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Many of the items in this list of usability myths are genuine myths, but the very first one is not.

There are two reasons that “People read on the web” is not a myth (by which I mean a widely believed falsehood). Firstly it is not widely believed, and secondly it is not false.

Almost anyone these days, if asked to describe their main behaviour on the web, would identify scanning rather than reading. And they would be right because that is what most websites are designed for.  So it is foolish for “usability experts” to express surprise or claim some merit for the discovery that people typically approach a new web page by looking for the navigational elements that they have been trained to expect.

But although it is not widely believed that “people read on the web”, there are in fact many web sites which are designed for deeper reading, and although some may initially aproach them incorrectly there must be plenty who want to read deeply online or otherwise they would not survive. (Examples include thoughtful blogs like PhilosophyTalk, and Real Climate, as well as various on-line books such as David McKay’s Without the Hot Air, along with most of the items linked to by Arts&Letters Daily)

Thus the idea that people read on the web is not a myth, and it is rather the claim that it is one which is the widely believed falsehood. So the idea that it’s a myth is itself a myth which makes it a mythical myth.

(And although it’s not the first on my list I think it deserves the #1 position - which I have been holding open til now while waiting for the perfect candidate).

Stephen Downes post on Semantics at Half an Hour: Having Reasons is devoted largely to the issue of how to establish the well-foundedness aspect of knowledge as well-founded true belief.

A large part of the discussion was devoted to the question of how confidently it can be asserted that “interesting learning” occurred in #CritLit2010. (With “interesting learning” apparently referring to the acquisition of new knowledge rather than just unfounded beliefs or behavioural responses - which are also of course examples of learning but not so interesting)

In the course of that discussion Stephen referred to http://www.downes.ca/presentation/251 slide 23, where the inference of learning appears to be derived from observation of behaviour in a social network. But it requires quite sophisticated observation to confirm that the behaviour is based on beliefs that are founded on good reasons as discussed in this posting. (For example it might involve observation of exchanges between members of the network when solving problems together and evaluation of the explanations given to one another in that process.) Also, there would have to be a change of behaviour (beyond that attributable to increasing familiarity with that specific network) in order to infer that the demonstated knowledge was newly acquired and so evidence of learning.  Given the looseness and scale of the network involved it would be a huge task to sift through all of the exchanges to identify signs of increased knowledge in even just a few of the participants.  So I must say I agree with those who are skeptical of Stephen and co’s ability to provide convincing evidence that “interesting learning” has occurred (other than perhaps by direct testimony of the participants).

#CritLit2010 is now over.

I enrolled in this largely out of curiosity about what it would entail and in the knowledge that my travel plans for subsequent weeks would make it difficult to devote much time to it.  I was interested enough to go through most of the readings and to make some discussion entries and blog postings, but if I had had to pay for it then I think I would have been a bit disappointed.
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Both Heli Nurmi and MCMorgan have commented on the CritLit2010 week 4 reading from Clay Shirky Shirky: Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags.

I can’t help feeling that the idea that search based on content and tags will replace heirarchical categories is in one sense overstated, but in another sense doesn’t go far enough. …more »

I was led to this by a CritLit2010 Tweet from Ruth Howard.

In it Clay Shirky responds to Nick Carr and others who worry that “the internet is making us dumber”. But I think to some extent Shirky misidentifies the concerns of the “dumber” camp (and certainly says nothing about making us smarter) although he does  address some important issues.

Carr and his ilk worry about the impact of web-based media on our reading habits and attention spans, and although I think that the evidence they cite is questionable I can’t really deny that their concerns about a potential issue may be legitimate.

Shirky looks instead at the concerns about quailty of content being drowned in a flood of garbage, which are also commonly expressed but not really as “the case for digitally-driven stupidity”.[1]

What I think is most useful in Shirky’s article is his claim that we will address the abundance issue by “invent(ing) cultural norms that do for the Internet’s abundance what the intellectuals of the 17th century did for print”. This is already happening (via “like this” buttons, “people who bought this also bought that” recommendations, and other reputation management schemes) but Shirky is right to draw attention to it as something that still needs work.

Addendum (June 13): Stephen Pinker does a better job of addressing the actual question of effects on intelligence.

Arrest over leaked video of US gunship attack - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). The video really is shocking - especially since nothing I could see (except the camera) looked remotely like a weapon to me.  But the former soldier who has spoken out against attacking the rescue truck actually defends the original shooting. He appears to accept the identification of weapons in the group and also claims that his team did find some on the ground when they arrived (but doesn’t say how many).

It would be useful to the US military if they could support these claims (and/or show that the victims were in a well announced no-entry combat zone). Since they haven’t done that my guess is they can’t - and so the charge of murder still stands.

Shaw « Deep Packet Inspection.

I do believe that DPI and related technologies will be abused by ISPs and media conglomerates if they are allowed to do so - and also that they should not have the option to arbitrarily favour one technology over another (as eg when Shaw says that internet delivery is “not a substitute” for cableTV). But technologies like bittorrent and skype do create speed by using extra bandwidth, and this does give the ISPs an opening to claim that they sometimes need to throttle certain kinds of traffic. However that claim is only valid becuse their chosen pricing model does not increase the cost for high bandwidth users. If we do not want to give the ISPs the authority to manage traffic volumes based on content-type (which they will certainly abuse) then we need to accept that bandwidth is a commodity in limited supply and should be paid for on a usage basis. This would have the effect of allowing market pressure to favour technologies which have less impact without giving anyone the power to arbitrarily favour their own technology or content.

Michael Geist - Angus Defends iPod Levy Proposal.

IF the “Canadian solution” of a media levy is valid (and I think it is), then there is no logical reason to distinguish in any way between different types of digital memory. In particular, the memory in an ipod is much more likely to be used for music storage than a randomly chosen CD (which is just as likely to be being used for backup of business records or private photo albums as it is for mp3 storage). I favour the ipod levy as it is totally unacceptable that the CDs used to store my personal photographs be subject to a levy when an ipod used almost entitely to store commercial music tracks is not.

In fact, EVERY bit of digital memory should be taxed at the same rate regardless of whether it is a CD, DVD, ipod or computer hard drive, UNLESS its owner has specifically undertaken not to record copyright content on it. But the proviso is essential and must be equally available on all memory types.

This could be achieved by selling specially marked media and devices (much like the coloured tax-free gas that is often sold for agricultural purposes) -  and if this was available, I for one wouldn’t mind if the penalty for abusing it was quite substantial.

Scott Leslie may be on the right track with another 1/4-baked idea - OER “virtual reference librarian” at EdTechPost, but I suspect that it may be less with the idea itself than with the doubt he expresses as follows:

<<Is “discoverability” even actually the problem with resources getting reused, or is it possible that the whole model is so flawed, so disconnected from how educators construct course materials, that it wouldn’t make any difference..?>>

Commenter Mike Caulfield followed up on this with

<<the really interesting thing is how many people said they wanted that, and how few people contact us for help>>

Some educators want a complete package provided by a publisher while others want to develop their own way of engaging students with the material.

In the space between those two extremes it would seem that there was ample room for a style of preparation which involved searching for and combining the best of what is available, and many of us think that is where we belong - but when push comes to shove we bifurcate and either go with a complete package or “roll our own” completely.

As variously a creator, organizer, and user of OERs I think I may have gained some insight into why this is the case.
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The Stanford Study of Writing provides a welcome counterpoint to some of the nonsense that has been put about regarding impact of the internet on literacy.

This year’s Blog Action Day is devoted to the theme of Climate Change and an understanding of mathematics is certainly essential for anyone involved in making making decisions about how to respond to this issue (which in a democracy is presumably all of us).

The choice of Math and Climate as the theme of this year’s Math Awareness Month emphasized this connection, and Murray Bourne at squareCircleZ  today points to a number of articles in which he has used related topics as a source of examples for teaching mathematics.

A good source of background on the science of CO2 related climate change is this excellent history prepared by Spencer Weart at the American Institute of Physics, as is also the RealClimate site managed by a team of well-reputed climate scientists, and the question of how to compare the effectiveness of different policy choices is addressed in this on-line book by UK physicist David McKay (reviewed by theRegister).

The fact that no amount of restraint or conservation can counterbalance the harmful effects of increasing population is not often noted in the CO2 debate so I was a bit disappointed that Murray did not include his discussion of that topic in his list.

Recently Facebook has been running very slow for me and even just hanging completely on page reload. I wasted a lot of time trying things within Facebook and after reading of many others with similar problems was even considered abandoning Firefox as my preferred browser, but as soon as I disabled the  Skype Firefox extension everything returned to normal. So if you are having similar problems, this may be the solution. (The extension is not necessary for the normal use of Skype - just for having phone numbers on web pages all become clickable.)

What disappoints me about Skype as a result of this is not the fact of the problem per se (making different programs interact is often difficult and it is not surprising that things go wrong), but rather the fact that there has been no loud public warning from Skype of a problem which has been around for some time (in fact the extension is still loaded automatically without warning during Skype upgrades).  If Skype had acted appropriately there would have been a high ranking Google hit which resolved the issue but in fact on Googling Facebook and Firefox I found many discussions which did not identify Skype as the source of the problem, and there has been no warning transmitted during several recent Skype upgrades.

This interview with a recent convert to teaching math using interactive white boards includes a lot of good ideas for using the computer display but  leaves me wondering what the IWB adds over what could be done with a tablet PC and projector.

One weakness of the WB is that it forces the presenter to face away from the audience for writing - something we are all used to and try to mitigate, but which could be avoided with the old style projector.

A possibly distinctive use of the IWB might be to have students come up and interact with it themselves, but the interviewee actually seemed to be saying that she tried that but found the benefits outweighed by the distraction of having people moving about so much.

I have always been a bit intimidated by bloggers’ talk of “Trackback” and “Pingback”, and am still unsure of whether they really do anything that isn’t just as easy to do “by hand”.

I recently came across a Tutorial written a couple of years ago by Teli Adlam which helped me to what I think is a bot better understanding but still leaves me wondering whether I am missing something.
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This article shares some of my own reaction to the “internet is making us dumber” nonsense, as well as commenting on other possible sources of increasing global intelligence.

Howard Knopf doesn’t like The SAC Double Negative Option Celestial Jukebox, but I have to quarrel with a number of his reasons.

Many of these have to do with defending the existing media levy schemes which unfairly extract funds from people who have no intent of copying copyrighted work and who are provided no option for declaring and committing to avoiding such activity when making the purchase.
Until there is provision for specially marked exempt media, the existing levy scheme is just legalized theft and like any other manifestly unfair law it undermines public respect for the law in general.

Also particularly galling is #6 “It’s inherently socialistic” - not because I have socialist tendencies myself (though I do), but because (a) it’s not, and (b) whether it is or not has no relevance to the effectiveness of the proposed mechanism, so (c) the accusation is just presented as name-calling.

EXCESS COPYRIGHT: More Myths about Myths about File Sharing

Wikis, GoogleDocs, and now Buzzword Documents all provide ways to share the editing of an online document (as do a number of other options). …more »

Many of these Top 10 Myths about Sustainability are mythical in the sense that they are just elementary misconceptions that don’t qualify as myths because they are not widely held by intelligent adults, but “Myth 6: Sustainability means lowering our standard of living” is an exception because it is, I think, widely believed by intelligent adults.

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that Sir Timmy taught the world to play