Order, unity and continuity are human inventions just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias. — Bertrand Russell
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, November 4, 2011 at 1:40 am
I’ve been spending more and more time in Second Life as I prepare to do my fieldwork for my thesis, and I’m enjoying it much more than I expected. A few days ago I stumbled onto a community called Thothica, full of folks with academic and casual interests in philosophy, science, literature, and education—this is much more readily appealing to me than the live music, bars, and shopping I’ve mainly seen. When I arrived at the community’s parcel of space, I joined in listening to a live reading from the last chapter of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land; the reader, Elaine Lorefield, does public readings in the space twice a week—she’s read Stranger to members of the community from start to just about finish over the last few months (the unabridged version, even!) and weekly reads thought-provoking short stories with discussion to follow. Tonight, we heard “Ephemera” by Steve Rasnic Tem, and then had a two-hour conversation that ranged from curacy to e-reading to open access. All the stuff I love.
What thrills me about this is how readily the experience became wholly legitimate and embodied—how there was almost no distracting contemplation about the “inauthenticity” of the “virtual experience.” Practically speaking, Elaine and the rest of us were sitting at our computers (dotted in this case across Canada and the US, as far as I know) while she read into a headset from her Kindle. It may as well have been a conference call. But, “in-world,” we’d assembled at the community’s library in Thothica at the scheduled time, took seats in the circle of couches and armchairs by the fire (in a configuration damned reminiscent of an actual gathering of this sort, with clustering around the reader and avoidance of text-chatting to other members or walking in front of her, even though these things in no way had an impact on the content delivery), and we listened for about an hour and a half. It was a cultural event rather than an audiobook. Understand, when I say the following, that I’ve been a long-time player of multiplayer games, including socially rich MMOs like Ultima Online in its heyday; I know that this sounds worrisome to people both with gaming experience and on the outside looking in, but I honestly concluded the evening feeling as if I’d spent a night out.
I know the experience is more transparent for me than others because of my fluency with the interface and my fast typing speed, but I really, really see this as a viable educational environment. Before today, I would have been much more cynical when one of the founding Thothica members described the space to me as a sort of campus pub. (Maybe active drinkers could disagree more reasonably.) Second Life is the earliest example I know of as a mainstream “free-to-play” game, so if anyone wants to give it a shot (and see if I’m just bonkers), let me know, and you can join me in the field. There’s a sonnet writing and discussion group on Sunday…
Posted by Danny on Monday, April 25, 2011 at 6:28 pm
(I usually write these posts by hand before putting them up, which means, I think, somewhat less horrible prosody that may otherwise happen, but also, that I can be side-tracked and my posts are either lost or terribly delayed. And, because I don’t date the writing in my notebooks, I have no idea how long ago this was intended to go out. The timestamp is a guess—I actually posted this on May 31, 2011. Appy-polly-logies, absent reader base.)
Both of the projects planned for Exploring Our World at Youth Group have come to nought: attendance is too spotty and folks are too tired coming straight from school to generate a consistent sort of participation. We got one good petition-planning meeting in, with fun, Mark-Thomas-style discussion, but our political machinations petered out; as has been the practice in the past, it’s been just me bringing in neat things, so the Web of Awesome has similarly failed. Alas.
But! While there’s been sadness there, I have discovered a few exciting things that have occupied much of my time and may pleasantly occupy yours.
Posted by Danny on Monday, March 21, 2011 at 5:54 pm
In response to the partial meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant following the earthquake on March 11, 2011, there’s been an understandable but unfortunate rise in opposition to nuclear power in Canada (and elsewhere, of course) by folks like me with limited and patchy knowledge of the physics behind radiation, and cynically advanced by stakeholders in public fear and, probably, providers of competing energy sources like fossil fuels. This is unfortunate if you feel that
nuclear power is a contending alternative to fossil fuels for sustaining our energy needs while we seek to transition to cleaner, more sustainable technologies and lifestyles, or that
public fear is, on balance, bad.
I wanted to post about this because there are a few public scientists and science-literate public figures who are trying to make the available data digestible (even appetizing, considering the circumstances) for folks whose dominant sources of information may be less than disinterested in public ignorance. If you have nine minutes, consider watching Martyn Poliakoff covering the workings of a nuclear reactor, the meltdown process, why the sea-water pumped into the plant as an emergency measure will compromise its future viability, and why potassium-iodide pills are being used as a precaution against radiation sickness. I found this to be a valuable and concise primer. (Direct link here.)
If “radiation” is equated uncritically with “badness,” it becomes impossible to judge the gravity of situations involving it, or to make decisions about its use as compared with, say, a coal-burning power plant, the byproducts of which seem to be more readily quantified in public discourse. The enterprise of usefully quantifying radiation (that is, the harmful form of radiation pertinent to living near nuclear reactors or eating bananas) has been recently undertaken by XKCD’s Randall Munroe to provide a sense of context and scale. The blog post featuring the chart in question is over here, but consider also reading Phil Plait’s brief discussion of it, here at Bad Astronomy.
Posted by Danny on Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 5:28 pm
For the last year and a half I’ve been working with Jenny to host “Exploring Our World” out of St. Clements with the older Youth Group Kids. This is billed (defensively, by me) as a “Secular Enrichment Class on Sundry Exciting Topics,” but essentially means I get to talk with intelligent and interested highschoolers about neuroscience, astronomy, ethics, and music. Programming, for the most part, has been semi-prepared (read: spontaneously inspired) (alternatively read: slapdash—deleted as applicable based on the results after the fact, typically), but we’ve just started a couple of long-term projects that I’ll be following here and wanted to tell you about.
Posted by Danny on Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 11:56 am
I’ve spoken before about the two archetypes of Internet-based distance education: asynchronous (typically using message boards, email, etc., and allowing participants to contribute at times of their convenience) and synchronous (text or video chat, immersive environments, etc., which permit instantaneous communication and feedback, but require participants to adhere to a common meeting schedule like a traditional classroom). My interest is mainly in the latter, but there are awfully neat asynchronous environments being designed at OISE and elsewhere to plumb the affordances of time-independent communication, such as deep organization, refinement, and archival of ideas while the communities involved collaborate to build knowledge. We’ll be talking with Stian and Marlene Scardamalia at my research meeting in an hour or so about Knowledge Forum, which you can learn about quickly with Stian’s video, below.
Stian mentions a common problem with information overload when approaching a typical threaded conversation on a forum; this is something I experienced acutely during my two online courses, and it’s exciting to see the idea-map style of Knowledge Forum work to address this. However, when a space in KF is mature, it can seem at least as impenetrable as the index for a huge threaded conversation. I hope to raise the following point today to address this:
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
