Afterhours in the Juniverse - Archives for October, 2002

I like Monday's Doonesbury cartoon. The dialogue:

* [looking over the shoulder of the other at a computer] What's that?

- Today's blog entry.

* Get out - you have a web log?

- Yup. My daily take on what's going on in the world.

* Wow!... that's impressive, dude. I had no idea... Wait, don't you have to have something to say?

- A common misconception.

I haven't been blogging much lately. Mainly because I've been working on a project I need to get finished by month's end, but also because, despite daily scanning of a few dozen mailing lists, etc., I simply haven't seen anything recently I feel moved enough to comment on. Not in a brief blog post, anyway; I've got scads of files on all sorts of stuff, but those are mostly material for longer essays.

I envy people who can just sit and write on any old topic and without stopping to massage the sentences into greater clarity - my style is mostly write once, edit three or four times. Even a few paragraph blog post can sometimes take hours. I can't see spending that amount of time and energy on something I don't care much about, so I won't. In the words of James Russell Lowell:

"Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it."

Seven more from the film festival:

* The Burial Society. One of the best - a comic-thriller that left me on the edge of my seat wondering what happens next. The plot has some logical holes, but its unexpected twists more than make up for them.

* Cry-Woman. Interesting plot idea, but spoiled by a completely unsympathetic and somewhat unbelievable heroine.

* Eliana, Eliana. Another unsympathetic heroine - whine, whine, whine! No real subtlety.

* A Little Colour. An enjoyable light romance. As one departing male member of the audience put it, a chick flick. (As opposed to a dick flick, with explosions, guns and mayhem.)

* Long Life, Happiness and Prosperity. A fun comedy, with some marvelous actors and a local Vancouver Chinese community setting.

* No-one's Ark. Boring. Slow paced, little plot, zzzz.....

* Tussenland: Sleeping Rough. Simple plot, but some lovely character studies and believable age and culture conflicts.

Combined with the first four, a total of eleven films, with four duds. A huge number of others that I didn't see - I envy a bit those people who take their yearly vacations during these few weeks and buy unlimited passes - sure beats a lot of other holidays I can think of.

Now that I've finally got a printer with the appropriate driver, I'm moving over to OS X (Jaguar). I've just spent the last few days housecleaning my files. The process feels like moving house: you toss all the old stuff you don't need and move the rest into more suitable quarters. Amazing what junk collects when you're not worried about space - I'm still only using a fraction of my hard drive, but at least with the junk and out-of-date stuff gone or filed, I have a better idea of what I have. And where I have it: documents all sorted into folders in the Documents folder, apps in the Applications folder; oooh, I'm so organized! - wonder how long that will last.

Jaguar runs slowly on this machine (a 400 MHz G3). I love the Mail app's spam filter, but Mail is too slow to be useable, so I'm still using Eudora and my previous set of custom filters, which work nearly as well. There's a funny Jaguar weirdness going on, too: if I drag a desktop icon to the far left of the desktop (so its name juts off the left edge), then when I release it, it jumps to the right - and so does every other icon on my desktop. I was wondering why my icons kept drifting off the right edge of my screen! Happens on my iBook, too. There's a similar weirdness when I rename files in list-ordered folders - they jump right.

Next thing I want to do is replace that stupid dock if I can - my DragThing docks are much more useful.

Some interesting stuff from Stephen Downes today (er, yesterday - where did the evening go?)

First, an article in the Learning Place, entitled The New Literacy. The first and next-to-last sentences are bookends surrounding and summarizing a fascinating discussion of the generation gap in how we use media to learn and communicate.

Time and again we hear from academics bemoaning the loss of the cultivated and literate student in today's schools, the victim, they say, of a multi-media diet of McDonalds, music videos and post-modernist pablum.

...

But lament it we should not, because by avoiding the need to codify knowledge into sentences and seminars students today are acquiring not only different modes of learning, but much more efficient and effective modes of memory and recall.

I don't always agree with Stephen, but here, he's right on the mark. Echoes in that last sentence as well of what Walter Stewart (SGI) says in his public talks.

The second piece is his commentary in OLDaily on the paper on interactivity by Terry Anderson that I posted about a bit back. As noted before on this weblog, Stephen's not too impressed by the idea of student-content interactivity. What's interesting here is how he dismisses it from his world view:

Yes, there is a third dimension of interaction. This dimension is sufficient to support learning. But this interaction is not with content itself, but with non-human devices that hold content. Working with online content should be viewed as analagous to working with a human. Changing, manipulating, querying and selecting online content should be viewed as analagous to changing a person's mind, influencing their thought, asking them questions, or picking their brains.

The error here is seeing interactivity with online content as merely a form of organizing and reorganizing information retrieved online into different patterns. That may be true in word-based subjects like philosophy or the social sciences. But a child with a dynamic geometry software program who moves circles and lines around the screen and transforms them to discover new patterns and relationships among them is not interacting with any pre-existing database of information; he is interacting with the geometric objects themselves. A chemistry student working with an online lab experiment is not interested in "changing a person's mind, influencing their thought"; she's interested in finding out (safely) what happens if two chemicals are mixed.

We interact differently with content in different subject areas, and it's a mistake to assume that the forms of student-content interaction used in discussion-based subjects are the same as those used in other subjects.

The Math Forum reports on an interesting site at UBC: Oliver Byrne's edition of Euclid. Byrne's book was published in 1847, and presents the first six books of Euclid as much as possible in terms of pictures. Instead of the customary labels to denote objects, the book represents and distinguishes segments, angles, areas, etc. by means of bright colours. The book, considered "one of the oddest and most beautiful books of the century", has been digitized by UBC's Digital Mathematics Archive.

Whether or not Byrne's efforts complicate or simplify Euclid is an interesting and debatable point. Parts of Byrne's attempt to design 'colour-coded' mathematical proofs are more successful than others, but it is our hope that even the less successful parts can serve as themes for discussion if not models for imitation.

It's interesting that this attempt to communicate mathematics non-symbolically was published so many years ago. I think he was on the right track as far as communication goes; it's clearer to refer to "the red triangle" and so on than to chase letters around a diagram to find triangle ABC out of a dozen or so labeled points. Publishing mathematical diagrams in any colour other than black on white has usually been prohibitively expensive up till now, making literal labels essential. With electronic publication, things have changed; simple drawing programs can easily make professional coloured diagrams for use online. Maybe it's time to reduce the mathematical symbollicosis that obscures so much current mathematical presentation and look at Byrne's idea anew?

For October 2002