events
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.
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.
Information geography
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 | events | No Comments
I went to the JISC 2008 conference yesterday. To be honest I didn’t find much of what I heard especially ground-breaking. Granted, I only went to a couple of sessions, but behind the tantalising names were mostly common-sense findings (well, I suppose it’s better than if it didn’t make sense at all). On the other hand I do realise that often common sense is hard to come by, and that it actually requires quite a bit of rigorous research to weed out misconceptions and install conceptions that actually represent reality.
There was one idea that caught my attention. In Dr Ian Rowlands’ session entitled ‘Google Generation‘ he was talking about how the Google Generation isn’t a generation at all and that quite a few young people who should belong to this generation are giving up technology and (oh horror!) reverting to reading books. This is no big surprise to me - after all, when have you been able to subsume a generation of people under a label and actually expect it to be true for all of them? But then he went on to ask some interesting questions about how we help users navigate the unwieldy information space that is out there, on the internet. Dr Rowlands pointed out that a large proportion of information-seekers, even the supposedly progressed, well-educated and advanced information-seekers (i.e. academics), often have a very deficient picture of what information is out there and how to go about finding it. How do we provide users with a better ‘mental map’ of the information space? he went on to ask.
My immediate response to this is that we should teach people to be aware of where they are in the information landscape and to construct ‘mental maps’ as they go along. Nobody’s map is going to be as good as your own. I think that this is another reason to teach kids at school to structure the information they are working with into some form of overview or a map, to give them a habit of ‘information geography’.
Another rather humouristic comment to come out of the Google Generation session was that we researchers should really learn something from Tesco. Whereas we generalise across whole generations, Tesco’s got hold of the right idea of segmenting it’s user population into a myriad of categories and doing thorough research on the many facets of user behaviour across and within segments. Similarly we should stop using chain saws for fine wood carving and the Google Generation and the Digital Natives might not be suitable terms for the nuanced and complex thing we call ‘reality’.
Once upon a school
Friday, March 28th, 2008 | events | No Comments
This is an inspirational talk by Ted Eggers about his project of getting creatively and personally engages with local school children. The starting point for the project was that most kids don’t get anywhere near enough one-on-one time with their teachers. Solution: set up a drop-in homework centre run by writer-volunteers, which also sells pirate supplies. Give the talk a listen and you’ll understand - I think that’s the shortest way of putting it. Having watched it I have a call: can you please tell me of similar projects in England? Do they exist? Where do they exist and in what form? Who is running them? I think we can all learn from this project.
[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.490631&w=425&h=350&fv=bgColor%3DFFFFFF%26file%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fstatic.videoegg.com%2Fted%2Fmovies%2FDAVEEGGERS-2008-2_high.flv%26autoPlay%3Dfalse%26fullscreenURL%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fstatic.videoegg.com%2Fted%2Fflash%2Ffullscreen.html%26forcePlay%3Dfalse%26logo%3D%26allowFullscreen%3Dtrue] from www.ted.com posted with vodpod
Ted Nelson lecture
Monday, March 17th, 2008 | events | No Comments
Image from http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/
I’ve just been to a lecture with Ted Nelson at the OII and it has been a most enlightening, entertaining and humbling experience. Enlightening because Ted is a brilliant speaker and because he put a lot of history of technological ideas into a rather short space of time. Entertaining because Ted is a brilliant speaker. Full stop. Humbling because it made me realise that some people are just brilliantly creative in the way they think - not because they’ve learned how to do it, but just because they are.
Sometimes I wonder (I think most people do) how certain creative individuals come up with these wacky ideas that takes most people a significant amount of time and effort to even begin to understand. But to them it seems to come naturally - as if they just think in different terms. Well, I think that in some way they do. Ted was talking about how we lose out ability to see through being educated. “I don’t know anything about that subject because I never took it” - he mocked academics. And in a way I think he is right. Not knowing anything about anything does help keep your eyes equally open to any problem or topic or field. In another sense, I think there is a qualitative difference in what people are able to see in the first place. It’s not that we forget how to see, most of us are just unable. Maybe if we had all magically retained our childish ability to ask questions of everything we see, we would be better at it. But I do not think that growing up in an environment where all your questions are followed up is enough to give you the gift of ’sight’ that Ted talks about. (Of course Ted also talked a bit about Xanadu - although not nearly enough, and he also (barely) mentioned Zigzag.)
The talk was recorded and will be is web cast on the OII site. I’ll try to keep an eye on it and post a link here when it goes online. That was you can have a look and a listen for yourself. The talk is now available here. It’s well worth the 1.5 hours - it had me sitting on the edge of the seat, that’s for sure. Whatever your opinions may be about Ted Nelson’s somewhat controversial figure, the talk is well worth watching, so keep an eye out for it.