Log

On the Crisis in the Humanities .

This article was brought to my attention as it shows the decline in the number of students dong humanities degrees in the US (1948-2017). There have been at least two articles that comment on it.

Not the only choice (of keyboard layouts)

I’ve come across the Dvorak keyboard layout a number of times previously, but had not considered switching until this summer when I came across Tynan’s switching posts.

Choosing a Backpack

The task of finding the right backpack can be a difficult one.

Downgrading iTunes

With Apples new release of iTunes they decided to do that thing that is quite annoying and removed usable functionality and replaced it with something much poorer.

Text of my letter to Tony Smith re Copyright

Dear Tony Smith MP

Governments and data logging

There was a recent article in The Age whereby police gained access to a journalist’s phone records without a warrant.

BibDesk and Pandoc and citation keys

I was having considerable grief after I shifted to using pandoc for converting Markdown to LaTeX and PDF. Everything has been working fine except Pandoc’s citation processing was not recognising some of the keys that I had generated in BibDesk – basically it does not want to handle punctuation at the end of the key. However, BibDesk is quite happy to generate keys with punctuation in them (which seems to be valid BibTeX).

Why might people be leaving America?

The BBC has and article about people packing up and leaving the US after Trump’s election.

Academics, Platforms, and ownership

It seems that there is a rising awareness of platforms and data ownership of late.

When Mac OS is unresponsive

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been grappling with my Mac just hanging for 5-10 seconds.

the spectacle

I came across Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectale, text here

A couple of thoughts on Voluntary Euthanasia

There is debate and social media attention around the issue of Voluntary Euthanasia at present and this has me thinking about the complex issues involved.

Academic Integrity

There have been two issues of late in the academic community in the discpline of theology.

Society, Suffering, and Death

I was listening to a colleague talking about how as a society we don’t talk about or spend much time with suffering and death, how we avoid it or move over it as quickly as possible.

There Is Something Wrong With Research

Lately I have come across two examples of research that was published and derided by the academic communities into which it was offered. Now, some decades later, there are developments that mean that these communities are now embracing these ideas. How is it that we can have research presented and be so completely dismissed?

An Important Watch .

Often we hear about privacy and encryption and think it’s a bit hard and complicated or that it’s overblown and paranoid and in the realm of conspiracy theories. This 45min talk by Cory Doctorow helps us to see that yes it is complex, but it can be life and death (for some) and needs to be taken seriously and be much higher on our social and political radar than it currently is. Because the government and many corporations have no reason to.

Ebbs and Flows of Technology

It is interesting to watch the ebb and flow of technology, whereby one minute it seems everyone is using a particular platform (eg. blogging platforms livejournal, blogger, wordpress) and then a significant proportion shift to another one (being medium at present).

Personal Podcast Station

With the advent of iTunes it seemed that many people flocked to that platform to put up their podcast channels and so we subscribed through there. That was our introduction to the world of podcasting.

A Shift Away From University Entrance Rankings .

This is a pilot to use alternative measures of student ability as a basis for entry into Swinburne courses. I think that this is a shift we will see more of, and that other indicators of credentialing like MOOC completion and Open Badges will gain consideration rather than a single figure for each unit of study or overall being the sole determiner.

Why Are White Deaths Rates in the US Rising? .

Interesting analysis on the increased death rate of whites aged 25 to 54 over the past 10+ years. They suggest an answer can be found in regard to their “reference group” - those whom they compare themselves against. These white males see themselves as being worse off than the previous generation while other men in that age group are seeing themselves as being better off than their reference group.

A Typology for Curriculum

I have been thinking about curriculum of late and I think we need to talk about three types of curriculm, each of which has a different aim of change in the learner:

Dealing With Attention .

An interesting idea to externalise awareness and decision making: “An attention charter is a document that lists the general reasons that you’ll allow for someone or something to lay claim to your time and attention”

A New University .

This is interesting as it is (1) a research oriented university and (2) with “No majors, no lectures, no classrooms”. The idea is to use project-oriented learning with project completion marking ‘study’ completion. I think many will be watching.

Welcome to Jekyll!

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways, but the most common way is to run jekyll serve, which launches a web server and auto-regenerates your site when a file is updated.

A Different Anniversary

A little bit different for Kate & my 14th anniversary:

Jekyll + Octopress + Github =

This site is an adventure in producing for the web.

An Introduction to the Bible

Getting linkage .

Here is a simple test of linkage functionality where I can supply a link in the front-matter and then comment here.

Syntax Highlighting Test

What about the learners?

I came across a post the other day that raises an issue that has been floating around for a while.

Getting Started with Skinny Bones

The basics for getting Skinny Bones setup.

Author Override

Video Post Test

Image Grids

Another Media Post with Large Feature Image

Welcome to Jekyll!

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory - edit this post and re-build (or run with the -w switch) to see your changes! To add new posts, simply add a file in the _posts directory that follows the convention: YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.ext.

Media Post with Large Feature Image

Post with Large Feature Image and Text

A Post with Images

More metaphors

I have been thinking a bit (maybe a lot) about useful metaphors for teaching and learning.

Foundations

Rowan and I have been working through the unit that we are rolling out, getting the guide prepared.

Planning and preparing

The past couple if weeks have been all about shaping the unit that we are looking at. The outcomes move us one way and we can now see the content in light of that - rather than being 2 competing agendas.

Art and pedagogy

Had a great discussion with Art today about the project.

Pedagogical principles

Had a good meeting with the crew today.

We are green

The proposal for me to be co-teaching/instructional designing for Faith Foundations has been approved by all parties, so it is into design mode.

meeting 2 reflections

Meeting held 15th May 2012 1-2pm

Testing Readability with a Bunch of Text

Metaphors to ponder

As we have thought about the integration and roll out of technology across Tabor, one of the things that some of the staff and I have been grappling with is the question of what tools to leverage going forward.

10 years

Today marks 10 years married to the most wonderful Kate. So many shared events, places, times, emotions and experiences to celebrate!

Local cricket

</a>

Joseph:

Learning about learning

serious

fairly serious for a 6 week old

trying to think Biblically

about angels and demons for an upcoming lecture. There sure is some strange stuff in the Old Testament.

Sample Post Style Guide

Below is just about everything you’ll need to style in the theme. Check the source code to see the many embedded elements within paragraphs.

self portrait