April 21, 2009
The Royal Commission into the bushfire tragedy of February 7th, began today.No-one knew, i think, how unstoppable fires would be in those conditions – the tragedy across the state being that people didn’t know the fire behaviour would be so different from other days.Living in Bendigo –which describes itself as a ‘city in the forest’ - we had some proximity to the fires ...could see flames from the other side of town at one point.
One thing I noticed on the day was the paucity and confusion of information – which is the point I want to look at here – particularly the CFA website.
At one point I could smell smoke, and scanned the sky in all directions without seeing anything. Its not unusual for smoke to blow in from distant fires during summer so I thought it might be that.
My wife had ventured out with the kids to the pool and came home saying she could see a pillar of smoke over Eaglehawk, on the other side of town. She also said the local commercial FM radio was running constant updates on the fire in town.
I was surprised as I had been glued to ABC radio, which was running non-stop official bushfire updates, and I’m sure the ABC did not mention Bendigo at all that afternoon.
I had also sat with my laptop focussed on the Country Fire Authority website. The main summary page on the CFA site (Updates and Incidents) hadn’t alerted me ether, despite constant refreshing the page.
The other part of the CFA website was so confusing and hard to use that i eventually copied and pasted the ‘incident page’ for future reference.
here’s the first few lines ...see below... these pics break the blog template 
At 6pm - about the time my neighbour called to say he could see the flames from the other side of town - there were more than 550 entries listed from around the state, in one big, unsorted, list on the webpage.
In font size 9, it runs to 25 pages of pages when i copied it into a word processor – impossible to effectively scan for timely information.
(the mornings entries had already dropped off – it only seemed to show about 5 hours worth).
the disclaimer at the bottom of all of this
Disclaimer: This information is extracted from CFA's Incident Management System (IMS). This information is not necessarily 'real time' information, but is provided as a general indication of current activity.
Like the disclaimer suggests, it felt rather like an indiscriminate dump out of a database.
Some fires were entered multiple times, with different names, at different times of the day. Many used unpredictable names which made them hard to locate.
The main problem with this is that was no capacity to sort the data – its ordered by time (of entry?) – so entries on one fire may be spread out with different names and times. The obvious function of sorting by region ...(what’s near me?) was not implemented.
A map would have been useful (Google actually made one a few days later, locating fires from news information- although i don’t think it preserved all the information).
Buried in the 550 entries on the CFA site were several that would have been highly relevant to us, but we had trouble finding them. I tried searching the webpage by the term ‘Bendigo’ but that was no use- they were listed by the town’s various suburb names instead. So the closest fire, only a km or so away, was listed under ‘Quarry Hill’. Fortunately it was only a little fire in someone’s front lawn – just 50 m from my son’s school.
The main fire in Bendigo, which destroyed 50 houses and killed one person, was variously listed under Eaglehawk, Maiden Gully, Long Gully`...and when ABC finally got onto it, it was the 'Bracewell St' fire in Bendigo. Earlier in the day i’d missed the closest fire of all, in Flora Hill (Edwards Rd), when trying to read the website. There is practically nothing between us and Edwards Rd but 500m of bush so that was disturbing ...although the wind was blowing the other way, and we never actually located where that (“structure fire”) exactly was.
Not being able to locate these fires by town name meant I tended to miss this info- listing the suburb might add precision, but not if you can’t also locate it by town.
So i found the data really quite unusable ... [and the ABC radio was lagging ... there were no updates while a fire burnt into town- while they discussed road closures around Horsham in detail].
I noticed several weeks later that a sort capacity had been added – here’s a part of todays’ page
(Even on a mild autumn day, there is a page of this). There are new instructions for sorting in the heading, and the triangle on the ‘Reg’ – showing its currently sorted by region.
This little change makes a huge difference – most people need to be able to sort it down to their local region, not sifting through the whole state.
Anyway, the given density of data on that day, I thought i'd apply a new tool i've made at work. My job this year has been getting a handle on large amounts (100 spreadsheets worth) of curriculum data .. so i've tried a few methods for seeing the patterns.
I’ll expand on this later, but what i have noticed, in short, is this:
• Many things have a natural tree hierarchy (ie natural divisions and subdivisions)
• Sorting tables of information (by one or more columns) is identical to using a tree
classification ... sorted tables and trees are interchangeable.
•Treemaps are good for visualising patterns in large amounts of data.
(treemaps are patterns of nested rectangles - where parent nodes enclose child nodes – and size and colour represent various aspects)
So just for interest i pointed a treemap tool i made in Excel, at that bushfire extract of 5 hours of information. I use green for fires that were listed as Safe or Contained – and red for fires that are "going". You get shades of red and green where regions contain varying proportions of both type. The size of each box relates to the number of reports contained within it.
Across the state, one can see, for example, that Region 13 had the most reported activity, by 6pm, and that region 12 had less, but a higher proportion of fires that were listed as 'Going' so it is more reddish. Bendigo is in Region 2 - the left most strip.
the same map showing one more level of contained information (yellow hilight around region 13).
thats getting hard to read, so i will zoom into region 2, where i live (the left most strip on the first image).
Long Gully has the most reports, and zooming in there can see most of the reports are listed as Going (one is listed as Safe).
Since the treemap is based on trees(!) ... i use a navigation tool that allows you to expand and collapse nodes. Navigating the tree structure on the right causes the map on the left to update - (and clicking a shape on the map causes the corresponding tree node to open).
Its a bit slow .... takes Excel (VBA) a few seconds to recalculate and display the relevant autoshapes, out of the hundreds (mostly invisible) on screen. When i get time I'd like to write one in Flash, and have some other ideas for how to modify it to show curriculum most effectively.
While this is interesting way to look at it information, I don't actually think a map like this is the best way to handle bushfire info - a simple sort routine on the table, and symbols on maps, would be more useful.
But it does give a sense of what was missing on the day - the capacity to make sense of the data jumble, and zoom in to local level. (The level of detail continued to confuse reports for a few days, national newspapers confused the fire in the town, with another 35 km away, at Redesdale - they were attributing house losses from one to the other ..since at a state level they evidently all blurred into 'the Bendigo fire' ...and they even doubled the fatality for a while - one at Bendigo, one at Long Gully.)
There were many tragedies and heroism on this day, that make this tale of information confusion seem rather insignificant ...but i think the lack of timely information was a common complaint. My observation is that even what was known, was not well presented or easy to digest - which is only to critique a web site, not the volunteers risking live and limb ...
more on info viz, in more school related contexts, coming, since i'm in the interesting situation of needing to store and cross reference multiple curricula, and see the wood for the trees.
March 17, 2009
Like many I've been wrestling a bit to understand the background to the financial crisis, so now venturing a post to put my take. The story of Iceland looks like a window into the whole thing - since after Iceland's rapid entry to financial services market in 2003, many of the issues now seem writ large in its collapse.
In 2003, Iceland’s three biggest banks had assets of only a few billion dollars, about 100 percent of its gross domestic product. Over the next three and a half years they grew to over $140 billion and were so much greater than Iceland’s G.D.P. that it made no sense to calculate the percentage of it they accounted for. It was, as one economist put it to me, “the most rapid expansion of a banking system in the history of mankind.”
Which begs the question, how can banks grow so rapidly, without reference to underlying activity?
i guess in a global world they reference some-one's elses activity; nevertheless such an imbalance between GDP and asset sheet seems to defy the common sense notion of what banking is for.
This imbalance seems, in slightly less skewed proportions, but which still don’t add up, to be affecting the whole world.
in 2006, the measured economic output of the entire world was worth around $48.6 trillion. ... The total value of domestic and international bonds was $67.9 trillion, 40 percent larger. Planet Finance was beginning to dwarf Planet Earth.
(Niall Ferguson)
i can't see how that can be. Even if global GDP was somehow all in bonds, how could the bonds exceed total GDP? Something must be wrong when the paper assets are greater than all of the goods and services they can possibly represent? I guess bonds don't have to be tied to the yearly timeline that is implied by GDP, but still, to a rank neophyte in high finance, since bonds are only one way to 'raise capital', the fact that it alone is bigger than GDP seems out of whack?
Another naive question - How can financial system float so far free from the underlying idea of buying and selling goods and services so that we hear that the financial crisis is now hurting the ‘real economy’. What is the ‘real economy?’ contrasted to when this phrase is used? to the financial markets? and if so what do they buy and sell?
Back to the window on the icelanders..
They inhabited their remote island for 1,100 years without so much as dabbling in leveraged buyouts, hostile takeovers, derivatives trading, or even small-scale financial fraud. When, in 2003, they sat down at the same table with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, they had only the roughest idea of what an investment banker did and how he behaved—most of it gleaned from young Icelanders’ experiences at various American business schools. And so what they did with money probably says as much about the American soul, circa 2003, as it does about Icelanders. They understood instantly, for instance, that finance had less to do with productive enterprise than trading bits of paper among themselves.
I like the idea of free markets as the exchange of money for goods and services in a way that leaves both feeling improved by the transaction - the Adam Smith idea- i can appreciate that (although he used examples like buying bread) ...and the extension of ‘service’ to all sorts of management and financial services, in principle, i understand that as well, seems like a good and reasonable thing.
I also get the idea of a farmer using a futures contract to lock in a price for his harvest 6 months down the track, and thus deal with the risk.
But beyond some moderate role in risk mitigation, how can trading in this futures market actually generate new wealth that correlates to anything in the 'real economy'? At some point, it starts to look like speculating on what the price of something else might do, and spreading your bets accordingly. Which is ok - but the correlation to gambling doesn't suggest it actually creates anything?
Even when option pricing works, surely there comes a point where the huge derivative market must be a burden on real productivity; can all those transactions grow any more bananas, or make any more software... what underlying good or service corresponds to profit here?
[Ignoring the fact that even when it seems to work, the idea of correctly pricing options, hedging risk, has already lead to an earlier fiasco of massive investment companies needing government bail outs, lest their collapse take the system down with it ...apparently the Black Scholes pricing equation, was only referenced against a limited bell curve based on only 5 years of reasonably good data ... and so its assumptions couldn’t factor in the risk of the wild events the market is historically subject to...hence an earlier mid 90s bail out for the investment company that pioneered its use and got the system into serious hot water when one of those events occured.]
i guess while all markets are trending up, though, nobody questions it, and for that matter i didn't mind a modest slice of the housing bubble, even though i don't understand where that really came from either ...the market kept moving even when demand and supply hadn't changed ... where does a years wages of relatively sudden appreciation really come from?
i’ve wondered at times how much of what happens in many corporate financial towers can be translated to a good or service? That is, minus the glossy surface and complex acronyms, what translates to increased production of any sort, anywhere, in the 'real economy'? Who pays for the wealth here? At some level its trading ownership, or shares, of real companies, i guess, and no doubt planning investment, and centralising HR etc... but the profits involved in some of these 'services' can seem dispoportionate, speculative, to the production of anything. Trading on currency markets, for example, with computers wired to respond in fractions of a second - seems so detached from the canonical examples of buyers and sellers feeling improved by the exchange of a good or service for money - it stretches the colourful idea of 'market' into such an attenuated place, that maybe the mutual satisfaction idea stops working. Some one still ends up happy, i guess, and maybe paid ridiculous bonuses for venturing here; but is it just compensation for playing with pools of money and betting on numbers, with no good or service in sight?
Similarly while its no doubt clever and innovative to aggregate mortgages - even those that should never have been issued - and turn the aggregates into various complex securities, get them rated AAA, trade them, and their derivatives , around the world, on basis of the rating ... evidently that innovation and rating turns out to be not that well thought out..
back to the Iceland window...where one person spoke of his transition from fishing – where it took a long apprenticeship to become captain of fishing boat - to being a financial wizard.
It took years of training for him to become a captain, and even then it happened only by a stroke of luck. When he was 23 and a first mate, the captain of his fishing boat up and quit. The boat owner went looking for a replacement and found an older fellow.... “I took two trips with this guy,” Stefan says. “I have never in my life slept so little, because I was so eager to learn. I slept two or three hours a night because I was sitting beside him, talking to him. I gave him all the respect in the world—it’s difficult to describe all he taught me. The reach of the trawler. The most efficient angle of the net. How do you act on the sea. If you have a bad day, what do you do? If you’re fishing at this depth, what do you do? If it’s not working, do you move in depth or space? In the end it’s just so much feel. In this time I learned infinitely more than I learned in school. Because how do you learn to fish in school?”
This marvelous training was as fresh in his mind as if he’d received it yesterday, and the thought of it makes his eyes mist.
“You spent seven years learning every little nuance of the fishing trade before you were granted the gift of learning from this great captain?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“And even then you had to sit at the feet of this great master for many months before you felt as if you knew what you were doing?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you think you could become a banker and speculate in financial markets, without a day of training?”
....
“I started as a … “—now he begins to laugh—“an adviser to companies on currency risk hedging. But given my aggressive nature I went more and more into plain speculative trading.”
and the punchline
“I think it is easier to take someone in the fishing industry and teach him about currency trading,” he says, “than to take someone from the banking industry and teach them how to fish.”
Now maybe Iceland is so exposed exactly because of this naiveté ...but i have a deep suspicion that on a lesser scale, that something of this short term aggressive guesswork, not always as skilled as a tradeperson with their tools, although wearing nicer suits, runs through a lot of the financial sector.
The fact that fund managers for example, apparently typically perform only marginally better - or on par - with dart board stock picks, and get paid well anyway– investing other peoples money on a rising tide...
or maybe its my teacher background that struggles with some of this
high school teachers and hedge fund managers tend to have roughly similar levels of education actually, but the highest paid hedge fund manager in America was paid enough last year to pay the salaries of all 80,000 New York school teachers for five years (1)
i can’t see how the mismatch can be explained by productivity ...the market doesn’t price what teachers (or many other jobs) really contribute over the long term (i used to tell students we should tax them on future earnings) ...and nobody is really that much more productive, not by orders of magnitude – surely at core its just that lot of other people’s money is aggregated and they pick which way the market might lurch ... and backed by teams of smart analysts looking for info and with sophisticated tools, they might even get it right more often than the dart board.
I’m sure they’re dedicated and all that....but not thousands of time more than good music teachers or child care workers or nurses
this is not really meant as a deep critique of capitalism – the dynamism and creativity, incentive and opportunity of the market seems to be vitalising agent and has the best comparative track record – and i find i like some of the pro-active aspects of the business world - but i’m not sure that the creation of a virtual economy with its 'hypertrophic growth' of derivatives - makes any sense – and if i was of a Marxist bent, i could see a case for complaining against those who, rather than owning cotton mills, seem to have the system leaning their way in ways that may not actually be related to real productivity (at least not their own) ... it was a bank director who noted that the best way to rob a bank is to own one ...
by contrast, Bill Gates as the wealthiest individual i can appreciate ... even if he rode a fortunate wave, at least there is a real product in there – and whatever its failings, at least real products are being developed and sold and used - thats the model i like and get -(and now Gates seems to be strategically giving it all away he might be remembered in the end for wiping out malaria, rather than creating windows )
(or take macs and ipods for another take on the same principle) ...or Google, though i don't quite get their business model yet ...but all these are paying reward for innovation and risk and creativity and boldness .. thats what i do like in the model of capitalism... just that its very imperfect in practice ... doesn't always reward or price these contributions in various sectors correctly ...maybe the assumption that people act rationally based on clear understanding of a complete set of information is the flaw in the real world
lastly, Niall Ferguson's thoughts on a Jubilee like approach to debt cancellation are interesting...
from a naive point of view that sort of restructure might make more sense than budgeting enormous amounts of extra debt.
March 2, 2009
little chat in the supermarket
...easy to use movie making app (xtranormal)- simple to position characters and cameras etc
... world maths day -500 million practice questions answered online in the last month ...
November 3, 2008
Here's some info from a virtual house for learning sustainabiliy, which i've described before ...a project with Swinburne uni, orginally inspired by River City
its a full 3D environment, which kids seem to relate very well to, in our testing ...here's a few screenshots
we can give a copy of the game to educators who want to trial this hopefully they'll want to help develop curriculum, and provide feedback...but just having a look is ok
here's a collaborative doc, which i can give interested people access to
send me an email (rob at thinkingcurriculum.com) or comment below...
still looking at whether uploading or sending a CD is best option - its about CD worth of info...we could post it out if needed [update 8th Nov; have it on a server for download now]
So... something cool...open for any interested educators to get involved...
October 12, 2008
fun.... if you're wired that way
...same reason the tech story of chrome is readable, maybe
lots of similar quirky stuff on his wobsite
humour ...
September 13, 2008
what difference has ICT made in school maths?
In spite of the smoke, just about none.
We just use the technology for more efficient representation of the same content. Hundreds of years of pen and paper has deeply shaped the way we think of maths, and we're not sure of how to unleash the new thinking that ICT provides ... such as the power of modelling in an era of spreadsheets and recursion. Although the practice of science and engineering is highly transformed in places, we've barely modified the content or approaches to 'problem solving' in maths education....barely scratched the surface of how these tools overlap with the school subject we call 'maths' . We have some interactive whiteboard demos, but not much has changed in secondary maths...we have lots of little disconnected 'learning objects' that illustrate a concept or two(the Learning Federation spent $100 M on a set of very ordinary, disconnected 'learning objects'... which tend to be feel scripted, artificial - not much of the rich constructivist thinking that ICT can offer)
Some commerical organisations have done a bit better... eg Mathletics using the network effect of ICT to allow, for example, live competition and integrated scoring systems that reflect on an avatar's virtual purchasing. Kids like that ... though even the main component is still largely a fairly narrow representation of traditional curriculum, with closed answers and very limited exploration ... sweetened a bit by electronic record keeping.... but the problem solving space isn't really informed by ICT approaches ... no rich manipulatives ..
Compare this with the rich interactvity of game engines.... the huge and sustained development that makes a world fluid and believable and compelling ... where are the versions tweaked to make maths explicit?
school barely even attempts to go there ...-
(here's a minor example of what i mean)
Alan Kay thinks the real computer revolution hasn't happened yet... and we're still in the early days, like the first 50 years after the printing press, when it just looked like a better way to make manuscripts....
.. when there is a realm of ideas and approaches that can be tapped - click the pic to see what 6 simple building blocks can do, when we move beyond the computer as reproducing text, to having tools that allow new ways of thinking, new ways of seeing the material
this is literally, a few building blocks ... click to see ... year 7 and 8 kids got this at first go...
there are 200,000 other projects shared in this space, and some rich maths ones...
in spite of the limitations of the tool, Scratch is rich enough to allow
- expression of creative ideas
- tinkering
- experimentation
...attributes often rather lacking in school versions of maths
I’ve often noticed a few kids in school – often totally under the radar of their teachers- have quite strong skills at programming, largely self taught - even though they might be mediocre at maths or english, as judged by results.
just about no-one in school tries to the leverage the overlap...since education still tends think of 'mathematics' as manipulating symbols according to the same rules ... and computing has become a black box, where we are 'users' and others to the work of developing the simulation and model
Contrast with this
"(If you like programming, but you hate mathematics, don't panic. In
that case it's not really mathematics you hate, it's school. The
programming you enjoy is much more like real mathematics than the stuff
you get in most high school math classes.) In these books I try to
encourage this sort of formal thinking by discussing programming in
terms of general rules rather than as a bag of tricks."
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1ch0/preface.html
Papert of course had strong views on this - that school maths was too
dry, and that playing with the turtle gave even young students access to
ideas like vector calculus, in a more intuitive way, without the
formalism normally associated with these ideas....
for example,
Repeat 360 [fd 1 rt 1]
Is an alternate and possibly more intuitive way for kids to explore a circle, than the classic analytical description
(x-a)2 + (y-b)2=r2
(and when differentiated according to the rules for doing this...
dy/dx = --- [an expression too full of indices, brackets and square roots, to be formatted into an email (where some of this was drafted) ]
and so what intuitive meaning does a student see in the rate of change of y with respect to x
and which version will a child most likely see in school?
The former approach gives more "feeling" for the differential changes; and so maybe in later years 'curl' and 'div' and all that would be likely to make more sense, if one had played with the 'feeling' of curves like this ... or at least, maybe one is more primed for some sense of the mathematical objects ... maybe ... (like paperts 'gears' becoming the mental tool he spun to appreciate what 20=4x+5y meant)
why is the mapping between these domains, across them, so weak in school maths - with all the effort expended in both ICT and maths ... why not better allied ...
I know I move into a more creative place when i model or program maths ideas - and have ever since my own schooling - and thus find the maths makes more music ... and I want the kids to experience all this via modelling and programming ...
will take some more permeation of ICT into maths... not as a presentation tool, but as modifying the discipline itself...
Papert and David Perkins describe this as "2nd order" change - not just using the new tool to more efficiently represent traditional paper based content, but allowing it to interact, modify the content and discipline itself ... will sound like sacrilege to many maths educators; less so, i suspect, to pragmatic scientists and engineers, whom we like to think we are preparing..
July 2, 2008
I guess nearly everyone is aware, to some extent, of the One Laptop Per Child Project – which is, as the same suggests, trying to get a cheap (nominally $100) laptop (known as the XO) into the hands of the world’s children; prioritizing poorer areas (outback Aus would probably qualify). Its hit various problems – and also had a strange spin off in provoking the large manufacturers into producing smaller models which compete with it… even Microsoft has suddenly found a way to get XP onto small systems.
One fall out of all this has been that the software (known as Sugar) has taken on something of a life of its own – and can be run other hardware (eg this CD allows you to run Sugar - even if you normally run MS or another non Linux system).
Another spin off has been a renewed discussion of how children learn – what’s the best thing to do with computers, anyway, if millions more kids are getting one? The OLPC thinking on this has focussed on ‘constructionism’ – which means, loosely, that people generally learn best by constructing their own understanding (not just being told) and a particularly good way to construct your own understanding is to make something. ('tell me and I forget, involve me and i learn' etc) (more...)
June 13, 2008
someone asked about flash projects for year 9s and i remembered this one - an animated acrostic poem (click the 'start' text).
Its pretty simple, but good for practicing layers and frames and tweens, and the kids seem to like it - so here's the instructions for doing it.
(This was originally done in Flash 5, and it works the same in Flash 8, so i expect it would be same in the later versions).
So, to start with - it needs staggered start and end points for each letter - (see the pic in step 4) .. so here's the process:
(1) set up as many layers as there are letters in your name -add label each layer
(in this case - 4 layers for FRED)
(2) on the bottom layer, add a key frame in frame 1, and use the Text tool to type in the first letter ("F') (choose a font of say size 24) .
(3) take the number of letters in your name, and multiply x 10. Fred has 4 letters, so the "magic number" is 40. Go out to the magic number (40 in this case), and add a key frame on the bottom layer.(So the 'F' starts on the stage at Frame 1; and ends at Frame 40 (or whatever your magic number is)
(4) on the second layer, add a keyframe into frame 10, type the second letter ("R" for Fred) , and offset the end point 10 frames on as well (see the pic) , so it is staggered in relation to the layer below.
(5) add the remaining letters into the other layers, and continue staggering the start and the end points 1o frames beyond the previous layer. (it doesn't look like the two top layers in the pic have staggered end points, but they do .. have just truncated the screen shot a little ) if you play it now, it will look like this (click the little "start" text at bottom)
so now to add in the rest of the word, and morph them (so 'F' morphs into 'Fruity' for example) :
(6) on the bottom layer, add another key frame 10 frames past the previous end point (now frame 50 for Fred). Edit the text so on this key frame so it has the full word (Fruity, not just F).
(7) Need to break the word into a shape, so its not ordinairy text. Select the text box (click the arrow tool first), then choose "Break-Apart" under the Modify menu, twice. (short cut : control-B twice).
(8) still on the bottom layer, break apart the single letter ('F') on the previous key frame.
(9) Now you can add a shape tween 
between these two keyframes, to morph the F into Fruity. Here's one method for this - with the "F' keyframe still selected (frame 40 in this case), and the properties window showing (select Window Properties if you need to), select "Shape" out of the "Tween" drop down
(10) all being well there should be a green arrow like this : 
between the key frames .... if you see the dreaded dashed line then one or other of the keyframes probably wasn't broken apart fully (needs to be done twice to break a word right down to a shape).
(11) so .. .repeat all that (step 6 to 11) on the other layers ..
(12) now add an extra keyframe to each layer so they all end in the same spot - so the end of the movie should look something like this
(13) from here, you could add images etc on other layers, to come in at appropriate times - an apple appears with the fruity layer etc, and motion tweens around, and maybe sounds, etc - or change the timing, if you want a delay between each letter etc
enjoy
June 8, 2008
I’ve wondered why ICT seems to lacks clarity of purpose in education. – why effective ICT usage is such an elusive thing. Also about the sense of alienation many seem to feel – that ‘technology is being done to us".
I think its because “ICT” is not one thing; it’s a million things.We might think a skilled IT person – in education say - is good at a set of programs {wordprocessing, spreadsheets, internet use; movie making … .etc}
Problem is that it is not a finite set – there are as many potential domains of ICT usage as there are domains of thought – so it’s a forlorn hope to try master it all. Taking a look at how software works, it can actually simulate every other system that can be thought of - any system that can be described, can also be simulated on a computer.
That might seem a big claim - but its what Turing mathematically demonstrated even before computers were built. And its why software is endlessly flexible–- its like the permutations of writing. - (and at bottom software is very like language) - so that set will never close.
(We don’t quite see this, partly because the physical object of a computer appears to be “one thing”, or one collection of programs – not quite seeing its capable of running every simulation that can be thought of – morphing into any conceptual form).
The first “meta medium” as Alan Kay called it.
So no wonder we’re not sure what the best way to “use ICT is” - its like asking what’s the best way to “use text”? It rather depends on what you’re wanting to do, express, analyse, what you are interested in. So what does an educator, with some responsibility for getting students or colleagues to “use it”, do?
A common approach is instrumentalist - we try to be adept at knowing a relatively wide range of tools, and potential ways to use them for learning and teaching. And then we expose others to some sense of the range of tools, and their use in mastering various domains.
(So implicitly some progressive position on education and curriculum etc often accompanies this - Marco Torres is really on about a passion for social equality, and Ken Robinson is really about creativity, as much as they might be interested in ICT as a vehicle for their ideas etc).
The mantra of this sort approach is ‘Its not about technology– its about achieving your goals etc / its about learning etc”
I think this goal driven approach is a productive and useful path, especially for busy teachers.
There is, though, a set of generic skills that still applies and is worth teaching children, who have time to learn. This seed will be more congenial for some than others – potentially grow some very big trees.Its understanding that software really is a “meta-medium” – that has a creative potential similar to language or mathematics; or some hybrid of the two.
That is, getting students to see that software is, behind the scenes, a particular type of formal language, limited in some ways – non emotive, analytical - but can be expressive and descriptive of ideas, and empowered to run at such speed that the simulation is tangible, interesting, expressive.
(listen to Steve Jobs describe the people who built the Apple
If you study these people a little bit more what you'll find is that in this particular time, in the 70's and the 80's the best people in computers would have normally been poets and writers and musicians. Almost all of them were musicians. Alot of them were poets on the side. They went into computers because it was so compelling. It was fresh and new. It was a new medium of expression for their creative talents. The feelings and the passion that people put into it were completely indistinguishable from a poet or a painter. Many of the people were introspective, inward people who expressed how they felt about other people or the rest of humanity in general into their work, work that other people would use. People put a lot of love into these products, and a lot of expression of their appreciation came to these things. It's hard to explain
So its interesting that when schools are talking so much about 'creative use of ICT', that the capacity to escape the boundaries of some else's simulation; and build ones’ own – to create at the language level – is not promoted more widely. One would think building and taking control like this would be included in the canon of constructivist / constructionist approaches to ICT.
It would help to get kids and teachers to understand that all flavours of software - spreadsheets or word docs or movie editors or browsers etc – everything is a system that begins life as an idea and becomes reality through a series of interactive expressions and rules.
It’s a pity in some ways the art of creating this is called 'programming' – since that feels like a dry, behaviourist sort of term. But as Seymour Papert said, its better for the kids to programming the computer than the other way around – and he investigated the wide ranges of “styles” that students brought to this medium.
As with other forms of literacy we want to be on the creating (writing) as well as consuming (reading) side. (The trap is because its so much easier to consume than produce - and using well designed software is such a compelling experience that we might be happy to leave creating it to the 'tech nerds').
Yet I think not doing this also contributes to a our sense of alienation – that ICT is being 'done to us', and we’ll never 'catch up'. That is, in a sense, probably true, if we’re just observing and positioning ourselves to try to use that set, which keeps growing.
Proprietary systems that position the “user” as completely apart from the “developer” and give little accessible or obvious means to get started with creating software are also part of the problem – most people sense that’s it all too difficult or involved to go the 'developer tools' and all that.
But really it doesn’t need to be that way - simulations that allow software development at some level should be quite accessible.
Ironically, the first generation of personal computers had a much easier starter language inbuilt (called BASIC) : Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Language.
Sounds like the sort of things schools should be interested in – and indeed many were.
Purists despise it of course – but it wasn’t bad for getting started – and that’s whats missing today – kids never get that start.
I'm not suggesting all should be programmers, (although if we called it software creativity it might sound more appealling) ; but the seed of that capacity should be on offer in schools; accessed via maths or english or science or robotics or overlaps of these - we should be able to cultivate that sense of creative control - which can grow in as many directions as there are ideas (in fact the idea can be the motive for learning the art).
this meta-medium allows any system to be created, simulated, transmuting one thing into something else – this is, from a particular point of view, the essence of ICT – and its what happens inside this software stuff, and so is worth understanding – or at least offering a scaffold for those how want to understand, since it becoming so pervasive and powerful. Its a slower discipline, compared to using software (maybe analogous to learning music, rather than the easier task of appreciating it) - but avoiding it seems to rule off a literacy that can be very empowering.
May 31, 2008
Wikipedia is the best known wiki. The wiki thing is about simple editing of pages, simple addition of pages, collaborative editing - and a mindset that allows work in progress to still be useful, sketched out and in use, and flexible, incremental changes
Ward Cunningham invented the thing and is also one of the developers of extreme programming - which loosely, seems to mean something similar; allow things to evolve, with a minimal master plan to start with - since its likely to change - allow incremental changes and constant updating
Nice to see the behind the scenes thinking of a key web 2 tool. There is - a fascinating podcast on all this here- cool design ideas on keeping it simple, intuitive, feeling empathy in the software process, teaching software ...
(twit has other very interesting insights from other creative types who were at the heart of whole software story)