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Balls
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Mar. 18th, 2006 @ 06:12 pm
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Fully one SEVENTH of Canada's economy is paid for by the Federal government. Scary. That's a lot of power for 50 people around the Cabinet table, and no doubt a shitload of bad economic decisions. |
| » off to Cali again |
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Why is it everytime I go flying I am up to stupid hours of the night? Too much to do.
Oct. 14th, 2005 @ 04:10 am
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| » OKCupid! political test |
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Didn't quite hit the bullseye.
You are a
Social Liberal
(61% permissive)
and an...
Economic Liberal
(38% permissive)
You are best described as a:
Centrist
Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid |
Sep. 24th, 2005 @ 12:32 pm
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| » enough said |
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Sep. 20th, 2005 @ 12:31 am
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| » DART responding for once, but blocked |
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If you recall our Canadian military's DART from the tsunami--and how everyone got angry that the government didn't use it... well, they wanted to send it to Katrina ravaged areas this time.
But of course they were turned back.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/8/31/235829/261
If the Republicans want more Canadian military support, I'll just point to this. There it was, we did it, just exactly how it would have theoretically been used, and they blew it.
This is either small potatoes or large potatoes. I'm not sure yet.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/national/nationalspecial/08aid.html
Sep. 8th, 2005 @ 12:05 am
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| » Using the depravity of the Internet to fight itself |
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This is so delicious.
http://pranked.hopto.org/
Basic gist: Create an IM profile of an attractive female that is available for public chatting. Then automatically connect one perv to another. Log the ensuing conversation where both parties think they are talking to a girl, when they are only talking to another perv. Post logs on the Internet.
Sep. 7th, 2005 @ 01:52 am
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| » Blog annex |
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According to Egan (1978), education and curriculum studies have become nearly synonymous. When we look at WhatIsCurriculum, we see that one of the major defining factors in who gets to decide curriculum is the locus of power. Much of education and curriculum studies can be said to be either reinforcing the dominant power structure or rebelling against it. This dramatic story is all to frequent, and so we might wonder if they are really ConvenientRationales? That is, playing to their audiences.
( Read more... )
Additional parts of this essay:
Aug. 31st, 2005 @ 06:15 pm
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| » Vygotsky |
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I find it weird that people haven't translated more of Vygotsky if he is so important. Best resource I can find:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/
Ok I'm dumb; that's on the course syllabus. That explains why it's in my bookmarks.
All these second sources makes it hard to understand what he is actually talking about. I fear that people just make it up based on a few catch phrases.
(I think that will be the only time in my life I will ever link to marxists.org.)
Ah, there is a book from Harvard University Press from 1978. Bugger.
Aug. 30th, 2005 @ 04:54 pm
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| » Curriculum of virtual community |
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re: Nolan and Weiss (2002)
I recently wrote some collateral at Socialtext that described how to manage the adoption curve of our wiki product line inspired by this.
The introduction began,
Adoption as learning
Whenever someone encounters new software in the workplace, they are faced with critical learning objectives that act as barriers to adoption. With social software, software that changes the structure of communication and relationships between co-workers, additional social learning objectives are created.
The objectives were, in summary, "What is it?", "How do I use it?", and "How will it change my relationships?"
(Can't post the whole thing just yet.)
I strongly believe 'ease of use' in 'social software' is really more about social adoption than about Fitts Law. Low level motor skills are more of a hygiene factor than a real reason why something is used. If the software doesn't have basic usability, people won't adopt it, but if it is really the most easy to use thing in the world, they still might not adopt it for social reasons.
This is why people use LiveJournal and MOOs and wikis today, despite the fact they have terrible UI. It doesn't matter. The more important draw is the other people you want to form personal relationships with.
My collateral continued:
The biggest draw to a Socialtext workspace are the people there. The goal of a Socialtext workspace is to add value between the relationships of those people. Socialtext workspaces ease the entrance of a new participant through a mix of technical and social methods. Technically, we work to expose and simplify your relationships. Socially, you will get others to adopt the workspace simply by using it to communicate with them.
Naturally, the biggest question to answer learners is "how will it change my relationships?" This of course is a totally different educational question as the power dynamic will constantly change.
Aug. 29th, 2005 @ 12:31 am
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| » What is curriculum |
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Read the cut for the whole thing.
( Read more... )
These debates can be summarized as the following dimensions of curriculum.
- Locus of Power. Who gets to decide the curriculum. The State, Industry, the parents, the teacher, the learner, immediate necessity?
- Objective. What the curriculum is for. Growing citizens, growing better employees, progeny of culture, personal empowerment, enjoyment of life's potential.
- Material. What the curriculum covers. The classical curriculum, cultural studies, or whatever the learner feels like.
- Organization. How the curriculum is organized. Quantified gradation through learner-chosen courses through guided group activity through learner-centred self-exploration.
- Method. How the curriculum is taught. Uniform "mass" education by rote memory, behaviourist habit forming, personalized development, or learner-initiated.
- Evaluation. How the learner is evaluated. Standardized tests created by employers, quantified gradations set by school boards, narrative interviews, or immediate validation through direct experimentation and evaluation.
Beyond this explicit curriculum, there are two curricula in the negative space for each of what and how.
- Null curriculum. (Eisner, 1994) What material is not taught. By choosing not to teach something, authorities imply it is not of value to students. Much debate in curricum studies is about moving material from the null curriculum into the curriculum.
- Hidden curriculum. (Illich, 1978) How a curriculum reflects the desired power and role structure in society, and thus teaches and validates this structure as the only legitimate one.
References
( Read more... )
Aug. 29th, 2005 @ 12:16 am
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| » Dewey in quotes |
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Just the first four chapters for those who need it.
( Read more... )
Aug. 28th, 2005 @ 10:14 pm
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| » Philosophy of Education is for rebels |
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The traditional school could get along without any consistently developed philosophy of education. About all it required in that line was a set of abstract words like culture, discipline, our great cultural heritage, etc., actual guidance being derived not from them but from custom and established routines. Just because progressive schools cannot rely upon established traditions and institutional habits, they must either proceed more or less haphazardly or be directed by ideas which, when they are made articulate and coherent, form a philosophy of education. Revolt against the kind of organization characteristic of the traditional school constitutes a demand for a kind of organization based upon ideas. I think that only slight acquaintance with the history of education is needed to prove that educational reformers and innovators alone have felt the need for a philosophy of education. Those who adhered to the established system needed merely a few fine-sounding words to justify existing practices. The real work was done by habits which were so fixed as to be institutional.
(Dewey, 1938, p. ?)
There are more philosophies than practitioners. The irony is disturbing, as all of the philosophies we studied involve directly taking action to gain experience to prove the hypothesis.
The reason of course is that gaining control over the State school system is very difficult, even a little part of it, as it should be. So there is a lot of people fighting for the access by proving themselves on the battlefield of 'ideas'... and that leads to a lot of bogus criticism that untested ideas are wrong based on more untested ideas.
There has to be a better way, but of course Deschooling Society is not that easy to do. (Or is it...? see the Internet & open source.)
Aug. 28th, 2005 @ 10:14 pm
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| » MOOs & Chromosoft Mirrors vs. Telework |
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I think social conflicts get harder to resolve the longer you telework. My whole day is like a waking dream. Words dance across the screen. My brain ingests them (sometimes through a haze of exhaustion), tries to understand them, imagine the (social) context that caused them to be created and flung in my direction, respond, imagine the impact of the response and the probable reaction to that. Repeat the latter loop for a long time until I have something I have confidence with. Then I make more words dance across my screen and send it off into "cyberspace"" like a bird into fog. All the while, of course, new words are flashing across my screen inducing new imaginings as distractions, making it all mixed up.
As much as I earlier metaphorized the Net as an outside window, it's more like an ongoing lucid dream. I can see why it this dream is so seductive. It draws people into the dream so thoroughly, the masquerade becomes more solid than the external world. I find the MOOs fantasy world disturbing. There's a reason Neal Stephenson so thoroughly mocked it in Snow Crash by Hiro's video game mentality competing with his pizza delivery storage container reality.
This is a psychosis. Children 7 years and older stop playing these games of false reality (seriously). The world stops becoming a Quixotic waking dream. What's happened that I've punched through the Looking Glass? I've spent so much of my life sceptically scornful of those on the other side. Now, I wonder if my perception of reality is simply the summation of words--theories--that I've ingested over the past two years of this academic life.
My head is in the clouds. I need to punch through, but not into the blue sky, but down down down to touch the ground.
Yet I'm more connected up here than I've ever been before. It's seductive seeing the world spin below. The paradox of the Internet. Digital personal relationships trump real ones. Real relationships become digital.
We are all being sucked inside our own dreams. (Turn them off.)
Aug. 24th, 2005 @ 12:44 am
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| » Talky talky, no Dewey. |
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Sitting in the park today trying to chill out, I was watching the kids splash around in the wading pool. Between the two things: burn out from too much 'cognition' and watching kids learn how to use the world, I started wondering why we spend all our time doing things 'mentally'?
Not a new idea. In this class, we talked a lot about practice in the real world. The value, for instance, of building the museum objects rather than just gazing on them. But there's the rub... we talked about it, not practiced it. Not that it was easy to practice.
Masters degrees are mostly all talk. When we have done case studies, they have been incredibly valuable learning experiences. But mostly, we just talk and think and write. School is entirely about getting you to think in different ways, or (more colloquially) breaking your mind. Making you think critically. Basically, making you think harder.
Why? Thinking harder does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. Often it makes you fail, as you wrap yourself up in a lot of false premises that lead to false conclusions. Bounded rationality is important.
But thinking is cheap, that's why. Talking (again) to someone today with a huge wiki project designed, planned, diagramed, charted, a couple of us were scratching our heads. Why? As it turns out, for a masters degree, of course. It's so much more impressive to design something huge than to actually build something more mundane, I guess. And mostly, you can work through a theory further on paper (thereby proving you can think hard) than in practice (thinking usefully), which is what everyone wants.
Costs are everywhere. Ethical guidelines get in the way, as well as the difficulty of arranging group projects, and so on. It takes more time to succeed than to fail (but what wastes more time, really?).
The worst part are evaluations. Evaluations in school are about how cool the theory was, which again is best worked out in paper, not how successful the project was, which is best worked out in reality.
This is what academia does. Because resources are so scarce, an academic argues and argues and argues to blow competitors out of the water so he or she can get the money, lab, access, whatever. Any time there are few resources, nastiness and insanity increase. Also, people without money spend all their time talking because they have nothing better to do. Students learn this art as part of the enculturation.
(Blogs are very much like this too.)
But direct competition is not valuable at all. Indirect competition is far superior. It's much better for society if multiple independent groups are free to bring their ideas to fruition as far as possible before there is market consolidation. This is of course expensive in the short term, but powerful in the long term.
The difference between European and American governance is essentially that. America has more money, so they just try a whole bunch of crap out. Europe does not, so they talk the issue to death. Both are somewhat successful in a way, I suppose, but it's a lot more spiritually fulfilling to dig your own two hands into the earth than dip a pen in an inkwell.
So, we talk because it's cheap. And that means a lot more ideas make it to the table, sure. And diversity is good, sure. However, when talk is cheap, the ideas are cheap. Without testing the ideas in reality, we have no idea how to assess their comparitive value. Instead, all we can do is be critical (i.e. try to destroy the competitor so our own ideas advance to the pot of money). Instead of winnowing out bad ideas, learning from good ideas, recombining composite parts of ideas into new better ideas, all we have are a lot of papers with people committed to them all waiting to see their ideology win out in hope the money flows their ways. It's all a house of cards.
I wish it were different in business, but in non-capital enterprises like consulting, you see it as well. Consultants write truckloads of white papers (for free) hoping to have some money flung their way. But because those consultants are writing white papers instead of working, those white papers are a lot of hot air. How else could you find inexperienced people in their mid-20s being high paid consultants?
I am aching to get back to doing real solid work in the world again. Sitting here today, I found myself blocked because I'm basically scared of writing a white paper for a client that might be bullshit. As an developer, I always used real working things as demonstrations. I refuse to write bullshit. Maybe I'm just not suited for this gig.
Aug. 23rd, 2005 @ 07:03 pm
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sunir's journal
