“When you want a computer system that works, just choose Linux.
When you want a computer system that works, just, choose Microsoft.”
Seen in an email signature.
A blogging milestone
Martin’s reached his 100th post and is reflecting on it.
This is emphatically not a ‘guide to becoming a blogger’ since I don’t think one person can tell someone else how to do that. Just my thoughts on my experience:
Firstly, I narrowed the focus. Previously I had tried to be a blogger for all people, but I found it necessary to have a specific subject area, in my case educational technology and e-learning. With this acting as a spine I could branch of occasionally in to other subjects (witness ramblings on football), but generally I found it easier to use this as a basis.
Secondly, I found an appropriate tone. I had struggled before with how to comment on, say, meetings I had been in. While ‘X was their usual curmudgeonly self’ may be true it is both libellous and not very interesting to others. So I tend to use the meetings as springboards for more general points.
Thirdly, I built up some momentum before I let people know about it. This was helped by writing a book at the time, so I had lots to say and time to say it.
Lastly, I began to think about everyday experiences in terms of blog postings…
He’s right about tone. One of the things our students find difficult about blogging is the difficulty of finding an authentic ‘voice’. Most people are unaccustomed to publishing their ideas in any kind of forum. So blogging presents a terrifying challenge; it raises awkward questions like: to whom am I addressing these semi-random thoughts? And why am I doing it anyway?
US military ‘planning’
This is a PowerPoint slide from a White House briefing by General Tommy Hanks in August 2002 explaining how post-Saddam Iraq would be managed in a series of orderly stages (‘Stabilization’, ‘Recovery’, ‘Transition’) which would require only 5,000 US troops in country by 2006. The presentation was obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive under the Freedom of Information Act. It makes one wonder what these guys were smoking.
The NYT comments:
August 2002 was an important time for developing the strategy. President Bush had yet to go to the United Nations to declare Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons programs a menace to international security, but the war planning was well under way. The tumultuous upheaval that would follow the toppling of the Hussein government was known antiseptically in planning sessions as “Phase IV.” As is clear from the slides, it was the least defined part of the strategy.
General Franks had told his officers that it was his supposition that the State Department would have the primary responsibility for rebuilding Iraq’s political institutions.
“D.O.S. will promote creation of a broad-based, credible provisional government — prior to D-Day,” noted a slide on “key planning assumptions.” That was military jargon for the notion that the Department of State would assemble a viable Iraqi governing coalition before the invasion even began.
Scale-free patterns
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.