Brains working towards machine consciousness

Although I have been aware of the DPA since the legislation was passed, and have worked in a role where I was responsible for auditing my company’s compliance (or at least my department’s compliance), I confess I had not thought about the burgeoning use of Social Media sites in the context, except in terms of how they should behave with my data.

I have been involved in an interesting discussion on Twitter this morning, with @TerryWassall, @JamesClay, @OStephens, @GrahamAttwell, @HallyMK1 and @AJCann about issues relating to course materials and copyright.

Yesterday I decided to install Windows 7.  I was going to go the Vista route so I didn’t have to re-install programs, but then realised that I didn’t want to lose the will to live.

It went pretty smoothly.  Migrating files from old set up to new one took many hours, and still isn’t complete because the system tells me it doesn’t have enough disk space (despite having twice as much free as it is trying to copy).

The UK has a new eSafety drive for school children, with the “Zip it, Block it, Flag it” mantra, which is to be incorporated into Personal, Social and Health Education.  This is a good thing, but there is a danger that as children grow up, they are left with a mistrust of social media.  There is already anecdotal evidence of university students staying away from interactions online, because they have been taught of the dangers but not educated about the rich possibilities.

 Liam Green-Hughes mentioned in a tweet that "I think though that society is nothing without individualism though, perhaps a controversial point :)" and it made me think it was about time I wrote something on the subject.

 On the 30th November, an email was forwarded from our 'Clean and Green' team, which pointed to a rather shocking expenditure of £3,500 on electricity on Christmas Day last year.  I assume almost nobody was working on campus, that there weren't any major displays of Christmas lights, and that most lights were not left on.  

It occurred to me to think about how much power our "Thames Blue" IBM blade center (sic) consumes, and how much of that figure might relate to that, thanks to Karsten who mentioned the subject.

 I have had reason to think about Libraries lately.  I am giving a talk to library staff at my university on Digital Identity, so I have been thinking through the whole 'library in a digital world' idea.

 This is far from perfect, but listening to tweets while reading something else is about the best use of the spare audio channel in my brain I can think of at the moment!

This is written in Ruby, and uses the marvellous Twitter client from @jnunemaker (the Twitter gem)

We all live within an environment.  Part of that is obviously our physical environment, but the bit I am writing about is our learning environment.  Looking at what each of us, as an individual, uses to support our learning gives rise to the concept of a Personal Learning Environment, or PLE.  The term PLE, however, is typically used with regard to the technological toolset an individual uses, rather than the sum of all factors in the learner's environment.

 There is a fascinating distributed dialogue about the nature of instructional scaffolding, the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and how they can be viewed in the domain of today's learning landscapes.  Graham Attwell identifies the issue of the role of Teacher in the work on ZPD.  He points out that a lot of learning occurs without one person acting in a Teacher role.