March 8, 2010
In yet another TED talk I’ve been hoarding, Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain talks about how digital media exist only because of the inherent goodness of humanity. Isn’t that a lovely thought? And he backs it up. He points out that the only reason the Internet’s structure worked was because the creators weren’t doing it to make money. And he explains from there how the whole world collaborates to make the Internet possible.
Then, YouTuber Nalts made a similar point. He’s reverse-psychology-ing his kids by paying them to play video games, explaining, “we’re motivated through money for algorithmic left-brain tasks to a certain point, but after that money can have the opposite effect… on heuristic tasks, right-brain ones, ones that we find intrinsic value to, we’re actually counter-motivated by contingent remuneration.” So he’s agreeing that things done for the love of it work very differently.
And to complete this trifecta of weirdness, the Internet argument reminded me of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, which a book based on a series of radio shows, in which, essentially, he argues that if you look around the world as a sensible person, Christianity just makes sense. So he’s agreeing that everyday life provides proof of the divine.
Is it absurd to use a lawyer, a consultant, and a dead writer to back up an argument that the existence of modern technology is proof of a higher power? Yep. But I might do it anyway.
I’m not sure I’ve convinced even myself just yet, but the more I think about the extent to which we depend on each other, the extent to which online technology relies utterly on that, and the extent to which that dependence comes from a trust in our inherent goodness… there’s something there.
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January 21, 2010
What’s this all about? Who’s Matt Hall? Check out the series:
- Blogging
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- Organization
- Lists
I’m going to be starting my PhD in the fall and I have a chart of all the things I’m interested in for research. One of them is visual literacy. I’d love to get your take on this. I’m trying to see it from an educational perspective (lesson design, interactive white boards, enhanced version of writing, etc…)
First, it must be said, I was never so happy / relieved / exhausted / elated as when I finished my master’s thesis. Despite having the best thesis advisor in the world. Hi Dr. L! So the concept of a dissertation boggles my mind. Seriously. Boggles. Like, presses it down and pops it up and rattles all the little bits around.
But that’s not really the point here, is it? Visual literacy. That’s the point. So. There’s two sides to how I’m thinking about it.
The first is the individual. Am I visually literate? Are you? How does a teacher decide if a schoolkid is? How do you score someone’s visual literacy as a capability of a human?
The other is the technology. Will this gizmo enable visual literacy? Does it make it easier to intake information? How do you score something’s visual literacy as a capability of a technology?
But the thing that’s more difficult than either of these sides of the coin, is the fact that the overall concept is a moving target.
- Visual literacy now can mean learning how to design and interpret infographics, or being a technology that enables their creation. Five years ago, nobody knew what an “infographic” was.
- It can mean editing YouTube videos. Ten years ago, the only people who needed to know how to make a video narrative cohesive were professional film editors.
- From the professional world down to grade school levels, visual literacy now includes a fluency in PowerPoint. It didn’t exist a few decades ago – presenters used index cards and transparencies on an overhead projector.
So my main point, regarding visual literacy, is the difficulty of defining and measuring a moving target. Schoolchildren will need to be literate in an entirely different way in the next generation than they were in the last one, and it will continue to change. How do you track that, and make sure it’s keeping pace with society? I don’t know the answers.
That’s why I’m not doing a dissertation.
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January 17, 2010
This might be not at all interesting unless you’re named Sarah. Quite probably not. But as I am… here we go.
According to the journal Speech Communication, some Finnish physiologists did a study in 2003 called “Conveyance of emotional connotations by a single word in English”.
The word, as you’re guessing, was “Sarah”.
They had people say it 10 ways, to express “naming”, “sad”, “pleading”, “admiring”, “content”, “commanding”, “astonished”, “scornful”, “angry”, and “frightened”. And they had people guess which ones were which.
They learned:
- It’s easiest to say my name in anger, fear or astonishment and get your point across. (I know there’s got to be a joke there.)
- When you’re trying to speak with neutrality, sadness, admiration, command, anger or fear, you need to focus on changing the tone of your voice, whereas
- When you’re trying to convey astonishment, plea or scorn, you need to focus on varying the timing of your speech.
- If you’re trying to express admiration, positive surprise, scorn, plea, command, fear or neutrality, you sound the same in either English or Finnish.
So what I want to know is…
- Who cares?
- Why would Finnish physiologists care about English linguistics?
- And most importantly, why out of all of the words in the world did they pick my name for this test?
Science. It’s mysterious.
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