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Learning and Learning LiveCode. David W. Brooks. Lift your arm and touch the tip of your nose above your elbow. Did your nose feel that?. Take the tip of your forefinger and touch the same place on your arm. Did your finger feel that?. Now touch the tip of your nose with your forefinger.
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Lift your arm and touch the tip of your nose above your elbow. Did your nose feel that?
Take the tip of your forefinger and touch the same place on your arm. Did your finger feel that?
Now touch the tip of your nose with your forefinger. And you feel them both concurrently.
You know these are the same length. There are cultural differences in the degree of this illusion.
Both of these (nose touch, lines) are ways in which our minds comport what we see with how we think the world works.
WSJ Day After 2004: So the lawyers didn't decide this election after all. The voters did -- including millions of conservative first-timers whom the exit polls and media missed -- emerging from the pews and exurban driveways to give President Bush what by any measure is a decisive mandate for a second term. 2012: President Obama won one of the narrower re-elections in modern times Tuesday, eking out a second term with a fraction of his 7.3% margin of 2008, in a polarized country with the opposition GOP retaining and still dominating the House. Mr. Obama will now have to govern the America he so relentlessly sought to divide—and without a mandate beyond the powers of the Presidency
Like physical illusions and optical illusions, we manipulate data to fit our picture of how the world works. We transform the incoming information to fit our persona. The touch, the image, & the WSJ are examples of things that are learned.
What makes anyone think a school would be different? Why would you think learning is different? Why would you think you are different?
In 2010 my colleagues and I published the Unified Learning Model.
Working Memory … is a notion around since 1956. While you can remember/sense a lot, you can only deal with about 4 things at one time. These things are chunks – for Miller and Waddington, these chunks can be LARGE.
The ULM • Pay attention (top slot in working memory). • Connect. • Repeat.
Motivation amounts to the allocation of working memory. Motivation means paying attention.
Because their teacher tells them to (makes them). Because they see some really nifty things accomplished using LiveCode.
People rarely spend a lot of time at something they don’t expect to succeed at. C++ requires a lot of time.
You can be productive with LiveCode in minutes. That is, you can make something you’ve never made before. Just minutes.
You can become very knowledgeable about Millard Fillmore in several days. (13th)
To design an effective drug takes years of prior learning. No shortcuts. No just-in-time learning. Huge rewards, but huge investment. And few chemists end up being successful.
You can make a cute LC stack in a half-hour or half-day depending on how much you know. People with huge chunks get up here and show off by doing it in minutes! (That means you, Miller and Beaumont!)
To make LC accessible we need materials, different ways of connecting.
There are many LC “lessons” online. There are the 3 “Academies” available on CD. There are YouTube movies. There is a book (Holgate) and another on the way. There’s lots of stuff.
I work with teachers, mostly chemistry teachers. I think LC will roll through schools and be at the same level HyperCard was within 3-5 years. I used to teach HyperCard.
I’m finishing up a LiveCode course that I will offer as soon as I’m back in Lincoln. This is aimed at teachers. BYU through Devin Asay has had a course for as long as I’ve known about LiveCode.
Things will drift out of control. There was a software that was sort of HyperCard for those who thought HyperCard was too hard. There are versions of UNIX and Android. Who knows what LC will be like in a decade.
I certainly did things with HyperCard that others thought were impossible. For example, we proposed using HC as a videodisc controller in a large grant and the reviewers said you couldn’t do that – even though we’d had it running for a year!
I authored Web-Teaching in 1997. It was the first book about teaching on the Web. It stressed using the Web for automated feedback Feedback is just now becoming important. Khan, for example, has discovered feedback. So, I totally over-estimated the impact on learning -- and missed completely the Web’s business aspects.
I bought about 65 books on HyperCard. (My wife commented about the impact on our “budget.”) I’ve bought about 5 paper books in the past 3 years. I read everything else (>70 books) on my iPad using Kindle software. One click buying, too. The Wilson biology iBook is a thing of beauty.
The most valuable learning tool for me has been the LiveCode community.
Jacque Gay – immensely helpful to me. André Garzia – immensely helpful to me. Trevor Devore – very helpful to me.
At the first LC meeting I’d ever gone to (in San Francisco), Dan Shafer gave a talk putting LC (Runtime Revolution) in the context of similar software (HC, ToolBook, SuperCard, …) Last June in New Jersey at RR12 I thought the talk given by Chipp Walter was about as well balanced and informative as any talk I’ve gone to in >55 years of going to talks! It was a – ‘here’s what you CANdo’ talk about a large project.
Of the things that are at risk, the LC community is one. It may just go away. I once needed MacWorld. I’d go there – and return with a foot high stack of paper. I’d then give the next talk at the local Mac users group, pass out those papers (which people would take notes about) and we shared.
I learned about LiveCode at a MacWorld. I shook hands with Rinaldi. That was like shaking hands with Roald Hoffmann.
Now we don’t need MacWorld. People “tweet” one another and “like” things on FaceBook.
The current listserv may see 10-20 newbies a month. What will happen when there are 10-20 newbies an hour??
I offer to you as food for thought that the community is at risk. At the same time, I assert that this community has been what has sustained and nourished my interest in LiveCode.
I think you are better off having a 1% share of 1,000 pies than a 100% share of one pie. That’s where I think RunRev is today. And this is a high point meeting for me. I’m excited to be a small part of this community.
At the same time, everything I know about learning tells me that things will change in ways not yet foreseen, and those things that have given me pleasure and support over the past decade may well disappear.
I want to thank every member of the team who has helped me. Kevin and Mark. Ben. Dave Williams. JoJo and especially Heather.
We are learning about learning. You don’t have one “whole” up in your head; you have scores and scores of competing modules – ones whose communications with one another often are lax. (The left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, so to speak.) That voice in your head, the one that tells you that you are in control, reports >100 milliseconds after the important neural action has “decided.”
The voice in your head is not really the voice of the President. It’s the voice of the President’s Press Secretary, the one often purposefully kept in the dark and the one whose job is to “spin” the statements.
