Maish Nichani has written a telling post on inner spam filters. He was inspired by an article in the Scientific American, Your Inner Spam Filter. Maish succinctly relates that there are two types of people, “those who can remember large amounts of information (high-capacity individuals) and those who can’t (low-capacity individuals). The draw on research and show that it’s not that the high-capacity individuals have a larger store, it’s just that they are better at ignoring the spam that comes their way! In fact they found that some low-capacity individuals were holding more information than high-capacity individuals.” Which am I?

Is this a skill or an ability that we can teach to our students? This is certainly a skill for the 21st century. Kyle Barrow published the chart shown above last May. I wonder what data generated the chart yet assuming it is accurate it is quite clear that we need to impart to our children the ability to filter out the noise and eliminate the spam in the first instance.

Dean Groom in his role as Howard as he weaves his OzNZ disciples down the PBL pathway

Sat in on an OzNZ educators flash meeting. It seemed I arrived first and rather idiotically I clicked on the Start Broadcast button and sat there like a stunned mullet for a bit until I realised I had hijacked the opening of the proceedings. Oh well, I will not lose any sleep over at that.

There was discussion regarding Second Life and also Interactive Whiteboards. I was looking forward to more talk on SL actually. SL intrigues me somewhat.

Some educators rave about SL. Others deplore it. Two documentaries regarding virtual worlds and Second Life that aired on the 6th August on SBS TV here in Australia, the Age of Avatars and Wonderland: Virtual Adultery and Cyberspace Love did not go down too well in some education sectors. PodLove may have perturbed some educators as well.

Then as the online discussion continued, Dean Groom, provided us all with an excellent and impromptu live example of PBL. We were all involved as we gradually collaborated to solve the problem set up by Dean. One gradually took on a role as we sought a solution to the conundrum. Dean is a real practitioner. Impressive. It was a good get together. I lurked more than contributed. Next time I should be more proactive. A number of sites were referenced during the meeting:

AUGrid
Machinima
OSGrid
GenerateWebSite
Skoolabarate
Digital Ethnography

I participated in what I believe was the first OzNZ flash meeting back in April. That was a interesting experience as well.

This evening’s meeting has been archived here. The OzNZ educators group is well supported with a wiki, diigo group and a ning.

Addendum: Discovered this nice piece on Machinima on the SBS TV website. May interest you.

Created a tip sheet for Photoshop Elements ~ version 3 admittedly but still useful for later incarnations of the software. I am running a workshop for Year 6 students from a neighbouring primary school on Monday. They have been collaborating on a project with our Year 7 students. They would like to repair and modify some photographs, hence the workshop. You may find the tip sheet useful. It is a pdf file ~ about 1.3mb. I created it using Comic Life and ‘printed it to pdf’.

Well, had a quick look at Bimbl yet I am not impressed. Should the team at Posterous be worried?

Posted by email from Watershed Lite (posterous)

Our kitchen is being replaced. On Friday our old kitchen was removed. Back to the original walls and floors. We temporarily covered the floor to prevent accidents with nails protruding from the wooden part of the floor. Parts of the wall were removed. Inside one of the wall cavities were pages from a newspaper dated March 28th, 1978. I flicked through the pages and the items that caught my eye are illustrated below.

Advertisements for calculators that still give the impression of the revolutionary and brilliant this technology. Calculations… Casio solves them scientifically! I think our family obtained its first calculator in 1977.

Then there is this advertisement for a 48cm colour television with a price tag of $599-00AUD. That was an enormous amount of money back then. That may have been equivalent to a month’s salary for many people, perhaps more. The advertiser has used a photograph of ABBA on the TV screen. Love the AM/FM transistor radio and the bedside AM/FM clock radio. You still see those clock-radios in motels.

Finally, an article about the copyright problems posed by the rich man’s new toy, the video tape recorder. The article indicated thet there would be legal battles between manufactuers, television stations and home consumers of the product. Things have certainly changed in some respects.

We are going to put a current copy of the local paper, wrapped in plastic, back in the wall cavity for the next renovators to discover years from now. I wish there was an anachronism lying around I could throw in for good measure.