Doug Belshaw's shared items

Earlier this week, I reviewed the Bluelounge’s CableBox. It is an accessory that helps keep wires on your desk organized. Today, I will be reviewing Bluelounge’s CableDrop. The accessory is meant for cables, but for an entire different purpose. On my desk, there are endless amount of USB cables and power cables! These wires become tangles behind my desk and where the space is needed most. Thankfully, CableDrop’s is an easy to use solution. CableDrop is a multipurpose cable clip for anywhere use.

I think one of the largest benefit of the CableDrop is that they are tiny and fit anywhere from behind a desk, on a table edge, etc. Genius. Inserting cables into CableDrop is easy. It prevents your cables from falling to the ground every time you disconnect a device (ex: iPhone, iPad).

In addition, CableDrop is super simple to setup. It comes with a peel and stick backing with you stick wherever you want to. The only con is that there are not any other extra adhesive backings that come are provided, so if you decide to change your mind in the future you’ll have to hope it sticks again or find an alternative.

CableDrop are available in both bright and muted colors and are sold in packs of six. I would recommend this product to anyone who wants to clean up the wires on their desk.

With concern mounting over the potential impact of the Stop Online Piracy Act and claims that it could make the Domain Name Service more vulnerable, one group is looking to circumvent the threat of domain name blocking and censorship by essentially creating a new Internet top-level domain outside of ICANN control. Called Dot-BIT, the effort currently uses proxies, cryptography, and a small collection of DNS servers to create a section of the Internet's domain address space where domains can be provisioned, moved, and traded anonymously.

So far, over 4,000 domains have been registered within Dot-BIT's .bit virtual top level domain (TLD). Those domains are visible only to people who use a proxy service that draws address information from the project's distributed database, or to those using one of the project's two public DNS servers. 

While it's not exactly a "darknet" like the Tor anonymizing network's .onion domain, .bit isn't exactly part of the open Internet, either—call it a "dimnet." Just how effective a virtual top-level domain will be in preventing censorship by ISPs and governments—or even handling a rapidly growing set of registered domains—is unclear at best.

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Kill your maps. They’re useless. What you need, says Vincent Meertens, a recent graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven, are time maps. “Everybody thinks in time rather than distance,” he tells Co.Design in an email. “That is what TimeMaps is about: putting time in a map and letting go of the distance.”

It might sound counterintuitive at first--a map that’s unconcerned with actual geography?--but think about the last time you had to get somewhere quickly in a foreign country or even your own city. Here in New York, my apartment is 20 miles away from JFK airport. Which must mean it takes about 20 minutes to get there, right? Wrong. On the subway during the day without delays, it might take an hour. At night with delays, it might take as long as 2 1/2 hours. That's the only information I need and care about.

The map is live. It grows and shrinks during the day.

And that’s what TimeMaps would reveal. A web app, it plots a region—in this case, the Netherlands--according to train travel times. Load TimeMaps from anywhere in the country, and it automatically checks your location, shows the nearest train station, and charts trip times around the country in rings, with each colored ring representing another 30 minutes.

Most importantly, the map is live. It grows and shrinks throughout the day, as travel times themselves grow and shrink; the bigger the map, the longer it’ll take you to get around. Note in the video above that the map expands at night, when trains run infrequently or not at all, then contracts during the day, when trains run on their regular, zippy schedule. Track delays? The map grows again.

At the moment, TimeMaps only details train trips. In the future, Meertens hopes to incorporate cars, bikes, and other forms of transportation. He also plans to develop an iOS and Android version of the app (currently, it’s only available online). “This version will have all the functions of current trip planners like HopStop,” he says.

Which prompts the question: What does TimeMaps offer that HopStop does not? The short answer is, pictures. “When I see HopStop I get a little scared off,” Meertens says. “I have to fill in my starting and destination address, a time, a date, one way, round trip, etc., etc. This is too much to fill in and not user-friendly at all.” TimeMaps, on the other hand, checks you in automatically and gives you an instant visual of all possible destinations on a map. (You can plug in a specific destination, too.) If there’s a delay along one route, you’ll be able to see it. You’ll also be able to see, and then plan, an alternative route. “It’s all in the map, visible at once,” Meertens says. “A visual trip planner so to say.”

And it might make its way to the states soon. “I am currently looking for a job in NYC and trying to get a visa,” he says. “As soon as I am in NYC I am going to work on a TimeMaps for NYC.”

TimeMaps was nominated for the Brains Eindhoven award, which recognizes innovative student work, and is up for the public prize. Vote for it here.

[Images courtesy of Vincent Meertens]

It occurred to me some time ago that fear is the result of a lack of control, and try as I might I cannot conceive fear existing without this vacancy. Looked at from the other direction, in a situation where you feel completely in control is it possible to still be afraid?

Furthermore, a lack of control is not always accompanied by fear. Fear appears to be a secondary, distinct response that may or may not occur as a result of a lack of control. We must be able to say this because there are a great many situations where people experience a lack of control but do not exhibit a fear response.

Lastly remains what one does when one loses control. Quite logically, most of us try to remedy it by gaining control, whether through fleeing the situation ("flight") or action ("fight"). I suppose no response (completely breaking down in fear) is also a possibility. I thus propose the following model of fear:

lack of control → desire for control [+/- fear] → action

I haven't really taken this model to any depth yet, though. Which philosopher's have written about fear? Where would be a good start to read about the philosophy of fear?

UPDATE:

It seems to me that the concept of fear is intimately connected with the concept of causal determinism. Lack of control is caused by uncertainty, and uncertainty comes when you are concerned that things may not go the way you want them to.

I have been trying to think of other ways fear might come about in an organism, but no despite my efforts they all seem to boil down to uncertainty about the future.

A King Cobra is 3 feet from me. I am afraid. Why? Because I may or may not survive the next few moments of my life. In other words, my future is uncertain.

I am doing my first solo parachute dive. I am slightly anxious (anxiousness is categorically the same as fear in psychology; in general usage, "to be anxious" is just to be "slightly fearful"). Why am I anxious? Because maybe this one time my parachute will not open properly and I'll fall to my death. My future, thus, is uncertain.

It is not merely a coincidence that you often here the saying "Mankind has always feared what it does not understand". Not understanding something is uncertainty; when that uncertainty potentially could have a negative impact on your future, that can lead to fear. Note that I said "can lead to fear", and not "always leads to fear". It is, as I mentioned, possible to not be afraid when you encounter an uncertain future. But it does not seem possible to me that—when you actually are afraid—your fear is being caused by anything else than an uncertain future (feel free to try and think of a working counter-example!).

Since—in a causal system—the future is very much determined, theoretically it is foreknowledge which grants feelings of security. That is, people who aren't afraid are either:

1. certain that their future will go the way they want (or falsely certain)
2. somehow have psychologically overcome their need to exhibit a fear response
   • i.e. through not placing any "superficial" ("special") value on their existence
   • and other techniques (See Buddhism, Stoicism, REBT)

These ideas I bring up here, they are very much philosophical, but for a relatively in-depth look at the neurobiology behind it, Edit my post and look into the HTML comment I placed their originally. I left it out of my post because it's not useful at this level of investigation, but some people might be curious.

It’s my week at #change11. My topic? Rhizomatic Learning.

Rhizomatic learning is a way of thinking about learning based on ideas described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in a thousand plateaus. A rhizome, sometimes called a creeping rootstalk, is a stem of a plant that sends out roots and shoots as it spreads. It is an image used by D&G to describe the way that ideas are multiple, interconnected and self-relicating. A rhizome has no beginning or end… like the learning process. I wrote my first article on the topic ‘rhizomatic education: community as curriculum’ in an article I wrote in 2008.

I’ve been talking about rhizomes and learning for about five years now. I have spent the better part of the last three months trying to collect all those thoughts together and organize them ‘properly.’ The problem with that, of course, is that the whole idea of rhizomatic learning is to acknowledge that learners come from different contexts, that they need different things, and that presuming you know what those things are is like believing in magic. It is a commitment to multiple paths. Organizing a conversation, a course, a meeting or anything else to be rhizomatic involves creating a context, maybe some boundaries, within which a conversation can grow. I’m going to try and create some context for a conversation about rhizomatic learning by offering four questions about education… and explaining how i’ve tried to answer them with this theory.

• Why do we teach?
• What does successful learning look like?
• What does a successful learner look like?
• How do we structure successful learning?

Why do we teach?
I refuse to accept that my role as a teacher is to take the knowledge in my head and put it in someone else’s. That would make for a pretty limited world . Why then do we teach? Are we passing on social mores? I want my students to know more than me at the end of my course. I want them to make connections i would never make. I want them to be prepared to change. I think having a set curriculum of things people are supposed to know encourages passivity. I don’t want that. We should not be preparing people for factories. I teach to try and organize people’s learning journeys… to create a context for them to learn in.

What does successful learning look like?

the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectible, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 21)

It is that map that I think successful learning looks like. Not a series of remembered ideas, reproduced for testing, and quickly forgotten. But something flexible that is already integrated with the other things a learner knows. Most things that we value ‘knowing’ are not things that are easily pointed to. Knowing is a long process of becoming (think of it in the sense of ‘becoming an expert’) where you actually change the way you perceive the world based on new understandings. You change and grow as new learning becomes part of the things you know.

Sounds a bit like networked learning…? The rhizome is, in a manner of speaking, a kind of network. It’s just a very messy, unpredictable network that isn’t bounded and grows and spreads in strange ways. As a model for knowledge, our computer idea of networks, all tidy dots connected to tidy lines, gives us a false sense of completeness.

What does a successful learner look like?
In a recent blog post i tried to offer three visions for ‘what education is for’ to help provide a departure point for discussion. Workers take accepted knowledge and store it for future reference. They accept that things are true and act accordingly. The soldier acquires more knowledge and becomes responsible for deciding what things are going to be true. The nomads make decisions for themselves. They gather what they need for their own path. I think we should be hoping for nomads.

Nomads have the ability to learn rhizomatically, to ‘self-reproduce’, to grow and change ideas as they explore new contexts. They are not looking for ‘the accepted way’, they are not looking to receive instructions, but rather to create.

How do we structure successful learning?
Establish a context
As we approach any new endeavour, we need to understand how we can speak about it. We need to learn the language, our timetables… the shortcuts that allow us to be part of a conversation. This goes into our memory. This is good. It helps us see the local context. It is not what i think of as learning… it is one of the building blocks of learning. I think of this as an open syllabus.

Community Curriculum
Gone are the days where we need to painstakingly collect information, package it up in time to send it to the printers and await the return. A curriculum for a course is something that can be created in time, while a course is happening. The syllabus becomes a garden space, a context setting within which learning can happen and the curriculum is the things that grows there. The tidiest example of this I’ve done are live slides which attempt to give room for the learners to create slides for a presentation.

Activity.
As an activity for this week I’d like you to take a piece of your own practice and think on it rhizomatically. Does it mesh with what I’ve described here? Are there goals that you want to accomplish that would not be served by a rhizomatic approach? Is there a way to change what you are doing to make it more rhizomatic? What impact would that have? Good? Bad?

I need not tell anyone that they are free to critique these ideas, they are in the open, and critique is one of the biggest reason that I post my ideas. So please, critique away.

Postscript
I am one of many who found Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the ‘rhizome’ as a useful framework for talking about learning, education and what it is to know. Appropriately, I suppose, there is no ‘rhizomatic learning’ that you can cite and define specifically. You could take Maryanne’s view or like Glynis Cousin use it to critique the VLE or delve into this interesting series of journal articles from 2004. I should probably apologize to these scholars for not having cited their work… but, to be honest, i didn’t know about them until sometime this summer and I have been exploring the rhizome since 2005. For those of you interested in broader exploration of Deleuze in education, google is your friend. I have none of those smart people to blame for these ideas… it’s all me borrowing and twisting some of the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari, and, really, from all my network, for my own ends.

“Go without a coat when it’s cold; find out what cold is. Go hungry; keep your existence lean. Wear away the fat, get down to the lean tissue and see what it’s all about. The only time you define your character is when you go without. In times of hardship, you find out what you’re made of and what you’re capable of. If you’re never tested, you’ll never define your character.”

-

Henry Rollins

(via Jimi Axelsson)

I think it is important to articulate why I am against for-profit organizations running schools. This isn't to say that there aren't good people working in some of those schools, and this isn't to say that kids don't learn at all in those schools. It is, instead, an argument about systems and what kind of structures we should build.

I don't believe in for-profit education because so much of what gives a company the ability to make money doesn't apply in schools.

To wit - states allocate money to schools. The same per-child (with exceptions for Special Education) in a district. So the only way to make a profit is to spend less money.

Think about that for a moment -- the only way for a for-profit school is to spend less money per child.

Call it "discovering efficiencies" or whatever you want, given the lack of ability to affect pricing, the only way a for-profit charter operator makes money is to spend less per child.

I'm not o.k. with that.

And if "discovering efficiencies" means paying young teachers less money just because you can trade on their idealism, then I'm even less o.k. with that.

if a school has figured out some efficiencies, then that money should be put right back into the school, not into a profit margin. Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but most for-profit charter operators work in districts that tend to be underfunded to begin with.

Found a way to save money on textbooks? Awesome, start a chess team.

Found a way to reduce the number of administrative staffers needed by streamlining business practice? Great, hire another teacher.

Found a way to lower facilities costs? Great, take a field trip so the kids can have powerful out-of-school learning experiences.

You get the idea.

Some things shouldn't be for-profit. School is top of my list.

 

cross posted at Tech Learning