Have you ever thought of what it would be like to look up at the night sky and see, among thousands of brilliant stars, Herschel’s Jewel Box, or the beautiful Hercules star cluster?This is the International Year of Astronomy. There is fascinating activity in an area of land in New Zealand, known as MacKenzie Country. Very little smoke or other pollutants rise to the sky from its less than 2000 inhabitants, so cloudless nights are abundantly rich in starlight.Jet streams - high-altitude, high-speed wind currents - usually flow from the west at high speeds in the upper atmosphere and can spoil the view of the night sky. But there's no significant turbulence in the air above MacKenzie Country, for there is no jet stream near enough.For these reasons, MacKenzie Country is tipped to host the first world heritage site in the sky.Graeme Murray is the director of Earth and Sky Ltd, which has exclusive tourist rights at the Mt John Observatory, a main centre for astronomy research in New Zealand.Murray’s dream is to establish a World Heritage Starlight Reserve in the MacKenzie Country by obtaining recognition and protection for sky in the region from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).UNESCO support for the project may well be celebrated this year.New Zealand could then become the centre for The Startlight Reserve in this, the International Year of Astronomy.

It’s a Scottish tradition to tidy the home before New Year comes in.At the end of last year, I decided to follow this tradition on my blog. Come Hogmanay, otherwise known as Auld Year’s Nicht in Scotland, I’d tidied up newmiddle-earth.blogspot.com.I brought all my post-labels up to date and created new ones that were relevant to topics covered in each post.I updated the alt attributes on each image tag and removed the link-to-image that’s automatically added when it's uploaded into Blogger. Some months ago, I started taking these measures with all new postings.I’d learnt that this provision was courtesy to the visually impaired who may choose to use a speaking browser - otherwise known as a screen reader (incidentally, I also removed Odiogo last year for I found it did not provide a significant advantage).I checked links on all posts dated after 1 June 2008 to ensure that they were still active and relevant. There were some webs that had actually changed (their content was no longer relevant).I found alternatives for the few that were in this group. There were others that simply didn’t work any more. I either found alternative sites to link to or I removed the offending links.I’m used to using a link-checker on my work web at TCS. Incidentally, the entire TCS site is down at the time I write this post and has been since before the New Year. Consequently, none of the links on several of my resources posts work at the moment. Sooner or later someone will rectify this at TCS and all will come right - I hope.No apparent luxury:I do not have the luxury of a link-checker for my site in Blogger. I use the ‘check links’ facility in DreamWeaver on my development web site at work, but I can’t run my blog site through it. I’ve searched Google several times over the months and not found any quick link-checkers for blog sites. Latterly, I began to wonder how other bloggers checked the links in their archived posts.I have 131 posts dated 2008 on my blog. Most have at least one link to another site. It may be to a blog site or a web page. In a few more months, I’m going to have a sizable lot of posts to look after, and a corresponding set of links to maintain.It’s dead Jim:There is nothing I find more disappointing, when following a link on someone’s post that looks like an interesting lead, than getting the dreaded ERROR 404 or other such ‘Web-site Not Found’ notice.Web links have a half-life. They don’t necessarily last forever. Some break altogether, which means the unfortunate reader goes nowhere on click. It could be that the linked site doesn’t exist anymore, or that it’s been relocated, with no provision for redirection. It could also be that the site has gone down, and that the fault may be rectified in the near future. I’ve found it pays to wait a bit before revising a dead link if it’s to a site that I can trust. There’s life Jim, but not as we know it:Sometimes the content on a site changes. As a result, the site may no longer be relevant to the context of the link in my post. While this rarely happens with links to blog posts, it is not an uncommon problem where links to web pages are used.The need for vigilance in this regard is paramount when web links are used in elearning modules. Though the performance of the links on my blog is not as critical as this, it can be regarded by visitors as a reflection of my blog.What is good practice?When I find that links are faulty on my blog posts or web pages, I fix them by finding alternative relevant sites or remove the offending links in courtesy to my readers. Am I being too fastidious in bringing old posts up to date? Does it really matter if old links don’t work anymore?How do you check for broken links on your blog posts?

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers has brought about an outpouring of interesting reviews. Some are lucid, some are not so; some are supportive and some are emotional. Some show distrust for the claims he makes.I wonder why there is such emotional feeling in so many of the reviews I’ve recently come across. The 10,000-hour principle is one particular aspect that seems to be taking a bit of a thump from some reviewers.Yet the evidence Gladwell provides, and let’s not deny it, the past support for this not-new principle, clearly points to its validity.It’s true that Gladwell is making some sweeping statements in his book, but his arguments are compelling. It’s also true that if someone goes looking for evidence to refute any of Gladwell’s claims they are sure to find it (Goethe).Looking for evidence:As I read through Outliers, I found myself looking for evidence for and against too, and why shouldn’t I? From my own knowledge and experience, most of what Gladwell alleges about expert ability in musicianship alone seems to stack up.But one has to take care when considering exactly what is meant by an ‘expert’; I will discuss one piece of evidence I found in support of this. Virtuoso violinist, Yehudi Menuhin was undoubtedly an expert on his instrument. I choose Menuhin because Gladwell does not mention him anywhere in Outliers.A quota of hours:Menuhin began to play the violin when he was 3 years old. He reached expert status perhaps before the age of 13, and continued to practice, perform and teach in the realm of the expert till near the end of the twentieth century. There was plenty of time between the age of 3 and 13 for Menuhin to have put in his requisite quota of hours to become one of the 10,000-hour experts.Yet when I looked about for evidence of his inexpertness on the violin, it was not hard to find, even within his mature years as a world-class violinist. I had already recalled an interview I’d seen on TV when Menuhin admitted that the techniques required to play Scottish fiddle music were beyond him. These techniques applied especially to his expertise with the violin bow.Recently, I’d also found a YouTube video where Menuhin admitted that he could not improvise while playing jazz and swing alongside Stéphane Grappelli - that Grappelli had to write the music for Menuhin to follow so they could perform together.Yet Menuhin could improvise on his violin, there is no doubt about this. Improvising is part of the classical ‘training’ that all violinists go through sooner or later. He simply could not improvise in jazz and swing music. For as close as jazz music is to classical, the genres are significantly far removed from each other to compromise Menuhin’s expertise.Clearly, the term ‘expert’, in the context of Outliers, has to be well defined before a cogent discussion can eventuate the pros and cons of the principles involved within the discipline of the expert.Cooperation, collaboration and the common good: Let me state here that in no way do I write this as a criticism of Menuhin’s talent as a musician or performer. I have admired his supreme musicianship since I was a child. I also feel that it says a lot for how Menuhin was as a person, that he came clean about his own deficiencies as a violinist. Few expert musicians would be so openly honest about their expertise on their own instrument.Menuhin was willing to cooperate and work with his fellow expert musicians, in all aspects of their interests, their craft, their various instruments and musical disciplines. This is one message that I took from Outliers, that a successful society has to be built on collaboration for the common good, not just for the privileged or the elite. Kim Hill's interview with Malcolm Gladwell (27m 48s), NZ 13 Dec 2008

When Catriona was very little, she found comfort in a little bag of sweets. She rarely ate them, but would find pleasure in knowing they were there. She'd pick one from the bag, suck on it for a few seconds, then replace it, in the knowledge that she liked that sweet and could return to it for a suck later on. She did that with all her sweets, discarding the ones she didn’t like.One of Tony Karrer’s 100 conversation topics is Ways that my children are learning that is significantly different from how I learn. This posts is about Tony’s topic number 25.Have you ever been confronted with a technology and didn’t know how to use it? Y’know, the situation where you need to use the darned equipment but never had the opportunity to learn how to, and there’s no one around to show you. Now! When you’re desperate to use it!It'll go bang!I find this happens to me a lot. I have to jolt myself into action to do some exploring, maybe push a button here or click a link there - tap the keyboard to see if anything changes. I have to push aside my fear that the screen might explode, or that smoke may come gushing out of the computer. I fidget and look around to see if anyone’s watching.This is a fear that I’ve always had when trying out new things. I realise that it’s my fear of computers that drove me to want to find out more about them. They are fascinating things, computers. Too fascinating to leave alone, and yet too mysterious not to excite my fear that I might get pounced on if I play with them.Perhaps it’s something to do with my upbringing in an age when technology was rich in contraptions. The Billy Connolly line, "You’ll poke your eye out with that!" doesn’t seem inappropriate."Leave it alone! You don’t know what you’re doing! You’ll break it!" These are all demon voices that shout from the past at me, when I venture to explore somewhere I’ve never been before at the computer. "You’ll go blind!"Habits die hard:I recall when I was teaching young typists to use what we called word processors, way back in the late 80s. These women were fascinatingly slick at typing - on typewriters. Yet they could not get their heads round the idea that the Enter key (labelled Return key then, funny enough) didn’t have to be tapped when you got to the end of the line, or that typos didn’t need correcting as you typed them.I had a great time unteaching these young minds about all their habits. It was a lot of fun. It taught me that humans are creatures of routine. We follow practices and cultures, unquestionably. We become so committed to them that we’ll argue the point when someone suggests we shouldn't follow habit.I introduced the typists to what I called the suck-it-and-see approach to finding things out on the computer and was met with looks of horror. "We would never do that," came the affirmation.Across the barriers:Young minds always catch me out with their direct thinking. And I’m not alone in this. Last year at the NetSafe Conference 2008, I listened to a presenter tell her story of a survey that had been constructed to fathom the practice and thinking of young teenagers.She told of a 14 year old girl who was asked the survey question, "Would you swap a blow-job for a mobile phone?" The girl immediately replied, "What sort of a mobile phone?" The thinking transcends the barriers - obviously!I just found it!I watch my kids with a new remote or computer game. It mesmerises me to observe the way they work. How is it, for instance, that with all the years of tuition, enquiry and practice I’ve had using PhotoShop, that my teenage daughter will find things on the application, within minutes, that I’ve never seen before?I’d ask her, "Who showed you how to do that?" She would reply, almost insolently, "No one - I just found it." She would have found it using the suck-it-and-see approach. But she would have had no inhibitions about ‘sucking’ to find out.Suck it and see:Here's an exercise. The next time you are using a new application, or one that you're not too familiar with, lay aside half an hour to check out the menus. Most apps, like Word 2007 for instance, are quite extensive, but half an hour spent checking out the menus on a blank file can pay dividend.If nothing else, it can help you learn the layout of the menus. With any luck, you'll pick up a thing or two about how to do things that otherwise would lie hidden, never to be found, till a teenage child - son, daughter or student - stumbles across it in minutes while fiddling around.I don’t honestly think that this approach is anything new. In fact, I’d say that it is a natural fun way of finding out and learning. My feeling is that the baby-boomer learners, like myself, may carry baggage unwittingly, that inhibits them from using the suck-it-and-see approach as a first measure in learning.

Last week, being in the middle of New Zealand’s summer holidays,I looked for something out of the ordinary. Whatever I was in search of, it had to take me and my kids away from the melee of technological society - away from TV, play-stations, mobile phones, blogging, elearning. You name it: I wanted to be away from it!A front-page article in Wellington’s daily, splashed a picture of an activity I thought might just do the trick. So early next day, Catriona and I hurriedly bundled ourselves into the car with a lunch hamper, and off we set.An early start:At that time on a Saturday morning, it was only half an hour’s drive away. We arrived at Harcourt Park, early enough to stroll round and breathe in much of what we would experience while the day matured.The natural beauty of surrounding bush, pristine sweetness of the air, simplicity of being on foot, softness of cropped grass, gentle medieval music tinkling up from the valley, brought us into another age and atmosphere.This is 2009! On these hallowed grounds, there are to be duels fought - and battles! There are to be archery competitions, mounted skill-at-arms contests, and the pageantry of jousting!Callum Forbes and The Order of the Boar Jousting Club, the network of medieval clubs from all over New Zealand including The Company of the Dragon, and the welcomed participation by jousters from, Sweden, Belgium, USA, Canada, Australia and Holland, are set to make this a day to remember.The Upper Hutt City Council is the sponsor of a two day World Invitational Jousting Tournament.The parade of the participants is colourful and it is splendidly different.If it weren’t for the digital cameras poking eagerly from the appreciative crowd, and the quality Tannoy commentary, I’d believe that the twenty-first century is a memory of things past! All this is happening - with today’s technology - now!The most skillful jousters, riding the bravest steeds, are wearing the finest suits of armour at the tournament.But warm up contests are necessary to whet the skills of horse and rider. Armour is not required. Besides, carrying 40 or 50 kilograms of extra steel must not tire a trusty steed too early in the day.There are archery competitions to watch and siege engine displays to see. Activities of foot combat and swashbuckler combat rouse the interest of all, anticipating the main event, the jousting.Round one, of three, begins at noon. The day is a sizzling pizza, warming in summer’s oven.Let the pageant commence. With such splendid displays of sport and ridership, it was difficult to cope with the connotative action from the Tannoy when its music started up. We were pulled sharply back into the twenty-first century.As the last jousting run of round 3 came to a close, the sizzling pizza, hot from the oven of summer’s kitchen, cooled in a humid afternoon.

Have you ever thought of how you go about reading links in a blog-post or a web-page? A recent posting on Sue Waters' enviably informative site impresses me by advising bloggers to cite relevant information using links (hyperlinks), as long as it doesn’t mean going hyper with a fan of links. I go along with her reasoning. I also find comfort that she (a scientist after all!) is as fond of a fan of links in a post as I am.Links in a post can be extremely useful. They can put you in touch with people you didn't know existed. They can also keep you up to date with things perhaps you should know about.Most recently, there seems to have been an increase in the attention given to the ‘cognitive overload’ that accompanies sifting through burgeoning masses of information online - the dizzy headaches - the hazy eyes - the lack of concentration - the spinning head.These symptoms are exactly what I experience when I visit a fan of links, one after the other, while also trying to follow the highbrow train of thought of the blogger who posted them. Following up a fan of links baffles me! Link becomes a four-letter word.Decision making can be exhausting:Making decisions can tire the brain, apparently. But making decisions is exactly what you have to do while sweeping through a bevy of links, skimming through the accompanying articles as you go. When I do this, my brain constantly has to come up with yes/no answers to a fan of questions:Is this information going to be any use to me?Should I know this?Is it going to be any use to someone else?Could this be useful for my students, say?Should they know this?Is what I’m reading important enough to come back to?What’s it got to do with what the writer’s saying anyway?I get up to about link 5, and recognising that I’m on the verge of blowing a gasket, I break - for a coffee. It's probably the best thing I could do.One method I’ve used is to ignore the links altogether, at least in the first read. I bash on with what’s in the post or article to try and make some sense of it. This sometimes works.But if there’s essential information cited through links, especially early in the text, and I know nothing about that stuff, I’m sunk. My brain runs out of steam when following the rest of what's there to read. My understanding wobbles. I effectively go nowhere when I try to continue reading.I’ve then got to stop, retrace, and do some homework on the content in the links. This procedure is irksome, frustrating in the extreme, probably because by that time, I’ve got the old cognitive overload syndrome. Again. My head starts spinning.There have been several postings recently on writing for skimming, notably Tony Karrer's, and there is certainly room for improvement in the way material is presented to reader/learners. But the need for the reader/learner to improve skills and strategies for coping with floods of new information is also becoming a major priority in the workplace.But what's the best way of tackling a fan of links? If you have any thoughts on this, strategies or practices that you could share, please let me know. My head hurts.

Reading through Tony Karrer's recent post Better Memory, reminded me of the importance of cataloguing information so that it can be easily found again. The recent revision of his First Time Visitor Guide also got me thinking about the importance of indexing.Since I published my 100th post, I've found it more and more difficult to keep track of what's on my own blog. Things are becoming more difficult to find there for I forget when and where I wrote things and sifting through my archived posts has become too cumbersome (I also recalled what Sue Waters said about a blog archive taking up valuable space on the side-bar, so I might relocate mine yet).I know from my own experience how difficult it is to find topics posted on other blogs and I'm often gobsmacked when I discover some archived gem on a blog that I thought I knew well.So I'm taking a few tips from Tony Karrer. I'm experimenting with an Index Page for Blogger in Middle-earth. Check it out and help me improve it.

Kevin Hodgson (aka Dogtrax) is an amazing teacher, blogger and friend who continues to impress me with his energy, enthusiasm and inventive ideas that are put into action; this man walks the talk.He was the first person ever to post a comment on my blog. He reads 500 blogs a day on his RSS Reader. I awarded him the Fantastic Commenter Award during my first month of blogging because of the ubiquitous way he permeated the blogosphere posting relevant comments everywhere I looked.He involves his students in some of the most remarkably innovative activities and he and his students are well known for their claymation movies.He started his own published cartoon series, Boolean Squared. He has also been running a blog activity called Day In A Sentence for years and it gives me a lot of real pleasure to host Kevin’s ‘Day In A Sentence’.This week’s challenge, true to Kevin’s principles, is to use the theme peace in your day/week in a sentence.So get your thinking furnace roaring, forge your sentence, and post your words in a comment here. Your innovative product will be postedE O T W.

courtesy make your own comic I’ve just read Dick Carlson's How to create amazing technical learning. It’s an ebook that contains a lot of down-to-earth common-sense advice. It’s a good read and hilariously funny, lightening what could otherwise be a rather boring topic.Carlson gives some grunty tips on preparing and delivering training as well as pointers on how to handle a few aspects of a training company. It’s in a 72 page portable document format (pdf). Check out the link at the base of this post[1].Techos hate them!I like pdfs, and was surprised to learn that techos hate them. A couple of years ago, I had a really useful discussion with my son, Jack, who explained what it was about pdf files that irked the pants off techos.I remonstrated at the time. On reflection, I now have to agree with Jack.Some pdfs look good, smell good, feel good, but when you get down to using them as resources, they are inordinately difficult, if not near impossible to use. And there’s no excuse for this.Hundreds of pages!There are pdf resource ebooks that run to hundreds of pages but have no linked index or bookmarks to assist you to navigate the content.I get lost and I’d give up on a lot of those if it weren’t for my dogged determination to learn the good stuff in them. When I open an ebook, the first thing that hits me, even with some of the best, is the stunning quality of the huge images, the copious intros, and the trailing contents in the first, several pages. These are all very good for letting me know what’s in the book: I just get tired getting to the stuff.As I scroll through the contents, I recollect the original intention of the pdf. It was to provide a way of sending a formatted electronic text that could be printed without problems to do with the exactness of how the printed end product looked.Keeping up with the technology:Since last century, Adobe has built some very useful and wonderful features into Acrobat. I won’t bore you with the details, but nearly all of those features come into their own when the pdf containing them is viewed from the screen.These days, most pdfs are viewed from the screen, but they’re not made to be used that way. They’re designed as if they should be printed and read from the sheets. The problem is that the use of the technology has just not moved with the technology available.Neither are resource ebooks meant to be read from start to finish. When I find a resource ebook that’s really useful, I have to open it in Acrobat and put in links, as well as bookmarks, to prevent me having cerebral blowout when I try to find things that are useful.Content? Link it!Even with a large ebook, it doesn’t take me longer than half an hour to put the links in. But it’s easier to do when the pdf is first made, and of course, I’ve no control over that decision. Content links, as well as bookmarks that can be opened from the left margin, can be planned when the text file is first created, and before the pdf is made.Check out the links and bookmarks in this Content Developer’s Bulletin by Becta. It’s only an 8 page pdf. But it’s written for people who haven’t a lot of time to scroll through even 8 pages looking for the good stuff.Wonderful resources:There are links to these wonderfully information packed resources that are hard to navigate at the base of this post[1 - 3]. Check them out too. They all have great, useful information in them. It’s a pity it’s so difficult to find. There’s one that’s admittedly a report[2] and not really an ebook - but it has over 270 pages!The writers of The eLearning Guild post some splendid ebooks on all aspects of elearning. They are truly wonderful and I recommend them to anyone interested in learning some good tips and skills. One of their books has 834 tips for successful online instruction[3]. It runs to 71 pages. I’ve used it a lot, and I kept going back to it, but only after I’d thrown it into Acrobat and bookmarked the sections.I’m all for moving with the technology. Let’s use ebooks, yes, but let’s also have them made using the up-to-date features available with today’s technology, so that the functionality of the product is also up-to-date.Creating Amazing Technical Learning - Dick CarlsonEnhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies - The Berkman Center For Internet & Society, Harvard University834 Tips for Successful Online Instruction - The eLearning Guild ( 2 ) << - related posts

There has been doubt hung on the worth of past learning over the years. Recently, Bill Farren put into question the value to young students of what has been learnt by ‘old’ teachers. There has been much new debate about the efficacy of content, which presumably is a record of past learning. Out of a plethora of bellicose discussion came the notion that the use of textbooks, whether paper or digital, is now past its use-by-date.A million hits:How much of this has come about without real thought being given to the usefulness of past learning? Perhaps it is motivated by other factors not at all related to the worth of what has been learnt.Could it be that the huge amount of content, the ease that this can be displayed through in-your-face millions of hits on Google, has driven our pedagogues to a state of desperation? Has the burgeoning quantity of data forced teachers, and teaching authorities, to swing the pendulum away from teaching content, in a bid that’s really centred on self-protection, albeit perhaps unintentional?What’s on the cutting room floor?It’s known that copious decision-making tires the mind, causing wrong decisions to be made, often at times when the correct choice is crucial. But when teachers have to select a useful curriculum from the great unwashed heap of knowledge, the decision-making that has to take place is profuse.Perhaps the use of Occam’s Razor in education is becoming commonplace, so that all problematic issues, including content, finish on the cutting room floor. It certainly seems to be the growing practice when the challenging issue is student behaviour. Perhaps it’s not the content that’s the problem, but the way it’s being selected for learners.Access to content:Textbooks have been subject to makeovers for decades. Broad indicators of the changes can be examined without any real understanding of the knowledge the books contain. Indexing, as one specific indicator, has undergone dramatic change in the last 50 years, from the algebraic nightmare of numerically indexed paragraphs within chapters, to the complete absence of an index.Mid-twentieth century textbooks had contents pages, traditionally near the beginning of the book, and often had an index at the rear. Latterly, the style and format used for the layout of content pages and index pages were at the whim of the publisher. Many formats were designed for looks rather than utility.Whose responsibility?It was not uncommon for a textbook to have an index that learners couldn’t or wouldn’t use. A textbook with such an index is as useful as one with no index at all. I recall having several textbooks like that in the 70s. They were good resources for what they contained. Their indexing was so bad, however, that I had to develop my own system for refinding the information. I’m still doing that with ebooks today.Apparently, the onus to take charge of indexing, as well as the refind that Tony Karrer talks about, is being placed firmly on the learner. There’s no doubt that being responsible for refind is becoming a learning necessity - almost an indispensable learning skill for those who have accumulated the so-called 21st century skills.Though I don’t doubt the usefulness of the skills, I wonder how much the need for some of them is being impelled by a move away from traditional indexing in learning resources, both digital and printed, that are being built for use in schools and tertiary institutions. related posts - >> ( 1 )