Two Reports and a Presentation for Tomorrow

It's been a stressful couple of days and I still need to pull off two reports from the Open Learn project and give a presentation for tomorrow. It is 10:25 pm and I am not way near completing these at present.

The reports relate to the first content and tools trials of the OpenLearn project. The talk will be centred around the Melon project. This is going to be a difficult one!

Any advice?

I am going to have to do a lot of cutting and pasting I think - I will have to sacrifice being able to do what I would really love to do.

We did trials on two of the tools that we will be using in the LabSpace namely Compendium and FlashMeeting. I found it quite good fun to use FlashMeeting. I would still like to use Compendium a bit more and perhaps find ways of using it for qualitative analysis. It is a sort of mapping tool and can be used to express relationships between ideas.

Well let's see what happens....

The Learning Bubble

This will be my first attempt to try to explain an idea of mine which I will call the learning bubble. It is based on a number of ideas:

• the human mind continually changes and this change includes the formation of new neuronal links, neurone regrowth and change, besides non-physical organisational changes
• when it comes to learning it is the context that is important
• nurture rather than nature
• immersion - daily lived experience

The model of learning it attacks is that learning is something that accumulates over time i.e. as we get older we 'know' more or become more experienced...experience being interpreted as being better to deal with our current environment.

Within this model I perceive the individual as existing within a time bubble and it is the recent learning that is more relevant to that individual's experience. We can perhaps imagine a time bubble of about three years in size. This bubble contains within it a number of learning experiences which are more likely to be relevant to the current context of the individual. Taking Ericssons idea's of expertise, if the experiences are intense or immersive enough there can be significant changes in individuals.

Let's take a psychomotor example: learning a tune on a musical instrument. I may learn a tune off by heart but if I don't play it for a while, even a couple of weeks, it needs revision before I can play it. A short spell of revision may make it playable again...but it is the currency of playing and doing it that counts...it has to be almost there at your fingertips.

The other day I played my first squash game for a long time, years, and I have not really played a great deal since my early twenties. I can still play, I know the skills are still there but they are not as yet at anything like the level they were.....or are they all there, but dormant? Is it a question of re-working and re-jeuvenating synapses, neuronal channels etc. How much of my brain is the same as it was 20 years ago? In chemistry, information, structure? Am I indeed a different person?

These two examples are interesting reflections relating to largely, but not wholly, psychomotor skills. If I was to surround myself within a three year bubble of playing squash, playing regularly, how good would I get? Of course it all depends on the degree of immersion, social involvement and so on.

I see the bubble idea as fitting in strongly with the principles of life long learning...it's not so important what you did then (in the past, at school, university etc), it is what you do now that counts. I suggest in this way that it is possible for us all to become someone else to a certain extent.

DAY 19 - Not Much Progess

I have set aside 50 days to write a rough draft of my PhD. Unfortunately this attempt only really lasted a week before it petered out, and even in the first week I confined myself pretty much to reading and a bit of work trying to prepare drawings of hands. I did not really do any writing or analysis. I did however do some reading although the sum total of this would probably only be about 150 pages.

I feel that my aim of writing the the whole draft in this 50 days is too much and maybe Xmas is more realistic.

Juliette, my work colleague, said that I should just do a little each day but be consistent, especially when things are busy at work. I know this is the best advice on such issues, because a little bit every day eventually gets you there. Anyway all is not lost because I still have 31 days left, a whole month, so I will try to get back onto the conveyer belt. In the next weekI should really focus more on writing and analysis rather than reading perhaps. Well let's see how it goes.

DAY 2 - It's Hard to Draw a Hand

Day 2 of 50 - Writing the Draft of my PhD

Well, I haven’t finished all my reading today (5 pages short) and it feels like I have not done a lot else. I need to do my first visually displayed episode of the use of gesture by a teacher in explaining graphs. This has involved me having to draw a number of hands in different positions (mostly done previous to this 50 day effort). The way I did this was to copy the position of the hand adopted by the teacher with my own hand and then take a digital photograph of this position. I then imported the image into Paint Shop Pro (ver. 7). I then zoomed it to a largish size and using the paintbrush tool drew an outline of the hand…this was set as a new layer on top of the hand. I then copied this layer and reduced it in size to give a hand. This was quite a difficult process since it is fairly hard to trace a line with the mouse. I have so far drawn about 20+ different hand shapes. I will incorporate these shapes into the story of how the teacher explains the relationship between a time-distance graph that he has drawn on the board and the graph produced as a result of students attempting to emulate the graph with their own movement in front of a motion detector.





A word file containing the images of the hands may be obtained from the link below. The next step will be to tell the story as a kind of comic strip illustrating the hand movements and the teacher’s dialogue.

http://kn.open.ac.uk/public/document.cfm?documentid=8672

Writing a draft of my PhD

From Monday I am going to endeavour to write up the whole of my PhD in draft form. Am I ready for this? When is anyone ready?

The aim is to complete my PhD by the end of the first week in January or thereabouts.

I am going to allow myself 50 days for this process. This will also coincide with an intended period of abstinence from alcohol (this for a variety of reasons including getting my weight down).

At a 80 000 words (80 to 100 thousand being allowed for a PhD) this represents 1600 words a day.

I will also need to read during this period and expect this reading to take between 1.5 and 2 hours a day. I envisage the total number hours required to be of the order of 5 hours a day…giving a total of 250 hours, although more may be needed.

As part of my reading I wish to finish off Where Mathematics Comes From (Lakoff, Nunez, 2000) and Women Fire and Dangerous Things (Lakoff, 1987). In order to complete these within the first 30 days I would have to read 10 and 17 pages per day from each of these books respectively. I have another Lakoff book that I wish to read – Philosophy in the Flesh, or some such title….cannot remember.

The important thing about this process is that the PhD draft does not have to be good…it is a draft but something on which to work and build. Essentially there will be:

Reading
Analysis
Writing

At least I have already made a rough draft of the P chapter.

Parallel Processing and Multitasking - Good or Flustering?

The concept of parallel processing has often been talked about, or in other words, multitasking. The underlining message or belief is perhaps that this is some kind of greater efficiency of working. Even I find now that I cannot do without two screens for my computer - it makes it easy to work between programs or documents. Doing several things concurrently is meant to be good.

Where does this concept come from. The alternative idea is that carry on with one task, and that task only, until it is completed! You are not distracted! The job gets done and out the way, whereas with the parallel approach it is more difficult to keep a trace on what you are doing and to finish things, and you simply end up just getting befuddled, confused and flustered, however you avoid the boredom of doged pursuit in the one task approach.

I suspect that for me the idea of parallel processing comes from perceptions of computing and the way that the brain is perceived to work....you can only instantly recall 6 or 7 numbers immediately after they are given to you, therefore the conclusion might be that the brain can parallel process at just about these levels. However, we are talking about numbers here and short term memory, not complex tasks.

There is a sense that if parallel processing does occur is largely automatic or semi-automatic and the skills do not necessarily interfere with each other too much. Driving a car (largely kinesthetic and visual) can be carried on whilst listening to the radio (purely auditory). It is more likely that the parallel processing we talk about in work is simply rapidly shifting to and from different mediums, tools and content, in small chunks rather that co-carrying a number of tasks and activities simultaneously. The danger is that if you try to handle too many of these things simultaneously you might become flustered and in the end focus your energy into one area, or redistribute your time in manageable chunks.

In distance education if students have to handle to many different types of thing more or less concurrently this might become somewhat overwhelming and pose a problem to their learning.

Starting my new job

I am now officially three days into my new job - Open Content Initiative - based at the Open University. Things have been a bit hectic with me actually finishing and sending off the revised PhD ugrade document to Bristol University...I just hope now it is Ok. It is amazing how long it has taken me...I think a lot to do with this is the process of just thinking about it...it is also hard to overhaul something and reassemble. Sometimes I think it is easier to create something anew.

I know it has its faults but it has a rhyme and reason and is much more focused. The ideas, especially the philosophies are also interesting and thought provoking.

I am also balancing the ongoing work from my last project at the OU. I hope that there will be significant output from this.

The new job appears to be interesting and it is particularly valuable for me to get an insight into the creative process of producing something large and potentially very significant. As part of my initial role I have the chance to act as researcher in observing the development process by attending all the meetings. This is interesting in that it gives me insights to things from other perspectives such as design, technical implementation, marketing etc. I am a kind of participant observer in all of this.

The Open Content Initiative site will have basically two sides, a learner side - for course content, and a Lab-site where people can create or modify content. That's basically it in brief but I will try to give a more self-contained review later.

Mathematics and the embodied mind

One of the things I need to consider is what is mathematics and where it comes from? One often hears the Platonist's kind of idea that mathematics exists 'out there' independant of human existence, that it is somehow fundamental to the universe, like the parts of a clock, allowing it to happen, that concepts such as the number pie have an existence beyond human thought. This idea of mathematics is similar to a belief, it is not proven, or testable. It also does not really answer the question of what it is.

An alternative view is that it is something that arises form within, something that is in part determined by our biology, and then later by our culture and mathematics as a cultural discourse. At the moment I am reading Lakoff and Nunez, "The Emodied Mind - What is Mathematics Really". It seems to me that the essential argument of the book is that mathematics is based on a series of increasing abstract conceptual methaphors that are originally grounded in the physical, and everyday experience of individuals. For example the natural 'hard wired' instincts of for example being able to conceive of a discrete object with an inside and an outside, the ability to put things into groups or piles, the ability to subitize (instantly recognise how many objects there are in a group - up to four in most people although I have heard of certain cases of autism where inidividuals are able to instantly identify larger numbers - I think Oliver Sachs talks of a group of twins where this is true.

At the moment I am just reading the chapter on arimthmetic, and the origins of addition, substraction, multiplication and division (I have often thought of all of these as just forms of addition - they can all certainly be expressed in terms of addition. Lakoff and Nunez go on later to talk of various metaphors such as the number line. There is no real number line - it is a metaphorical tool to think about number.

So in sum, as it appears to me, mathematics is a particular type and series of increasingly abstract and complex metaphor grounded on daily experience and the way the mind and body work. Of course I've yet to read more of this theory.

Additionally what makes this type of metaphorical symbolic thought different from other forms of thinking?

Why is this important in my research? Because I need to understand how we understand.

Getting back into it - Steps

At the moment I am having to edit, change and overhaul two pieces of my work. These are:

• a draft of a paper relating to interaction with computer eductational content
• reworking my upgrade document for my PhD

I find this difficult for the following reasons:

• difficulty getting back into the data
• deciding between editing and re-writing
• feeling overwhelmed by feeling I have too much to do

I find the feeling of being overwhelmed by too much, and hence feeling flustered and fogged, an experience that I often get in research. Certain things make this condition likely to happen, such as the complexity of the data, the feeling that there are innumerate papers that you should be reading, the pressures of other things in your life, the complexity of the stored data on your computer (where is it all?- I literally have thousands of files relating to my data, usually in many versions) , the juggling of ideas, theory and data, overcoming mental inertia, the multitasking nature of it all (I am actually going off the concept of multitasking somewhat) . So one of the problems is finding where you are, taking stock, and breaking down the complex large task into smaller units.

This type of writing needs time, time to consolidate, think, re-establish your immersion in the data. Getting to that state of immersion is not, for me that easy.

Anyhow in my current position, of 'getting back into' these activities I have just written a series of steps (like quanta, packets of action) thus breaking up these complex tasks. Let's see if it works.

Step 1, for the content paper is simply to find and read my last version of the paper and make highlights where necessary. I probably haven't read this for some time. The aim of this is to try to get me back 'into' the paper. Anyway in my next entry I will talk more about these steps, and if this method helps.

Introduction

This blog is about my experience as a professional researcher and also as a part-time PhD student. It is about the struggle of research. The struggle of writing, reading, thinking and developing ideas and a critical way of thinking. Hopefully it is about networking, developing and dealing with problems. It is about my inner demons, or angels, however you decide to look at them, or how they are framed by the context...for example is the inability to write disguising an internal struggle and formation of ideas that has yet to be expressed via the writing. I will also be putting forward ideas and views that are spin offs from my research and general thinking. I like to take ideas that are generally accepted and question them.

To say is to think?

Are the acts of writing and talking ways of allowing thought to be concretised, solidified, rather than a vague wish wash of ideas?

So what is my research about?...in brief terms :

As a researcher: education and technology - currently in distance learning

As a PhD student: maths education - particularly in a technological context although the prime focus is not on technology per se.