digitaldust

The moose has left the building. Go play Moosehunt.

Moosehunt from Simon Evans on Vimeo.

An interesting quote that I just heard attributed to Arthur C Clarke (in a talk by Sugata Mitra) and something similar crops up in The Underachieving School.

My first thought was NO, technological determinism! But then after thinking about it, the answer is of course YES! Whether it was intended to be or not the idea is actually incredibly liberating. The role of a teacher is to do the things that cannot be replaced by a machine. If a teacher is doing something that can be replaced, then it is good for everyone to have it replaced. If a lecture can be replaced with a video, questions answered by the web or learning facilitated by a VLE then great. In fact if I can get a robot to do my job then I would be very happy.

It has been a year. What started as a bit of a dry spell turned into me choosing a whole year of blog celibacy. I had already slowed down blogging and reading RSS feeds, so I stopped doing it all. All sorts of things had got in the way and it is often better to take a big step back and take a deep breath.

A lot has happened, and now that I write this, I see that a lot of things have happened for the first time. It has been a rather eventful twelve months.

• Finishing my first full year of teaching
• Being published for the first time
• Presenting my first academic paper at a conference
• Organised my first conference
• Starting working with the Pervasive Media Studio
• Finished my teacher training
• Being a parent for the first time. Hello Noah

What is it? MicroDJing? Social mixworking? The love child of Twitter and Last.fm? Whatever it is, it is amazing and addictive.

I would try and say something smart or detailed about it, but Iain has already done that, and much better than I would. For an app that looks very simple it has had a lot of thought put into it, and it works like a well evolved piece of the web coral reef, hooking into last.fm, twitter and myriad of those other micro-blogging corals that are co-cohabiting the reef.

So here is the music that makes me want to shout, let me hear yours. http://blip.fm/invite/digitaldust

Not every tag cloud has a silver lining. The worlds first performance tag cloud will be digitally bodged live next Tuesday (28/08) at the Cube, Bristol’s own indie microplex. It’s time for the Grumpyman.tv night,a miserable mashup between the cube.tv events and the Grumpy Man DJs.

Ed and I will be doing miserable and annoying video surfing, supported by a real world participative tag cloud. It’s Grumpyman 2.0. And if that doesn’t get on your tits then we’ve got more that’s guaranteed to make you morose, tetchy and downright angry.

The rest of the night promises to hold melancholy music videos and angst film whilst we do the sad web weirdness. There’s a bar and music as well as pictures. So come along and drown your sorrows. We will be.

hai. our kittehz haz cheezburger fame. kthxbai.

While in Spitalfields over the weekend I saw an beautiful retro drafting desk. The kind with wires and pulleys so it can go from flat to vertical and be aligned just right for whatever you’re working on. It got me thinking about what the dominant ergonomic desk paradigm would be for the 21st century. The 20th century has been about desks to write, type and now compute on. Drafting or art desks were rare.

Maybe, just maybe, with the advent of all these multi-touch screens, drafting desks would come back. They are better for working on this kind of interface, neither upright like in the Minority Report or flat out would work for these things in a single user situation.

And the steampunk in me hopes that 21st century drafting desks’ll keep all the pulleys, gears and polished wood too.

It occurred to me as I read the Clay Shirky essay on Situated Software that he was seeing/experiencing the same things as Michael B Johnson said the other night, when talking about writing internal software for Pixar.

We make scalpels not swiss army knives.

Good tools, for the right person, in the right context. They don’t need to do more than they need to. More examples of Why? in design rather than Why Not?

Have you got what it takes to be an academic?

We are looking for a new lecturer to join our team at the University of the West of England. Basically what we are looking for is an Information Architect, Interaction Designer, Interface type of person. The kind of person we are looking for has industry experience, not necessarily academic credentials – though obviously that is good. You would be teaching on stuff that contributes to the BSc Web Design and MSc Information and Library Management courses.

Now is a good chance to get in on the ground floor of the BSc Web Design course and teach at the intersection of design and technology.

You will be a dynamic enthusiast, eager to develop new areas of research and teaching in information architecture. By the using the term Information architecture we refer to the emerging discipline which includes some or all of the following:

• Content design and management for web sites
• Structural design of information space
• Organising, labelling, classification and navigation schemes within web based information systems
• Metadata development and taxonomies
• Developing principles of design to web based information systems
• Searching, finding and managing information
• Social media and Web 2.0 technologies and applications

An appropriately experienced candidate may be given responsibility for the further curriculum development in web design and information and library management.

Go to the UWE site to download the job spec and apply

If you’ve got any questions then leave me a comment of drop me a mail at dan dot dixon at uwe dot ac dot uk.

A great little find from Piers.

Brain Research and Teaching: “

The science behind learning, for me, is much more important than the politics. Just found a good list of 20 teaching tips derived from brain research.

1. The brain learns from its environment. Enrich the learning environment.
2. One’s personal, emotional state greatly influences what is recalled during a learning episode. Deal with emotional influences in your classroom before teaching.
3. Prime the brain for learning. Provide visual outlines or show select pictures representing different parts of the upcoming lesson.
4. give the brain time to process verbal information. Pause 3-7 seconds between important statements.
5. Wait 5 seconds after asking a factual question and 10 seconds after asking a complex question.
6. Present, rehearse, apply, then review.
7. Develop concept before content.
8. Teach by asking questions.
9. Teach pattern recognition. Often.
10. Research suggests that neurons need some downtime to consolidate information. Teach new information over time, providing periodic review.
11. The % of information remembered increases as the learning episode shortens and decreases as the lesson time lengthens.
12. Change the type of instruction or student activity every 20 minutes.
13. Teach students how to ask great questions while they are reading.
14. Periodically, have students record/share 3 things they learned from the lesson or 3 things they found interesting.
15. Sleep is required to store information into long term memory. John Hopkins University found that it takes 6 hours for a new skill to be consolidated and tagged for long term storage. (Teenagers need at least 9 hours of sleep a night).
16. Have students listen to music before writing and spatial reasoning activities.
17. On average, learners will only remember 5% of a lecture 24 hours after it is given. However, they will remember 90% of the information 24 hours later if they teach it to someone else.
18. Use personal, white, dry erase boards in class to check for understanding as you are teaching.
19. Very specific and positive comments will be remembered over time and will be immediately motivating to the students.

and then, just to keep bloggers happy,

1. Journaling has been found to improve memory and cognition. It enhances motivation to read and reading comprehension.

(Via Monkeymagic.)