Commenting on Linzi’s blog

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I’m having the same drama Linzi, I’m sure I’m doing this correctly but it doesn’t seem to trigger. 🙁

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I thought dramas with this blog were over last week when I had to rebuild everything, sadly, however, I was wrong. I spent hours trying to get the IFTT comments feed working before someone pointed out that I wouldn’t see it work until one of my classmates approved my comments. Frustrating doesn’t cover it.

Commenting on Clare’s blog

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Hey Clare,
this is something I am struggling with too. I think I am conditioned through my job that when I add anything to the web it has to meet certain standards of aesthetics and accessibility, the lifestream approach doesn’t really live up to this so I can’t help myself, I want to go back and edit, tweak and visualise everything.

I like to think that the concept of showing a stream of real life rather than presented life we see on facebook and Instagram is somehow more real and grittier. I think I understand it as a concept, as a kick back, doesn’t mean I enjoy it in this sense 🙂

I too have had a bit of a nightmare with IFTTT and wasted hours trying to get it to do something I could have done manually in half an hour so I feel your pain.

Maybe if we force ourselves to engage, we may be pleasantly surprised to see changes in our assumptions and maybe even our own behaviours by the end of the course?
Eli

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Should Oscar Pistorius’s Prosthetic Legs Disqualify Him from the Olympics?

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Should Oscar Pistorius’s Prosthetic Legs Disqualify Him from the Olympics?

Scientists debate whether prosthetic legs give Pistorius an unfair advantage in the 400-meter race
By Rose Eveleth on July 24, 2012

Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Erik van Leeuwen
Tags: #mscedc
January 24, 2017 at 12:46PM
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I came across this article this week and it started me thinking about when technology use crosses the line to becoming an enhancement. As a forty something, I remember not being allowed a calculator in a maths test because calculators were seen as an “enhancement” and not fair on those using their own ability. These days, however, the school provides calculators for use in exams. So are they now seen as tools and no longer an enhancement or something which belittles ability? Or are we now used to these tools and what they allow us to do that we now expect more and therefore the tools have become essential?

As someone with a learning disability, I have heard a lot about “equalising” opportunities, in other words using tools or behaviours to give someone with a disability an equal chance to those without. For me this means I wear coloured glasses or use coloured filters to help me read but could this also be viewed as benefiting from technology and not getting by on my own skills or abilities? With me, it’s a bit more subtle than a paralympic runner wearing blades. Clearly, they would not be able to compete and in some cases even run without the aid of technology so I’m hesitant to accept this technology labeled as an enhancement but if we take this same concept into the classroom, one student with access to an iPad during class and another without. The student with the iPad would clearly have an advantage if they could search the internet, electronic libraries etc to access information where the other student didn’t have access to anything other than their own memory and notes.

 

 

 

Commenting on Colin’s blog

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I know what you mean, I’m a bit of a control freak so having to adjust to being told to do things in a certain way particularly with the lifestream blog, it just goes against the grain with me because it’s not premeditated and pre-designed for maximum user experience but maybe that’s a good thing, maybe I need to be pushed out of my comfort zone so that I don’t keep looking through the same lens.

After all, if I won’t be open to things, how can I expect colleagues to be open to my suggestions?

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definition of homo faber given by wikipedia

 

 

 

 

Is the only difference that humans can control their environment, apes can’t?

This, in turn, led me to think about the new movie versions of “planet of the apes” and I do genuinely wonder, if apes could communicate across their species and mobilise, would they compete against the human race if the situation arose? Give an ape a gun and let them see a human use it, I bet they’d use it to become dominant in their tribe/group. So how different from humans are they really and what is special about humans, or were we just lucky that we progressed onto technology first?

 

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