Personal Blogs

The OU student blog platform changes are largely an improvement but there has been one catestrophic change - 2200+ blog posts later and all my tags are now in a random jumble rather than alphabetic order. How, after three years of effort building this am I supposed to find and click on a particular theme or issue, name or anything else? An easily fixed error surely? Using an iPad other functionailty has been lost - going into HTML mode you cannot copy or paste anything - crucial if you have a lengthry/complex url to paste in as a link or image.

Fig.1. From Max Hastings new book. Catastrophe.

This is wrong!

Russia's partial mobilization on the 26th understandably gave rise to considerable worry in Germany and Austria-Hungary.  Only when Russia fully mobilized on the 29th did Germany responded. It worries me how many inaccuracies, lies, and old assumptions will be published and broadcast over the next five years. Max Hastings is not an historian.

Perhaps in our connected 21st century any such errors will be quickly picked up.

Did your great-grandfather or grandfather take part in the conflict? Did a great-grandmother become a nurse? Is there a death or several indicated in your family tree from this period? How relevant is it today tothe map of Europe and of the world?

Fig.1. From the transcribed interview for the Business & Information Systems Engineering eJournal, Vol. 1 PP126-129 (2009)

Found as an eJournal rather than the title of the piece. I'll add him to my growing gallery of 'Who is who' of eLearning.

The fact that an entire paragraph of his interview is quoted by Prof. Laurilard suggests that he has something important to say. In parenthis (Laurilard) and blue (my choice). I will add examples or case studies to enhance and/or to embed my understanding of this.

(See last entry)

I'm delighted to say the the transformation is an enhancement and the improvements are seamless without any loss of what we had before ... a 'bulletin-board-cum-blog-thingey'. My previous post suggested I might have found a bolt-hole without Internet. It hasn't lasted.

I will get Internet access down the road (I had wanted a garden office but this desire became an insummountable barrier at home).

All that it requires from me is something I lack - self-discipline NOT to get distracted by email, which includes updated postings from forums and the likes of Linkedin (let alone a gaggle of family members on Facebook). AOL is the worst as I innocently go to check email and find 20 minutes later I am still clicking through the inviting gobbets of news and sensation that is offered. 

I had hoped to behave like the smoker trying to give up - I'll only smoke other people's fags. A very, very, very long time ago ... I can honestly say I have never smoked a cigarette since I turned 20.

Back to the Internet. Like Television.

Or diet. We are living in an age where self-control is vital. Having not had a TV for several months I was eventually pushed to buy one. Courtesy of Which? we now have a TV so Smart that it probably tells my brother in South Africa who is watching what .... we can Skype sofa to sofa. I just wonder if our antics could be recorded and posted on YouTube? Not my doing but any of the teenagers with the wherewithal just hit a record button somewhere.

In all this hi-tech I DO have a tool I'd recommend to anyone.

I've invested in an hour-glass. In runs for 30 minutes. While that sand is running all I may do is read and take notes. This might be an eBook, or a printed book, either way they are on a bookstand. I take notes, fountain pen to lined paper. What could be easier? The left hand may highlight or bookmark and turn a page, while the right writes?

This works as the filtering process of the knowledge that I am reading and want to retain needs to go through several steps in any case. The handwritten notes will be reduced again as I go through, typing up the ideas that have some resonance for me.

My current task has been 'How Europe went to war in 1914' by Christopher Clark.

I doubt my second thorough read will be the last. From notes I will start posting blogs and going into related social platforms to share and develop thoughts and in so doing be corrected while firming up my own views. I need this social interaction, to join the discussion if not the debate.

Meanwhile I will revisit Martin Weller's book on Digital Scholarship.

However swift the age of the Internet may be he suggests it will still take a person ten years to achieve the 'scholar' level ... whereas John Seely Brown recently reckoned this was now down to five years. i.e. through undergraduate and postgraduate levels and popping out the other end with a PhD in five years.

DIdn't an 18 year old who was home schooled just get called to the Bar?

She graduated with a law degree while contemporaries did A' Levels and finished High School and then did a year of pupillage I suppose.

The intellectual 'have's' of the future will, by one means of another, achieve degree status at this age. The Internet permits it.

School is far, far, far, far, far too lax.

It tends to the median if not the mediocre. Long ago it found a way to process kids as a genderless yeargroup instead of treading each student as an individual ... so let them skip a year, let them stay back a year ... allow them to expand and push subjects that appeal to them.

From Jack Wilson MM

Fig.1. My late grandfather featured in the Consett Gazette in 1917 on receiving the Military Medal.

A few months 'out of the loop' and I feel my knowledge on e-learning draining away - it is such a vibrant and fast moving area that I feel I need to refresh and update at every opportunity, so here I am again with H818 The Networked Practitioner.

There's a practice based element to this which I'll apply to an longheld interest in the First World War.

There'll be a lot of interest, reflection and soul searching over the 100th anniversary from 2014 to 2018. That war is relevant to the Europe and wider Europe we live in today, from Northern Ireland to Syria, via the Balkans and the EU.

I've just read 'The Sleepwalkers. Why Europe went to war in 1914'. By Christopher Clark.

More than any book I have read before on the subject this blows away any myths or propoganda - not least the fact that Germany did not start the war, that award goes to Russia with France's support. I'd have liked to study this period with the OU but the History modules simply don't accommodate this. I'll therefore be going up to the University of Birmingham, in person, once a month for a mamoth day-long series of tutorials and lectures. That's as 'distant' as it gets with very little online support.

I won't study at the OU just out of habit and I'll have to take on more work to pay for it, but I am looking to continue my studies here. Nothing else works but the relentlessness of it. I miss the 'railways tracks' of the VLE that punctuate my week with some reading with meaning and an activity or two or six or more.

Perhaps after a lifetime of wishing I could write as well as read French this is something I should tackle?

Having said that - a recent visit to Belgium and I was surprised when people looked at my blankly when I spoke French - for them it was Flemish or English. I gave up apologising for speaking English and slipped, usually, into a fluent conversation. It seems that Belgium is close to us, even if we aren't close to them. Like Scandinavia I think it has something to do with back to back English TV.

FIG.1. Projected onto the sitting room wall

The migration between kit and now the use of multiple devices tells its own story - that and my enhanced levels of digital literacies. And dependency on my OU blog??? I am too used to starting here then cutting and pasting the HTML results into WordPress. This platform works because it is kept simple. OK, you have to get your head around a few basics (which are good for any blogging platform), but the thing is stable and robust - it hasn't changed much in three years and it is always there.

Either I'll wean myself off it or I'll plugin to another module of course and be here for another decade. You get used to a thing - especially when it works. Calls to other institutions regarding their VLE have left me cold - some still old school box of books and turn up for an all day Saturday face-to-face once a month as your only tutor and peer group contact.

From a clapped out Mac Book that died and a Psion I moved on to a borrowed PC laptop ... and scrounging computer access around the home. Only recently I got a Mac Mini - for the previous 18 months I've been fine on an iPad with moments on my wife's PC to view and print off DOCX.

The Mac Mini gets what ever screen my teenage son leaves me with - he tends to snaffle away any new screen I get, just swaps them over. I may take me days to realise something is afoot.

And then there is the above - projected onto a wall with me working on a wifi keyboard and touchpad. It changes things. Next to this screen there is a large whiteboard. I get up and doodle.

As for the sitting room? Long gone. Cries for a TV to bring the family together fall on deaf ears. Why would any of us gather to watch ONE version of an event when we can each take or leave our news, or films, or anything else as we please on a bigger or smaller screen in various other rooms and cubbyholes around the house?

An iPad mini will replicate when I had a decade ago with a Psion, something handheld, light and discrete that I can tap on whenever I wish and wherever I am.

'The Private Life of the Brain' Susan Greenfield is my current highly recommended read. It is certain to take you off on a tangent from whatever you are studying, but if offers a layperson's view of the inner workings of the brain.

My belligerent stance on the impact of computers to the brain - not much in my view, we're too complex, our brains too massive (94 billion neurons) has been tipped on its head courtesy of a short interview on good old BBC's Woman's Hour last Thursday. The interviewee was Susan Greenfield (Professor & Baroness). She invited listeners to get in touch if they wanted the facts on 'mind change' - as big as 'climate change' in her view, that as the brain is affected by everything that hours spent infront of a 2 dimensional world (sound and vision) our minds, especially younger, plastic brains, will form connections that make these people different.

I particularly liked the thought that all the time a child spends infront of a screen is time NOT spent 'climbing trees, interacting face to face and having hugs'. I may be adrift at the moment but have a reading list for the summer.

And breathing space.

How I prepare a TMA or EMA is completely unlike anything I did in the early days, even in the first couple of years or more of the Masters in Open and Distance Education (MA ODE). It is far more like designing an Airfix model, making the parts, then constructing the thing. At this stage, having thought about and written up all the component parts I did a rough assembly and came up with 3437 words for a 4000 word assignment.

Actually this is too many words - not a problem as I know where the fat lies, ideas expressed in too large a chunk. After that it's a case of getting the prose to flow.

Prioritise and give it time to breathe. I've pretty much given up on social media too - this is study journal and a moment to reflect. 'Blogging' and writing an academic paper are very different things - even journalism doesn't get close. Blogging is playing in the sand, journalism is a papier-mache self-indulgent sculpture, whereas academic writing is gathering together a complete set of artefacts, carefully arranging them in a cabinet and including all the labels.

A new edition of the ‘dictionary’ of mental illnesses was published this year – the catchily named, DSM 5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, fifth edition). Compared to its predecessors, it classifies many more types of behaviour as ‘mental disorders’.

My view is that we should think of disease as the status quo, that  we all have something wrong with us, that this variety is part of what makes us human - we are not a troop of baboons, rather we are 7 billion lonely people, each unique, with very different brains, but also different responses to and vulnerabilities to disease. Modern science and computing in particular allows these conditions to be identified; many more such patterns will become clear as data is streamed into computers for analysis from people wearing or ingesting smart medical devices.

If this isn't a hypothesis that has been tested maybe I should take a look?