Forgetting to speak

18 Mar 2007

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!)

Prolific poison

14 Mar 2007

Is it a placebo effect if you don’t remember why the effects are occurring? I just glanced at my calendar for tomorrow after having briefly gone to bed then got up thinking I had unread/written emails, spent a while doing that, then realising it’s 1.15am and I’m not at all tired. Then, thinking back through the evening and recalling that sugary black liquid was involved at some point.

Clearly, the only option is to become addicted to the stuff. What’s bizarre is that it is available everywhere, people don’t think twice about consuming or offering it, and yet (for me at least) it has greater immediate consequences than smoking tobacco (bad smell aside). I will be a wreck by tomorrow evening.

I’ve already started the week inexplicably exhausted (I have been sleeping more sensibly/normally the last few days/week than I have been for the last month) without the involvement of caffeine, and fortunately have had time enough to respond to that exhaustion (I had 14 hours sleep last night) with little impact to my scheduled commitments, but I still drank most of a bottle of this stuff without thinking. And I’m not at all physically ill, with the exception of something that looked like a very slight cold late last week. I have no reason to be tired (and, conversely, no reason to be this awake with the exception of that stuff).

Anyway… I’m now going to try and go sleep a while. Dreaming of people who aren’t projects, and Christ as a judge, as well as a saviour who takes the punishment deserved by men, Macbeth and dark performance on a daylight stage, and inexplicably out-of-sync databases.

Matthias site revisions

13 Mar 2007

It’s finally starting to actually look okay. Amazingly, it’s become a resource that people will actually readily use — one of my TACKLES kids (he’s 11 years old) said that he’d just realised he could use the website to find out when TACKLES were having socials on Friday nights. Even better is that pretty much everyone on staff is prepared and willing to use the website to promote things. Its impact will always be pretty intangible, but it seems to be aiding the way we communicate quite a bit.

Little sister

12 Mar 2007

There are some things that just don’t come easily…

Microsoft interoperability – Outlook 07, Hotmail, & UTF8 dramas

10 Mar 2007

Outlook is a Microsoft product. Hotmail is a Microsoft product.

These sorts of things really shouldn’t be possible in this day and age. Grumble grumble. I may need to (very reluctantly) stop sending email in UTF-8. UTF-8 should be mandatory, seriously.

And that’d be another geeky post. :