Texting frequency and moral shallowing

An interesting study that reveals, in accordance with Nicholas Carr’s predictions, that there is a close positive correlation between what most of us would consider moral ugliness and frequent texting, at least among young people in Winnipeg. The correlations between frequent texting and moral dissolution are unsurprising, as the study appears to suggest that 42% of students in Winnipeg appear to text more than 200 times a day. 12%  of them do so more than 300 times a day. That leaves little time for thought. It averages out at once every 3 minutes for 15 hours of the day. I guess they read the replies too And eat and use the bathroom (I don’t want to even think about that in the context of texting). And indulge what appear to be quite prodigious and positively correlated sexual appetites (or that). Luckily for the rest of us, that leaves little time to pursue their interests in wealth and status.  My suspicion would be that most activities apart from breathing that that we engage in 300+ times a day are unlikely to do us much good. 

Address of the bookmark: http://news-centre.uwinnipeg.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/texting-study.pdf

Elgg source code evolution (before 4th May 2013) – YouTube

A fascinating diagram showing developer contributions to the open source core of the Elgg project (used here on the Landing) over the past 5 years or so. Quite fascinating to watch, and especially pleasing to see how the number of contributors has grown over the past year or so, probably as much due to moving to Github from Trac as anything else, though the great work of the Elgg foundation team in building and employing the work of the community goes hand in hand with that. Makes me feel quite a lot more secure about the future of the technology to know that so many people are active in pushing it forward. It would be intriguing to look at the larger ecosystem of plugins that sits around that using a similar visualization.

Address of the bookmark:

Discourse – rebooted forum software

Discourse is an extremely cool and open source reinvention of forum software that is replete with modern features like real-time AJAX loading of threads (which are not the usual tree-like things but more a flat form with contextual threading as and when needed), lots of collective features including reputation management, tagging, rating and ranking, what’s-hot lists and so on. Looks slick, hooks into plenty of other services. I’d like to see something like this on the Landing instead of its simple discussion boards. Not trivial to integrate, but it does have an open and rich API so can be called easily from other systems.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.discourse.org/

Spy ebook reader

I like this device but I love the way it is being sold. This and other products on the site are sold (at exhorbitant prices, incidentally, that can all be greatly bettered elsewhere) as devices intended to help people to cheat in exams. Excellent.

While a cheat reading carefully from a watch of this size is unlikely to fool any but the least attentive of invigilators, it and other technologies available on the site demonstrate rather nicely that the arms race between examiners and cheats will never be won by either side. It inevitably leads to spiralling costs that cannot be sustained for schools, universities and other organizations that use them and some cheats will always be caught. This is in the nature of technological evolution. It cannot be otherwise. Sometimes cheats will be on the ascendent, sometimes invigilators, but neither faction can ever win.

I think there is a place for summative exams in some limited areas like driving cars or for journalists, where the method of assessment is authentic for the task being assessed. For formative assessment purposes, they can be a good idea, as long as nothing rides on them, they are ungraded, and the resulting feedback is positive and helpful.  In most other cases, decades of research proves that they are antagonistic to motivation and thus to learning. Studies reveal that the majority of school students, a large number of undergraduates, and a smaller number of post-graduates admit to having cheated in exams. Even the least sophisticated exams are expensive because there is less-than-no contribution to the learning process so costs are always in addition to the cost of teaching. Most even fail in their most basic role, to provide a reliable measure of skill or achievement. It’s way past the time to get rid of them.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.spystudy.com/ebook-reader-Mp3/Mp4-spy-watch.html