For thosen regular readers of the Triple A Blog, you’ll know that 10 new laptops were recently donated to the One Laptop Per Child project. The use of the XO laptops, as they are known, has attracted the attention of a whole host of researchers from various universities around the world.
Children in Madagascar show off their new XO laptops
Here at Triple A Learning, we’ve always supported the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) cause. With a mission to “empower the world’s poorest children through education“, who could fail to be moved by its ideals.
Aristotle was the first philosopher to extol the virtues of peripatetic philosophy or the art of thinking while walking. In our computer-bound world, the very idea of going out for a meditative walk may appear bizarre. What’s wrong with interacting with the world from the safety of one’s home or office? Descartes would have embraced the IT revolution as one can just imagine him answering young Princess Elizabeth’s latest query through extended emails and texts. Yet, this is the way philosophical enquiry began and no doubt Plato himself invited his student Aristotle for contemplative strolls down to Piraeus harbour in the same way Socrates had conducted his dialogues with friends or strangers accosted in the middle of busy Athenian streets. The Socratic method demanded the immediate receptiveness of the participants to new ways of thinking as the master’s thought s were punctuated by the rhythm of his feet. The man who described himself as a ‘gadfly’ needed the open air to chase and trap new ideas. Just like the walker’s body is constantly subjected to new impressions and sensations, his mind is liberated from the confines of pure logical thinking as well as the temptation to reach for a book and lose his unique stream of consciousness.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau found in his solitary walks the inspiration for a new Romantic sensitivity, alien to his salons obsessed contemporaries. Rousseau rediscovered his true self through his direct contact with nature. Unlike Socrates for whom walking was a way of letting his mind wander and hit upon the right train of thought, Rousseau strove to lose his ‘civilised’ self and let his ‘natural’ side enjoy the basic sensations of being at one with his surroundings. Walking certainly has a soothing effect on the mind and illness-prone Nietzsche regarded his daily perambulations as an essential therapeutic as well as philosophical exercise. His most provocative thoughts were inspired by long, strenuous walks through the mountains and valleys of the German and Italian Alps: ‘A sedentary life is the real sin against the Holy Spirit. Only those thoughts that come by walking have any value.’ Both Rousseau and Nietzsche were individualists who chose to pursue their own truth off the beaten track. Posterity celebrates them for the originality of their thought and their idiosyncratic way of thinking. Maybe, we should follow their example and take our philosophy students out of the classroom and let our feet take us onto unexplored philosophical paths.
A superb TV series is currently taking people in the UK by storm. It is called ‘Frozen Planet’ and narrated by Richard Attenborough – it really is a classic and has relied heavily on the use of new technologies to aid its filming.
The programme focuses in on life in the Antarctic and Arctic and has so far covered the seasons. Last night it was Winter and some superb footage was released of a ‘brinicle’.
Triple A Learning has just donated 10 new laptops to One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a cause they have always supported. Its mission is to “empower the world’s poorest children through education“. Read the full story.
I gave a presentation as part of my introduction to TOK presentations. Basically, it looked at the role of humour in our understanding of the world, (or Humour as a Way of Knowing)!
This was inspired by the number of jokes about economists – made by economists – I have heard since the GFC.
As the influenza season begins in the northern hemisphere I thought it a great time to draw your attention to two websites that hope to track influenza-like symptoms (ILIS) around the world.
The first is Google Flu Trends at (www.google.org/flutrends ). This relies on data provided by America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and from other such organisations in other countries. It gathers data from such things as sick notes handed out by doctors for flu like symptoms.
A frightening portrayal using brilliant imagery to illustrate the abuse of women in war with special reference to the DRC. This could be used in ‘Populations in transition’ as a means of illustrating how the exploitation of women is used as a tool of war. It also emphasises the key role that women play in society in holding communities together.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/multimedia/2011/01/rape_weapon_war
I just started teaching simple harmonic motion today with my grade 11 class. Because the lesson is in the afternoon I didn’t want to go straight into the mathematical stuff. They seem to follow that better when I teach them in the morning. I asked them if the period of a pendulum depended on its amplitude. Some said it did and some said it didn’t. I then set them the task of testing their hypothesis and seeing if there is a difference within experimental error. The lesson didn’t show very much except that their measurement techniques are not accurate. I got them to repeat measurements to see if the difference between repeated measurements was bigger than the difference between measurements with different amplitudes. Lets just say results were inconclusive but it was a nice intro and we did go on to define SHM, amplitude, angular velocity etc before starting the maths next lesson.
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