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 »
Posted by Danny on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 at 6:56 pm
I’m grateful to Gideon Weisman for a lot of things: I met him in high school and formed a very tight friendship with him in our OAC year, though both of us lived only tangentially within each other’s dominant social circles. We fell in and out of contact through university, but as is the case with a few of my really good friends, we revert to our easy bonhomie almost immediately regardless of the time spent apart. I was privileged to attend his wedding to Marissa last summer, and my friendship with both of them has blossomed.
As I designed Philomathy.org and wrote my bio-blurb, it occurred to me that for many of the interests by which I define myself—my love of pens, tea, and audio equipment—I have Gideon to thank. The pattern seems to be that I will stumble upon one of the refinements with which he seamlessly surrounds himself, have a conversation with him about it, incubate the topic for six months to a year (or four, for my audiophilia), then suddenly be seized with an urge to learn everything I can about it, study it online for a few months, expend relatively immoderate funds on it, and then catch up with Gideon to report on my findings and share the interest with him intelligently, rather than as a gawking neophyte. Usually at that point Gideon brings my attention to something else amazing that I hadn’t noticed before, and the process repeats. The friendship is unspeakably rewarding.
One thing Gideon and Marissa shared with me that incubated very swiftly was an interest in actively learning about natural history (or, that province of biology that focuses on fuzzy, or leafy, or chitinogenous things and their interactions with each other—to wit, the stuff I’d been dying to learn about since I was four but was scared away from by (deeply important but much less approachable) organic chemistry diagrams and all the stuff that happens to ATP). At Carleton, Gideon took Natural History with Michael Runtz, a course also transmitted to distance students by mailed VHS and broadcast freely on iTunes as a podcast. It was at Gideon and Marissa’s direction that I sought these videos out and discovered the availability of nearly 72 hours with what amounts to the best possible synthesis of Charles Darwin and Robin Williams.
Dr. Runtz is a world-renowned wildlife photographer and naturalist who works primarily in Algonquin Park. He is excited by nature and “natural drama” in a way that reveals Discovery Channel offerings for the hyper-processed Sunny-D sludge of edutainment they are; he is Steve Irwin without sensationalism or self-conscious branding. In one lecture, he brings in a stuffed porcupine for demonstration and then pricks his fingers as he loses himself in a sudden (characteristic) digression, jolts painfully back to the present, forgets where he was, suddenly remembers something neat, and then pricks himself again. This goes on for at least five minutes. Like Poliakoff, he is impossible not to like; he shares the chemist’s warm, self-deprecating sense of humour, but has an infectious eagerness and wonder that makes for much better pedagogy. I’ve delighted myself (and kept sane) by consuming lectures and lessons outside my chosen fields of study, but only viewing these lectures have I felt genuine envy and regret not to have devoted myself thither. I will never get to be Michael Runtz, and I think I could have been.
Resources! The best thing you can do is watch the lectures and breathe deeply the heady Algonquin essence—to do that, search for “Michael Runtz” in the iTunes Store and subscribe to his 1902 and 1903 podcasts. However, if 350 megs per lecture is a bit steep for you to jump right into, a series of educational films he hosted called Wild by Nature are available for streaming in their entirety at FactualTV.com, and can give you a sense of the fellow. Please, please, please be aware that he’s nowhere as cool in these videos as he is in front of a room of students. Try this stuff, and see if you aren’t thankful for Gideon and Marissa too.
Posted by Danny on Friday, March 20, 2009 at 2:51 am
(Update: I’ve since expanded the following ideas into the final paper for my Constructive Learning and Design of Online Environments course. If you want a slightly more rigorous treatment, the document is available here as an ePub or PDF.)
I haven’t tried it, but Second Life sounds a great deal like the forsoothing and *emoting* experience of my Ultima Online role-playing crowd from years and years ago, except without the opportunity to be virtually sodomised by roving bands of semi-literates wielding cheerfully rendered implements of medieval can-opening and firey death. It’s probable that the semi-literates persist, though I’m sure that sodomy of any sort is now at least restricted to consensual zones.
It’s been almost six years since my back was wholly divested of the UO monkey, and though I’ve found other online vices to supplant it and erode my academic viability, Second Life came up in my research for Clare Brett’s Educational Applications of Computer-Mediated Communication course last term. The article talked about virtual classroom environments being built and coördinated with university instructors to facilitate seminars and broadcast lectures—something that struck me as tremendously groovy and mitigates somewhat the picture of the silver-fox furry sitting among other virtual students. The picture on the top of p22 shows a group of students participating in a virtual seminar attached to a Harvard Law course, where apparently the video from the real-life seminar room is broadcast to groups of students in the virtual environment. It would be amazing if this was happening in real-time, with a corresponding portal in the real-life seminar room open into the Second-Life seminar, allowing for full two-way interaction (though I have no idea if this is how it worked, and suspect that it would be too bandwidth intensive under the restraints of present technology). With this in mind, and hearing Stian describe the micro-communities that formed from the broader ecosystem of his Wiley Wiki experience, I started doodling an interface pipe-dream upon which I shall presently expound. Read more »
Posted by Danny on Saturday, March 14, 2009 at 6:33 pm
As I acquaint myself with WordPress’ levers, pulleys, and screws, I’m haphazardly contributing to a directory of links you can find south (at time of writing) of my biography on the left-hand column. My intention was to devote a section entirely to Open Education links and then gradually introduce them (and the concept of open education itself) to you, patient readers, over the course and career of this ’blog. In typical fashion, however, Stian Håklev just brought together much more information that I would have mastered in the next few months, and presented it with nearly TED-like production value to a largely awed and enthusiastic crowd of our OISE professors. So, uh, you should read his ’blog.
I will still gradually introduce many of these resources myself, largely because I am myself gradually exploring them for the first time and find that they are less daunting if approached more leisurely (this is my pedagogical gambit to avoid a Semelean tan). For those of you with interest in the topic and even less expertise than me, just bear in mind that others have tread here first and if you’d like to move more quickly, Stian is your man. The fast track starts here.
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 