Brains working towards machine consciousness

 Many people suffer some degree of stage fright when confronted with having to give presentations.  It can range from a mild anxiety (often said to help enhance "performance") to truly horrifying, gut-wrenching fear of being the focal point, the expert, in front of many people with high expectations of you.  Indeed, it can be sufficiently bad that some people are sick or just cannot go on stage to give the presentation.

 (based on a true story by Ella Davies, Earth News reporter for the BBC... well, sort of ;-))

Dave White wrote about his Digital Resident/Visitor model on the TALL blog back in 2008 (http://tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk/index.php/2008/07/23/not-natives-immigra...) and it has been well received. I have recently been thinking about the Digital Native/Immigrant idea of Prensky again, and finding a lot of the criticism of it to be focussed on a particular point, and somewhat lacking in critical reasoning, so I thought it about time I went back and looked at Dave White's model too.

I see a lot of people saying that Prensky's concept of Digital Natives (http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/prensky%20-%20digital%20natives,%20di...) is flawed because e.g. you can't differentiate by generation, that not all young people are a whiz with technology, or that brain structures have not been modified by experience with technology.

Just a brief mention of my colleague, Karsten Oster Lundqvist's tutorial on Android game development, which he runs as a workshop for our undergraduates (and others!). He has an online version on his blog (http://oster-lundqvist.com/karsten/?p=4886)

It is in a nice conversational style, with plenty of screen shots and working copies of code should you run in to difficulties. The only thing missing for a java-numpty like me is how to get Eclipse to run reliably. I know it works for a lot of people, but I also know quite a few who suffer the same woes with it as I do... ;-)

Dear Sir,

Please can you tell me how much money was spent by your department on the Opera report mentioned in your press release http://www.communities.gov.uk/news/corporate/1925280

Furthermore, can you please let me know how much of this cost the department has identified as having been wasted by reviewing the claims the Opera report makes in light of Ben Goldacre's expose of it's inadequacies (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/24/bad-science-local-go...)?

In 2002 I was not convinced that it made absolute sense to have researchers actively involved in teaching. After all, the best researchers seldom seemed to have an excess of skills in teaching. But then, it can be argued that HE doesn't really involve teaching - it is a lecturer's job to lecture, and it is for the learners to figure out how to learn the material. And who better to convey the information to the learners than those responsible for the research?

Prof Steve Wheeler (@timbuckteeth on Twitter) was having a discussion using the #learning2020 tag earlier which I couldn't help but eavesdrop on. The bit which was interesting me was @bradbeach saying he'd never heard anyone say that their best learning experience was due to content or technology, but rather because of dialogue.

Further to my last post, this is the current draft of my application, and I would welcome feedback on it. Generally when doing these things, I find other people remind me of stuff I have done which I have forgotten about, but it is also possible that someone out there might challenge aspects of this. I am open to suggestions on improving the wording or any other aspect as well! I've got about another 2000 words I can use, so there is plenty of scope...