What a plethora of metaphors inhabits that title!
SOmewhat arbitrarily I'll be thinking less about "time" in the near future, and more about time, i.e. deadlines. Leaving aside the philosophical problems, time seems to represent people's response to patterns in the world, patterns of repetition & newness. (Thanks Mic.k) One response - perhaps not solely my own - to newness is anxiety and one solution to anxiety is, perhaps, to repeat a solution, or to seek a repetition, a familiarity in the newness.
This is not a question of imposing "order" (time) on "chaos" (kaos); chaos is as much a human superposition as time. Time represents a comforting order; other orders are not precluded, perhaps simple not recognised, or, indeed, required.
Technology & time, both responses to the world. Insofar as technology creates repetition and reduces anxiety it could be said to create time. The common complaint about technology, that it steals time, reflects the fragmentation and destruction of predictable orders
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
More from the NYT
Another link from the Education supplement to the NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19fob-medium-heffernan-t.html?_r=1
The necessity of drilling/rote learning and technology to render it less painful.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19fob-medium-heffernan-t.html?_r=1
The necessity of drilling/rote learning and technology to render it less painful.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Technology update
Well, it's been a bit of a mixed week.
Firstly I got sidetracked by a technology-in-itself, called TiddlyWiki. Check out http://www.tiddlywiki.org
for details. There's something about the building up of the wiki through fragments & the alternative associational structures (linking & tagging) that I find appealing; as is the fact that the wiki is a single file containing both the software & content, which means it's physically portable on a USB, readily backed up into the cloud by email and can actually be used to run a website, which if you're not fussy about the name, you can set up to run from home in about 30 minutes. It's really very elegant.
The other thing about it that I like is that you can adapt the software that runs it really easily, and it's all maintained in the same one file. There's a whole essay crying out to be done on what constitutes technical elegance (and to what extent it's personal), but this thing ticks lots of my boxes. OK, I have to learn javascript to exploit that, but a.) I've been meaning to for years & b.) it isn't in any way necessary to use the base product.
The only objectionable thing I've found so far is that it doesn't work as well in Chrome (for uploads & synchronisations & imports) as it does for FireFox. But that's OK, since UTS forces me to use FireFox anyway.
Another thing is that although the concept has been around for quite a while, there still seems to be a fairly active community involved in tweaking it. Plus, there is free hosting at http://tiddlyspot.com and doubleplus there is an experiment in communal wiki cross-linking happening at http://tiddlyspaces.com. I think I'll be following up the latter as I get time.
Anyway, check it out!
AS committed in my learning contract, the self-learning documentation needs to be in a public forum, and you can find it at http://tejjyid.tiddlyspot.com. At the moment there's no feedback option built in - but I'm working on that. Anyway, you can comment here if you feel the urge - very grateful for any comments, including critical & questioning ones.
From the thematic viewpoint, I wanted to look at psychology this week, but it has been difficult to get into without being overwhelmed. (I feel overwhelmed) What I have found, which I think will be interesting is some psychologists with a phenomenological bent, and also a group of people interested in FBFW "narrative psychology". I don't like the way they express themselves (they talk about narrative as if it exists independently of people) but the idea that story-creating and story-consuming are reflective of, or parallel with internal meaning-creation is interesting. Structure, and particularly structure-in-time, is a big part of the response to a story. Here we have time-as-pattern, a pattern created by people as narrative-(participants). It's a little tricky at this stage. But it will be profitable to ask, how do machines affect the structuring of narratives and the resultant cohesiveness of those narratives?
Then I think I can look at learning as both the acquisition of narrative ("text-producing") skills and also a narrative in itself. Technology and time are then implicated in both the content (the to-be-learned) & the delivery (basis-for-learning).
Firstly I got sidetracked by a technology-in-itself, called TiddlyWiki. Check out http://www.tiddlywiki.org
for details. There's something about the building up of the wiki through fragments & the alternative associational structures (linking & tagging) that I find appealing; as is the fact that the wiki is a single file containing both the software & content, which means it's physically portable on a USB, readily backed up into the cloud by email and can actually be used to run a website, which if you're not fussy about the name, you can set up to run from home in about 30 minutes. It's really very elegant.
The other thing about it that I like is that you can adapt the software that runs it really easily, and it's all maintained in the same one file. There's a whole essay crying out to be done on what constitutes technical elegance (and to what extent it's personal), but this thing ticks lots of my boxes. OK, I have to learn javascript to exploit that, but a.) I've been meaning to for years & b.) it isn't in any way necessary to use the base product.
The only objectionable thing I've found so far is that it doesn't work as well in Chrome (for uploads & synchronisations & imports) as it does for FireFox. But that's OK, since UTS forces me to use FireFox anyway.
Another thing is that although the concept has been around for quite a while, there still seems to be a fairly active community involved in tweaking it. Plus, there is free hosting at http://tiddlyspot.com and doubleplus there is an experiment in communal wiki cross-linking happening at http://tiddlyspaces.com. I think I'll be following up the latter as I get time.
Anyway, check it out!
AS committed in my learning contract, the self-learning documentation needs to be in a public forum, and you can find it at http://tejjyid.tiddlyspot.com. At the moment there's no feedback option built in - but I'm working on that. Anyway, you can comment here if you feel the urge - very grateful for any comments, including critical & questioning ones.
From the thematic viewpoint, I wanted to look at psychology this week, but it has been difficult to get into without being overwhelmed. (I feel overwhelmed) What I have found, which I think will be interesting is some psychologists with a phenomenological bent, and also a group of people interested in FBFW "narrative psychology". I don't like the way they express themselves (they talk about narrative as if it exists independently of people) but the idea that story-creating and story-consuming are reflective of, or parallel with internal meaning-creation is interesting. Structure, and particularly structure-in-time, is a big part of the response to a story. Here we have time-as-pattern, a pattern created by people as narrative-(participants). It's a little tricky at this stage. But it will be profitable to ask, how do machines affect the structuring of narratives and the resultant cohesiveness of those narratives?
Then I think I can look at learning as both the acquisition of narrative ("text-producing") skills and also a narrative in itself. Technology and time are then implicated in both the content (the to-be-learned) & the delivery (basis-for-learning).
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Technology & Time (1)
I'm well into the swing of reading up on time & technology; I seem to have stumbled on a quite a promising can of worms, although, so far, there's not much connecting it back to education directly. Interestingly there is a lot of stuff in the business sector - I would've thought phenomenology was a bit anti-capital for the MBA crowd.
I'm developing some ideas that don;t fit directly into what I'm reading, even though notionally sharing some underpinnings. For example, in their intro. to 24/7, Hassan & Purser talk a lot about the human perception of time before switching to a discussion of the way in which computers (the main technology I guess, in general (although, come to think of it, the telephone must have been an interesting impact-er on perceptions of, say, "communicative distance", must get back to that (I still remember calling my grandparents at Christmas for the 1st time, and how over 4 years it went from an expensive complex process to something taken-for-granted))) alter the way in which clock is measured - almost without acknowledging that they have completely altered their perspective.
Anyway, tentatively I see it this way - human time (phenomenological time) has an envelope of "now" which OVERLAPS past and future; this human time is not wholly sequential. That envelope allows us to perceive the sense of a sentence, or a piece of music, or indeed any sequence - images are maybe a different case. So then if we look at this envelope, what constructs it & what constrains it? If it were constructed by the sequence, ie, sense dependant, it seems likely that we would comprehend quite complex ideas readily when spoken, but the difference between written & spoken language suggest that the envelope is media, rather than content sensitive. Also, it seems plausible that the envelope is managed by the brain, so it would come under cognitive/psychological discussion. Perhaps the brain cannot manage (given some complex of conditions) an envelope beyond a certain size, or perhaps there is a behavioural/affective COST associated with expanding the envelope.
I wonder how the idea of "flow" (the educational version) might fit into this? Is "flow" another way of looking at the envelope? "In the zone" is an extremely-extended envelope?
Lots of questions.
I'm developing some ideas that don;t fit directly into what I'm reading, even though notionally sharing some underpinnings. For example, in their intro. to 24/7, Hassan & Purser talk a lot about the human perception of time before switching to a discussion of the way in which computers (the main technology I guess, in general (although, come to think of it, the telephone must have been an interesting impact-er on perceptions of, say, "communicative distance", must get back to that (I still remember calling my grandparents at Christmas for the 1st time, and how over 4 years it went from an expensive complex process to something taken-for-granted))) alter the way in which clock is measured - almost without acknowledging that they have completely altered their perspective.
Anyway, tentatively I see it this way - human time (phenomenological time) has an envelope of "now" which OVERLAPS past and future; this human time is not wholly sequential. That envelope allows us to perceive the sense of a sentence, or a piece of music, or indeed any sequence - images are maybe a different case. So then if we look at this envelope, what constructs it & what constrains it? If it were constructed by the sequence, ie, sense dependant, it seems likely that we would comprehend quite complex ideas readily when spoken, but the difference between written & spoken language suggest that the envelope is media, rather than content sensitive. Also, it seems plausible that the envelope is managed by the brain, so it would come under cognitive/psychological discussion. Perhaps the brain cannot manage (given some complex of conditions) an envelope beyond a certain size, or perhaps there is a behavioural/affective COST associated with expanding the envelope.
I wonder how the idea of "flow" (the educational version) might fit into this? Is "flow" another way of looking at the envelope? "In the zone" is an extremely-extended envelope?
Lots of questions.
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