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When wasting time turns into something grand
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments
I seem to be having a theme on creative waste of time. Maybe it’s because I like the results that creative waste of time produces. In any case, have a look at this piece of time-wasting - it’s grand! Unfortunately I can’t find the embed script for this, so follow this link instead: http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/152506/detail/
The simplicity of genius
Monday, March 9th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments
I’ve just come across a feature of Google that I’ve not been aware of before - it’s probably old news to most of you, but I just have to do a little virtual jumping up and down about this.
We all know that Google has access to almost limitless amounts of information form all our searches and clicks and that it is aggregated somewhere and can be put to a multitude of uses. This particular feature is called Google Flu Trends and uses the search data that we all (or rather so far just the americans) contribute to provide an accurate picture of flu activity across the population.
Turns out that when the flu is arond people make flu-related searches on Google (surprise, surprise!), and that aggregating this data provides a more accurate and up-to-date picture of a flu epidemic than U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. They even published their results in Nature - now, that’s what I call distributed cognition!
Another bit of creativity
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Here’s another bit of fantastic art that I stumbled upon (yes, I should really be working, but look what I’m doing instead!). It’s a little stop-motion animation about.. a healthy lifestyle, I suppose… and about friendship between cakes and vegetables.. Just what we need in January!
“Sweet Dreams” (2007) from Kirsten Lepore on Vimeo.
How about this for excitement?
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments
I’m just having a little chucke over the set of ‘exciting posters’ that the OCR examination board offers in connection with the launch of the new A-level history specification. How’s the Black Death for excitement? My thoughts drift to the anti-motivational posters so abundant on the web these days - makes me feel like adding a big black frame and writing ‘Fail!’ under the ‘Black Blotches - Black Death’ slogan. Apaprently this is one of a set of ‘thought-provoking and interesting posters’ that will ‘give a glimpse of the type of thinking and analytical skills that students will need to employ in order to investigate different sources’. Granted, this is probably a brilliant idea - it’s just that the advertisement is a tinge morbid. Oh, well, I suppose history is grim in places - and if you were living in, say, 1604, you’d be quite excited at the prospect of the possibility of potentially not getting the plague.
Web favourites
Sunday, August 31st, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments
I’ve decided to do a little series on my favourite stuff on the web. Those types of funny and creative things that the web makes possible and that remind me about why the Internet is definitely up there with sliced bread and chocolate milkshakes.
The first one in the series is ‘Where the hell is Matt’. Matt was just (and for all I know still is) a regular guy who went traveling. A travel buddy gave him the idea to record ‘that funny dance’ that Matt used to do and record it on camera. So he did. And he recorded the dance everywhere he went. He put together a video with the little dance sequences, which attracted so much attention, that some guys at StrideGum decided that they wanted to pay him to keep travelling and keep dancing. The result has been more funny and strangely inspirational videos with Matt and his funny dancing. He sure manages to lift my spirits whenever it’s required. I hope he can lift yours too - not possible without the internet!
The original video is here - and below is the latest addition. This time masses of people join in the silly dance. Enjoy!
About happiness
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 | Uncategorized, events, leisure | No Comments
I’ve been browsing talks on TED this weekend. There is an awful lot of inspirational material to be had there on a lot of different topics. I watch the talks and I try to glean some tricks on public speaking from the good speakers - along with some ‘what-not-to-dos’ from the not-so-good speakers. This time I’ve looked at TED’s happiness stream. These are talks about… well, what makes us happy. I especially liked this one, on how we synthesize happiness.
In my family we’ve got a saying: all that happens is for the best. So the worst thing that happens to you is also the best thing that could possibly happen. And you know what’s good about that saying? You can never prove it wrong. How crushed I was when I was not allowed to read Psychology at Copenhagen Univeristy - and how happy am I now looking at it in retrospect, from my PhD desk at Oxford University! Who knows what would have happened if I’d got plan A to work? Answer is: we’ll never know - and truth is: we don’t want to know!
This talk is about something similar - it explores how we build happiness out of even hopelessly inferior situations to those of plan A. In my case plan B turned out to be exciting - but what if it doesn’t? Turns out, we’re still going to be happy - genuinely happy! And it turns out that giving us the choice between plan A and plan B isn’t always to our benefit - but we stubbornly believe that it is. We don’t always do what’s best for us.
Same blog - new space
Thursday, August 21st, 2008 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments
Welcome to my new location. I’ve moved my blog over from Wordpress.com to here, on my own domain, in order to satisfy my curiosity about how people all across the world find my posts. Here I’ll be able to get more detailed visitor statistics, so I’m hoping that I’ll still have some visitors to count. So please update your bookmarks, RSS feeds etc. - and welcome! 
Many questions - few answers
Monday, July 7th, 2008 | Uncategorized, events | No Comments
I attended an ESRC seminar today, which is part of a series about the educational and social impact of new technologies on young people in Britain. Quite a few questions emerged in my head while listening and I’d like to throw them out to everyone to comment upon. I would really appreciate your ideas, because whereas I have many questions, I have very few answers. A colleague at the department told me that that’s what it’s like being in academia, but I would still like to (naively?) believe that we’re here to find some answers as well as posing new questions.
The most important questions for me came out of Steve Moss‘ talk about the Building Schools for the Future project. The BSF project is a 45 billion pounds (!! - yes, 9 zeros) government investment to rebuild secondary schools both in terms of bricks and mortar, but also in terms of ICT. Steve was talking about how physical as well as virtual spaces can create new opportunities for learning, and illustrated it with examples of both physical transformations of school space enabling a flexible learning layout and virtual spaces which enabled and facilitated a deep dialogue between students and tutors outside school hours.
He went on to say that the VLEs or ‘virtual learning environments’ we most often see today, are nothing of the sort, but are in fact ‘virtual teaching environments’ geared towards efficiently getting content out to learners and getting their responses back. Although the distinction between a VLE and a ‘VTE’ is not really well formulated in my head just yet, I agree with this point, and it very much echoes my experience in one of the schools participating in my doctoral study. Technology is often thought about in terms of making existing practices more efficient and very much of streamlining administrative tasks. Pedagogy in this case falls behind, and although I’m all for making necessary but time consuming tasks more effective, this can hardly be termed ‘technology for learning’. But if we in fact build real virtual learning environments, that are to be used for learning and not just teaching, which transcend traditional boundaries of school, such as disciplines and departments, will the teachers necessarily take naturally to them? I have great doubts about this. I think major institutional changes are needed in order to refocus attention on learning and away from teaching and administration. What will it require to induce this change of focus? That’s one question without an answer - but following are some related questions that may have part of the answer hidden in them.
Both virtual and physical spaces are being re-thought and re-designed in the BSF project. A great problem is to rethink spaces in light of existing theories of learning and pedagogy, so that we don’t just reproduce the spaces we have today in a new colour, and don’t end up with some of the properties of today’s school which we would rather avoid. It is proving problematic in the project to engage designers, school leaders and educational researchers in the new designs within the time frame of the individual school projects. But what interests me even more is the inbuilt (although not unquestioned) assumption that the new spaces will be able to transform pedagogy. Steve was talking about the importance of school strategies and pedagogical views on the formulation of the design. But how far will even a good design be able to push the boundaries of existing pedagogies, as long as the assessment structures currently shaping English education, are in place? Will the new spaces be able to induce more creativity within the ‘box’ of the assessment scheme and perhaps reduce the exam to ’something at the end’ rather than being ’something we spend the year preparing for’? Will the spaces - both physical and virtual - even allow schools to transcend the ‘assessment box’? And what if they do?
What I was really missing was a discussion about how assessment and curriculum policies should be harmonised with initiatives like the BSF project in order to provide an actual move towards creativity, inclusivity and flexibility, that such a rearrangement of spaces could enable. I may sound pessimistic in posing this question, but will changing the layout of our learning spaces really enable us to innovate pedagogically, or will we be constricted by the assessment culture that is currently a dominant influence on pedagogy?
And finally we will need to think about how we will prepare our learners - and not just our teachers - for taking more responsibility for their learning. Learner agency, it seems to me, is something to be practised from an early age, and even then, will we end up enabling some learners and not others by making learning more flexible and in that sense ‘threatening’? But that must be a question for another post, since this one is getting way too long.
Rows vs. columns
Friday, May 9th, 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments
I was sent this video by a friend on Facebook - and I tend to agree. I am not specifically quick to take a stand on the issues of global warming, which is why I think this guy has a point. This is a simple risk/benefits analysis that leaves us with no choice but to act. Rows stand for the correctness of what we know about climate change and columns stand for our actions. The video invites you to focus more on choosing a column instead of guessing at rows. I happen to agree.
Another point this little video makes is about the power we have to use the internet for campaigning. In fact it is a brilliant example of a campaign that may well capture the attention of many people across the web. This keys very well in to a book called ‘Mobilizing generation 2.0‘ which Danah Boyd blogged about a couple of days ago. Whether as a politician, an organisation or an individual with something to say, you have a powerful tool at your fingertips if you use it correctly. Granted, this is not news - but I don’t mind reiterating an important point.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ&hl=en]
Asking boring questions gets you boring answers
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 | Uncategorized, Web 2.0 | No Comments
I really liked this vlog post about social networking and in particular Twitter. I do not agree that social networking is pointless (although he’s got the right end of the stick with disliking the verb form ’social networking’). Granted, for a social octopus who is capable of keeping in touch with everyone, and naturally changing colour to fit into any setting or group of people - yes, such a wonder of nature is not necessarily helped by Facebook-like sites. For the rest of us, who tend to mostly stay our particular shade of gray, it can be an invaluable tool to remind us of all those people who we’d actually rather like to speak to again, but for some reason have moved away from, stopped calling or sending greeting cards to - just lost. For those particular reasons I’m a keen user of Facebook.
I’m not a keen user of Twitter on the other hand. I have never used the site simply because their sales pitch failed to convince me that this is a form of communication that I’m missing. I did sign up to Twitter - it seems all the rage these days, and as someone purporting to have something to do with technologies for education, I feel I have to give things a chance. But there my engagement with Twitter ended - I simply didn’t see the point. I think Lore Sjöberg is absolutely right in his post - they ask the wrong question. Ask me to tell you something interesting and I might. Ask me what I’m doing right now… well, I’m blogging. Excited? Probably not. You’d probably rather read my actual blog post than read about the fact that it is being created. Is this a sort of meta-reporting that we really don’t need?