redbud trees have been been blooming for about 2 weeks or more now.  They should be about done, but some are still just getting started.  Irises are blooming in some parts of town, but not yet in my yard.

Bradford pears and daffodils have been blooming for a while, and they are winding down, though still looking lovely.

Wood violets are vigorous and happy, with blooms.  Established inland sea oats and day lilies are sending up new shoots, and the turks cap and purple coneflowers also have some greens underneath the dead leaves.

New leaves on oaks and on redbuds, and on rosebushes and other established perennials.

I think people make decisions for strange reasons.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?