We are in the middle of a two-day blizzard. So, we have lots of time with nothing to do. Actually, I knew this was coming and brought plenty of work home. But, work is work and blizzards are for having a good time.
I had to do play around a bit to overcome the limits of WordPress.
Double click this image to play.
My son tweeted this morning about spending a tough night with a couple of friends (technical writers) who were just laid off. He has been working independently rather than for a production company most of his career and his life style is probably what more and more of us have to look forward to. At one time, he valued the opportunity and flexibility working for yourself allowed. He happens to be pretty good at what he does, but the stress of finding the next gig is always there.
If we are moving in this direction, I really wonder what happens when being hired as a temp to complete specific assignments becomes the norm. My fear is that a new normal will only increase the power/wealth/creativity gap. When most folks must scramble to find the next task, those who now relish their opportunities to be creative will find themselves in a much different situation. Creativity without security is not that common. Must be a Maslow hierarchy thing or something.
I know there is a similar trend in education. Tenure and security are out – possibly victims of public sentiment that regards those with secure positions as free loaders taking advantage of the system. Funny as I comment this morning (Saturday) on this topic there are three people in their offices on my floor – average age about 60.
High standards, new ideas, and creativity – supposedly what we need to compete and advance. Is that what you get when those with the most experience must accept their assignments from administrators with their own agendas? There really is a very significant difference between the commitment you see in those who work to live and those who live to work. Working to live means you complete assigned tasks and then go home. Living to work means you take a break to complete a blog post because you can and then you return to what you do weekend or not. Some of us are lucky.
If you spend a great deal of time using GMail, you may want to take note of a new feature. This feature adds a simple to-do list (called tasks). TechCrunch provided the first description I read.
My experience in trying the feature was a little different so I will attempt to explain the activation procedure as I experienced it.
I found that the feature had to be activated from Settings (top of GMail screen). The beaker symbol did not appear for me until I had activated “Tasks”. I am guessing the beaker symbol does not appear until you experiment with one feature.
Under the settings heading, you want to activate “Tasks”. This is the to-do feature.
When tasks is activated, a link (Tasks) will appear in the left sidebar under contacts.
Selecting the “Tasks” link opens a window allowing the input, deletion, and prioritization of tasks.
Dave Warlich’s post on learning at conferences gives me an opportunity to say some things I have been thinking about for some time. First, let me say that the conference experience is not a unitary thing. There are various types of sessions and various categories of presenters. There are also informal opportunities that are planned for and that attendees generate themselves. Second, folks go to conferences for multiple reasons. My attitudes are my own and reflect my experiences and personality. Conferences also differ greatly. I attend some conferences at which most attendees are active researchers and are there to share (AERA). They present, but they also listen. I attend other conferences which involve very distinct categories of participants – some presenters arrive, give their pitch and then leave; others mostly listen and move from session to session picking up what they can (NECC).
I hate it when a presenter in a moderately sized group or larger takes time away from a presentation to engage the audience in a Q&A or worse yet asks them to talk among themselves. I attend sessions based on the topic and the reputation of the presenter. My time at most conferences is limited and I would rather not spend it in what nearly always amounts to unproductive chit chat. Random combinations of people in a large group sharing ideas for a few minutes at a time seems very unproductive. I know that short writing assignments and short discussions are promoted in large lecture classes, but this is a very different situation in which the participants spend a great deal of time together and acquire some skill in responding to what become predictable requests from the instructor. A presenter is not an instructor. If the presenter is not going to present, I would like to know so ahead of time so that I can avoid such sessions.
A format that I do like is the round table. This is one of the options AERA uses as an alternative to short (15-20 minute) research papers and longer presentations. You can move from table to table if you like, but typically you pick the paper that most interests you and spend a longer period of time with that group. The person presenting his/her work usually has a paper to distribute and spends some time describing their work, but the interaction is free flowing and unpredictable. Most conferences have sessions focused around a large collection of posters that provide similar opportunities.
So, most conferences have opportunities for topical discussions. I would rather when someone signs on to take the role of presenter they not turn their session into something else.
I seem to remember that Microsoft Word has a built-in autosummarization tool. I am the curious type so I have used it to see what the tool thought was the core of what I had written. I was never certain what I was to do with the results. After spending hours writing something, I was not likely to send a 10 sentence summary to anyone.
GreatSummary offers a similar service online. You submit a URL or upload a document and the service will return a summary consisting of the number of sentences you specify.
According to the site, the system works by:
# Using a mathematical technique called singular value decomposition, the system identifies the words that capture the key threads of the text. The process is repeated until the number of sentences requested by the user is reached.
# GreatSummary then ranks the sentences according to these words.
The content I decided to summarize can be found on our web site – Participatory Web. It is a description of Web 2.0 (participatory web) applications and the common characteristics that identify Web 2.0 applications. I would think the core of this piece would be the characteristics of Web 2.0 applications. Our list was not selected, but the first sentence selected (see below) is a reasonable choice.
* Our intent is to offer these examples as a frame of reference before attempting to identify ”characteristics” of these or other examples that both explain what experts argue make such a collection of services different from what was available previously and perhaps set the stage for speculation regarding the adaptation of such services for educational purpose (18)
* We provide these examples because we assume you are aware of at least a few, not because we are proposing that the examples are suited to educational applications as the examples are commonly encountered or that a given example is the most educationally relevant within a category (e.g., all blog services, all wikis). (18)
* Within this environment, learners have ready access to the collected skills and knowledge of the community (collective intelligence) and these resources can be tapped efficiently (access data at a granular level). (43)
* Henry Jenkins (2006) (note this is a pdf) challenges educators to involve students with participatory experiences to address some different issues. (46)
* Taking some time to consider these characteristics is productive because it is the characteristics rather than the examples that make the case for a qualitative difference in the way many use the Internet (28)
It reminds me of the speed reader’s summary of War and Peace.
It’s about Russia.
The question of exactly what conditions must be met before online participatory experiences result in increased rather than decreased insight continues to fascinate me. I am using the opportunity presented by teaching introductory topics in social psychology to explore topics in group information gathering and processing. Groupthink and selective bias were known issues long before bloggers attempted to educate themselves by reading the comments of others with similar views. Part of what I am doing is translating some of the research from the textbook into examples students may appreciate. I am not certain that I will discuss blogs and the bias in blog rolls, but I think the question of whether you prefer FoxNews or CNN and what is your political orientation is likely to make some sense. I am also thinking that using the “poll the audience” example from “Who wants to be a millionaire” will be more likely to connect than talking about wikis. Students are very familiar with wikipedia, but for them it exists as an online information rather than a participatory opportunity.
I collected data in my last class that I am preparing to present and discuss during our next meeting. James Surowieki begins the “Wisdom of Crowds” (at least the audio version) by telling a story about Sir Francis Galton. According to Surowieki’s account, Galton was somewhat of an elitist and believed that expertise should be trusted over the wishes of the group in making important decisions. However, an event at a country fair resulted in a somewhat different perspective. Galton observed an event in which a large of group offered predictions on the dressed weight of a live ox. Within the group were some (e.g., farmers) who might have unique knowledge in such matters and many others who would seem to know very little. After the event, Galton secured the data and conducted his own analysis. Galton, a pioneer in statistical techniques, discovered that the average guess of the group was remarkably close to the actual weight. The aggregate of the crowd’s knowledge, the input of experts combined with the input of the agriculturally uneducated, was superior to nearly every individual prediction (and the predictions of most of the experts).
So, I decided to see what I could do to replicate this demonstration. I was not exactly certain where I might locate an ox and to tell the truth I am not exactly sure what an ox is (we had cows back on the farm in Iowa). I decided to substitute a large box of Hot Tamales. I have no explanation for this choice and understand that the connection between the ox and a favorite candy possibly defies any known form of logic. Anyway, I offered a box of Hot Tamales to the student or students who came closest to the box I held up. Because others may not have my personal experiences, I also opened a second box to show the size of a hot tamale and passed the open box around for individuals to sample. Students submitted their estimates on signed slips of paper.
It turned out the box held 131 pieces of candy. The average estimate was 143 which was somewhere in the 60th percentile of all estimates (significantly above average). It looked like my little experiment had kind of worked, but I was hoping for something more spectacular. When examining the individual estimates I discovered one entry that predicted the box would contain 1000 pieces of candy. How could anyone seriously believe this could be true? Perhaps I had tapped into a type of learning disability – some failed form of basic numeracy. More likely, this situation may have involved a student who did not appreciate the seriousness of the task I had presented. Such things do happen in Intro Psych. Anyway, I discarded this one entry – statisticians might label it an outlier – and the results were magical. The group average was 131.7. The closest prediction was 135 (3 individuals).
I have some difficulty grasping exactly how this works. As I understand the explanation, any “estimate” consists of knowledge and error. As long as the error does not reflect bias it will be random and pretty much cancel itself out (as much error above the true value as below). I remember the concept of “true score” from my early statistical training, but I am not certain if this is the same thing. As you are reading the answers and encounter values from the 60s to 250s, it is difficult to imagine that the mean will be nearly right on.
So what might the Intro students know that would be valuable? I suppose most have useful notions of volume and numeracy. It turned out some had knowledge I did not anticipate. In passing the box around several noticed the nutritional information. This box contains 7 servings. Each serving consists of 20 pieces. Lucky for me, since I am purchasing a box for those making the best estimates, the manufacturer must only have to offer approximate information. Galton might have sided with the smug experts. Ha, no candy for you!
The news this evening carried a story concerning Apple Computer’s attempt to become “greener”. Sure enough when I visited the Apple site and searched for green I found a note from Steve outlining the efforts being made to remove harmful toxic chemicals from computers and to increase recycling.
However, the story also reminded me of some pictures I took a couple weeks ago.
Cindy received a grant to use iPods to help ESL students and their families. I took these pictures as she was in the process of unboxing her new equipment. There must be a less wasteful way to ship this product.
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