Brains working towards machine consciousness

For the Open University Open Learning Open Course (I have to type that, just because I like typing Open so often), H817, we have been asked to consider what priorities we would advise a funding organisation to address if it wishes to promote activity and research in the area of open education.

There are suggestions around the ideas of sustainability, barriers to uptake, and technology, but I think it is important to focus chiefly on the three other areas mentioned.

As a first step in getting to grips with the content of the Open Education course, I put together a map of some of the key concepts. It is a work-in-progress, but in the spirit of open practice and open learning, key elements of open education, in my opinion, I am sharing what I have done so far.

I may need to re-edit this post to get it to work, but here goes...

I will be taking part in the course on Open Education with the OU primarily for my own interest, but also because it happens to coincide with my area of work and my PhD.

 In much the same way that I think a lot of the criticism of the notion of 'Digital Natives' is misinformed, I have once again run across the claims that "learning styles are a myth", that they have been "debunked" and frustration that the "myth won't die".  It is claimed that there is scientific, empirical, evidence that people do not have different learning styles.

A good while ago I had a play with the Educational Jargon Generator.  Recently I've been suspicious that people are actually using it for producing reports, so I thought it was time to play again.  I'll write a few words, get it to generate some jargon and put it in, and rinse and repeat.

 Dr Justin Marquis (@drjwmarquis)’s blog post, “Flipping and Expanding Bloom’s Taxonomy” got me thinking.  I have generally ignored Bloom’s Taxonomy because so much of it seems wrong to me –Shelly Wright and Marquis have taken a more sensible approach and suggested modifications to it in their posts (“Flipping Bloom’s Taxonomy” and “Flipping and Expanding Blo

 Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime

 While I am feeling *ahem* musical, here's a song (In to the midnight blue) I wrote a long time ago, which I finally got round to re-recording.  It could be a lot better, I know...  CC ND licence on this, I reckon, so if anyone is crazy enough to want to re-do it, you can, but you must say I was the writer/original 'artist' ;-)

 I'm really happy to be involved in a new JISC project here at the University of Reading, called Digitally Ready.  We've got the first programme meeting coming up soon, and the programme managers at JISC want an 'elevator pitch', which should be 'creative' and 'definitely no powerpoint'.

That's a challenge for a Comp Sci Engineery type.  No Powerpoint? What can these people be thinking? ;-)

 I guess I hadn't tried putting a default constructor in a Hash before, or if I had, the behaviour was different...

I wanted a Hash which holds a number of hashes (actually, to be honest, I probably just wanted it to have arrays, but when I started, I thought I wanted hashes, and it isn't an unreasonable use case).  I haven't worked out why this does what it does,