decision making

I convinced a coworker to eat a packet of ketchup/catsup by telling her it was for a class.  I didn’t think that was a sufficient rationale, but she told me she would do it if I dared her.  So I did, and she did.  I have been talking about this class for a while at work and my coworkers have somewhat of an invested emotional interest at this point, so I think that helped make her happy to eat ketchup.  My other coworker said she had to do crazy things like that all the time when she was rushing her sorority, so that eating strange things like that wasn’t really a big deal.

I think people make decisions for strange reasons.

pan flute flowchart

toothpastefordinner.com

What’s in a brain?

Where Are The Dogs Humping.com

Learning Contexts

Download and create an avatar in Second Life or There.com or some other 3-D online space. Many theorists and researchers are saying that this is the next learning context. How do you feel about this based on your experiences there? How would a 3-D learning context improve learning and/or cognition? How might it hurt learning and/or cognition?

I think it is a bit ambitious to call it THE next learning context.  It is certainly another learning context.
A 3-D learning context can improve learning or cognition for certain things.  Simulating interior design of real buildings most immediately comes to mind.  It would be a useful tool for designing space to accommodate human pedestrian traffic, since people are constantly walking (or flying) around galleries, malls, and plazas.

I do not think that a 3-D learning context is useful for viewing video or images, or for reading text, yet people present information in those formats in 2nd Life.    For those elements, the interface inhibits learning, in my experience.  Content management websites, such as Flickr or YouTube offer much faster delivery, cheaper bandwidth, and more tools for organization and sharing.

I do not think that a 3-D learning context can provide a suitable replacement for people who like to learn kinetically.  Manipulating an avatar with a mouse does not provide the same tactile experience as does manipulating legos, making ice cream from scratch, or brushing a person’s hair.

Problem Solving/Creativity

Go here: http://iamtryingtobelieve.com/
Where is the problem solving? What are you doing? What is the problem with this site? What creative solutions to this did you try?

The problem I faced was that the text is difficult to read.

The solution that I used was to highlight the text with my cursor, which caused the text to be displayed normally.

I thought of two other solutions:

1 was to view the page source, to view the page in plain text.

2 was to view the page using the Opera browser and setting it to user the user view, which produced black text on a white background.

The new problem presented by this last solution is that I often judge the trustworthiness and legitimacy of a website based on its structure.  If I convert all websites to the same format, I DO lose some content that helps me assess information validity or purpose.  In this instance, format = content.

Knowledge Representation

The text in the galleries, “contemporary ruins and urban archeology” constrict the viewer’s sense of space. The artists have already dictated the users expectations. Furthermore, the words “photography” and “work” inform users that they should appreciate these images as art, rather than as news media or journalism.

Before even interacting with the images, the user’s mental representation of the images is dictated in part by the artists’ representations of the images.

Regarding the images themselves, none of them are Detroit. Physically, the images are pixels displayed on a monitor in accordance with certain internet standards and protocols. The images are instances of photographic representations of Detroit. They are “instances” because these are not the original photographs. Those were on a camera at one point, but have probably since been removed. The images on the camera were created by light hitting a sensor beyond the lens. The representation of that scene was then transferred to another instance…either onto a processed print, or to a computer hard drive. Every time the photographer copied or transferred an image, another instance of a single representation was created.

The images are representations of Detroit because they only capture a monocular (most cameras have one lens, whereas most humans have two eyes) projection. They do not embody the entirety of Detroit (which includes the word “Detroit,” which in itself is a representation of the physical place of Detroit).

All of the images are curated around a single theme – urban decay. There are other aspects of Detroit not explored in this set of images, such as the Redwings, or auto companies, steel workers, unemployment, the Henry Ford museum, etc.

As knowledge representations, they are successful to the degree which the creators feel the images capture their original vision. But that suggests they are representations of the artist instead of representations of Detroit. The images, as knowledge representations, cannot be improved upon, but they are not universally helpful for everyone who is seeking knowledge about Detroit. Those people might find better information by seeking the representation of Detroit on Wikipedia.

Language Acquisition and Context

“Try to have a ten minute conversation with two different people in which you DO NOT use the letter “n.” Write a reflection about the experience.”

At first, I was very careful, and it made by speech very choppy. My wife said it was frustrating to hear me because I spoke so slowly. The few times that I made mistakes, I got flustered, so I would go back and try to rephrase each statement without the letter “n.”

After I completed the exercise, I tried to resume the same dialog with my wife where we left off, but I started to speak with disjointed sentence fragments, and was even more difficult to listen to for a few minutes.

memory self assessment

Through the assessment at http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/memory I learned that my memory is generally better than I thought, according to this assessment. My results must be qualified by at least two factors. One, is that I was concentrating much harder than I usually am in daily tasks, and there were few distractions when I took the assessment. This might have had a positive impact on my performance. The other factor is that it was the end of the work day, and I had already been working at a computer for 8 hours. This might have had a negative impact on my performance.

If I was to take this assessment again, I don’t think I would prepare myself any differently unless there was some kind of incentive to do well. If the point of the assessment is to just learn something about myself, then I would want to get an accurate reading. One thing that I would do differently is actually click on the smiley face at the end when I saw it. I remembered to click on it, but I chose not to because I did not actually think that the survey was over yet, since the progress bar at the bottom showed that there were still slides to come.

I followed this assessment with another exercise. I did not find this helpful, perhaps because I was mentally tired from a full day at work and then focused concentration on the assessment above. If I was designing a lesson in which the students needed to memorize some information to apply to problem solving, I would consider the time of day and the energy levels of the students, as well as the amount of time between breaks from work. I believe that the timing of the exercise and the assessment would impact student performance.

(in)validity of beautycheck — social perception

Beautycheck — Social perception is a silly website and a sillier study. Because it is silly, I will use the magic irony and compose a haiku to demonstrate my feelings. You kids at home can put on your irony hats and write a haiku as well. Ready!!???

from whence does it suck?
unsound methodology
and irrelevance.

now, a limerick:

they sought to test examine beauty
but this science is nothing but fruity
it should be understood,
the morphing software is good
but the research smells quite like tooty

The first sentence of the Summary section pretty much says it all:

“The face of a person can tell us everything.” about what? a skin condition? are we back in physiognomy? did we just take science back to 200 years before the enlightenment? Are rhetorical questions suitable for addressing this topic? What more can one say?

Perception theory in simulation of the manipulation of particles

The site particles | physics simulation utilizes a structuralist theory of perception. Three manipulable factors are displayed on the console: friction, attraction, and repulsion. Since these three elements are each independent of the other two, and not controlled in a holistic manner. Gestalt Theory helps us perceive groups of objects (Sternberg 126-128). These simulated particles are related in figure-ground (the particles share a visual space), proximity (the objects are in a group, and their proximity fluctuates based on the elements in the console), similarity (except for color, which helps us track the individual particles), continuity (balls as geometric objects are not disrupted or discontinuous), and symmetry (balls are symmetrical). The Gestalt principle of closure does not necessarily apply because each simulated particle is complete in itself.

Digital simulation aids human perception of elements too small to physically manipulate may be partially explained by Ronald Finke’s principles of visual imagery (Sternberg, 244):

1. “our mental movements across images correspond to similar transformations of and movements across physical objects…”
2. “The spatial relations among elements of a visual image are analagous to those relations in actual physical space”

4. “the construction of mental images is analagous to the construction of visually perceptible”

5. “visual imagery is functionally equivalent to visual perception in terms of the process of the visual system used for each.”

Principle 3, dealing with the use of mental images generating information not stored during encoding does not appy to this website. If a user decides to project the future path of a single particle, based on the settings in the console, then a mental image would be generating information not stored in the initial encoding.