- Five minutes with Sir Ken Robinson – extract from interview by Graham Brown-Martin for Learning Without Frontiers. On how we can stimulate creativity in our teaching and our students’ learning. “Teaching is an art form, it’s not a delivery system. I don’t know when we started confusing teaching with FedEx.”
- noob-2-133t [newb to elite] – reference in MindHacks blog to journal article reporting large-scale research on patterns of learning to play an online game which requires rapid perception, decision making, and motor responding. “We showed that lawful relations exist between practice amount and subsequent performance, and between practice spacing and subsequent performance. Our methodology allowed an in situ confirmation of results long established in the experimental literature on skill acquisition. Additionally, we showed that greater initial variation in performance is linked to higher subsequent performance, a result we link to the exploration/exploitation trade-off from the computational framework of reinforcement learning.”
- No, but you could have made it legible, Virgin Media – post by Rob Waller, The Simplification Centre blog. “My cable TV contract arrived from Virgin Media, accompanied by the traditional terms and conditions in unreadable type, complete with jokey cover…. Buried on page 4 is the rather alarming clause that, although I’ve signed a contract for a year, they can put the price up at any time….I ploughed through more tiny type and found that there is actually a separate section on how the agreement might be ended – and here it does state that I can leave if they put the price up. Fair enough. Except why did they not explain that more clearly?... The problem is that legal documents are not, and perhaps cannot be, conversational in structure. A normal explanation anticipates the reader’s questions [for example, in the Situation-Problem-Solution-Evaluation pattern]…. But to a lawyer it may more logical to see a contract structured with separate sections for the ways in which a contract can change, and for the ways in which it can end. There are plenty of ways to resolve issues like this, of multiple audiences and multiple uses. But they cost money and effort to do well.”
- Geeks on the Google bus create giant social problem in San Francisco – Observer article by John Naughton (referenced in his blog Memex 1.1). “Just under a year ago, Rebecca Solnit, a writer living in San Francisco, wrote a sobering piece in the London Review of Books about the Google Bus, which she viewed as a proxy for the technology industry just down the peninsula in Palo Alto, Mountain View and Cupertino. ‘The buses roll up to San Francisco’s bus stops in the morning and evening,” she wrote, “but they are unmarked, or nearly so, and not for the public. They have no signs or have discreet acronyms on the front windshield, and because they also have no rear doors they ingest and disgorge their passengers slowly, while the brightly lit funky orange public buses wait behind them. The luxury coach passengers ride for free and many take out their laptops and begin their work day on board; there is of course Wi-Fi. Most of them are gleaming white, with dark-tinted windows, like limousines, and some days I think of them as the spaceships on which our alien overlords have landed to rule over us.’
- Has the self-driving car at last arrived? - New Yorker article by Burkhard Bilger (referenced in Memex 1.1 blog). “Four-way stops were a good example [of the driving knowledge the programers find it necessary to include]. Most drivers don’t just sit and wait their turn. They nose into the intersection, nudging ahead while the previous car is still passing through. The Google car didn’t do that. Being a law-abiding robot, it waited until the crossing was completely clear—and promptly lost its place in line. “The nudging is a kind of communication,” Thrun told me. “It tells people that it’s your turn. The same thing with lane changes: if you start to pull into a gap and the driver in that lane moves forward, he’s giving you a clear no. If he pulls back, it’s a yes. The car has to learn that language.”
- Reading and hypothesis - post by Emily Short, in her Interactive Storytelling blog. "There’s ... an argument to be made that the backstory mystery is one of the most natural possible shapes for interactive literature. When it sets up questions and allows the player to look for answers, it engages the reader directly with the substance of the story rather than with extraneous tasks and challenges. It encourages reading hypothetically, making guesses about what really happened that are then affirmed or disproven as one goes."
Alice in Wonderland - striking stage presentation, with very impressive puppetry, from experimental theatre company Proteus. This was the kid's Christmas show at The Stables: a nice alternative to the mainstream pantomime, and certainly gave our grand-daughter plenty to think about.
Sherlock, series 3 - still (for my money) maintaining its winning formula of cracking storylines, snappy dialogue and vivid sense of place, animated by top notch performances especially of course Cummerbatch and Freeman. Nice character points explored in these episodes include Sherlock Holmes growing up thinking he was thick, because the only other standard of reference he had was his smarter elder brother, and Watson having a post-Afghanistan need for adrenaline and stress making him unable to settle into a routine life.
Sacred Wonders of Britain - lovely and moving series presented by Neil Oliver, blending archaeology with the (necessarily reconstructive and speculative) spirituality which gave rise to the sites.
Ursula Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind - collection of her talks and essays "on the Writer, the Reader and the Imagination". Particularly interesting to me were the pieces about rhythm and metre in prose (as distinct from poetry), which is an important determiner of how far written text reads like speech. Her own writing reads aloud beautifully: one of her stylistic features I've tried to imitate, even in my academic writing. The book is prefaced with a quote from Virginia Woolf: "Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words."
No comments:
Post a Comment