The Death of Homo Economicus: why does capitalism still exist? - review by Steven Pooole in The Guardian. "'Homo economicus' is the totally made-up creature who is the proletarian hero of mid-20th-century economics: going about his daily life with unimpeachable rationality, efficiently calculating ways to maximise his self-interest. But people don’t actually live like that, as the behavioural economists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman pointed out. It is a refuted model, yet its malign influence persists.... In the meantime, especially for the young, debt has become 'a way of life' and jobs are increasingly precarious. Fleming has an excellent chapter on the 'theatre of work', where looking busy and adopting the right emotional attitude in an office can be soul-destroying burdens, and he is very astute on the inhumanity of the zero-hours contract, allied to unprecedented methods of electronic surveillance over employees. Delivery drivers, for example, are paid only for each package they deliver, with no sickness or other benefits. Fleming extends the logic remorselessly: why pay a bartender for any time other than those exact seconds when she is pouring a drink? Employers, he writes, should be paying for 'availability' over a period of time; paying only for exactly measured micro-quantities of work is just the newest way to shaft the little guy. About Uber, Deliveroo, TaskRabbit et al, Fleming is particularly scathing: what is dishonestly termed the 'sharing economy' is a cynical monetisation of the widespread hardship caused by the 2008 crisis, and the final stage in the 'atomisation of the employee'. "
Badger or Bulbasaur: have children lost touch with nature? - article by Robert Macfarlane in The Guardian, about the origin of his book with Jackie Morris The Lost Words. "Cambridge researchers seeking to 'quantify children’s knowledge of nature' surveyed a cohort of four- to 11-year-old children in Britain. The researchers made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a common species of British plant or wildlife, including adder, bluebell, heron, otter, puffin and wren. They also made a set of 100 picture cards, each showing a 'common species' of Pokémon character, including Arbok, Beedrill, Hitmonchan, Omanyte, Psyduck and Wigglytuff. The children were then shown a sample of cards from the two sets, and asked to identify the species for each card. The results were striking. Children aged eight and over were 'substantially better' at identifying Pokémon 'species” than 'organisms such as oak trees or badgers'.... Their conclusions were unusually forthright – and tinged by hope and worry. 'Young children clearly have tremendous capacity for learning about creatures (whether natural or manmade),' they wrote, but they are presently 'more inspired by synthetic subjects' than by 'living creatures'. They pointed to evidence linking 'loss of knowledge about the natural world to growing isolation from it'. We need, the paper concluded, 'to re-establish children’s links with nature if we are to win over the hearts and minds of the next generation', for 'we love what we know … What is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never seen a wren'? "
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia - article by Paul Lewis in The Guardian "A small but growing band of Silicon Valley heretics [are complaining] about the rise of the so-called 'attention economy': an internet shaped around the demands of an advertising economy.... There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called 'continuous partial attention', severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. ... 'One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before,' [says Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the Like button]. It may or may not be relevant that Rosenstein, [Leah] Pearlman [also on the team that created the Facebook Like] and most of the tech insiders questioning today’s attention economy are in their 30s, members of the last generation that can remember a world in which telephones were plugged into walls."
Don’t press send … The new rules for good writing in the 21st century - article by Sam Leith in The Guardian, based on his book Write to the Point. "Five simple ways to engage and convince your reader. (1) Bait the hook.... (2) Be clear.... (3) Be correct.... (4) Prefer right-branching sentences.... (5) Read it aloud."
Why Facebook is in a hole over data mining - article by John Naughton in The Observer, referenced in his Memex 1.1 blog. “One of my favourite books is The Education of Henry Adams (published in 1918). It’s an extended meditation, written in old age by a scion of one of Boston’s elite families, on how the world had changed in his lifetime, and how his formal education had not prepared him for the events through which he had lived. This education had been grounded in the classics, history and literature, and had rendered him incapable, he said, of dealing with the impact of science and technology. Re-reading Adams recently left me with the thought that there is now an opening for a similar book, The Education of Mark Zuckerberg. It would have an analogous theme, namely how the hero’s education rendered him incapable of understanding the world into which he was born. For although he was supposed to be majoring in psychology at Harvard, the young Zuckerberg mostly took computer science classes until he started Facebook and dropped out. And it turns out that this half-baked education has left him bewildered and rudderless in a culturally complex and politically polarised world.
What I learnt from being a student - blog post by Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at The Open University. "Here are some of the things I’ve (re)learnt, from the perspective of being an educator while also studying... Small stuff is big – for all the talk of revolutionary pedagogy, personalised learning, disrupted education, what really matters most of the time is the straightforward, everyday matters: do I know what I should be doing at any given time? Can I access the material? Is it clearly written? Can I get support within a reasonable timeframe? Is it set out so I can plan my time effectively?... Engaging and challenging – ... I’ve mentioned before that I came to like assessment because this forced me to engage with the content and bring it together. So it’s not just about making sure as educators we cover topics A to E but also that the student wants to learn about them. Give me a reason to interact – given my time constraints, I didn’t do much interaction in the forums. And this was fine with me, I was glad the course didn’t make lots of interaction compulsory just for the sake of it. But also without a major prompt to do so, it was easy to avoid interaction all together, and if this was my first time studying, that would be a shame. It made me vulnerable – and not in a cute puppy way. I am from a science background and so don’t have any art history knowledge. I was therefore winging it a lot of the time, and didn’t have the vocabulary or the depth of knowledge most of my fellow students had. I would have been reluctant to have been forced to display this scarcity of knowledge in the open, so I was grateful for a closed environment, and careful feedback from tutors to scaffold my learning.... the important aspect was to be reminded of how vulnerable the whole learning process is."
8 Ways UX Design Theory Transformed My Approach to Course Design - blog post by John Spencer at The Synapse. "One of the key ideas in UX is to build systems that people will intuitively understand rather than trying to get people to fit into a system. Yet, in classrooms, I had spent hours teaching procedures. ... I hadn’t even considered the 'user experience' of my pedagogy, classroom management, or classroom space. UX design was a game-changer for me.... Here are eight ideas of UX design that I am trying to incorporate into my course design. (1) Embrace on-boarding.... (2) Begin with users in mind... (3) Create multimedia instructions... (4) Be intentional with copy text... (5) Be linear but be connective... (6) Be consistent... (7) Be simple... (8) Solicit frequent feedback.... The best systems are the ones that feel invisible. You step into it and immediately know where to go and what to do. Don’t get me wrong. Confusion can be a great thing in a classroom if it is leading toward deeper learning. But confusion caused by poorly designed courses leads to disengagement and frustration. It cuts learning short and disrupts creative flow."
Why we need a 21st-century Martin Luther to challenge the church of tech - article by John Naughton in The Observer. “I’ve always been fascinated by [Martin Luther], and as the 500th anniversary [of his 95 theses] loomed and Trump rose to power on the back of our new media ecosystem, I fell to pondering whether there are lessons to be learned from the 95 theses and their astonishing aftermath. One thing above all stands out from those theses. It is that if one is going to challenge an established power, then one needs to attack it on two fronts – its ideology (which in Luther’s time was its theology), and its business model. And the challenge should be articulated in a format that is appropriate to its time. Which led me to think about an analogous strategy in understanding digital technology and addressing the problems posed by the tech corporations that are now running amok in our networked world... Why not, I thought, compose 95 theses about what has happened to our world, and post them not on a church door but on a website? Its URL is 95theses.co.uk and it will go live on 31 October, the morning of the anniversary.”
Of Women: In the 21st Century by Shami Chakrabarti: priorities for feminism in the 21st century - review by Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. "There is no exciting new clickbait theory of feminism here, and there’s not much in her final chapter of recommendations that hasn’t been said a thousand times before: more free childcare, challenge gender stereotyping, do something about the tide of misogynistic hate speech on the internet. The world doesn’t need another feminist book to tell us that. What we do badly need, however, is a reminder to step back and look at the global picture. Too much of what is written and published about women in Britain is really written about and for a certain kind of woman – middle class, reasonably well educated, quite often white, fascinated by culture wars and symbols but rather less so by gritty economic issues – and makes only guilty passing acknowledgment of everyone else. But Chakrabarti draws in every chapter on stories from India or Kenya or Latin America as well as home. While these examples don’t necessarily lead her to any radically different conclusions about what’s wrong with the lot of women, at least for once we are seeing the problem in 3D. This book is likely to appeal to people who have frankly had enough of reading about the politics of waxing or the deeper meaning of Beyoncé, and who worry that western feminism is in danger of disappearing up itself in pursuit of rather glossy and superficial concerns, but still don’t for one minute think the battle is won."
World Without Mind by Franklin Foer: the turn against Big Tech - review by Ben Tarnoff in The Guardian. "This is not a book of small, gentle criticisms. According to Foer, Silicon Valley threatens our souls and our civilisation. Big tech companies, he believes, are on a global crusade 'to mould humanity into their desired image of it'. And this moulding is highly destructive. It involves the demolition of privacy, individuality, creativity, free will, competitive markets, the media and publishing industries, the distinction between facts and lies, the possibility for political compromise, and the space for solitary contemplation.... Because Foer sees collectivism as the problem, he has trouble imagining collective solutions. He proposes that we each make a personal commitment to consuming more artisanal forms of culture. He asks us to forgo the easy pleasures of technology in favour of 'the sustaining nourishment of the contemplative life' – a slow-food movement of the soul. But there are many who don’t find the contemplative life all that nourishing, and others who prefer to draw their nourishment from the new forms of collectivity created by the internet. Telling these people to read more books will do little to curb Silicon Valley’s growing power over our lives.... 'We have deluded ourselves into caring more deeply about convenience and efficiency than about the things that last,' Foer writes. This is a false choice. We can have Twitter and Turgenev. We can keep our humanity intact while enjoying the new tools tech has built – and use politics to make them better."
