thought about teaching

Naturaly there is a lot of thinking about teaching here. One thing I noticed was this big move recently to move towards a process called 'reflection'. I don't see the process of reflection as being a huge contribution to the educational process and certainly not enough to justify the additional work load involved.

There are only ad-hoc mechanisums to consider work load when proposing new concepts in teaching it is treated as a peripheal aspect to education. I think their is a lot to be said to intoduce time and its utilisation to the core of pedigocial theory. This way a development that reduces the time it takes to learn something would be given more signficance than it currently recives.

I thought of a good way to produce not quite the null hypothosis for reflection. I would give students sample thesis/essays to comment upon/mark. This would work for a number of reasons.
1 - Given examples of good and bad work students get a better idea of what they are doing and how far they could go.
2 - Promotes the concept of promoting a coherant argument through the work ( sadly missing )
3 - Needs some understanding of the topic matter requireing research

this is in some ways the exact opposit of reflection and I quite like the idea of using the original mark given as a way of testing student...

looks like the blogger spell checker is not working.

I'm back

I'm back I was chatting with simon over lunch and he appears to be getting close to something. I think we both think that things are ripe to change the use interface paradime from M.V.C to something more synthetic.

Simion's been talking about some new interface envrionments in small talk. but I think it might be nessasry to make a new language for them.

Object messages

I wonder how many times we right pass along messages like

boolean isEmpty(){ return someinternalmember.isEmpty(); }

in those cases were we want to expose some functionality of in internal class without exposing all the methods of the member ( in effect making it public).

perhaps one day we will have

@expose member.isEmpty,member.add, memeber.remove

This line will add 3 new public messsages to this class which are just forwarded on to the member class.

you can tell I have another day pumping out the java TMA ?

sightings in the mists of the sea of ghosts

Its been a strange turn of events. I was speaking to Bashar and explained why a computer programmer was so passionately interested in developing user interfaces. I think he got it when I said that it was the development of the first graphical user interfaces that helped drive the development of the first object orientated languages.

I was recording a podcast yesterday when afterwards richardwalker and simon got on to the subject of annotations in Java. He also talked about all the code that a good GUI builder adds to let you simply add code into you objects.

I just had a odd thought. If I started with a blank sheet of paper and wrote down what I wanted in a simple graphical user interface could I think of a way of creating the facilities for a languages that would make the description that small.

Naturally for me I want the interface to say four things.
1. What the interface 'looks like'
2. What the interface does
3. The text for the user explaining what the interface is (help file/user guide).
4. The text for the programmer explaining what the user interface is doing ( programming documentation like java doc.)

I feel like Admiral Hopper (inventing cobol)

Modern Lighting, Furniture and Home Accessories at Generate

Modern Lighting, Furniture and Home Accessories at Generate: "The 336 , designed by Robert Stadler (of the French design group Radi Designers), is a mirror able to receive SMS messages sent from a mobile phone. The messages appear as luminous text, running on the mirrors%u2019 surface when one gets close to the mirror."

quite cool. I like the idea of information on display. I wonder what else you might put in a mirror.

mirror mirror on the wall... whats for tea ?