Brains working towards machine consciousness

 I was engaging in some open learning earlier.  It largely involved eavesdropping on a Twitter conversation between Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) and Owen Stephens (@ostephens) (which also included Joss Winn (@josswinn), who patiently puts up with me miss-spelling his name, and Amber Thomas (@ambrouk), who patiently puts up with me generally on Twitter) about Open Educational Resources (OER).

 The Telegraph ran a story in April 2009 about some research by Immordino-Yanga et al.

 I like helping other people.  I generally don't look for compensation for it, either.  One might think that that should mean that I think the 'Big Society' is at least a good idea, whether I agree with the implementation details or not.

 I don't know why, but I was just reminiscing about the first round of pay negotiations I was in.  I had just turned 10, I think it was, and the pay master general (aka my Mum) told me my pocket money was going up to the princely sum of £5 a month.  I was over the moon - this was a sum previously undreamed of!

(all self evident really, but as I had penned it in an email, I thought I would also share it with the world...!)

 I use Drupal here, and also for the LinkSphere project.  The LinkSphere URL is in my institution's domain, and redirects to the site itself.  Most things work fine - but forms do not get the right base URL.  And so far, I haven't been able to figure out why.

At the moment, I get round it using a really dirty hack (complete with hardcoded element of the path - *shudder*)

 From time to time my mind wanders to thoughts about what the population is up to.  In this case, I was struck by a BBC report which happened to mention there are over 500,000 registered teachers in the UK (not all, of course, are necessarily actually in teaching - that figure is about 427,800).



 I am using the generally excellent hpricot library too do some XML parsing (saves writing boring, and error prone, regexes).  A piece of code which worked last week started failing today - not sure why as this was during a sanity-check test run to make sure I knew where I was up to.  That is, I hadn't changed anything since it last worked.  Not even so much as a foolish update of my ruby gems...

 Inspired by Dave White's post Does the Technology Matter?.

In a few days time I will be going to a #140Conf meetup in London http://www.meetup.com/140conf-London/calendar/13391290/ addressing the question:

"Constructing Education - Do we have a real time responsibility to future generations - NOW?"

  This is just a very brief introduction to my thinking on the subject: