Heh heh heh. From xkcd.
James
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Friday, August 10, 2012
More Swipe
A follow up to this post on a toddler's perception of a magazine being a 'broken iPad' is this article in Today's The Age:
James
...the research, which has so far tested 46 children aged four to six, involves examining their attention and problem-solving capabilities after using an iPad compared with using real toys. For example, as part of the study, children are being asked to solve a problem using a wooden model. They are also asked to solve the same problem using an iPad app. After they have played, they are given a test to assess their attention.
Dr Kaufman also gets children to participate in drawing, colouring and block building, both physically and on iPads. Preliminary findings have shown that for some children, touchscreens appear to motivate and enhance learning rather than hinder it.
Dr Kaufman also said results were indicating that calm, creative activities on the touchscreen, such as painting, were similar to their ''real world'' counterparts in that they ''do not seem to adversely affect children's behaviour or attention in the short term''.So you read it here, first, folks!
James
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Monday, December 26, 2011
Surviving for the fans
From The Age:
Andrew Tink, once the attorney-general in waiting, began his first intensive radiation treatment for throat cancer. But while his health may have prevented him realising his political dream of serving as part of the O'Farrell cabinet, it didn't stop him achieving another one: being a published author. Through his first battle with prostate cancer, he completed his first book, a biography on colonial explorer, land owner and politician William Charles Wentworth. During his second battle, this time with throat cancer, he completed his second biography: Lord Sydney: the Life and Times of Tommy Townshend, published today. It's the first biography of the man after whom Sydney Cove was named in 1788 - an astonishing hole, now filled. Having got through the worst of his recovery, Tink, now some 20 kilograms lighter than he was before his treatment, is giving speeches, with the occasional aid of a small blue drinking bottle filled with water. The treatment gave him third-degree burns to the inside of his throat, making it impossible to swallow for some time. He told the Herald's Anna Patty that, apart from his wife and family, the one thing that kept him going was his appearance at the Sydney Writers' Festival in May this year, just after his final session of radiation treatment. ''Through the whole of my treatment I was saying to the oncologist, 'I want to make my commitments at the Writers' Festival - please let me have enough of a voice and enough of a brain.' That became my goal.''
Depth Vs Breadth
From the Brisbane Times' 'Blunt Instrument', this comment:
A slight 100 years ago people were generally deeply read, but not widely read, meaning that they read the bible and perhaps a few other books deeply, but they had not read widely. It wasn't until the appearance of Mechanic's Institutes, public libraries, and more frequently found fee-based lending libraries that people began to read more widely and less deeply.
It appears that today the trend is toward technical reading and away from wide or deep reading. The purpose of technical reading is to extract information from a screen full of a mix of images, graphics, and text. This type of heavily graphics-oriented reading wasn't practical when I was young--in the 1950s. Up until the advent of the microcomputer graphics--especially color graphics--was an expensive proposition for print. Dense (and cheap) text was the norm.
As usual with technological advance it is difficult to grasp the qualitative differences in change. Really, is the change good or bad? Or, is it more likely that the result is just something "different"? With "deep" reading people could quote and recognize homilies from the bible. With "wide" reading that didn't happen so often, but we could identify the "sound" or structure of Shakespeare, a cowboy and indians tale, or a British spy story.
With technical reading people tend to think in multiple dimensions and see "exploded" technical images in their minds that they can rotate in multiple dimensions--graphical images of glaciers moving in and melting, images of the solar system rotating about multiple axes. Tricks like that make understanding concepts difficult to describe using just words, like evolution, suddenly simple to understand. Different techniques, different results. Not better, not worse, just different and adapted for the times.
Friday, October 28, 2011
A magazine is a broken iPad
What do you think of this?
You can 'read' the video in multiple ways - some trivial, some profound - in how we are changing in this generation. Whatever you may think, it's worth the effort. However if that thinking is replaced by the overwhelming habit of flicking to the next thing...
Of course that's what the first colour magazines were accused of in their early days.
As someone involved in the business of producing books and magazines, some aspects of the technological revolution we are currently in are, frankly, terrifying. Not just because it is interesting keeping pace with customer's expectations (and yes, all the fun whizzy stuff isn't the problem - the issue is boring, potentially business-lethal stuff like rights) but because of seeing even more of the medium becoming the message as Marshall predicted.
Content versus movement and flashing lights? It's going to get interesting, but shorter and less with the complex concepts and stories.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
