History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power have destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again. — Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980
About the Author
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately.
His interests include Open Education, metrical poetry, science (philosophy, history, and methodology of), amateur astronomy and astrophysics, solitary rambles, language and composition, democratic citizenship, concert music, pens, tea, and the colour brown.
Posted by Danny on Friday, February 5, 2010 at 12:13 am
Yay, more astronomy, sort of. I think It’s safe to assume that most people who’d read this blorg have heard of (and probably by extension, seen) the Powers of Ten video produced by IBM in the bygone era of the ancient 1970s, but if not, here’s your chance.
I love the tour through the sciences, moving from cosmology at the outer extent of the journey, through astronomy, then sociology (what the hell, right?—urban sprawl and stuff), biology, chemistry, and then physics. Also, the narrator has the sort of voice that’s only broadcast without irony in productions that are at least two decades old, or The Sciences. Bob MacDonald of Quirks and Quarks or Jay Ingram of Daily Planet are local exemplars.
Recently(ish) on Astronomy Picture of the Day, they featured a video that struck me as a contemporary successor to Powers of Ten, and which I present below. If you have the bandwidth, I strongly suggest viewing this at 720. (Also, if you’d like to read the APOD commentary, it’s here.)
Posted by Danny on Thursday, January 7, 2010 at 5:54 pm
I’m writing this post with two groups of people in mind: educators who have found a really great video on YouTube but can’t rely on an Internet connection in their classrooms on the one hand, and on the other, obsessive archivists like me who don’t trust resources to stay put on the Internet forever and want to be able to physically touch the storage device containing a digital copy of that resource, safeguard it for posterity like a deranged but sweetly philanthropic magpie, and then gradually forget about it during the intervening years while the content and media formats grow naturally obsolete anyway. If you don’t fall into either category, this may still be interesting to you. You’re just not as special.
Posted by Danny on Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 1:06 am
There is no dead gremlin lying across a circuit connection within Caligula, waiting to be gently expunged so that my computer can again roar into productivity and entertainment; Byron has confirmed this after an evening of pulling out components to see if one of them was broken and causing grief to the otherwise healthy workings, like a dead but unborn septuplet. We got down to the motherboard and processor without removing an offender, and according to the Dell community resources I found, a lot of folks with my model find themselves about two years into their ownership with a suddenly fried motherboard producing exactly the same symptoms as are displayed by Little Boots, so there it (probably) is.
Excitingly, the Dell XPS 710 uses a proprietary (exclusive!) motherboard layout to fit its generically inaccessible ports into signature inconvenience on the back end of my honkin’ tower, which means that replacements are limited to the stock that Dell has remaining and are way more expensive than they deserve to be for the hardware they represent. Also, because Dell has moved back to the standard, non-proprietary layout for its more recent XPS line, they probably won’t be manufacturing many more, so I feel like hunting down a replacement and paying for it would lock me deeper into a dead-end device. My other option is to buy both a new motherboard and a new tower, and then schlep Caligula’s working guts into it; this is morally correct but financially prohibitive and means that I won’t have a desktop for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, I’m running the universe out of my capable but modest laptop left over from my B.Ed. year at Nipissing.
Its name is The Gentleman Caller and it will service.
Posted by Danny on Monday, November 23, 2009 at 2:10 pm
This post is written defiantly on paper, in green fountain pen ink, amidst the high-pitched whine of computer monitors and the low-pitched rumble of the subway beneath the building. My computer is dead. It won’t reach the BIOS so I can’t jiggle its software guts from the command prompt or safe mode, and I don’t have time to qualify myself to noodle around with the hardware where the real problem probably resides. My laptop is useless for accessing my online class, so I’m in the computer lab at OISE, contacting the people who need to be contacted, downloading my readings for the week, and gradually pushing through the shock of being without my personal computer into a state of giddy, Luddish novelty that will in turn give way to the awareness that my paper-crunch and correspondence and peripheral device-charging are going to take place in this room, probably for the next two weeks.
It’s a good room! The lights and noises are ugly, but I’ve got space to work, it’s clean, it’s got broadband, and it’s free. I could be so much more unplugged than I am, and the disrepair of my computer could be so much more devastating to me, my family, my education, and my prospects than it is. When my big paper for Student Experience in Higher Education is finished, I’ll have time to try and resurrect Caligula, and if my data is really gone, I’ll be able to panic and writhe then, responsibly. This is such a petty catastrophe.
The potential for online education to obviate barriers of finance and geography continues to drive my research interest, but it remains that for most of the people who stand to benefit from it, online distance education won’t be delivered to personal computers with big, bright screens in private rooms with lovingly-tailored sound systems and a clean bathroom and ready food only seconds away. It probably won’t even be delivered to computer labs as nice as this. I feel like that expectation could probably be planned for, pedagogically. When I’ve got time, I want to look into the design of public computer terminals and quantify the tradeoffs between (say) the savings on fluorescent lighting costs vs. incandescent on the one hand, and student comfort, tenacity, and health on the other. Is the present arrangement of computers and monitors in a sort of wall-less cubicle system ideal for students working in parallel, with screens blocking face-to-face interaction, or could other configurations benefit learning by fostering local collaboration that could subsequently enhance or transfer to work online? I’m not asking this rhetorically–it may be that face-to-face obstructions prevent more disruption than collaboration of a sort we’d deem valuable, or that instant-messaging interfaces will frustrate this kind of thinking entirely as they become more transparent to the way we communicate.
I wish I could make better use of my time and actually explore some of this stuff.
Posted by Danny on Sunday, November 1, 2009 at 5:33 pm
I recently attended my first research meeting hosted by Clare Brett, which concluded with a discussion about the problem of sustaining online communities that form around distance education classes after they’ve ended. It was mentioned that students often request the spaces and accounts remain open so that shared resources, links, and discussion transcripts continue to be accessible (and long-distance friendships continue to be facilitated), but inevitably and usually quickly, attendance dies away and the community effectively dissolves.
This might not be such a tragedy—these environments came into being to serve a particular purpose, as did the communities that formed within those virtual spaces, and upon completion the students who took part supposedly (hopefully) achieved the growth of skills, experience, and knowledge they came for. Nonetheless, even if everyone was given a complete transcript of all posts, chats, documents, and perhaps even the contact information of the other students, there would be a sense of loss when the doors finally closed. Without the physical infrastructure and associated costs necessary to maintain these virtual spaces, those doors probably could be kept open. So why, ultimately, isn’t this successful?
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 