Compelling argument on Slate about Netflix heading the way of all social sites as they follow the way of all sites that are seeking to monetise attention.
average face
Noah Kalina has been taking a photo of his face every day for over 20 years. Here is a rolling average of these photos, shown at 2 months per second. It’s a bit of a confronting demonstration of the passage of time.
working from near home
Sydney is again in lock-down (or as we’re calling it, a stay-at-home order), so this article on working from near home by Cal Newport is a little further in the future. After over a year of working mostly outside the office, if anything, it has brought me greater appreciation of the workspaces that I’ve had access to in the past few years. And yet, there’s a lot of benefit to the time saved from not commuting.
unlikely databases
There’s a search engine dedicated to death notices and obituaries in Australia – the Ryerson Index.
privacy online
A recent ad for some of the iPhone’s new privacy features is a reminder of how much your online activities are mined by various third parties to build online profiles of you.
And yes, I recognise the problems with embedding this as a youtube video.
Related is this Twitter thread on privacy, via Haoran(some swearing towards he end).
Organisational cost of insufficient sleep
Working on the amount and quality of my sleep has been a personal project for at least a few years, but there’s plenty of research to suggest that organisations should also be thinking about employee sleep.
explaining finances
I presented the treasurer’s report at our church congregational meeting. When I do one of these, I try to explain the standard documents so that people can read the reports and make sense of them.
I’ve tried a couple of times now, and what I find works is to help people zoom out and see the whole table of numbers, then understand what they’re looking at by using coloured rectangles to show the difference between income and expenses, budget and actuals, variance, and then between assets and liabilities.
You can then quickly show the relationship between a profit and loss, budget vs actuals, and the balance sheet, and how they all fit together.
It’s a simple technique, but I think it’s a powerful one.
how kids learn
An article came across my desk today about how children learn at different ages, citing work by Egan (1997); from somatic (age 2) to mythic (age 5-10) to romantic (age 10-15) to philosophical (15-20) to ironic (21+). I’ve really enjoyed the kind of reflective learning that my current course of study has put me through, so I’m enjoying thinking through the learning process at these different developmental stages as well.
Related is this reflection on group work in a classroom context.
In our observations collaboration is often undertaken without teacher input, and against their expressed expectation that students complete the task ‘on their own’. The irony is that you can ask the teacher for help, but you are not to ask the student beside you for advice.
We know the following to be myths:
• That students learn best when a teacher instructs.
• That student collaboration inevitably slows ‘coverage’ down.
• That practice tests are the key to better exam performance.
I realised that I don’t have much of a sense of the progress of ideas around what constitutes best practice in the classroom as ideas on teaching and learning continue to evolve: is there a parent-level set of resources out there?
a lot of free books
A directory of 800 free eBooks of varying qualities. via Kamal Weerakoon.
Another year
I’m in the unusual situation of having some more time off at the start of the year than usual. It’s a season I’m spending investing in time with the kids, and preparing for the year. It’s my final year of study, and it’s going to be an intense one!