 |
Tuesday, November 22, 2005 |
Mildly depressed people more perceptive than others. Surprisingly,
people with mild depression are actually more tuned into the feelings
of others than those who aren’t depressed, a team of Queen’s
psychologists has discovered. “This was quite unexpected because we
tend to think that the opposite is true,� says lead researcher Kate
Harkness. “For example, people with depression are more likely to
have problems in a number of social areas.� [Science Blog -]
6:57:34 PM 
|
|
ELGG vs. Moodle - defusing a false dichotomy. http://www.unisa.edu.au/odlaaconference/PPDF2s/13%20odlaa%20-%20Anderson.pdf
I've had a few people come up to me at conferences recently and ask me to compare ELGG and Moodle,
and choose between them as if they were somehow mutually exclusive.
Indeed, even within the Moodle community itself there seems to be a bit of dismissiveness about what ELGG does, and the notion that with just a couple of twists of code Moddle can easily replicate its functionality.
Well maybe, but this is what excited me so much about the paper
linked to above by Terry Anderson and the work he describes taking
place at Athabasca University. I had the pleasure of seeing Terry
present on this recently and wish I could link to those powerpoints as
I think the illustrate the point I'm trying to make better than the
article does, but what is exciting for me is that Terry and Athabasca
are putting together a large, production environment
in which Moodle and ELGG will seemingly co-exist quite nicely, thank
you very much, and take care of different problems. Hopefully I am not
going to mangle this too much, but as I understood it, Moodle was being
positioned to handle conventional 'course management' problems like the
delivery of content, assessments, discussions. In Athabasca's case (and
I'd argue in all of our cases, but that's another post) they also have
to deal with a continuous uptake model, where instead of cohort-based
programs they also have very much self-paced programs with differing
start times. Thus they are using ELGG as one of the ways to build
community "between" the space of courses, community that is formed not
because of one's membership in a pre-ordained group or cohort but out
of your interests. Sounds to me like a job for social software!
Can Moodle support similar ad-hoc community formation across course
(and even institutional) boundaries? Maybe, and it sounds like we will
find out fairly soon through upcoming releases. And bully for them if
they can. But what I love about ELGG is that it is built from the groud
up around the user and their connections as they key focus, rather than
on 'courses' or 'content' (I'm not trying to levy a criticism at Moodle
here as I like it very much as well). Far from being only a 'blogging'
tool or a 'eportfolio' tool, what excites me about ELGG is that it is
becoming a social networking 'framework' (o.k. you can dispute that
term as much as you like) that while it has initially focused on tools
to create blog posts and share files, isn't interested in restricting
you to only its blogging tool (and why would it? RSS anyone?)
and is looking at a whole set of other interesting apps (Calendaring?
Synchronous tools?) that are also of intrinsic value but become even
more useful if people can use them with other semantically related
users.
Should elearning providers be looking to one single tool to provide
all of these aspects and more? Maybe. Right now though, the best bet
seems like trying to get the best solution possible through a set of
provisional measures. Personally, I'm more interested in making these
and others co-exist, and seeing if we can get the integration between
them to be more than lame-ass 'pointing to their URLS' or simple single
sign-on; if instead we see if we can get shared identity happening
across a number of these services in a way that takes identity mean
more than your username and password. - SWL [EdTechPost]
6:47:42 PM
|
|
Can distraction keep us from getting distracted?. Attentional
blink researchers Christian Olivers and Sander Nieuwenhuis noticed
something curious when they conducted their experiments. When they were
testing their stimuli, they felt that they could do the task better
when they were distracted. Their participants also reported that they
tended to perform better when they were a little unfocused on the task.
Attentional blink, as we’ve reported before,
is a short period when we’re less able to notice an item flashed
briefly in our visual field. The classic experiment involves a rapidly
flashed sequence of random digits or letters — Olivers and Nieuwenhuis
use letters flashed every 120 milliseconds. Then after a short
interval, a digit is substituted for a letter. Nearly all observers
notice this, even though they only see the letter for about a tenth of
a second. However, if a second digit is flashed within the next half
second, the rate of detection for this digit falls measurably.
So
why would participants feel they were better at detecting the second
digit when they weren’t as focused on the task? Was their introspection
real, or did it just seem that way while they were performing the
aggravating task of picking out digits from a rapid sequence of letters?
Olivers and Nieuwenhuis developed an experiment to systematically vary
how focused participants were on the task. To decrease focus, they
tried two methods — music and free association. Participants did the
standard attentional blink task while listening to music (half of these
people were told to listen for a “yell” which was inserted into the
recording about 15 percent of the time, the other half simply listened
to the music — it turned out the results were the same in both cases).
Another group was told to think about the upcoming Christmas shopping
season while they performed the task in silence. Finally, to try to increase
focus, another group was offered a small reward (worth about a penny)
each time they responded correctly. The computer gave these
participants a running total of their accumulated wealth as the
experiment progressed. Here are the results:
The orange line represents typical data for participants
doing the task under normal conditions. Curiously, if the second digit
is displayed immediately following the first digit, participants are
very accurate. But if even a single letter is displayed inbetween the
first digit and the second digit — corresponding to a period of 200 to
500 milliseconds — accuracy in identifying the second digit is
substantially lower, declining from over 90 percent to the low
60-percent range.
The yellow line shows the results of the
group that was rewarded for performance: their results were not
significantly different from the standard testing condition. However,
the other two groups (light blue, distracted with the shopping task,
dark blue, distracted with music) showed substantially less attentional
blink. In fact, the group listening to music had practically no blink
at all.
Olivers and Nieuwenhuis offer three possible
explanations for this phenomenon: the music and thinking about the
holiday could have increased participants arousal. Their mood might
also have been changed by the distracting tasks. Or, perhaps most
interestingly, these distractions could have actually broadened the
participants’ attention state, leading to an improved ability to detect
the digits in the stream of letters.
Olivers,
C.N.L., & Nieuwenhuis, S. (2005). The beneficial effect of
concurrent task-irrelevant mental activity on temporal attention. Psychological Science, 16(4), 265-269.
[Cognitive Daily]
5:54:02 PM
|
|
Do new objects capture our attention?. The
picture below will link you to a quick animation. The blue ring will
gradually get smaller until it obscures the three “8″s, then continue
to shrink until the figures are visible again. While they are obscured,
the 8s will be transformed into letters (S, P, E, U, or H), and a new
letter will also appear. Your job is to search for the letter U or H —
it has an equal chance of appearing where any of the 8s were, or in the
new spot. Click on the picture to try it out.
Attention researchers Steven Franconeri, Andrew
Hollingworth, and Daniel Simons used a similar animation to answer a
key question about what attracts our attention. Recent research has led
to two different hypotheses — either the appearance of a new object, or
a change in the luminance (brightness) of an area of our field of view
is what attracts our attention.
In many cases, both of these changes occur at the same time. For
example, we’re driving down the street and a boy runs out in front of
our car chasing a ball. The boy appearing in front of our car is
certainly a new object, and the light reflecting off of his sweatshirt
carries a different luminance value from the asphalt pavement we had
been looking at.
Franconeri
and his colleagues cleverly designed the animated display you just
looked at to introduce a new object without a corresponding change in
luminance: the object was introduced while all four objects were
obscured by the blue ring, so when it appeared, there was no luminance
change.
In a separate condition, the group presented the same animation, with the ring passing behind
the letters, so that when the new object appeared, there was a change
in luminance. They repeated the task with 2, 3, and 4 objects in the
final display; in each case, participants knew that the 8s would change
into letters, and that they’d be searching for a U or an H. Here are
their results:
When the ring passes in front of the letters, there is no
difference in reaction time, whether the target letter (U or H) appears
in a new position or an old position. This suggests that the mere fact
of a new letter appearing doesn’t attract our attention, because if it
did, we’d react more quickly when the target letter appeared in a new
position. Compare this to the control condition, where the letters are
always in view:
Now, reaction time is significantly faster for the new
item. So when a new item actually changes the luminance of an area in
our field of view, we react faster. Franconeri and his team argue that
this result supports the luminance hypothesis. They suggest that when
the new item corresponds to a luminance change, we direct our attention
to that new item. Then we are able to complete the task more quickly —
to determine if that item is an H or a U. So a change in luminance
attracts our attention, but the appearance of a new object on its own
does not.
Franconeri, S.L., Hollingworth, A., & Simons, D.J. (2005). Do new objects capture attention? Psychological Science, 16(4), 275-281.
[Cognitive Daily]
5:51:56 PM
|
|
Google Gift to Digital Library.
Google plans to make a $3 million gift to the Library of Congress for a
project that aims to digitize significant primary materials from
national libraries. By KATIE HAFNER. [NYT > Technology]
5:48:45 PM
|
|
Sweat is good indicator heart attack may be coming. Sweating
during physical activity or in hot weather is healthy. But when
individuals begin perspiring while experiencing discomfort in their
chest, arm, neck or jaw -- with little or no exertion -- it could be
the onset of a heart attack, according to a new study at the University
of Illinois at Chicago. [Science Blog -]
5:26:18 PM
|
|
Outsourcing to Rural America.  [Slashdot]
this has the potential to revitalize the hinterland in both Canada and
the US and counter the megacity urbanization side effects. -- BL
7:52:09 AM
|
|
Dueling simplicities.
Most of my writing goes straight to the web, but my column still takes
a detour through the print magazine. Usually that's no problem. I'm not
a news hound. And while I'm comfortable editing myself, I enjoy the
thoughtful feedback I get from Neil McAllister who, in addition to
editing my column, writes his own.
Every now and then, though, I wish I could have bypassed the print
loop. Case in point: next week's column on two-way RSS. I wrote it last
week; it will appear on InfoWorld.com tomorrow; magazine subscribers
will get it after the holiday. In that column I discuss how both
Microsoft and Google plan to use XML syndication for two-way data
exchange and, more broadly, to bring database-like capabilities to the
web of linked documents that we are all collectively building. If I'd
blogged it last week, I'd look really prescient now. ... [Jon's Radio]
7:23:02 AM
|
|
© Copyright 2005 Bruce Landon.
|
|
|
