WiseWordPress

There is a push in my academic world to focus on learning outcomes rather than learning objectives. However I was reminded by the Coodabeens this morning that paradoxically sports coaching is all about process not outcome. I will need to think more about this strange contrast given the intrinsically outcome-focused nature of sport versus the process focused nature of academic study.

It used to be that every few months, I would have a sudden burst of online activity and update my own website, or write a few things. Then it spread out to every year, somewhat like a spring cleaning activity. I just noticed that it is almost two years to the day that I have made any real contribution to my web-presence other than updating my list of publications.

I now have a number of research threads operating at the same time, and I am teaching into a number of different streams of psychology, so it becomes important to collect the tidbits of information that I’m thinking about into one easily-accessible place. The mobile technology is ripe for it, and my physical notebooks are becoming scrappier and scrappier, so I plan to write regularly on the things we are thinking about, working on and reading about. I might even try to develop an active readership for commentary and link-sharing!

In flicking through my most recent posts (ie early 2010), I was reading the things that have become part of my thinking life, things like James Paul Gee, Csikszentmihalyi, Vygotsky, Hirstein, and possibly just starting on the work of Marshall McLuhan. I had probably also delved into Pylyshyn’s work and started re-reading Fodor. I was beginning to think about relationships between attention and spatial coding in the martial arts and sports world and attention and cognitive processing in general, and I was trying to grapple with the idea of causal contact with the real world.

Now that I almost have a real lab and real technical equipment that can be used to collect real data (I’m almost back to being a real scientist!), I have also returned to the idea of finally mastering at least a small amount of maths – particularly the geometry stuff required for motion capture, and the statistical notions that match the research questions we are dealing with. But the things that will need ongoing discussion and consideration will be on how to ensure that the “real science” doesn’t get side-tracked by the things we can measure rather than the questions we want to answer.

[As always, I need to develop the discipline to write regularly in small doses on a blog so I can have a head start on the longer pieces for academic papers. Somehow, my small doses never seem sufficiently finished to post ...]

From The Age: Honest parents named as emotional abusers.

PARENTS who have not harmed their children are being wrongly recorded as having ”emotionally abused” them because authorities generally cannot legally intervene unless a parent is found to be at fault.

This is a glaring example of the way in which documentation in the service of bureaucracy records information known to be false in order to achieve a result in the spirit of the principle the documentation is designed to uphold. If it isn’t on the form, it can’t be recorded. If nothing is recorded, we can’t receive the service. So we’ll lie now to get what we need, but the lies might come back to bite us in serious ways later.

This particular situation is also a glaring example of the Pollyanna world of popular feel-good psychology – if we love and praise and nurture our children, it will all be good: they will have happy, healthy lives, do wonderfully well at school, get great jobs and be whatever they want to be. If it doesn’t happen that way, someone must be to blame. Always, someone must be to blame.

And now for my Easter-themed post, which in an odd way “flows” from my reading of Csikzsentmihalyi’s work. via Chocolate: how much is too much? Sadly, not much.

Not only did the chocolate eaters have a 39 per cent lower risk of heart attack or stroke, they had lower blood pressure.

Research shows that eating chocolate can have health benefits,  and these are presumed to be due to the antioxidants in chocolate. Dark chocolate has more antioxidants than milk chocolate and is therefore better for you. And portion size is important … the emphasis is on input and output, rather than on the motivations for eating chocolate. Another distinguishing factor between eating dark chocolate and milk chocolate is that dark chocolate is generally better quality and more expensive (due to the higher ratio of cocoa product) – people who eat dark chocolate are perhaps more likely to be eating it for the delightful taste sensation which they savour rather than quaffing it in large quantities for the “comfort factor”. Perhaps it is the mindset of delighting in pleasurable food and savouring each morsel (taking the time to enjoy the moment without obsessing about cost and calories) that is more important in lowering the risk of heart attack and stroke. Eating the requisite portion of dark chocolate with a red wine chaser after a salad of pear, rocquet, blue cheese and almonds all with the appropriate balance of anti-oxidant, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients may not have any of the health benefits of selecting exactly the same food combination from the sheer pleasure of the visual presentation, aroma and taste sensation (including the anticipatory pleasure from preparing the food to achieve this outcome). It may be that it is the ability to find pleasure in each aspect of daily life that mitigates against the risk of heart attack and stroke, rather than the precise quantity of each nutrient that we ingest.

Similarly, the art of drawing free-form fine pictures with the steamed milk of a cafe latte (latte art) requires the crema of the coffee to be perfect and the consistency of the milk foam to be similarly perfect- i.e. requires a level of excellence  in the making of the coffee, that then allows the barista to “play creatively” in announcing this perfection – a joyous expression of quality assurance. And yet a misguided focus on outcome gives us production lines with automatic espresso shots, thermometers in the milk, and toothpicks to draw pictures. The end result is pretty pictures, and perhaps even a modicum of “quality assurance” (or repeatability), but the creative joy for the barista and the discipline required to achieve mastery of coffee making has been lost.

Maybe those applying economic “theory” to areas that are not primarily about making money such as education and training (or those applying “psychological theory” to non-sentient entities such as markets …) should take heed of misapplied analogies:

Soviet biology was set back a generation when the authorities decided to apply the rules of communist ideology to growing corn, instead of following experimental evidence. Lysenko’s ideas about how grains planted in a cold climate would grow more hardy, and produce even hardier progeny, sounded good to the lay person, especially within the context of Leninist dogma. Unfortunately the ways of politics and the ways of corn are not always the same, and Lysenko’ efforts culminated in decades of hunger. (from Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, p140-141, emphasis added (because it’s the line I found particularly apropos))

Here is a (yet another) cautionary tale about productivity indicators in academia – how many of the greatest discoveries in science or the greatest academic thinkers would have been nurtured (let alone employed) in academia of today? And what of the relative value of one paper that solves a puzzle that baffled mathematicians for more than a century versus 20 papers on somewhat more mundane issues that anyone could address?

via Cleverest man in the world ponders whether to accept $1 million.

American colleagues remember his fingernails being unusually long as well as his eccentricity, and the frugality of his lifestyle. In 1995, he shocked his peers by returning to the poorly funded research institute in St Petersburg, turning down lucrative offers in America in favour of a salary worth the equivalent of pounds 120 a month.

He had been uninterested in churning out routine academic papers and was determined to focus on solving a complex maths puzzle known as the Poincare conjecture that had baffled mathematicians for more than a century. But it seems his new colleagues lost patience with him.

“Grigory did not want to waste his time [on academic papers] and colleagues voted him out. They voted out the most brilliant mathematician in the world,” recalled Tamara Yefimova, one of his former maths teachers. Embittered, Mr Perelman left in December 2005 and appears not to have worked since. In 2002 and 2003 he had quietly published the answer to the Poincare conjecture, which involved proving a hypothesis about three dimensional space and which academics believe could further our understanding of how the universe is structured.

It took four years for teams of academics around the world to check Mr Perelmans solution, but eventually they confirmed that he had cracked something that many had thought was unsolvable.

This article on Foreign Airline Safety versus U.S. Major Airlines comes from Philip Greenspun via Michael’s Beebo blog (yeah, yeah – it’s from a while ago, but I don’t really keep up with blogging).

Greenspun takes issue with Malcolm Gladwell’s cultural explanation of poorer safety records of foreign airlines which he paraphrases thus:

Gladwell comes to the conclusion that foreigners are unsafe because they are … foreign. They have a strange and defective culture that prevents the first officer (copilot) from speaking up and pointing out problems to the captain. If only everyone were American, the world would be a better and safer place.

This article explores an alternative explanation: foreign airlines do comparatively poorly because their first officers have almost no pilot-in-command experience.

In the course of following a link on the distribution of American geniuses (thanks Michael ), I read the OKCupid privacy policy (since they publish amusing and interesting statistics on the information provided by their users).

The privacy policy is a really good example of how to actually explain what may happen to someone’s information, including how it is archived and what would happen if the whole website changed hands … I like it!

The stats are also interesting – there are obvious issues with the self-selecting sample, but it makes a change from “the sample were first year psychology students participating for course credit”)

I went to Harvey Norman’s today, against my better judgement, since the last time I shopped there, I made poor purchasing decisions under the extremely persistent and persuasive sales pressure. I wanted to buy a desk lamp (Furniture), a camera cover (Electronics), some headphones and some blank DVDs (Computer). Having carefully selected all my items and carried them around the various sections, I went to the closest cashier (Computers) to pay. She saw my camera cover which was on top of the pile and said I would need to go to Electronics. I went to Electronics and my pile of goods piled up in a different order. This cashier said to go back to Computers for my computer items, and I would also have to go to Furniture to pay for my desk lamp. When I asked why I should have to go to different places to pay for different things within a single Harvey Norman store – surely they could track purchases on their computer system, I was told that actually each division was a separate franchise. I left my computer/electronics purchases at the cashier and went to Furniture to buy my desk lamp (which was the only thing I really needed). I was not very happy at this point and asked the Furniture people if I could speak to their manager to complain (no – not here on the weekend), and if not, could they give me a contact number (no – I could look it up myself).

Why am I writing about this? There are two main reasons. One is the demise of smaller specialty stores because big mega-stores can stock a wide range of things at lower prices. The other is that I find it offensive that, despite all the mantra about customer service, I need to know the internal structure of large organisations (like Optus, Harvey Normans, Westpac etc) to be able to interface with them effectively. They appear to operate as a single entity and apparently that is why I should go to them and trust them etc – but there are all sorts of things that I can’t do, or I have to go to a different department for, or get screwed up because the single organisation is not in fact a single organisation at all, but a whole lot of loosely affiliated systems that are unable or unwilling to communicate with each other. (An aside: I get regular mail from each division of Optus about the massive savings I’d get if I swapped my Landline, TV, Broadband or Mobile service to them – they are apparently oblivious to the fact that I already have these services with them)

To elaborate on small stores versus megastores: I make a conscious effort to shop at smaller, local stores where I can form a relationship with the people with whom I do business. The places I like to shop are specialty stores who stock a range of things selected by the expertise (and whim) of the store owner. I understand that smaller places may need to charge slightly higher prices because of things like buying power, but I also know that the people in the shop have decided what stock they will have to sell. I am perfectly aware when I step into or out of someone’s store and I know who is providing me goods and services at each store. If I get good service in the greengrocers, and bad service in the butchers next door, the butcher’s service does not impact on my assessment of the greengrocer. In contrast, any bad experience at a supermarket, whether it be with respect to groceries, deli items or meat, reflects badly on the whole supermarket.

The only times I go to places like Safeway or Kmart or Bunnings are when I want to shop efficiently for mundane consumables at a reasonable price. So back to my shopping experience at Harvey Normans. The store I went to is laid out like most department stores – open plan with no walls or doors between different departments. (Note: I’m there for shopping efficiency …)  I collected my items – and there was nothing to indicate that I should plan to group my purchases according to department, and there are no indicators to alert me to the fact that I’ve taken one department’s goods into another department without paying for them. (Note: In a normal shopping mall, I go into one shop, buy my things, proceed to the next shop, buy my things and there are alerts if I attempt to take unpurchased goods from one store to another). I was not exactly thrilled at being told to go to different places to pay for different things (inefficiently retracing my steps around the store carrying all my purchases) and I asked what sense it made to have a Harvey Norman “store” rather than going to a regular shopping mall with different shops. The somewhat aggrieved Furniture guy (who could not give me a manager or a customer service number to complain to) then spouted the value of the Harvey Norman brand, number one retailer of this and that and the other thing …

As I left the store, I was thinking that the people working there in sales are just trying to make a living and probably don’t get paid enough to have to deal with the anger of frustrated customers – but I also got to thinking that Harvey Norman have gone a step beyond other “megastores” in depersonalising and cheapening the concept of brand and of service. They have taken the idea of a “megastore” (lots of stuff, good prices, efficient shopping) but implemented it as separate open-plan “shops” (inefficiency of going to different counters for different purchases). There is no sense of individuality, no sense of each section operating as a separate entity – it has all the bad points of shopping malls and none of the efficiency of supermarkets – and none of the individuality and charm of small suburban shopping strips. It was a bit sad to see that the Furniture guy had a strong brand loyalty and pride in working for Harvey Norman rather than for the individual owner of the individual franchise (who that person is I may never know … and maybe it isn’t a person – maybe it is a nameless investment entity). It was even more disturbing that he was offended by my not be impressed by the Harvey Norman name (apparently I should be honoured to be able to give HN my money …).

It seems that 20 years ago, the idea of a supermarket invoked images of uniformity of product, cheap prices and convenience but limited personal service. Now it seems that advertising is how we know what to buy (versus discussing things with a knowledgeable store owner), and good service means cheaper prices and not having to wait in line to pay rather than knowing about the goods being sold. Loyalty means getting purchasing rewards via cards (versus having the shop-owner actually know who you are and give you occasional freebies).  The model of “best practice” and uniformity in shopping experience is now seen as something good and trustworthy, so that trust and loyalty is invested in brands rather than people and it is seen as riskier to go to a small local operator (might not be here next year) rather than a large brand name store (store will be around, albeit with different people).

And all this began with the microwave oven dying – I went to the local small electrical goods outlet that I’ve been to for the past 20 years to replace it rather than to possibly cheaper Harvey Normans for all the reasons above. Unfortunately they don’t stock desk lamps … if they did, I would not have wasted half the day writing about the demise of local shopping and customer service!

Game guru Sid Meier explains gamer psychology | VentureBeat. (via Stephen Downes)

Sid Meier is the maker of Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Pirates! and other such games. He notes that people don’t want to play games that are too hard, and for many things, if you make them more realistic, they become harder …

… you have to always tilt the odds in favor of the player winning, regardless of the true mathematical odds for things such as battles. If you don’t do this, players will perceive your game as too difficult and will drop it … I thought the more realistic you made a game, the more historically accurate, [the more] the player would appreciate it. In reality, I was wrong …

One example he gives of the “realism problem” is flight simulators. At first, they were simple and fun. But as they became more realistic, the controls became more complex. Fewer and fewer people could master them. And ultimately, the games became so inaccessible that the genre died out.

So although people will learn about history (or railroad tycoonery or pirating), they will get a distorted view of the level of difficulty involved in ruling the world (or the railroads or the high seas).

This article from the ABC website documents the declining standard of maths from high school through to uni. Talk to students at schools trying to maximize their ENTER scores and start to understand that the way scores are calculated drives subject choices, rather than the actual relevance of the content …

(written on the iPhone … Not sure whether this is a good idea from an editing point of view …)

Building a Better Teacher ~ Stephens Web ~ by Stephen Downes.

Stephen comments on an article in the NY Times that claims great teaching can be taught, an issue of great interest to me and Stephen alike. In his comment (from which I declined to actually read the original article), Stephen suggests that the article is effectively a marketing blurb for a book by Doug Lemov, which in turn is promotion for his consultancy. When The NY Times implements its “subscription paywall”, this sort of book promotion will not be effective because the articles will no longer be widely distributed (many of the people who read the NY Times for free will not pay for the privilege). Stephen also notes that Lemov uses “unsurprising techniques” (ie nothing new or innovative) and there are no scholarly references to the “Lemov Taxonomy”.

I am interested in Stephen’s comments because there is subtext that jumps out at me:

1) Paywalls will discourage advertising masquerading as journalism. (Possibly a good thing about paywalls? Of course I won’t find out because I won’t pay …)

2) Where will newspapers get their pay-for content? (Implication that much of the content of newspapers is actual marketing / promotion. Can real journalism only be resurrected by making people pay to read?)

3) Lemov has no “scholarly references to it” – by which I presume Stephen means that Lemov is not cited by any papers in academic journals and that this reduces Lemoy’s credibility. I find this an interesting observation given the subtext in a lot of Web 2.0 discussion that the gate-keeping process of peer-reviewed academic journals creates an unnecessary monopolisitic constraint on the dissemination of new ideas.

Couple Elizabeth Blackburn’s comments with the Climate Change Wars, and you start to see why “science” is getting a bad name. Add in the funding models over recent times (who pays for research) and it all starts getting even murkier.

NOBEL prizewinner Elizabeth Blackburn’s discoveries in molecular biology led her into cross-disciplinary research in cancer and chronic stress, but she warns that researchers first need deep specialist knowledge.As institutions are focusing on breaking down barriers to cross-disciplinary research, the University of California-based professor cautions there is a risk of researchers being shallow if they seek to generalise early.”My feeling is not to get too cross-disciplinary and shallow and spread all over the place too quick,” Blackburn tells the HES while visiting Monash University, where she is a distinguished visiting professor.”One needs to be able to bring something very substantive to the table because I can see the temptation would be to try to be overly generalised and shallowness would be the consequence.”

via Deep specialisation key to collaboration | The Australian.

Standing Resolutions of Council – Chapter 4 – General Resolutions Including Protocols : The University of Melbourne.

It’s a sad reflection on Australian academia that this needs to be stated clearly, but it is refreshing that it has been.

Doctor and Patient – Looking Beyond MCATs to Pick Future Doctors – NYTimes.com.

The investigators found that the results of the personality test had a striking correlation with the students’ performance. Neuroticism, or an individual’s likelihood of becoming emotionally upset, was a constant predictor of a student’s poor academic performance and even attrition. Being conscientious, on the other hand, was a particularly important predictor of success throughout medical school. And the importance of openness and agreeableness increased over time, though neither did as significantly as extraversion. Extraverts invariably struggled early on but ended up excelling as their training entailed less time in the classroom and more time with patients.

It is interesting to see that the personality factors leading to long term future success are different from those leading to short-term “success”. Failure to consider progress over the whole training continuum is becoming a serious “quality” issue in education. The need to  enforce more rigorous standards early in training to prepare students for later training is difficult to do when evaluation is at the wrong granualarity. (Note to self: look up the Belgian study from which the data were reported)

I’ve been reading lots of Oliver Sacks over Christmas – reinforcing my view that the foundation of scientific study is observation. He provides this quote in the preface of “An anthropologist on Mars” which is itself from G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown:

Science is a grand thing when you can get it; in its real sense one of the grandest words in the world. But what do these men mean, nine times out of ten, when they use it nowadays? When they say detection is a science> When they say criminology is a science> They mean getting outside a man and studying him as if he were a gigantic insect; in what they would call a dry impartial light; in what I should call a dead and dehumanised light. They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his “criminal skill” as if it were a sort of eerie growth, like the horn on a rhinoceros’s nose. When the scientist talks about a type, he never means himself, but always his neighbour; probably his poorer neighbour. I don’t deny the dry light may sometimes do good; though in one sense it’s the very reverse of science. So far from being knowledge, it’s actually suppression of what we know. It’s treating a friend as a stranger, and pretending that something familiar is really remote and mysterious. It’s like saying that a man has a proboscis between the eyes, or that he falls down in a fit of insensibility once every twenty-four hours. Well, what you call “the secret” is exactly the opposite I don’t try to get outside the man, I try to get inside.

I have particularly enjoyed reading “Uncle Tungsten”, his memoirs of his childhood, where he had the freedom to do curiousity-driven research despite all the potential risks, thereby gaining a much deeper understanding of the world, and a thirst for knowledge gathered through detailed observation and reflection as well as through careful experimentation.

Thanks to this post, I have finally solved my WordPress login issue:

Fixing the WordPress login issue | John Hawkins Unrated.

Last May, I noticed that I had only posted 4 things in the past six months and had not been doing regular upgrades and was basically completely out of touch with the web world and the art of regular writing. I got excitable, wrote some stuff, decided to upgrade WordPress to the latest version, couldn’t log back into the admin site and have been locked out ever since. I spent two or three evenings spread across the last 6 months trying to solve the problem and decided it must be a weird Mac thing. I had pretty much given up until I read this post and cleared the plug-in entry from the database.

Job done!

The only remaining issue was to try to get my uploaded media content working again, but I solved that by linking to it elsewhere. So now I have a working blog and all I have to do is start writing!

There were two things I forgot to mention in my post about Stephen’s presentation.

1) When Stephen was introducing the concept of connectivist learning, he used an example of the knowledge that “Paris is the capital of France” to talk about symbolic versus connectivist learning. He described the propositional version of declarative knowledge, and countered with the idea that we have a cloud of connections around the idea of Paris, and around what we mean by France and that, in fact, there is not a sentence in the head declaring Paris is the capital of France, but there are instead a whole host of connections that embody that information (or something along those lines). I couldn’t help but think that the example was a poor one because to me, X is the capital of Y is quintessentially the sort of declarative knowledge people have with absolutely no other understanding of Paris, of France and of the notion of “is the capital of” (economically? politically? socially? is the biggest? is the most well known?). I know many people who know the all the captials of all the small african nations without even knowing where the country is on a map, who lives there, or anything else about the notion, because either they learnt it at school, or they know it for trivia quiz nights.

2) The other example Stephen used was of flying a jumbo jet from New York to Melbourne. He commented that flying a jumbo jet was so incredibly complex that one couldn’t possibly consider it to be a set of declarative propositions (or something like that – he was way more eloquent in his connectivist description of Paris and flying jets). What stood out for me, as a result of having thought about military pilot training for the past two years, is that the airline industry is the most proceduralised industry in the world, and there are checklists and procedures for every foreseeable situation. That is to say, there has been a concerted effort to write down every step of the process of flying a jet from New York to Melbourne, including every possible error-situation or event that may happen …

Anyhow – I’m not sure that knowledge carves up neatly between declarative, procedural, connectivist or symbolic. I suspect they are different levels of analysis and apply in different contexts, depending on what entrenched position is being challenged.

I noticed on the weekend that Stephen Downes, my online-learning-communities hero, was running a workshop in Melbourne. In a fit of boyish enthusiasm, I registered for the event – it felt a little bit like buying a ticket to a Leonard Cohen concert or something like that … not quite my genre of presentation (a workshop for people mostly from the “education sector” rather than from the cognitive science or web development world) but nevertheless an opportunity to see my hero face-to-face.

Probably the key things that came out of the morning for me were:

1) I’m not really a blogger as such – I prefer to consider my responses before blurting them out to the world, so I tend not to publish the first thing that comes to mind, and that is probably a blessing to my readers.

2) I don’t actually write “for my readers” – I write things that are effectively “note-to-self” rather than having an audience in mind. I publish online for ease of my own access, but also because some of what I have thought through might actually be of interest to some of my friends/acquaintances, and they can read it for themselves at their leisure.

3) Any time I become aware of a tangible audience, I find myself less likely to write because I’m then filtering what I write through what (I think) they might think of what I write … and I become more aware of potential political or personal ramifications of my views.

4) I am such a fan of Stephen Downes because he is such a prolific writer and manages to be considered and engaging in his writing on a very regular basis. His OLDaily newsletter seemed to find most of what I’m interested in in online learning and effectively saves me the time and effort of searching – it’s a lazy approach on my part but it reflects the level of interest I have in online learning (not enough interest to search for my own material regularly).

5) The more compelling reason I am a fan of Stephen Downes is because he has an academic grounding in philosophy (including a great web-site on the logical fallacies), very strong technical skills, and great visual and verbal communication skills so he has true multi-disciplinary knowledge encompassing the theory and practice of what he does. The multi-disciplinary deep knowledge is sadly lacking for many people who operate in the elearning / social networking space (evangelists for all that is new and modern, but without an understanding of what is old and traditional, and how the old transitions to the new).

6) Although the workshop itself was fairly straight-forward, the most exciting part for me was a bit of a discussion on the “Connectivism” course run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. The course itself was run in an interesting way using Web 2.0 (eLearn 2.0?) technologies and was a fee-paying, for-credit course for 22 students and was open and free for the other 1200+ (not sure of the number but lots not a few) students. There was disappointingly little discussion at the workshop of fee-for-content versus fee-for-accreditation, nor for discipline-based-accreditation versus assessment-of-understanding. To me, these should be issues that are at the forefront of educators’ minds. There was, however, a brief discussion (between Stephen and myself) of connectionism versus symbolic representation and of levels of analysis.

7) This brief discussion with Stephen spawned a whole range of ideas which, were I a more prolific blogger, would have spewed forth unedited into the world as I thunk them.

• connectivism versus connectionism – connectivism appears to be a new term linking learning nodes (at the level of concepts?) versus the neural connectionism that describes brain functioning. I’m not sure in a distributed cognition framework what exactly constitutes “knowledge” (some amorphous cloud of connections?) and what is embodied in an individual’s learning (7-of-9 removed from the Borg collective?). I am also unsure of what version of “network” is being mooted – network models abound, but they are not all the same, and the type of network has implications for what happens at nodes …
• Pylyshyn and symbolic representation (there are not many people with whom one can discuss Pylyshyn!): I was questioning whether Pylyshyn’s version of symbolic representation is the same as Fodor’s (and I’m not sufficiently philosophically acquainted to know the answer, or indeed if there is an answer). I know that I disagree with Kosslyn, but I’m not sure that my reading of Pylyshyn aligns with Stephen’s. Does Pylyshyn’s version of proto-objects and indexicals in early vision embody a symbolic representation that isn’t a set of propositional statements in the visual domain – is it Fodor in vision, or is there a non-visual representational level that is neither “visual image” nor symbolic representation – or does that make no sense at all (as in, is a symbolic representation by definition glued together by propositional statements)? Perhaps a different phraseology is “is it possible to instantiate a symbolic representation in a neural network, or is the symbolic representation a different level of description of the functional outcome of the neural network – or does that amount to the same thing?. And is it possible to discuss philosophy in a non-symbolic representational form (ie not through maths/language) or does that become art/music/dance/movement). (This particularly needs careful reflection and consideration – when I think about Fodor/Pylyshyn/symbolic representation and sensory/perceptual/cognitive systems and spatio-temporal awareness, I can’t decide whether what I think is blindingly obvious but difficult to express, or whether I’m just condeptually confused – I still think that it is difficult to express non-linguistic concepts linguisticallly).
• Somewhat less interestingly, I am still frustrated by the number of straw men in the elearning, web 2.0 domain. I’m also annoyed by the failure to distinguish between teaching and learning. My role as an academic is to teach in my discipline area. I also have an obligation to continue learning in my discipline area. Some of my learning will be facilitated by “teachers” but much will be self-directed. The further I progress in my own learning, the more the ratio of teacher-led to self-directed learning for me will shift to the self-directed. Whoopy-doo. So what? Does it mean that because my “quality learning” is self-directed, that teaching is bad? Is there any concerted effort to understand what teaching is about and how much of the teaching enterprise is about deciding what constitutes the core discipline area and about calibrating and reflecting on the discipline and the level of expertise in the discipline through the process of defining what students need to know about. The process of delivering it is less important than the process of defining it.
• I am also frustrated by the idea that back-channels are “good” and that audience participation is always a good thing. Back-channels have always been around and are important for people with short attention-spans, but reflective commentary can shared after the event rather than during it. I was mostly well-behaved at the workshop so I didn’t ask all the questions or challenge all the ideas that I wanted to, mostly because the people attending the workshop came to hear Stephen, not me. The direction I could have hijacked the workshop towards may well have been instructive and interesting to the participants, but would not have been what they came for. They came to hear Stephen because he has thought about things they are interested in, and they know enough about the style of his thinking to feel confident of the value of listening to him. They trust his insights. They have no knowledge of whether or not my insights are based on careful analysis or years of thought, and even if I have thought extensively, whether or not my thought processes are sound. In essence, they don’t trust my insights. Presentations tend to be more focussed than chats around the bar, and sometimes we want the ideas distilled before we invest the time around the bar. They are different communication modes, and serve different purposes. They are not interchangeable.
• In a similar vein, I’m also annoyed by the lack of consideration of timeframe and content of communication in different media. Twitter, Facebook chat, Facebook status changes are transient “conversational” modes that have an expiry date of “fairly immediate”. Discussion posts or blog posts are slightly more considered, but are also at some level “unedited”. Lectopia recordings (live podcasts of live presentations) are also somewhat “unedited” and reflect thought processes and language production in real-time. Putting such things online for people to access asynchronously is good, but allowing people to sift through the tea-leaves for hidden meaning (ie to take things out of the context of the time frame in which the original was produced) is not helpful. Like slo-mo replays in sport. Like video replays in refereeing. Like this is turning into a “real blog post” of unedited thoughts, so it’s a good place to stop …

So anyway, in the end, it was a very stimulating session to have attended, not for the content of the presentation itself, but for the ideas that have been bubbling around and probably need to be clarified into papers sooner rather than later.

Less than a week ago, I was at a workshop at Swinburne’s Healesville campus, the only time I’ve ever been there. We went out for lunch in Healesville and, just by chance, I caught up with a dear friend who happened to be driving past and stopped for coffee. I haven’t seen Di for a number of years and we had a wonderful chat. We didn’t bother exchanging phone numbers because, as she said “You can always get in touch with me via the Marysville Lolly Shop”, which she owns with a friend.

It’s only a few days later, and all of Marysville, that beautiful historic town nestled in the hills is burnt to the ground.

Di – I was so happy to see you on the ABC News to know that you survived the fireball. I am so sorry you lost your beautiful lolly shop, but I know you have the courage and circle of friends and family to deal with what life throws at you. My heart goes out to all the people who have lost homes, livelihoods and more importantly, have lost their loved ones. It will take a long long time for communities to recover.

And as an aside (note that this was written on the Sunday night of the fires), although the fires and devastation this weekend have been much greater than Ash Wednesday, I think many people in Melbourne are fairly oblivious to the scale of devastation. The difference is that on Ash Wednesday, the wind blew smoke and ash onto Melbourne itself, so that people thought their own suburbs were on fire and it was impossible to ignore. There are many many young people who don’t listen to local news services and, in any event, don’t know the names and size of towns in regional Victoria.

Wednesday: An update to the aside: As events unfolded, everyone in Melbourne now knows the extent of the tragedy, but it still feels far away for those that don’t go out to regional areas much. It is as “unreal” for them as pictures of warzones in Iraq. The possibility of two large fires joining around Healesville as the warms up again is quite frightening.