict that phones will soon come equipped with more sensors i.e. light, temperature, distance (lasers) etc. A GPS is a sensor and has spawned massive applications in recent electronics and computing so it may be worth exploring sensors more - all the technology exists cheaply.

Predictions for 2009

2009-01-06T07:57:00.000-08:00

90% of all predictions for 2009 will be wrong. This is because making predictions is hard. Especially about the future.

The 9% of predictions that come true will be boringly trivial. Trend x will increase moderately while trend Y will die down yadda yadda yadda

Somebody somewhere (Mr or Ms 1%) will invent something new. However this person will not be one of those doing the predicting.

Invention cannot be predicted. But great changes will come. In order for innovation to be foreseen the revolution would have to be televised. The revolution will not be televised.