It is usual for a blog post to attract nearly all its visitors during the first few days after being published. This is so much so that the term ‘the long tail’ is often used to describe the shape of the visitor profile of a typical post.
Normally even the tail of a popular post would dwindle quickly over a period of less than a week. After two or three months, only the occasional visitor would be registered by visitor tracking.
I use Google Analytics (GA) to track one sector of visitors to my blog. It gives a fair indication of comparative popularity.
The July post is an exception to the long tail trend. Its visitor profile is at the top of this post. It has received recent attention of a magnitude not unlike what might be expected of a newly published post, yet it was published over four months ago.
I first took note of its unusual visitor profile when comments started to appear, again, as if out of the blue. It has since attracted a significant number of comments.
Occasionally posts generate very long tails that never really dwindle to nothing. Working With Online Learning Communities is such a post, published 1 April 2009. Its visitor profile shows recent steady traffic.
When was the last time you laughed at a joke? Where did you hear it? Was it on TV? Or was it on a video clip or podcast?
Susan Greenfield says, “Everything that happens to you will be seen in terms of previous experiences.“
Your brain “can see one thing in terms of something else and that’s your unique perspective”, even when it comes to appreciating a joke.
Here’s what she says:
If you are a scientist or if you are just interested in Science, you may also be familiar with the erroneous opinion that Science is humourless. A joke is a cognitive jolt based on your previous experiences. This jolt can happen even if these experiences are to do with Science. So let yourself go! Abrogate your sense of self and have “a cognitive time” with some Science humour from Brian Malow.
How do you tell if a learning resource is successful?
You have to use it of course! Or at least, it has to be observed being used by learners who may benefit from it in some way.
But there’s more to it than that . . .
A game-based resource can be seen to be popular and for this it gets a big tick in a check-box.
But does a learning resource need to be popular to be successful? Does the popular resource assist the learner to meet the target learning objective?
Extensive research on a whole series of resources might throw some light on these questions. But let’s just limit the discussion here to one resource.
How do you know if a learning resource is effective in helping learners reach the objective or objectives the resource was designed to meet?
This needs more than just observation. Learner focus
Attention must be focused on what the learner has gained by using the resource. This acquisition has to be very specific if the resource is to be regarded as a useful ‘learning object’.
Oops, I’ve used that term!
I know! ’Learning Object’ is not a popular term among some educators. At least the term implies that the resource actually has an objective associated with it. Whether the resource assists learners to meet the objective is quite another matter.
In fact, some very good learning resources are often found to meet objectives that are not necessarily directly related to the objective or objectives that the learners were supposed to be reaching. That’s life! Sometimes it just happens that way.
So how do we know when a resource is meeting its objective?
It’s taken me a few hundred words to get to this nitty-gritty stage.
How do we know the resource is really achieving the learning that was intended to happen?
As obvious though the answer may seem to be, it is often something that’s completely overlooked when a resource has been planned, crafted and produced for learner use.
Follow up
One of the important stages in the development of any course module, or even one of its components, is the time consuming and difficult process of assessing its real worth. It’s one of these stages that teachers and developers would rather not get too far into, for it is both complicated and complex. And it takes a lot of time.
But it is obviously very important.It means that a series of analyses has to be performed involving the learners.
As well, it has to involve a thing called ‘learner assessment’. Oops! Another not too popular term.
That’s right! The learner has to be tested. And this is difficult, for how do we know that the assessment item designed to test learner achievement assesses effectively the objective that it’s meant to? This brings us more or less back to where we started.
Sorry folks! It’s the dogged chicken and egg story all over again.
Before we can be sure that the assessment item is any use, first it must be tested! And of course, this always means learner involvement.
Compounding problems
We now have learner assessment as well as learning resource design to deal with. It’s a bit like the collective effect of errors, if you’re familiar with how that works.
Small errors that occur at stages of a process tend to be cumulative. They add up to one significant error in the end. Often this error can be big enough to discount the whole process.
Catch my drift?
“What does it all mean then?” you say.
Frankly, it means that teaching and learning is a difficult process to assess. The learning that could possibly take place through the planning, building and subsequent use of a learning resource by learners is actually very difficult to assess.
Can you imagine the tasks involved in checking properly a whole course made up of multiple series of resources?
Time consuming? Yes! This alone is a factor that puts teachers and developers off the whole idea of attempting that all-important final stage of checking to see if it all works.
If you think that building a successful learning resource is a quick and easy thing to do, then maybe you should think again.
Some say I have a chip on my shoulder about education.
At 9 years old, I returned to Scotland with my parents, having spent almost 3 years in Nyasaland (now Malawi). While in Africa, I was home-schooled for almost a year. I then attended St Andrew’s Primary School, in the Capital City of Blantyre, for the remainder of my stay.
I had no education in the traditional sense during the months-long journeys to and from Nyasaland on Union-Castle liners. The unusual long routes round the Cape of Good Hope, were taken at the time of the Suez Crisis when access through the Suez Canal was unsafe.
My childhood experience of living in Africa was an enriching one, but my traditional education fell sadly behind. When I re-enrolled at Dunfermline Commercial Primary School in Scotland, I sat beside the classmates that I’d been with three years before.
They were all so far ahead of me by that time. I had real difficulty catching up. My schoolroom behaviour took a turn for the worst.
I was soon to be classified as a boy much in need of counseling, and was made to attend a series of Tuesday afternoons with Mrs Len, a child guidance counselor.
My visits consisted of sessions of being helped through tests, mainly so-called association tests and intelligence assessment, presumably to determine my state of mental health and my ability.
A beautiful glen
I recall one session in particular. Mrs Len began by asking what I did on Saturdays. I explained that I spent fine-weather days down the beautiful Glen in Dunfermline. I loved the Glen and would have spent every Saturday and most Sundays there if I could.
“Why don’t you go to the films on Saturday mornings?” was her response to my story. “That’s what lots of other children do.”
I explained that I didn’t like the movies that were on at the local cinema.
“Why not?” she asked. “These films are specially chosen for children!”
Gangster cadillacs
I explained that I didn’t like watching cowboys and Indians killing each other, or wars with ‘Japs and Gerries’, or gangsters hooning about in Cadillacs, or cops and robbers blasting themselves to bits.
That was in 1957. I was ten years old.
Not that long after the war, it was still acceptable for children to see all this violence. Mrs Len’s assumption was that it was good for me to be subjected to hours watching movies of people shooting at each other. I had a different opinion.
Educational assumptions
In fact, in discounting the years of my lost education, she made a number of assumptions.
Based on the results of the tests she gave me, one assumption was that I was unfit to attend High School. Luckily I had caring parents who insisted that there was ‘nothing wrong’ with their son and that he would attend High School no matter what.
The long and the short is that my parents eventually removed me from Commercial School to enrol me in Pittencrieff Primary School nearby.
A year later I attended High School. In 1965 I became a student at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. I left that place of education in 1972 with a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
So I’m not knocking Scottish education. All things considered, I firmly believe that the system served me well. But when I think of my last months at Commercial School, there were several odd and perhaps invalid assumptions made by my teacher, the school I attended and the child guidance councilor, Mrs Len, about where I stood in relation to ‘education’.
Abominable assumption Wikipedia defines assumption as a proposition that is taken for granted, as if it were true based upon presupposition without preponderance of the facts.
This means it’s a preset notion with no factual foundation.
Assumption can present barriers and can lead to disastrous decision making. It has dogged the view of where Earth is in relation to the centre of the universe since before the time of Ptolemy. It seeded the reason why Shakespeare’s Romeo took the fatal poison.
The legal maxim that a person is innocent until proven guilty was initiated by the recognition of its fallacy. Yet assumption is often used mercilessly by legal council in leveraging notion and supposition while swaying the opinion of a jury.
One of the greatest barriers to learning is initial and erroneous assumption in the mind of the learner.
Another is initial and erroneous assumption in the mind of the teacher.
In Wellington, New Zealand, just after 6 am on 12 September, 2001, I learnt of the World Trade Centre Twin Towers collapse.
In New York City, it would have been just after 1 pm on 11 September. At that time the original 7 World Trade Centre building was still standing. More than four hours passed before it too collapsed.
Official reason
The official reason given for the subsequent disintegration of the 7 WTC building described that it was damaged by debris when the nearby North Tower of the WTC collapsed. Fires were ignited on the lower floors, which continued to burn throughout the afternoon. The 7 WTC building collapsed catastrophically when a main column buckled causing structural failure throughout. Expectations don’t stack up
There were features about the collapse of the building that puzzled me.
One was that the initial damage was caused by debris, apparently ejected during the collapse of the North Tower at speeds close to 100 kilometres per hour.
Material ejected at this speed could only have been assisted by huge amounts of energy, driven from some source other than just the collapsing of the North Tower. Any bright year-13 Physics student can prove this.
Video footage screened on television in New Zealand clearly showed the 7 WTC building fell extremely rapidly. It looked like a controlled demolition using explosives.
Recent investigations from video footage have shown that the disintegration was what’s known as a free-fall collapse. It took just over 6 seconds for the top of the building to fall onto the collapsed pile of rubble that was all 47 compacted storeys.
Only an explosion-assisted collapse of the type used in controlled demolitions could have caused such a free-fall collapse. The explosives would had to have been detonated on almost every floor.
Pancake collapse
In a so-called pancake collapse of a building, the floors remain more or less as discrete layers. Contrary to expectations, however, the rubble from the collapsed building showed no sign of layering of floors at all. Instead, it consisted of crushed concrete, dust and twisted steel.
Danish scientist Niels Harrit carried out rigorous investigations of the debris from the collapsed WTC buildings and published a report in April this year. He and his co-workers found evidence for a significant amount of a substance known as thermite in the debris. Thermite can consist of fine aluminium dust and powdered iron oxide. When well mixed and ignited, these substances react rapidly, forming aluminium oxide, molten iron, smoke and huge amounts of heat.
Thermite was used for welding tram tracks early in the 20th century.
Molten iron
Observations from videos taken just before the collapse of the towers showed the ejection of huge amounts of molten iron. Experiments have confirmed that these quantities of molten iron could not have come from steel structures melting in the burning building and aviation fuel. Steel girders, roasted in a burning building, do not melt and flow freely.
Until 11 September 2001, no high-rise steel constructed building had ever collapsed because of fire – yet on that day, three WTC buildings collapsed.
There has been a series of consistent analyses conducted by independent analysts. Compositional analysis shows that the molten iron ejected from the building was what’s expected from iron made during thermite ignition.
A wall
Examination of footage of the moment of collapse of the South Tower shows clear evidence for a descending series of explosions, preceding a floor-by-floor collapse – an occurrence that could only be brought about by synchronised detonation of a type used in building demolition.
I find it almost unbelievable that the publicity surrounding the collapse of the 7 WTC building was so scant. It’s only recently, in reading about the emerging evidence for the presence of thermite in the tower debris, that my initial suspicions have been wakened.
What these facts and other evidence point to is a cover-up of some huge dimension that was apparently enacted at the time of the towers disaster, and maintained over the years since. They leave questions hanging over why the planes were involved in what seems to have been a large scale and extremely well-planned operation.
Somehow a wall appears to have been successfully built around what really caused the collapse of the World Trade Centre buildings. I would dearly love this wall to be demolished so the truth of what happened in New York CBD on 11 September 2001 is revealed.
Courtesy NASA
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