We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it’s forever. — 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 Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 1:55 am
I’ve gotten linked to John Boswell’s Symphony of Science videos a couple of times now, so this probably won’t be news for anyone. I’d kind of like to document it though for archival purposes so that, if nothing else, I can know when I discovered Neil deGrasse Tyson, a science popularizer cut from the same cloth as Carl Sagan but with perhaps a more straight-forward rhetorical style and less in the way of overt poetics and classical invocation. More on him very soon, but first, of course, the videos.
At the time of this writing there are two videos on the Symphony of Science website, though there are apparently plans to make more.
Posted by Danny on Tuesday, September 29, 2009 at 12:08 pm
One of the readings this week in CTL 1608 is a comparative, simplified overview of the divergent, often internally contentious body of learning theories that make up constructivism. I read it about a day after articulating my theory of learning, which on reflection seems auspicious in its timing: if I’d read this article before talking about why I disagree with constructivism, I’d have seen how muddy these waters actually are and would probably have been paralysed, or at least enervated with intellectual timidity. The ideas with which I’d hoped to tangle, I would have seen, comprised such a mass of writhing complexity that no vector of approach could be readily expected to engage them with relevance. (I have also felt this way when accosted by self-proclaimed feminists on the charge of being hesitant to number myself among them.) Instead, after developing my ideas against a shadowy, straw-man adversary, I now have an articulated sense of where I stand and can locate myself within a carefully, systematically revealed landscape of thought (albeit one, I maintain, populated by a large proportion of crazies). This way feels like learning, like that sophistication of my ability to interact with stimuli, rather than frustration. I wonder if this is a failing—I feel like most of my peers can do this more elegantly the other way: that they can see the whole landscape, or build it easily as they read work by the theorists, and orient themselves progressively as they go.
Phillips’ article, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The Many Faces of Constructivism” is immediately sympathetic to me because he makes clear pretty quickly his bias against constructivism’s cult-like incarnations and frequently unquestioned adoption, but also suggests coquettishly that he has some “critical and evaluative” points he’ll raise in a subsequent publication which I’m probably going to track down. For the time being, though, his approach is to define three dimensions of variability within constructivist thought, and then to place the major theorists within that space. Herewith, therein, shall I narcissistically place myself.
Posted by Danny on Saturday, September 19, 2009 at 12:51 am
Stupidly, at some point, I stopped being a good sponge and started caring about what others saw me sucking up. If everyone in the room seemed to have already sucked it up long ago, for example, the compulsion has grown for me to try to make a note of the thing, and then to pretend as if I, too, was a dead, turgid invertebrate successfully repurposed for carrying this particular popular effluvium. (But the metaphor grows strained… mangled… finished.)
I really regret that I have sometimes—unthinkingly!—nodded my head in mature acknowledgement of my fluency with a name or other reference, uttered by a respected speaker, when that name or reference was at best only semi-familiar-sounding to me. This is for two reasons: first, it adulterates my supremely laudable curiosity, wonder, and avid lust to understand everything about everything everywhere with petty social duplicity; second and more importantly, I am often ashamed into passivity rather than correction, and don’t bother to look up the thing afterwards and educate myself.
Sometimes I wise up and actually hunt down that thing I’ve been nodding my empty head to. Richard Feynman’s come up in XKCD a couple of times, and elsewhere, and I finally looked him up a few months ago. He was (for those of you who don’t know and haven’t looked him up yet but are willing to privately acknowledge your potentially uncommon ignorance by reading onwards) a legendary and beloved teacher of physics, one of the scientists who developed the atomic bomb, a prolific writer of popular and theoretical scientific works, central to explaining NASA’s Challenger disaster, an amateur painter and bongo-player, and so on. I listened with unexpected relish to his autobiographies as audiobooks, and have tried to follow some of his celebrated Lectures on Physics with mixed success. All in all, it was one of my more rewarding admissions and corrections of pretention.
He did an interview/talk for the BBC program, Horizon, in 1991 (available on YouTube and embedded below) wherein he tells abridged versions of a number of the stories in his autobiographies. If you have ten minutes, please consider giving the first video segment a shot—I’m happy I’m not missing this anymore. Read more »
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
