Thanks to David for the pointer. Worth a look, especially for the idea that the AK-47 and Wikipedia are fundamentally similar in approach.

• Scratch means that children can program
  New MIT tool from Mitch Resnick et al that’s worth looking at - uses a building block concept.
  Tags: code children MIT
• BBC Backstage :: Feeds & APIs :: Postcoder Api
  Will be interested to see what they come up with and how they deal with the Post Office copyright
  Tags: BBC code geocoding API

Gregory Treverton outlines a nice distinction between puzzles and mysteries in an article called Risks and Riddles

There’s a reason millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler’s mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction along with frustration. Even when you can’t find the right answer, you know it exists. Puzzles can be solved; they have answers.

But a mystery offers no such comfort. It poses a question that has no definitive answer because the answer is contingent; it depends on a future interaction of many factors, known and unknown. A mystery cannot be answered; it can only be framed, by identifying the critical factors and applying some sense of how they have interacted in the past and might interact in the future. A mystery is an attempt to define ambiguities.

Puzzles may be more satisfying, but the world increasingly offers us mysteries. Treating them as puzzles is like trying to solve the unsolvable—an impossible challenge. But approaching them as mysteries may make us more comfortable with the uncertainties of our age.

Jim’s comments while MBAs and other similar programs seek to provide people with a basic tool-kit for solving problems, they assume a framework, but

“They offer far less guidance on the far more difficult task of framing issues in ways that can be addressed.”

All good stuff. It reminds me of the apprentice-journeyman-master model. On this puzzle-mystery reading, you could say that:

• An apprentice is unaware of the puzzles and doesn’t have the tools to solve them
• A journeyman is aware of the puzzles and has the tools to solve them. But is unaware of the mysteries
• A master is aware of the puzzles and has the tools to solve them. What sets a master apart though is the awareness of the mysteries and the ability to use that to make your own puzzles.

The world doesn’t increasingly offer us mysteries. It’s probably pedantic, but I’d say instead that more and more people are aware of the mysteries that the world offers, and as a result more and more people are aware, albeit faintly, that the journeymen might not cut the mustard.

The catch is, of course, you normally have to become both apprentice and journeyman before you can make your valuable puzzles from life’s little mysteries.

• Converting a colour photo to a single layered stencil with Photoshop - Tutorials - Stencil Revolution
  for weekends when I think I can still wear T-shirts …
  Tags: photoshop tutorial stencil t-shirt

Arthur Marshall was an astonishing man. At lunch today, I was told about his novel approach to training pilots, and I wonder what sort of place it might have in a classroom.

“Marshall started giving flying lessons after completing only 70 hours himself, and he was made a master instructor by the Guild of Air Pilots in 1931. From his experience he became convinced that selected ab initio pupils would make the best flying instructors, in contrast to the accepted RAF practice that only the more experienced pilots could perform this role. Operating on this principle, Marshall’s flying training methods resulted in the company’s elementary flying training schools being the most productive in the country. His scheme was eventually adopted across the RAF, for which the Marshall flying schools trained more than 20,000 pilots and instructors during the Second World War.”

Could that sort of approach work in the classroom? For instance, a lesson a week where a child from the year above teaches a child from the year below? Maybe have other kids as homework mentors? Tricky, I suppose, for practical reasons but there’s some real potential for modelling it digitally via the web 2.0 gamut …

May 20th 2007 | Comments(2) | Thoughts, Notes on ArthurMarshall, History, mentoring, RAF, training youth

Clarence Fisher has an interesting idea. While admitting that a curriculum constrains much of what can be taught, he suggests that within those constraints there’s room to let student’s build their own “Everything is Miscellaneous”-style piles of leaves.

What if we started the entire school year off with outcomes listed on cards which the kids could move around and organize into structures of study that were more meaningful and helpful for them? Several days spent categorizing and forming personal or small group knowledge structures, setting a course for the next few weeks or months ahead would be much more meaningful to students than us imposing a taxonomy of information upon them. It would make the knowledge, the information, the learning that needed to happen become theirs.”

• Science Experiments for the kitchen
  Some great ideas for making science fun. How to put a candle under a balloon and make sure it doesn’t pop, explaining global warming at the same time … that sort of thing
  Tags: science education teaching experiments
• How Technology Has Begun to Change Teaching and Learning at North Shore
  What’s great about this is the non-technical aspect. It’s not “we’ve got, blogs, wikis etc”, but “we’re now doing this sort of project which helps children like so”
  Tags: Learning social_computing practical
• Disappearing networks
  Interesting research “This network is transient; we only know about it because we were able to look at this early period”
  Tags: networks research transience
• 7 tips for building a community
  Good solid tips, especially on the metrics. The 7 are: Take emotion out of decisions; Talk like a human, not a robot; Give people something they can be proud of; Bring users in during community decisions; Moderation is a full-time job; Metrics spread the
  Tags: community guidelines
• Integrating Beast within another application
  Beast is a great little Rails forum app, but I’ve been struggling to work out how best to integrate it with existing code. This looks like it could help
  Tags: ruby code forum integration

• Must encourage fellow teachers
  … to have a look at this overview of the Web 2.0 tools that are bringing children “in touch with the entire world through social networking, video, audio, and gaming sites”
  Tags: tutorial learning

This is a great idea for using Flickr in an educational context for lots of reasons. 3 immediate ones:

1. It always seems a shame taking down a classroom display. Storing them online means there’s some permanence
2. If part of the point of displaying work is to make students feel proud of what they’ve achieved, why not show them you’re proud enough to put their work up in front of the word?
3. I’d been wondering about using Flickr at school. There are real problems at primary level with regards to security and privacy. Of course, I’d not been clever enough to make the leap that you can just show the children’s work.

One thing I do think’s a little bizarre though is this sets’ copyright. All rights reserved? Shouldn’t we be encouraging a creative commons in the classroom?

Anyway, thanks Alec for the link.

May 15th 2007 | Comments(1) | Thoughts on displays, social computing teaching

Novelists, according to Julian Gough, are hemmed in by the tragic tradition, a human eye view of suffering. It might be time for a gods’ eye view and a smirk.

“…the internet is rapidly becoming Borges’s library of Babel, Rushdie’s sea of stories: everything is turning up there, in potential promiscuous intercourse with everything else. Everything is happening all at once, in the same place, with no hierarchy. It’s as though space and time have collapsed. It’s exhilarating, and frightening. Who’s capturing that in the novel? Because the novel is the place to capture it. The novel has freedoms which television has not. It can shape and structure multiplicity and chaos in ways the internet cannot.

Novelists can take from these new art forms new structures and techniques for telling stories, as Joyce did from cinema. But who has? Weirdly, the modernists have a more accurate take on now than the most recent Booker winners. Finnegans Wake reads like a mash-up of a Google translation of everything ever. But John Banville and Anita Desai read like nostalgia (for Nabokov, for Dickens, for traditional virtues, for the canon). They feel far less contemporary than The Waste Land—which is what Bakhtin would call a novelised poem: a poem that escapes Aristotle’s Poetics and hitches a ride on the energy of the novel. As Baudrillard should have said: postmodernism never happened. Since Joyce and Woolf (and Eliot), the novel’s wheels have spun in the sand.

So steal from The Simpsons, not Henry James.”

[hat tip 3quarks]

From Wu Ming’s 54 - Vittorio is a moral Italian soldier who has become embroiled in Tito’s young Yugoslavia. His son, whom Vittorio abandoned after the WW2, has finally found him on an idyllic island.

“You have the rocks, the sea, the islands …”
“Well, that’s true,” Vittorio will reply with a half-smile. “But isn’t that exactly what’s wrong? Small pleasures rather than big dreams. A beautiful view, sun and the best ricotta cheese in the world.”
“I was trying to look on the bright side.”
“The bright side? There is one, I’m aware of that. You can live well here, if you want to. But I don;t. I want something else, can’t you see that?”
Pierre will shake his head and turn away in silence, resolving not to put himself in a bad mood. There is no more impregnable fortress than pessimism whatever the cost.
Better to forget the whole thing and hurry down to the beach.”

At the school I’m working at, we’ve just started a blog. All in the best skunkworks taste, there’s only a few children working on it. It’s great to see them rolling up their sleeves and beginning to write some interesting stuff.

One post that’s caught my eye, partly for the response it’s had in the staffroom is this post. Zed is 10 years old. He’s seen something in his community - a run-down boat in the school playground - that he thinks needs fixing. Max and Josh agree. And they’re blogging their opinions, beginning to get it fixed off their own bat.

Do have a look and see what you think, and if you’ve got any ideas to help these activists save their boat, it’d be great if you could leave them a comment.

May 15th 2007 | Comments(4) | Life on blogs, children politics

Genius.

May 15th 2007 | Comments(1) | Asides on images, MrT RSS

• References on Children, Adolescents, and the Internet
  Looks useful
  Tags: research children online

Fascinating article in the New Yorker on an Ancient Greek contender for the world’s first computer.

Worth reading in full, but the following caught my eye.

“Until this moment, I had, like many others, continued to puzzle over why, if the Greeks were capable of building such a technically sophisticated device, they used that capacity to construct what is essentially a toy—an intellectual amusement. But as I beheld this whirring, whirling symphony of metal, a perfect simulation of a mechanistic and logical universe, I realized that my notions of practicality were foolish and shortsighted. This machine was much more than a toy; it embodied a whole world view, and it must have been, for the ancients, wonderfully reassuring to behold.”

Wonderful machines embodying whole world views. Something in that.

A Woody Allen gem:

“I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”

Fred’s got some great points about delicious’ overinvestment in crowdsourcing. [thanks to headshift for the link]

the fact that del.icio.us overlooks the value of the individual is a key structural hole in the service. Del.icio.us is populated by many brilliant minds, but they are simply too hard to find! Its almost as if everyone on del.icio.us is blogging anonymously. It might have made sense a few years ago, but it doesn’t anymore. Del.icio.us can improve the social aspects of the service without becoming another social network; the idea that adding social to del.icio.us is somehow a negative is completely bunk. Social can be added well, and it will make del.icio.us even more popular. It’s time for del.icio.us to realize the value of editorship.

I think that’s right.

Fred also talks about making finding people easier. I personally have two types of feed I follow in delicious. Luminaries - as Fred calls them - or people I feel I ought to be following are the first. This group are generally visible enough in other channels (blogs etc) for me to find them on delicious - though it still takes a bit of work). In many ways, though these are the safe bets.

The second group are less visible, but effectively provide me with a tailored, edited and interesting reading list. They’re close to hitting the “optimal unfamiliarity” sweetspot Ton has spoken about. Sadly, it takes me a fair amount of effort to find these feeds. Focusing on the editorial social aspects may well mitigate that.

• Tagging 20 years from now
  Looks like an interesting research paper. Big question, really, is “Even assuming that such a consensus were possible, do we really want a world where everyone speaks a collaboratively defined analogue to the Queen’s English?”
  Tags: tags classification consensus research

From Isaiah Berlin’s wonderful Hedgehog and the Fox:

People were preoccupied by personal interests. Those who went about their ordinary business without feeling heroic emotions or thinking that they were actors upon the well-lighted stage of history were the most useful to their … community, while those who tried to grasp the general course of events and wanted to take part in history … were the most useless… because “nowhere is the commandment not to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge so clearly written as in the course of history. Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and the individual who plays a part in historical events never understands their significance. If he attempts to understand them, he is struck with sterility.”
…
Tolstoy’s bitterest taunts, his most corrosive irony, are reserved for those who pose as official specialists in human affairs … these men must be impostors, since no theories can possibly fit the immense variety of possible human behaviour, the vast multiplicity of minute, undiscoverable causes and effects which form that interplay of men and nature which history purports to record.

Following up on the Orwell quote in the last post, here’s a 5 minute video of Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” based on the 1950’s cartoons Look magazine developed and General Motors championed. [Thanks zubadubop for this]

Wikipedia, as ever, has a nice starter point:

“Hayek’s central thesis is that all forms of collectivism lead logically and inevitably to tyranny, and he used the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany as examples of countries which, in his view, had gone down the “the road to serfdom” and reached tyranny. Hayek argued that within a centrally planned economic system the distribution and allocation of all resources and goods would devolve onto a small group which would be incapable of processing all the information pertinent to the appropriate distribution of the resources and goods at the central planners’ disposal. Disagreement about the practical implementation of any economic plan combined with the inadequacy of the central planners’ resource management would invariably necessitate coercion in order for anything to be achieved.

Hayek further argued that the failure of central planning would be perceived by the public as an absence of sufficient power by the state to implement an otherwise good idea. Such a perception would lead the public to vote more power to the state, and would assist the rise to power of a “strong man” perceived to be capable of “getting the job done”. After these developments Hayek argued that a country would be ineluctably driven into outright totalitarianism.

For Hayek “the road to serfdom” inadvertently set upon by central planning, with its dismantling of the free market system, ends in the destruction of all individual economic and personal freedom.”