This TED talk by Tom Wujec shows ways that visualising ideas helps to solve the problems. The “Visual Strategy Planning” idea, where a team maps out the entire problem on a wall, together, is a bit like a mind-map and is a nice interface to information.
It also has ramifications for learning in that new concepts could be presented to students as a map instead of a linear text.
I just got back from MAGISTRALE Kulturnacht’s Medialounge in which a good friend of mine has some photos on exhibit. There was a series of laptop audio performances by various artists which climaxed with a live performance of the so called Laptoporchester Berlin. Seven guys on laptops nodding their heads.They opened with a couple of pieces that were lead by a guy on a cool seven string electric guitar which had a body that was just snap on bars in the shape of a traditional guitar (see picture). They then ended with a cover of Terry Riley’s ‘In C’ which I’d only recently discovered being a big fan of Steve Riech.
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Its a hard problem and not many people are tacking it in the web development world. Heres some research into presenting content in different languages via HTML.
To frame the problem here is a good break down of the three technical issues:
There are three considerations for presenting HTML in non-English languages. First, that the document is delivered in the desired natural language (such as English, French, etc.) and dialect (US, British, etc.). Second, that the document is presented in the correct character set. This is a requirement for most Eastern languages (Russian, Japanese, etc.). Third, that the document is presented in the correct directionality. This is a consideration for languages such as Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese that are customarily written right-to-left or top-to-bottom.
Who said computer games can’t teach you anything? This video demonstrates that computer games are the doorway to advanced learning with young people. I think if you can keep it fun with a pinch of competition then you can teach people anything.
Suppose ‘consciousness’ could be defined as the ability of a ‘being that can learn’ to understand how its self learns. Thus it then has to ‘decide’, a rudimentary idea in our perception of ‘consciousness’.
I think this explains to a degree then our ‘personality’ which we use to direct our experiences in the world and thus our learning. We, in a manner, feed our learning what it likes best: pleasurable experiences.
If this is true, what does it say about the ‘Turing test’ and there for the way forward for AI research.
Use Flash as a background image.
There are a multitude of problems with embedding Flash into valid mark-up. Basically:
Drupal treats taxonomies like any other entity and so you can have as many as you like. You then associate them with module types and when someone creates an instance of a new module (Node) they are given the option to select which term(s) (i.e. category) they want to put the data in. Modules can have more than one taxonomy associated with it. In reality all data is treated the same and the taxonomies make the bumps in the landscape. we had the problem that you couldn’t associate one bit of content with another but someone wrote a handy module to do this. It basically allowed parent child relationships between the data of different module types i.e. so a an ‘Article’ about a course could have ‘Events’ listed with it to book those courses. The interface became unintuitive because the admin had to make then both separately and then separately make the associating between the course description and the booking listings.
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Shirky: Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags
This article looks at ontology’s and compares traditional predefined fixed expert ontology’s with the current web trend of individually defined organically growing tagging of web content post-publishing that is becoming every more popular on the web.
It reviews the traditional methods and looks at how they are based on library’s who’s systems where designed to find a book on a shelf so a thus it had to have only one place in the catalog system.
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This is a summary of the article titled ‘Criteria for the Assessment of Foreign Language Instructional Software and Web Sites‘.
This article develops standards ‘for assessing language-learning software and Web sites’. It gives examples of assessments using these standards of all the note worth language packages/websites for the learning of Russian.
A note on general language acquisition:
research in second language acquisition shows us that learners need to have good, authentic input—listening to and reading comprehensible texts—and many opportunities to practice speaking by using the language to negotiate meaning in situations that resemble culturally authentic communicative contexts.
Three criteria for effective learning software are stated to be:
- More of the students will reach higher proficiency levels in one or another modality in the same amount of time. (This is a cognitive goal.)
- More of the students will be sufficiently engaged and energized in the learning process to want to continue for a longer period of time. Students will thus attain higher proficiency levels in one or more modalities than they would have if they had stopped the learning process earlier. (This is an affective goal leading indirectly to a cognitive goal.)
- More of the students will be able to organize their studies and thus achieve better learning outcomes. (This is a metacognitive goal leading indirectly to a cognitive goal. Software and Web sites that meet this criterion usually put at the learners’ disposal resources that might otherwise not be available or as accessible, such as online dictionaries and strategy tutorials.)
Also stipulated are:
five characteristics of pedagogical design for multimedia applications or classroom lessons:
- Learners must know what they are expected to do and what goals they are expected to achieve by completing the task.
- Learners must be adequately prepared to begin the task.
- Learners must be adequately trained to complete the task.
- Learners must be adequately tested to assess their completion of the task.
- Learners must be given opportunities to expand their learning beyond the task.
Finally he offers ‘two caveats’ for software designers in addition to the above which are:
Sound advice.
The hope here is to produce some software that can be used as a learning aid that can not only track the students progress but adapt to it and augment it. Ideally such a method could be applied to subjects other than language acquisition providing students with a completely personalised teacher that uses continual testing to provide feedback and direction.
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