John Connell: The Blog

Address Is Approx­i­mate from The The­ory on Vimeo.

Flow­ing Data is a superb show­case for com­pelling data visu­al­iza­tion — just take a glance at their archive

The short ani­ma­tion above was cre­ated by one per­son — Tom Jenk­ins — and is the story of a lit­tle desk toy tak­ing a trip across the USA by StreetView.

Some other inter­est­ing Flow­ing Data picks:

• The true size of Africa
• His­tory of the Sky
• Best Sta­tis­tics Ques­tion Ever try this one yourself

Tech­no­rati Tags: flow­ing data, tom jenk­ins, google streetview, ani­ma­tion, visu­al­iza­tion

Rob Walker, in The Atlantic, on the Lytro cam­era, due to hit the shelves early in 2012, talk­ing to Richard Koci Her­nan­dez, a pho­tog­ra­pher and assis­tant pro­fes­sor of new media at the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia at Berkeley:

Imagine.…a pho­to­jour­nal­ist cov­er­ing a pres­i­den­tial speech whose audi­ence includes a clutch of pro­test­ers. Using a tra­di­tional cam­era, he says, “I could eas­ily set my con­trols so that what’s in focus is just the pres­i­dent, with the back­ground blurred. Or I could do the oppo­site, and focus on the pro­test­ers.” A Lytro cap­ture, by con­trast, will include both focal points, and many oth­ers. Dis­trib­ute that image, he con­tin­ues, and “the viewer can choose—I don’t want to sound professorial—but can choose the truth.”

Where the tra­di­tional cam­era cap­tures the light reflected off the sub­ject through a lens and onto a flat sur­face, in which a good focus on the sub­ject is all impor­tant, the Lytro will use hun­dreds of micro lenses within a sin­gle device to cap­ture the whole light field. Basi­cally, you will be able to focus on any one part of the image after the fact.

The impli­ca­tions of this device must prove to be gen­uinely rev­o­lu­tion­ary for pho­tog­ra­phy.

Tech­no­rati Tags: lytro, the atlantic, rob walker, pho­tog­ra­phy

For in the inter­ven­ing period I’ve come to realise that Twit­ter is actu­ally a unique learn­ing resource. By dis­cov­er­ing oth­ers through­out the World who share a pas­sion for edu­ca­tion, track­ing their thoughts, fol­low­ing their links, and engag­ing in pro­duc­tive con­ver­sa­tions – I have been inspired, chal­lenged and pro­fes­sion­ally invigorated.

Don Led­ing­ham on his Dam­a­scene con­ver­sion

Like many peo­ple who respect Don’s think­ing on edu­ca­tion and who have fol­lowed his Learn­ing Log since he set it up back in 2005 (beat­ing me into blog­ging by 5 months), I was sur­prised and dis­mayed when, in the mid­dle of 2010, he decided to call a tem­po­rary halt to his blog­ging — exactly one year later, he picked up the reins again. His remarks about that period of blog­ging absti­nence are very inter­est­ing indeed:

So what did I find out from my year out? Firstly, I missed the oppor­tu­nity to reflect upon my work and to be able to try to make sense of my world and to be able to share and check that mean­ing out with oth­ers. Sec­ondly, and per­haps more impor­tantly I missed the oppor­tu­nity to learn from others.

On reflec­tion my year out was a year with­out learn­ing. I did my job, I solved prob­lems, I led the ser­vice, but I’d go so far as to say that I didn’t learn – and with­out learn­ing we are not professionals.

Don is noth­ing if not scrupu­lously hon­est with him­self — a trait that is of course reflected in his work and in his deal­ings with every­one he meets — and his point here is one that many teach­ers and other edu­ca­tion pro­fes­sion­als would do well to ponder.

Tech­no­rati Tags: don led­ing­ham, twit­ter, blog­ging, lead­er­ship, edu­ca­tion

I have to admit that I had never heard of the five-paragraph essay until I read a piece by John Jones in DML­Cen­tral: Teach­ing Pub­lish­ing as a 21^st Cen­tury Lit­er­acy. It seems to be a com­mon way to teach writ­ing in pri­mary and sec­ondary school in the USA — it might well have a wider reach for all I know — i found a descrip­tion of it here.

Jones writes:

…you don’t often see these essays out­side of the class­room in mag­a­zines or news­pa­pers or other pub­lic writ­ing venues…

Often? Try never

I think the cen­tral point of his post though is spot on:

One of the goals of education—digital or otherwise—is to pre­pare stu­dents for think­ing and doing out­side the class­room. And while it is true that the goal of teach­ing writ­ing has always been to pre­pare stu­dents for writ­ing beyond the walls of the school­house, this is even more the case now that dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing has become so widely avail­able in our soci­ety. In other words, as much as pos­si­ble, the task of teach­ing writ­ing is also teach­ing writ­ing for pub­lic con­sump­tion, and teach­ing writ­ing for pub­lic con­sump­tion in the net­work soci­ety means teach­ing writ­ing and pub­lish­ing as being inseparable.

Although some tra­di­tional edu­ca­tors might choose to for­get on occa­sions that, since writ­ing is always for a pur­pose, even if some­times only a very per­sonal one, then learn­ing to write should always hap­pen with that core prin­ci­ple in mind. Jones offers three short ideas for how teach­ers can think about the over­lap­ping lit­era­cies of writ­ing and publishing:

• Pub­lished writ­ing is writ­ten for an audience.
• Pub­lished writ­ing depends on writ­ing technologies.
• Pub­lished writ­ing helps stu­dents learn iden­tity creation.

Some may ques­tion his use of the term pub­lish­ing since, often, ‘pub­lish­ing’ today can sim­ply mean shar­ing or giv­ing access to what we pro­duce — but whether we think of it as pub­lish­ing or sim­ply as shar­ing with oth­ers doesn’t really mat­ter. The knowl­edge of how to share with oth­ers, and the impli­ca­tions that such shar­ing has on the writ­ing itself, are all impor­tant enough to be con­sid­ered as impor­tant skills today.

Tech­no­rati Tags: john jones, writ­ing, pub­lish­ing, lit­er­acy

Maybe it could turn out to be a new take on Sug­ata Mitra’s Hole in the Wall experiments?

The One Lap­top Per Child (OLPC) project has devised a bizarre plan for deploy­ing its new XO-3 tablet. The orga­ni­za­tion plans to drop the touch­screen com­put­ers from heli­copters near remote vil­lages in devel­op­ing coun­tries. The devices will then be aban­doned and left for the vil­lagers to find, dis­trib­ute, sup­port, and use on their own.

The arti­cle in arstechnica.com doesn’t mince words with the title, The sods must be crazy, but then Negro­ponte him­self says that he got the idea from the 1980 movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy.

Negro­ponte, commander-in-chief of One Lap­top per Child, told the Open Mobile Sum­mit event recently in San Francisco:

We’ll take tablets and drop them out of heli­copters into vil­lages that have no elec­tric­ity and school, then go aback a year later and see if the kids can read…

The new tablets will be pre­loaded with 100 books, and will be able to con­nect to the Inter­net wirelessly.

It’s hard to dis­pute the notion for inven­tive­ness and imag­i­na­tion, but I can’t help but see a few poten­tial flaws: how will they know for sure that peo­ple can­not already read in the places they decide to drop the tablets? how can they be sure it will be chil­dren who will make use of this bounty from the skies? pre­sum­ably they will drop the tablets where they know there is some con­nec­tiv­ity avail­able, free?

And, while not a flaw as such, he is now look­ing for fund­ing from Gov­ern­ments will­ing to see this happen.…I won­der. For me, there’s an arro­gance, a dis­tinct hubris, sit­ting at the heart of this idea, whereas Sug­a­tra Mitra’s exper­i­ments have exem­pli­fied the antithe­sis of hubris.

Tech­no­rati Tags: olpc, arstechnica.com, nicholas negro­ponte, sug­ata mitra, hole in the wall, XO-3 tablet

Some stu­dents didn’t take well to Steven Maranville’s teach­ing style at Utah Val­ley Uni­ver­sity. They com­plained that in the professor’s “cap­stone” busi­ness course, he asked them ques­tions in class even when they didn’t raise their hands. They also didn’t like it when he made them work in teams.

Inter­est­ing tale of a US aca­d­e­mic who seems to have lost the chance of tenure because his stu­dents were hos­tile to his use of Socratic dia­logue in his lectures.

Maranville fol­lowed the Socratic teach­ing style and described his way of teach­ing as “engaged learning”.….He would ask ques­tions to stim­u­late dis­cus­sion. He divided his stu­dents into teams and gave them assign­ments out­side class.…..Some stu­dents were quite vocal in their demands that he change his teach­ing style.….Students did not want to work in teams and did not want Maranville to ask ques­tions. They wanted him to lecture.

Thank you to my good friend, Charles Fadel, for the link.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Steven Maranville, socratic method, teach­ing, higher edu­ca­tion