Archive for the ‘Learning and e-Learning’ Category

Teenagers and continuous partial attention….

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

Via my colleague Brian Kelly’s post, I read Catherine O’Brien’s How the Google generation thinks differently on the Times Online site (Brian gets cited offering advice on parenting in a digital age!).

I enjoyed the article, but one sentence in the middle caused me to reminisce about my own childhood, and my approach to ‘doing’ homework:

The experience with which my generation grew up, of absorbing oneself in a single book and allowing its themes to meander into the mind before forming considered judgments, is in danger of being eclipsed by the new, digital world order.

Now I judge myself to be more or less of the same generation as Catherine, but I have a quite different memory of doing homework. As I recall, I spent hours in my bedroom, with a text book or two for sure, but also with Radio Victory playing fairly continuously on my clock-radio. At pre-arranged times I would use my pocket torch to send messages in Morse code to the kid across the other side of the alley-way which ran behind my house. Here’s a sample:

- …. .. … / .– — ..- .-.. -.. / -… . / … — / — ..- -.-. …. / . .- … .. . .-. / .. ..-. / .– . / …. .- -.. / … — — . / -.- .. -. -.. / — ..-. / .–. — -.-. -.- . – / -.. . …- .. -.-. . / ..-. — .-. / … . -. -.. .. -. –. / … …. — .-. – / – . -..- – / — . … … .- –. . … / – — / . .- -.-. …. / — – …. . .-. / .. -. / .–. .-.. .- .. -. / . -. –. .-.. .. … ….

If you feel so inclined, you can translate this using this nifty Morse code translator.

My point is, of course, that continuous partial attention is not a generational phenomenon so much as it is related to age.

And furthermore, while the technology may be different, but thirty years ago I had a remote social network (with two nodes – I didn’t have many friends then, for some reason) which was maintained with a recognised, international standard deployed over a binary protocol using readily-available, commodity hardware.

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Posted in Learning and e-Learning, Social Software | 2 Comments »

A seminar on, and in, Second Life

Tuesday, June 19th, 2007

Today I briefly attended a follow up to the Eduserv Symposium, Virtual Worlds, Real Learning, Revisited which was an entirely ‘virtual’ event conducted in Second Life (SL). My attendance was cut short by an incident involving a laptop and a three-year old upon which I won’t elaborate…. I did manage to rejoin the event towards the end.

The event today was, essentially, a seminar, with a 5 or 6 ‘panelists’ and a varying number of audience members (maybe peaked at around 25 – difficult for me to say). Before the event Eduserv had given out full instructions about a ‘queueing’ system, designed to prevent everyone talking at once. When I joined the seminar, around 15 minutes late, this had been abandoned and a free-flowing chat was in progress. At times the chat system hit the same problem all such applications seem to do, which is that there were several threads or conversations mixed in together and it became difficult to follow.

At one point, one of the audience asked a question which made me sit up and take notice. The questioner wanted to know if people were looking at the avatars and virtual world surrounding them or if they were just reading the chat ‘history’. By this point I had enlarged the chat history window to the point where it obscured the rest of the virtual world entirely. This was the moment I wished I was using a better chat system – something more like Skype for example. To be fair to SL, it did attempt to cope with considerably more than Skype’s maximum of 10 participants in one chat session. Having said that, I found that the chat tool in SL is woefully slow if you’re in the middle of a flowing discussion – on my pretty powerful MacBook I found myself watching my keystrokes crawling across the input box. And my enlarged chat window was semi-transparent so that I could still see avatars doing that comical ‘typing in air’ thing which indicates they are ‘chatting’ (I imagine I can change this behaviour, but in the heat of the moment I didn’t want to go hunting for the switch).

I’m still very skeptical about the value of SL in education or e-Learning. Nothing in the discussion has made me feel differently and today’s experience, my first ’seminar’ in SL, just made me think back to the days when the early promise of ‘virtual learning environments’ began to pall and we realised that the integrated VLE was not generally better than the sum of its second-rate component tools, and that we might be better off just selecting better tools.

If I hadn’t run into an unfortunate child/laptop proximity event, I would have asked what the panel thought of the significance or otherwise of SL for distance learning. As I blogged before, the guys at Eduserv have already proved to me that SL can definitely play a part in delivering conferences – allowing a worthwhile degree of participation for remote delegates. I think SL has some real potential as a virtual meeting space – perhaps when the text chat gives way to voice (in development in SL) then we’ll start to see something really interesting.

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Posted in Learning and e-Learning, Web Infrastructure | 5 Comments »

Breakthroughs Happen in a Social Context

Sunday, June 17th, 2007

This post from Terry Frazier connects neatly with something I’ve been wondering about a fair amount lately: how to judge when to pause and think about something deeply, and when to dive in and see where your momentum and the ‘current’ take you.

Terry, describing a talk given by Lisa Haneberg, says:

* Breakthroughs happen in a social context – If you aren’t out actively promoting your goal or idea – discussing it regularly with friends, colleagues, and strangers and sharing your challenges, achievements, and objectives – you aren’t going to make any breakthroughs.
* Introverts, no matter how smart, rarely make breakthroughs – Breakthroughs do not happen in front of your face. They happen in the connections and gaps and networks that emerge from constant forward action and focus.

Now, I suppose that there is still a place for solitary, deep, uninterrupted thought. But when I think back, most of my ‘epiphanies’ have come after discussing my thinking with others. It’s the extra context you get from someone else’s slightly different take that often makes the difference. A small example: last week I was explaining the notion of ‘embracing constraints’ to my colleague Brian, a phrase I learnt from 37 Signals’ Getting Real. I’ve been taken with this phrase for a while, in it’s intended context of welcoming external limiting factors when designing software – to produce leaner, more focussed applications as a result. Brian, I think, slightly misunderstood my use of the phrase to taking it to mean that the end user embraced the constraints imposed on them by well-designed but less feature-rich applications. I started to correct him…. but realised that his view was, I thought, in the spirit of the intended meaning. His misunderstanding, and the ensuing conversation, has added a new depth to my appreciation of this notion.

So, breakthroughs happen in a social context. Modern technology, especially telecoms and internet technologies, ensure that the ’social context’ is very easy to find. A whole raft of Web 2.0 applications offer more social networks than we could possibly need. Indeed, watching colleagues playing with Twitter, I wonder if the social context might become something we start to have to find ways to avoid! What price quiet contemplation?

So anyway, are we seeing and experiencing more frequent ‘breakthroughs’ in our thinking, as a result of our handy ’social contexts’? In my case, I think….maybe.

(Terry’s posting found via Curiouser and Curiouser)

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Posted in Learning and e-Learning, Software Development | 2 Comments »