Posted by Danny on Friday, July 15, 2011 at 11:46 am
Thanks to the goofy interests of our usual attendants (and not, though the allegation would be fair, due to the name of the event), subject matter at Evenings for Brains tends regularly towards neuroscience and psychology in general. As a result, I was acquainted with V. S. Ramachandran’s TED Talk, and was subsequently chuffed all over to learn that he had produced an extended version of his presentation in the form of a five-part lecture series for the BBC.
The Reith Lectures are named for John Reith, the inaugural controller-general of the BBC, and exemplify the corporation’s now (tragically) quaint and paternal-sounding charter to “inform, educate, and entertain.” They resemble our Massey Lectures (or rather, the other way around), and might be positioned as TED Talks for folks with long attention spans.
When I first stumbled on the Reith lectures a few years ago, I asked around with various British radio buffs whether any attempt had been made by the filesharing and archival communities to collect and release the series online, as I’ve seen done with the Goon Show. I was told that it was a good idea, and that some of the more famous or recent lectures were in “circulation,” but that the body was vast and there was more missing than was accessible. Particularly with old BBC archival material, this had a ring of doom about it: in the company’s (later, corporation’s) early history, it was notoriously in the habit of recording new programs over old reels. I found my Ramachandran lectures, which were recent, and a single fragment of Bertrand Russell’s series, which was famous, and consigned the rest to a teary oblivion shared by the early seasons of the Goons, the pilot of Clue (until recently!), and some Doctor Who episodes which I wasn’t particularly broken up over.
It was enough of a jolt of good news to get me blogging again, therefore, when I learned from the ever-fecund Open Culture website that the BBC had made the entire series available for free as an international podcast!
Please, please try some of this stuff. There are names in the list of lecturers you’re bound to know, or topics you already care about. If you’re nuts like me, listen from beginning to end and witness the evolution of western social conventions and intellectual fashions—Uncle Bert often makes my heart sing, but his positivism is shocking and foreign, even to my idealistic, naïve self. If nothing else, try the first Ramachandran lecture (or the TED, linked above), and see if you don’t want more. I so wish the CBC was cool enough to do this with the Masseys; they sell the lectures on CD instead (at the time of writing, anyway—maybe they could maybe be shamed into opening up a bit by the Venerable Beeb). As it stands, the Massey lectures are a bit more populous in the wild than the Reiths were, so folks with the right inclinations and skills will do what they will.
One other thing I’d like to tell you about, O Absent Readership, is another swell bit of totally legal, openly accessible brainy goodness served up by Stanford University and brought to my attention again by Open Culture. Robert Sapolsky is a neurobiologist and primatologist, famous for his book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, has been featured by TED, The Teaching Company, and Big Ideas, and has recently had his open course on Human Behavioural Biology broadcast to the world, OCW-style.
Sapolsky’s name was familiar from the Teaching Company catalogue, but I hadn’t seen him teach until I watched the clip featured on Open Culture. Their pitch is my pitch: try a few minutes of the first lecture—if you’re hooked, the whole course is available to you. (The ability, from home, for free, to see a professor teach and to say, “gosh, I wish I was in his class,” and then to be able to watch ALL the lectures in that class, is like paradise. It’s transmission-based learning, but it’s still so, so tasty.)
What’s most valuable about this series, for me, is that Sapolsky provides a fairly thorough overview of the various lenses for viewing human behaviour scientifically, but is ever at pains (or, takes sadistic pleasure) to tear down the confident edifices of various modes of thought. He uses the metaphor of being trapped within one of many “buckets” when trying to explain human behaviour: evolutionists, molecular geneticists, and ethologist care about different things and countenance different kinds of evidence when explaining phenomena they would all equally recognize. Exploring the conflict between the different buckets, as Sapolsky does here, breaks down the apparent monolith of scientific accord and offers a more accurate picture of this particular way of understanding the world. For this I have great affection.
My approach to the lectures has been to download them from YouTube using FlashGot (free!), rip the audio data from them with AOA Audio Extractor (free!), and then listen to them on my iPod while commuting (fun!). For the buckets with which I’m familiar, this has worked pretty well, and I try to watch the lectures covering stranger topics, like neurology. It’s been awfully rewarding and compelling for me; I hope some of you find this useful, too.
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?
Read more »
Posted by Danny on Monday, July 20, 2009 at 11:06 am
If anyone’s still out there, you’ve probably had enough Blueberry music. I’m going to be posting a longer article shortly, but I wanted to bring your attention to some handy resources for ebooks, as I’ve just found them. First, there’s MobileRead, which I haven’t just found, but which contains this directory of free ebook lists and author websites. It’s geared mainly to non-academic reading in multiple formats (PDF, Mobipocket, EPub).
They seem to have a small selection of individually-published open ebooks, though I’ve added links to Lawrence Lessig’s author page and Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma, so it’s possible that there are other open books to be had which have yet to be catalogued here. It’s a wiki—if you know of something tasty, you should add it to the directory.
In other news, I’m gearing up for thesis research and adding resources to my daunting pile of “oughtta-read-this-before-you-go-talking-to-other-people-dammit” books. It turns out that MIT Press includes a lot of CC books and article series, among them the following that are of interest to me and maybe you:
Iiyoshi, T & M. S. Vijay Kumar (Ed.). (2008). Opening up education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I’ve been using articles from this collection since my first project in 2008; it’s full of tasty goodness.
Willinsky, J (2006). The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I haven’t read this yet but it looks pretty good, if you’re into the OA thang. Leslie Chan gets a mention.
Also, The MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning is available as well from the MIT Press. I’m particularly excited to look at Davidson and Goldberg’s The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, not surprisingly.
If anyone’s still out there, you’ve probably had enough Blueberry music. I’m going to be posting a longer article shortly, but I wanted to bring your attention to some handy resources for ebooks, as I’ve just found them. First, there’s MobileRead, which I haven’t just found, but which contains this directory of free ebook lists and author websites. It’s geared mainly to non-academic reading in multiple formats (PDF, Mobipocket, EPub).
They seem to have a small selection of individually-published open ebooks, though I’ve added links to Lawrence Lessig’s author page and Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma, so it’s possible that there are other open books to be had which have yet to be catalogued here. It’s a wiki—if you know of something tasty, you should add it to the directory.
In other news, I’m gearing up for thesis research and adding resources to my daunting pile of “oughtta-read-this-before-you-go-talking-to-other-people-dammit” books. It turns out that MIT Press includes a lot of CC books and article series, among them the following that are of interest to me and maybe you:
Iiyoshi, T & M. S. Vijay Kumar (Ed.). (2008). Opening up education: The collective advancement of education through open technology, open content, and open knowledge. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I’ve been using articles from this collection since my first project in 2008; it’s full of tasty goodness.
Willinsky, J (2006). The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. (Link) I haven’t read this yet but it looks pretty good, if you’re into the OA thang. Leslie Chan gets a mention.
Also, The MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning is available as well from the MIT Press, but start here for information and links. I’m particularly excited to look at Davidson and Goldberg’s The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, not surprisingly.
Posted by Danny on Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Dad was a devotee of computers probably minutes after discovering them as an undergraduate at Waterloo in the 70s. He repeatedly tried to instil the same wonder and excitement in me, groping for ways to connect the nature of computing machines to my own interests and probably disappointingly artsy foci—anything, at least, to extend their significance beyond the video games I was playing. One of the early uses, I learned, was for academics studying literature to compute word frequencies in texts, which was for me at once a completely novel idea, and seemed spectacularly boring and pointless.[1]
I hadn’t thought much about it until “tag clouds” started popping up on popular sites and the possibilities of this kind of data visualisation started revealing themselves despite my benightment. Recently, Geoff brought Wordle to my attention. Read more »
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 