Forgetting to speak

Two arti­cles from The Sun-Herald & The Age today con­trasted starkly and got me suf­fi­ciently upset. An Aus­tralian com­pany unveils a brain inter­face sys­tem for appli­ca­tion with com­puter games, which is quite geeky and, quite frankly, very cool.

“US reports sug­gested chil­dren took to the sys­tem more quickly than adults who were less able to engage in fantasy.”

Yes, okay. I’d love to be able to use this to get things done in Pho­to­shop more quickly — its appli­ca­tions seem pri­mar­ily cre­ative in nature rather than sim­ply replac­ing a key­board, etc., but that’s not really what upset me.

Excuse The Age’s hor­rif­i­cally sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic “TV blamed for rise in child-speech prob­lems” head­line, but the actual arti­cle isn’t that rub­bish. Essen­tially, it attrib­utes an anec­do­tal rise in speech prob­lems and a quan­tifi­able detection-associated rise in refer­rals to speech pathologists.

“There is good data to show that the more often you sit around a din­ing room table and have a con­ver­sa­tion around a meal, the bet­ter the lan­guage devel­op­ment of chil­dren,” he said.

Psy­chol­o­gists in Britain were run­ning a cam­paign called Back to the Table to try to get fam­i­lies to share meals together around a table on a reg­u­lar basis.

I’m not so con­cerned by it because I don’t have kids. I’m con­cerned by it because I deal with kids prob­a­bly just enough to notice.

Funny how two arti­cles so often crop up on the same day so starkly under­min­ing one another’s message!

For all the rhetor­i­cal garbage that media stud­ies & dig­i­tal cul­ture (described by a lec­turer as hav­ing emerged from soci­ol­ogy, only with­out method — I jest not) spew out about how we should eschew the pes­simistic futur­ists that tell us new media is only serv­ing to dis­tance us all… they are, in my view, quite plainly ignor­ing at least some of the impacts of these emerg­ing mediums.

This is frus­trat­ing. I want to believe tech­nol­ogy is ped­a­gog­i­cally advan­ta­geous, but strug­gle immensely with its appli­ca­tion even where there are fan­tas­tic (tech­nol­ogy, not con­tent) resources avail­able – and I’m a geek. Admit­tedly, that’s no qual­i­fi­ca­tion to teach, but it should at least mean some kind of cre­ativ­ity where the two meet. Or not.

Mostly, though, this isn’t about tech­nol­ogy at all. It’s about its effects, intended or oth­er­wise — and par­tic­u­larly for chil­dren. I don’t even see the speech prob­lems so much as the things that sur­round them, in the forms of atten­tion span & rela­tional dif­fi­cul­ties with both friends (less com­mon) and fam­ily. Please be pray­ing for wis­dom in think­ing through how best to deal with these issues.

(Yes, I am still say­ing I want to do sec­ondary teach­ing. I feel like I’m slowly being changed to have an open­ness to either sec­ondary or pri­mary, though. If you feel so inclined, pray about that, too!)

# by Josh on March 18th, 2007 Tags: , , ,
| 9 Comments »

Abuse of language; or, what is a lecture?

I have a clash in my uni timetable. That’s okay. But it would aid my deci­sion mak­ing process in what sub­ject I am plan­ning to avoid immensely if bloody aca­d­e­mics under­stood the mean­ings of words they encounter and use daily.

Accord­ing to the OED:

lec­ture, n.
4. a. A dis­course given before an audi­ence upon a given sub­ject, usu­ally for the pur­pose of instruction.

How then, I ask, is it accept­able to label a given teach­ing time an “inter­ac­tive lec­ture” wherein the prin­ci­pal activ­ity con­sti­tutes what would, in com­mon par­lance, be termed “group work”? Call if a sym­po­sium or some­thing else equally wanky and pre­ten­tious if you can’t bring your­selves to call a spade a spade and per­haps sim­ply call it a sem­i­nar, but for good­ness sake — avoid bas­tar­dis­ing terms where the nature of their deliv­ery and method is clearly under­stood to be some­thing else entirely!

This is not the fault of the Eng­lish depart­ment, by the way. The sub­ject in ques­tion is run by the fartily named “Dig­i­tal Cul­tures” school. I do not esteem them very highly thus far… the sub­ject seems like a bit of a waste of time, but hope­fully it’ll be good for net­work­ing with a hand­ful of other peo­ple in the course who also feel they’re hav­ing their time wasted, and then we can sub­vert the depart­ment from within by allow­ing actual web prac­tice to influ­ence these (prob­a­bly self-proclaimed futur­ist) lec­tur­ers in courses they don’t really understand.

I paid $17 for a pho­to­copied course reader full of arti­cles from before Bub­ble 1.0 burst. Rec­om­mended read­ing for “Web 2.0″ (yes, they dared use that word) con­sists of Wikipedia and arti­cles in Time mag­a­zine. Yes, I feel as vio­lated as you do. This seems like an area of ter­tiary edu­ca­tion that is par­tic­u­larly lost in its own mud­dled up lan­guage and self-congratulatory con­fer­ences and pub­li­ca­tions that it has not the fog­gi­est idea what real peo­ple are doing with the web. Or, alter­na­tively, if that’s not the case, there seems to be an awful lot of catch-up work required on the ped­a­gogy front: the reader facil­i­tates some kind of pseudo-sociological explo­ration of ‘the web’ as an entity, but some­how man­ages to seem com­pletely irrel­e­vant to actual practice.

What on earth is a Dig­i­tal Cul­tures major equip­ping peo­ple for? Not engage­ment with online media! An abil­ity to dis­cern a qual­ity Wikipedia arti­cle, and a cul­ti­vated taste for arti­cles in Time, and, per­haps, at best, an abil­ity to read par­tic­u­larly head-up-ass style jour­nals address­ing issues that are so bound up in recent anachro­nism that it can’t even be deemed an his­tor­i­cally valu­able specialisation?

Okay I’m [nearly] done. I’m going to stick around in the course because stu­dents were hav­ing some really inter­est­ing dis­cus­sions fairly inde­pen­dently of the lecturer’s [sic] direc­tion today, and because there are some peo­ple that sound like they have some idea what they’re talk­ing about. Of course, there’s always one mature age male try­ing to con­vince peo­ple to join him in devel­op­ing some web 2.0 social net­work­ing busi­ness case, but one in a course of sixty isn’t too bad. Grum­ble grum­ble. He’s prob­a­bly back at uni after hav­ing sent some poor busi­ness bankrupt.

I can see this hav­ing the poten­tial to be like a real-world overly-opinionated dis­cus­sion forum, but that’ll prob­a­bly be fun for a semes­ter. My opin­ions reserve the right to change dra­mat­i­cally over the com­ing weeks — I write this from only two hours of read­ing and an hour of “lecture”.

Really, I feel bet­ter now :)

# by Josh on March 7th, 2007 Tags: , , ,
| No Comments »

WordPress and another day in the life of Josh

A few loosely-strung-together obser­va­tions about today:

  • I need to build a caffiene tol­er­ance. Last night became 3am before I realised (but I did get lots done, so it’s not all bad)
  • O-week-day sucked. Hardly any cor­po­rate types hand­ing out free crap this year. Not that I’m one of those acquis­i­tive types, oh no. :|
  • Went to a UNSW Eng­lish lec­ture — just for kicks — and stuck my hand up to answer a ques­tion — again, just for kicks. It’s one thing to ran­domly rock up to lec­tures at another uni, and another thing alto­gether to actively par­take in them. Good times. It’s kinda like the agony that was ENGL1005 only with tacit acknowl­edge­ment that it is, in fact, well within the realm of lin­guis­tics. It was a cross-listed english/lingustics course-coded course, and they’re focus­ing on sys­temic func­tional lin­guis­tics instead of pure func­tional gram­mar — the NCELTR/Butt UFG text was sit­ting on the lecturer’s desk, but she didn’t men­tion it.
    Which is, in my mind, prob­a­bly more sen­si­ble. The lec­turer clearly delin­eated that there are, in fact, two dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines at work in that course which can serve to com­ple­ment each other, unlike in ENGL1005 at USyd where every­thing just got heaped into a mass grave and stu­dents were left to sort out the bones. The UNSW course is more like a well organ­ised, air-conditioned morgue. (I jest, though feel that more than any other sub­ject thus far, 1005 nearly killed me).
  • UNSW have a nice relaxed library lawn at lunch. It’s like the front of the quad only more inti­mate & shady & with added live music… though that might just be them suck­ing in first-years in the open­ing weeks.
  • I was not the only UNSW imposter today, which was at once strange, amus­ing, and scary.
  • I am not a good song­writer and revel in shar­ing that gen­eral inep­ti­tude in an amus­ing way. It is fun hav­ing some­one around who can play the gui­tar well, even when they sing worse than you do.
  • Word­Press 2.1’s front-page-as-page capa­bil­i­ties are abysmally over-rated. Or, at least, I abysmally over-rated them when the fea­ture was announced. There’s a rea­son it was a point-release addi­tion, methinks. I’m using a mix­ture of post-chronology and the usual hack­ery that I tend to get by with. I’m renounc­ing Semiologic’s front-page-plugin because it’s eas­ier to just hack it up in the tem­plates nicely. I get by.
  • I am scared of designers.
  • I feel increas­ingly like a designer as the days go by.
  • Every­one is get­ting busi­ness cards printed at a thou­sand dif­fer­ent print shops. I am begin­ning to think the only thing that dif­fer­en­ti­ates them is turn­around time. Mine takes ten work­ing days. I need them in seven. *fin­gers crossed*
  • I dis­like hav­ing to wait on peo­ple for things with loom­ing deadlines.
  • I am look­ing for an excuse to com­plain about a cer­tain website’s host­ing so I can cam­paign to get it moved some­where I trust (and not in a conflict-of-interest type way, for I wouldn’t touch run­ning host­ing for it with a barge pole)/with a bet­ter track record of reliability
  • I signed up for a Voice over IP ser­vice with DID with­out really know­ing why. Some­thing to do with redi­rec­tion and giv­ing a mobile a land­line num­ber with­out incur­ring ridicu­lous bills in these dark post-Orange days. And no, 3 have noth­ing to offer me.
  • A cer­tain Pharaoh got very seri­ously pwned in the exo­dus of the Jew­ish nation from Egypt in the Bible. Every­one (yes, includ­ing the other peo­ple of the Egypt­ian nation) saw it com­ing, includ­ing him­self: “Pharaoh hastily called Moses and Aaron and said, “I have sinned against the LORD your God, and against you. Now there­fore, for­give my sin, please, only this once, and plead with the LORD your God only to remove this death from me.” So he [Moses] went out from Pharaoh and pleaded with the LORD.” — he pleads hastily, and begs to be for­given only this one time. I think this is like peo­ple pray­ing in extreme cir­cum­stances today — they don’t nec­es­sar­ily know any­thing about God, and just turn to him as a very last resort. But as soon as he’s for­given (in this case, he wanted to be for­given because locusts had just eaten every sin­gle plant in the entire coun­try, and “the land was dark­ened” there were so many of them) his heart is hard­ened and he refuses to release the peo­ple of Israel from slavery.
  • I am feel­ing par­tic­u­larly un-on-top-of-things at the minute, and antic­i­pate this may get worse once uni starts up again. I’ve been work­ing stu­pidly lots this week to try and get in front but it’s like try­ing to climb out of quick­sand (hint: the best trick is not to move). Well, maybe not mov­ing would be a bad thing, but even so. I’m only doing 3 sub­jects and hop­ing that’ll be ben­e­fi­cial in bal­anc­ing var­i­ous commitments.
  • I am too excited about free­lance things. They are the sub­sis­tence farm­ing of web & cre­ative employ­ment. And pour­ing every­thing into a job is the sub­sis­tence farm­ing of life… it’s never going to be quite enough. I am try­ing hard not to fall into that trap but can’t resist it by my will alone.
  • My sleep­ing pat­terns need to be beaten back into sub­mis­sion. Last year I was more reg­u­lar in hol­i­days than any time uni was on, but this year I’ve been work­ing from home so that means I’m free to work caffiene-powered 13-hour days if the need should arise. Less of this would be more healthy.
  • As would join­ing uni gym and eat­ing less pizza. I really have no idea where to start, though.
  • I am going to bed 3 hours later than I had planned to.

*files under “everything”*

# by Josh on February 28th, 2007 Tags: , , , , , , , ,
| 4 Comments »

Walt Whitman and the Most Boring Lecture Yet

Well, it might be the sim­pler Eng­lish course this semes­ter, but that doesn’t mean its poten­tial for frus­tra­tion is in any way dimin­ished. Some lec­turer wasted an hour of my life today talk­ing about the bind­ing and cover of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the three metaphors in the title of that work, par­rot­ing some Emer­son essay for about thirty min­utes, and extolling the virtues of the Amer­i­can char­ac­ter as though it were some homo­erotic process of cre­ative inspi­ra­tion. Oh. Dear. And I won’t even start on her inep­ti­tude in the art of click­ing “next” in Pow­er­point. Shoot me now.

Unfor­tu­nately it is the same lec­turer again tomor­row. I’m going to be get­ting an aisle seat close to the door.

Then there is (mer­ci­fully) a one-week hia­tus, after which she will pro­ceed to (prob­a­bly) butcher Emily Dick­in­son — who looks vastly more inter­est­ing than Whit­man to start with, but I fear this can only mean there is fur­ther to fall.

# by Josh on August 1st, 2006 Tags: , , , ,
| 9 Comments »

Vocational vicissitude

I never thought I’d use my voca­tional train­ing Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy cre­den­tials to any great effect, but have dis­cov­ered oth­er­wise in my first sub­ject this semes­ter (Com­put­ers in Edu­ca­tion, part of EDUF1019). I [will, on sub­mis­sion of a bun­dle of pho­to­copied joy (also known as cer­tifi­cate doc­u­men­ta­tion) sit­ting next to me] be exempt from atten­dance for the rest of semes­ter until the open-book exam in week eleven. Spectacular.

I don’t par­tic­u­larly believe Cer­tifi­cate III train­ing in Net­work Admin­is­tra­tion is par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to Clar­is­works, but no mat­ter! The ram­i­fi­ca­tions of this one HSC sub­ject (and very very lit­tle asso­ci­ated effort/work!) are astounding!

Despite all this, some inter­est­ing stuff about education-research-specific data­bases, etcetera, so I might go along next week any­way as the lec­turer (facil­i­ta­tor? It’s not a lec­ture nor par­tic­u­larly a tuto­r­ial, so I’m uncer­tain!) says it’ll be a bit more of the same stuff… after week 2 it’s meant to get into mun­dan­ity (impor­tant mun­dan­ity, I’m sure, but not par­tic­u­larly stim­u­lat­ing if you don’t have to!)

Maybe IT and education/arts aren’t as dichoto­mous as once thought… hmm. Along that line of thought, looks like Edu­ca­tion get all the cool toys! I walked down­stairs to level 2 on my way to the Com­put­ers in Edu­ca­tion thing and there were two guys set­ting up a room with a Pana­sonic MX-70, heaps of LCD pre­view mon­i­tors, video dis­tri­b­u­tion amps, audio gear (includ­ing valve pre-amps and other such nice thin­gies), and var­i­ous other won­der­ful geeky things. It’s a pretty strange rig for an edit­ing suite, but an even stranger secu­rity mon­i­tor­ing setup (like, unbe­liev­ably waste­ful if that’s what it’s all for!)… but any­way, I’m hop­ing to fig­ure out what on earth it’s for then spend lots of time in there by what­ever means pos­si­ble! Muwahahahaha.

In other uni-related news, I changed my timetable for this semes­ter around a bit so that I don’t have an Eng­lish sem­i­nar end­ing at 7pm and can get to The Night Train (and our Wednes­day night bible study once that kicks off again in the sec­ond half of the semes­ter) with­out speeding/taxis/killing small children/missing sem­i­nars. Which is always a good thing!

# by Josh on July 24th, 2006 Tags: , , ,
| 5 Comments »

Whinging about uni and stuff

Today was, erm, inter­est­ing. One of the few peo­ple at uni that I’ve met since start­ing there (Will), and with whom I shared two courses (more than with any other per­son I know/have spo­ken to more than once), trans­ferred degrees today and is now going to be study­ing at Cum­ber­land cam­pus. Which is totally a good thing from where he’s sit­ting and Cum­ber­land is even closer and stuff, but… gah! –1 friend! This whole meeting-lots-of-people-and-trying-to-remember-names thing is way over-rated. Not that there’s really any alter­na­tive if I’m going to do uni with­out going crazy/existing in some ridicu­lous Christian-only under­world (because those are the peo­ple I’m guar­an­teed to meet) — though per­haps the two aren’t that distinct ;-)

So I thought I was start­ing to go places on that front. Appar­ently not. It’s inter­est­ing try­ing to make friends and meet­ing new peo­ple, and bal­anc­ing the fact that you really want to make friends with, well, every­thing else. As in, when you’re in a tut and after speak­ing to the per­son next to you for 10 min­utes (intro ses­sion thingy) realise that you’re really not going to get along (I don’t just mean dis­agree about stuff… I don’t mind that at all!) even though you can keep a con­ver­sa­tion up quite eas­ily with the usual bor­ing ques­tions about what degree, courses, subsequent-application-of-Arts-degree-in-some-way and so forth… but know that even if you actively tried to sit next to this per­son in a tuto­r­ial (or, shock, even a lec­ture of too-many-people) it wouldn’t be a par­tic­u­larly stimulating/enjoyable experience.

Maybe you read that and are now con­vinced I’m a snob. If so, we all are. If someone’s agenda revolves around sport, we’re not going to have par­tic­u­larly stim­u­lat­ing con­ver­sa­tions unless they diverge into literature/IT/history/random films they’ve seen/books they’ve read/ideas+more abstract mat­ters. That is, stim­u­lat­ing con­ver­sa­tions by my reck­on­ing. Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of dial­o­gism applies here: in a com­pe­ti­tion between sev­eral com­pet­ing per­spec­tives, it is accept­able — if not expected — that I will “fore­ground” my own val­ues here. Heh. So… be offended, or not, what­ever. Prefer­ably not… I haven’t really said any­thing offen­sive, only that I don’t like talk­ing about sport for pro­longed peri­ods: mostly because I have never made any great effort to fol­low any sport in par­tic­u­lar, which has a ten­dancy to make con­ver­sa­tion a lit­tle strained… and, in a dia­logic way, tend to force myself into the back­ground (con­trary to the notion that one will always tend to fore­ground oneself!)

There we go. Bun­dled lit­er­ary elit­ism. Good stuff. (Not that hard to fol­low, though Wikipedia’s Dial­o­gism arti­cle is a bit crap… I think stub-like)

Any­way. Had my first Phi­los­o­phy tut yes­ter­day and was thor­oughly unim­pressed, I think in part coz it took me too long to find the room and it was over­crowded and I was tired and already irri­ta­ble, and then our tutor per­son started using “true/false” and “valid/invalid” inter­changably for half the tut, which was prob­a­bly the most unhelp­ful thing he pos­si­bly could have done at that point. I had a per­fectly sound under­stand­ing of every­thing we’d cov­ered before going into that tut, spent 30 min­utes in utter befuz­zle­ment, then after a bit of aggres­sive ques­tion­ing we got back to san­ity. I wasn’t the only one [ask­ing ques­tions]… but started off the cas­cade of ques­tions lead­ing back to the core idea I’m pretty sure most peo­ple already under­stood, and started off… prob­a­bly too aggres­sively. Now my tutor prob­a­bly hates me from the very start… not that I really care, because the class size is like… 32 or there­abouts, so it’s way too big for some­thing in which engag­ing (as in, engag­ing of all in the group) dis­cus­sion can fea­si­bly be had. Same goes for remem­ber­ing names.

Then the phi­los­o­phy lec­ture today was all about rab­bits or “Bun­nies”, as the lec­turer — dif­fer­ent per­son to the tutor — so fondly calls them. Heh. Oooh… indi­ca­tor of my mood in tuto­r­ial is an exam­ple I gave to make a point about dis­tinc­tion between invalid/untrue. Sorry, have to share this whilst on the sub­ject of bunnies!

  • All bun­nies will die in 2005.
  • It is 2006.
  • Bugs Bunny is a rabbit.
  • There­fore, Bugs Bunny is dead.

Muwa­haha. (The point being that my argu­ment is “valid”, even if my premises are “false” — and hence my con­clu­sion is also “false”.) Any­way. Today’s lec­ture was all about bun­nies and how car­bo­hy­drates are like crack (as in cocaine) to them. Other crack ref­er­ences abounded. Lec­turer spoke about free will. Spoke about how he’d love to lec­ture naked… notes that was a joke, and that he would be too ashamed. Moves back to crack. Runs out of time, rushes through pic­tures of furry ani­mals, micro­phone stops work­ing (repeat­edly — it was demon­strat­ing free will to ignore what he was say­ing), starts talk­ing about cocaine some more. He has free will to con­sume all the crack he wants, as we have free will to ridicule him. Cer­tainly the peo­ple sit­ting around me were ridi­cul­ing him… oth­ers may have thought he was the coolest thing since… some­thing cool. I dunno, junkie philoso­phers don’t really do it for me. He was explain­ing some basic stuff about the nature of free will at the start, and put up a ridicu­lously sim­ple point in his over­heads, say­ing “This is when you wish you weren’t accu­mu­lat­ing a HECS debt to hear me teach­ing you”. If it wasn’t true then, it cer­tainly was by the end of that lec­ture. I don’t know how much HECS works out to per lec­ture, but my guess is it was a mod­er­ately expen­sive evening at a com­edy venue with­out the ben­e­fit of com­fort­able chairs or bun­dled food.

Doo be doo. I’ve got all this pos­i­tive stuff to say about how inter­est­ing all my sub­jects are, but against a back­drop of all that I don’t sup­pose it’d be par­tic­u­larly effec­tive. Although, if you’ve read this far, you’re prob­a­bly into pro­cras­ti­na­tion as much as that lec­turer was into bunny rab­bits on crack. Oh well. I’m done typ­ing, it’s late, I need to go to work tomor­row. And I’ll be away for most of the week­end, likely start the week exhausted, die in my Greek test on Mon­day, and so on.

</rant>

# by Josh on March 17th, 2006 Tags: , , , ,
| 7 Comments »