Walking on a beach today, we came on this pattern in the sand made by rivulets heading towards a small pool. My guess is that a satellite image of the Ganges or Nile deltas would show a similar pattern (minus the footprint!)
Symmetry
Tom’s photograph of a cygnet on Lough Eske.
Next parish Newfoundland
Looking westward from Donegal.
Murvagh beach
Near Ardara. Perfectly peaceful. Deserted except for us. Nobody else for miles. I only wish I could get these panoramas right.
Paradigm shifting
This morning’s Observer column…
It’s interesting how phrases take on a life of their own. Take, for example, ‘paradigm shift’ – originally coined in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher of science, to describe the transition of a scientific community from one theoretical framework to another. The phrase was quickly recognised as a Big Idea by people in all walks of life because they could use it as a metaphor for describing traumatic or difficult transitions in worldviews and mindsets.
As a result, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – in which Kuhn first sketched out the concept – has never been out of print and is among the 10 most cited books of all time. A quick search on Google for ‘paradigm shift’ brings up 1,240,000 hits. And an investigation using Amazon’s useful ‘search inside’ facility reveals that ‘paradigm shift’ occurs in over 23,000 books on Amazon’s virtual shelves, from all over the disciplinary spectrum. Truly, Kuhn’s phrase has entered our collective unconscious…
The Steep “Unlearning Curve”
I love this idea — of an “Unlearning Curve”…
One of the most challenging pieces of figuring out how to move education forward in a systemic way is “unlearning curve” that we teachers and educators have to go through to even see the possibilities that lay before us. So much of our traditional thinking about personal learning and classroom practice is being challenged by our ability to publish and connect and collaborate primarily because of the opportunities afforded by the Read/Write Web. For instance, in a world where literally any place can be a classroom, we have to unlearn the comforts of four walls that we’ve become accustomed to. When we can share our work with wide audiences, we need to unlearn the idea that student writing and projects are simply ways to assess what they know…
This doesn’t just apply to educators but to anyone who has been successful in an industry which is being transformed by technology. Broadcast TV, for example.
Martin’s Wii
My colleague Martin Weller has bought a Wii — for research purposes, naturally.
We bought a Nintendo Wii last weekend. I’ve not been in to games that much before – my gaming days ended around the time of Doom/Duke Nuke ’em (now those were some games). My main problem with games is that they just take so much time to get any return on. I really don’t have 50 hours to give over to battling aliens, and if I did then I experience a form of leisure angst – there are those unread volumes of Proust on my bookshelf that I really should get around to, or there is a five mile run I need to do today, or some craft activity I should be sharing with my daughter.
I am very much in the target audience for the Wii then – a game console for people who don’t usually buy game consoles. It’s mildly depressing to realise how well targeted you are, because the Wii is exactly right for me! You can pick it up and play immediately, the games can be much shorter and it doesn’t require a big commitment to get any return from.
It’s a big hit with the family too – my daughter has repeatedly knocked me out in boxing. Now I would be remiss in my academic duty if I didn’t mention affordances here. The Wii is a model of affordance for interaction – watching my daughter struggle with a PS2 controller compared with the ease with which she took to the Wii could be a case study in interface and object design. I should probably try and find some educational uses for it, but that isn’t what it’s for – its affordance is fun.
The Digital Delusion
Lovely story on Quentin’s Blog:
The general population really doesn’t understand digital technology. And it’s costing them money.
This was brought home to me last weekend while helping a friend choose a new TV. In the local shop, I noticed a variety of HDMI cables for sale. Now HDMI, for those of you not familiar with it, is quite a nice standard. It provides digital video and digital audio down a single compact and convenient connection. Much neater than the bulky DVI, VGA, SCART etc which preceded it.
However, notice that it’s a digital standard. This means that, subject to major failures, what goes in at one end ought to come out at the other. Why, then, does the store sell a variety of cables of different qualities and prices? In the days of analog connections, there was something to be said for low-impedance connections and for careful screening. Who knows, those articles in the hi-fi press extolling the virtues of gold plugs and low-oxygen copper cables might even have had something to them.
But in the digital world, if you put ones and zeros in one end of a cable and don’t get something recognisable as ones and zeros at the other, you don’t get a slightly worse picture or sound. You get complete breakdown, and major image or sound corruption. A cable which does that should not be sold at a cheaper price; it shouldn’t be sold at all. Better-quality cabling will allow things to work over greater distances, but for the average user with a DVD player under his TV, it will make no difference at all.
For example, my (quite expensive) CD player is connected to my (quite expensive) amplifier through a digital COAX connection. I use a single phono-phono cable I bought for about $1 in a Radio Shack sale. And the sound is perfect.
So I asked the nice man in the shop about the fact that they sold a modest-length HDMI cable for over £100 just beside the one for £15 (which, incidentally, probably costs less than a dollar to make).
“Oh yes”, he said, “it does have an effect. We had a customer do a side-by-side test just recently and he could see a difference. He bought the more expensive cable.”
Knowlidge is power
I was working with Stephen Heppell today and he told me about something he had seen in a PC World store. When I expressed disbelief, he produced a photograph and settled the matter there and then!
En passant… 99p seems a lot to pay for Brittanica 2003. That’s — let me see (counts on fingers) — four whole years ago.
Yahoo Pipes
There’s a lot of blogobuzz about Yahoo Pipes.
Yahoo describes it as:
a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.
Tim O’Reilly has a typically thoughtful piece about it. He calls it
a milestone in the history of the internet. It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as “an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator” that allows you to “create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.” While it’s still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone…
Brady Forrest has created a terrific exposition of the modules for building pipes.
One of the most intriguing things about Pipes is that it has enabled Yahoo to recapture some of the high technical ground it had ceded to Google. The company — which is having its problems with Wall Street recently — has just raised the threshold for Web 2.0 innovation.
Yippee!