The Learner’s Journey
The Learner’s Journey: An Epic Poem
On a night not very long ago
To sleep I fell, with nowhere else to go
While studying for my days so weary
A dream I had of learning theory:
A man named Vygotsky roused my slumber,
About his social theory he quickly recited this number:
“As we learn through a more knowledgeable other,
Be my companion and I’ll be your guide!”
His musical intelligence, I saw he had lost,
His lack of rhyme chilled my soul like a frost.
While he could not represent ideas with sound,
Him I followed, his other multiple intelligences would abound.
Like that, this setting was changed
Everything I recognized had suddenly been rearranged
My working memory flew to my aid
Its job to absorb the new surrounding made
Information processing had taken over me,
To my long term memory, I prayed all would be
Sadly I knew this would never be true
My thoughts fell to dissipation, which grew and grew
In a classroom I soon found us to be
But the students within lacked strategy
A Clinical Interview, did I quickly take
To assure each student had some make
It described to me how each one learned,
But was not practical, as each student yearned
To other methods, then did I turn
Summative assessment, represents what they learn
A Student-centered classroom had now been made
My job done, although I am not paid
The Instructional Strategies of Marzano of great use
In combination with reinforcement made the classroom loose
All these notions, to me, Vygotsky had shown,
Even though many were not his own,
With parting glance he said releasing:
“May your ZPD, be ever increasing”
Through his scaffolding did I see
That learning occurs through processes three:
By means of Apprenticeship do we see
That novices become experts timely
Our cognitive development plays an important role
Its different stages rooted deeply within our soul
Acommodation, and Disequilibrium change our schema often
As we grow our Concrete operations soften
And lastly value must we always have completely
For only that can yield the knowledge we keep so sweetly
If in combination with this punishment do we avoid
We imitate John Bosco, who’s students were always overjoyed
Through my dreams, all this had I learned
Only through self-regulated learning could I seek what I yearned
Truly, my motivation had been restored
But the thought of sleeping…I now deplored.
Report and Analysis of Meltdown by Thomas Woods
In his book Meltdown Thomas Woods Jr. seeks to analyze and explain our current economic crisis by analyzing its causes while also providing solutions based on his views of economic thought. By looking at the role of government institutions and other organizations closely tied to politics and the government, analyzing our current crisis by looking at it from a historical perspective, and scrutinizing the country’s current monetary system, Woods looks to explain why things are the way they are, and how they can be fixed. Throughout the book Woods is a constant proponent of the conservative, libertarian, free market, thoughts and ideas of the Austrian school of economics, and he uses them both to decry the errors of the modern school of economic thought, which he attests are responsible for our economic crisis today, and also to suggest the remedy of the crisis.
According to Woods, a significant part of our current economic crisis can be explained by the actions, or lack thereof, taken by government officials and institutions closely linked to the government such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of which collapsed and fell under government control when numerous Americans defaulted on their mortgages, and additionally, the Federal Reserve, which will be discussed here briefly and in detail with the role of our nation’s monetary system on today’s economic crisis. Woods compares the actions of government (or lack thereof, in some cases) to acting like an elephant is in a living room A rather crude analogy that illustrates the blindedness of said officials who seek their own political interests, rather than those of their constituents, and aim to please their constituents only to the extent that it keeps them in office. While the elephant, comparable to our current economic crisis, is in such a small place it will cause a great amount of damage. Yet the people in the room with the creature, call them the politicians and government officials, continually seek to blame the damage on a less-than obvious cause, and act accordingly, ignoring the real culprit. Woods explains that the culprit, in our economic case, is the Federal Reserve, a private institution that gets little attention from the media and is run by appointed government officials that control’s the nation’s money supply and interest rates among other things. By relying on fiscal policy, bailouts and spending in order to solve our Nation’s economic woes, Woods goes on, government official are ignoring the real problem, the Federal Reserve, which has the ability to expand the nation’s money supply at will through open market operations (among other things such as interest rates and bank reserve requirements), resulting in an artificial boom not reflective of consumer preferences due to an artificial credit creation. These effects caused by the fed can most evidently be seen in the boom and bust of the housing market, as explained by Austrian business cycle theory, which resulted in the collapse and government takeover of the two mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who purchase mortgage backed securities from banks. Woods explains this crisis with another analogy. He asks the reader to consider a homebuilder who believes he has a certain number of bricks. greater than he actually has, with which he can build a house, and to assume no additional bricks other than those he has are accessible to him. Believing he has a great number of bricks the homebuilder will endeavor to build a very large house, and will continue to do so until he realizes the actual number of bricks that he has. At the point he sees that his resources are too few to complete the project, the endeavor must stop, the house being built must be torn down and the labor and resources put to use for the completion of this project are squandered. Such was the effect of artificial credit creation on the housing sector of the market (amongst others, like the financial sector) by the fed through a lowering of the interest rate. In the early 2000s a reduction of the interest rate complemented by legislation such as the community reinvestment act, focused at a “nation of homeowners” mentality made it easier for people to buy a home, and provided homeowners with a great opportunity to refinance their mortgages, make improvements and/or renovations or move into a bigger house, as borrowing became more affordable. Home values began to soar, as more and more homes were being built. This however, could not last, as the increased access to credit was not complemented by a reduction in consumption and an increase, per the requirements of Austrian Capital Theory as an indicator of growth. In 2006 the bubble popped, and home values began to plummet as the public “realized” this artificial growth could not be sustained. Numerous people defaulted on their mortgages which resulted in the collapse and government takeover of the mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. In parallel, nearly the same thing occurred in the financial sector where numerous banks reached the verge of collapse because of malinvestment and imprudent lending during the artificial boom, only to be bailed out by the federal government, because of the “too big to fail” mentality. To summarize, then, Woods criticizes the government for attempting to treat symptoms when looking to solve and prevent the nation’s economic woes, rather than assessing causes, such as the Federal Reserve. He compares it to looking to treat a person for the cold when he really has internal bleeding. Only by assessing causes, rather than symptoms, can a nation ever hope to achieve prosperity and limit economic downturns significantly.
Woods also makes the point to compare our current economic crisis to those that have occurred in our nation’s past, most significantly the great depression. He explains that many of the ideas that are associated with the great depression and the events afterwards are myths that conform to that which he describes as the Official Version of History™, and, although they fall right in line with the views of modern economists and historians, they are not necessarily correct. Woods first explains that aggregate spending by the government, and, to an extent, by the consumer, cannot accurately describe a nation’s wealth, although both of these are essential components of what the modern macroeconomist defines as gross domestic product. Woods calls this noting more than taking an arbitrary number and adding it with other arbitrary numbers to do nothing more than amount to an even bigger arbitrary number. He decries the works of presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, both of whom promoted the use of government spending on public projects and credit expansion to boost the nation’s economy as prolongations of the Great Depression rather than means by which the nation escaped from it, calling it absurd to think that the production of massive steel ships being sent out to the pacific ocean to be destroyed during World War II , the point at which modern historians claim the nation was restored to economic prosperity, could add more to a nations welfare than an increase in savings. To justify this, he cites a minor depression in our nation’s history that occurred in the early 1920s. For a certain point during that time, soon after the creation of the Federal Reserve which brought on an abrupt expansion of the money supply, the nation experienced a slight economic downturn and a severe reduction in production. Unlike, in previous cases through history though, the FED raised the discount rate (the rate at which it lends to other banks) and the economy quickly readjusted in line with Austrian business cycle theory. Here, the free market itself was allowed to make its own necessary corrections without any government intervention and in no time the economy was back to setting production records again at a constant and soon increasing pace up until the point of the great depression. In short, according to Woods, nearly all of the economic downturns in American history have occurred as a result of some artificial credit creation, and were prolonged by government intervention and public works projects that added little or no benefit to the welfare of society as a whole. While this was especially true of the Great Depression in the late 1920s, Woods asserts that it was also seen in other economic crises in our nation’s history before the creation of the Federal Reserve for the same reasons. Woods cites particularly the Panic of 1819 which was brought about because numerous private banks were at that time creating their own excessive supply of seemingly worthless paper money, as well as the Panic of 1873 which was brought about as a result of the National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864 which sought to establish some form of sound monetary system for the nation. The result was, of course, an inflationary pattern that set into motion the Austrian business cycle of boom and bust.
In order to understand our current economic crisis and prevent future ones from occurring as a result of the same negative effects, Woods also explains that is necessary to have a firm knowledge of money as well as of our nation’s monetary system. Money, then, has three functions. It serves as a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. However, what money is and what it has been throughout history is defined differently from time to time and from culture to culture. In general, before the existence of money occurs, people tend to barter in a very primitive sort of economic system, that is, they exchange goods for other goods. This system is considerably ineffective, as it requires the participants in a transaction to have a double coincidence of wants, that is, each person must be willing to accept what the other is offering in exchange for his or her goods and/or services. Because of this inefficiency some uniform commodity ultimately arises that becomes generally accepted for the payment of goods and services. In more primitive societies these commodities can be shells, stones, etc. and in more advanced societies they tend to be precious metals such as gold, silver and copper. Both must be easily divisible, and easily transferrable. Once some commodity becomes generally accepted, people begin to seek a place where they can store this commodity. Such an institution ultimately evolves into what we today call a bank. Once stored, people are also able to issue notes to others which can be taken to the bank and exchanged for stores of some commodity. Ce Such facilitation ultimately became known as a note, a check or a demand deposit, and was the genesis of fiat money. As time progressed, banks saw that they needed only to keep a fraction of the commodity stored at hand, and could also make loans to others once they gained the trust of their clients. If, at any point, a bank could not make due on the demands of a client, a run on the bank would occur, where clients would seek their money from the banks and store it elsewhere. At this point, money is circulating mostly in the form of paper notes and commodities, and is backed 1:1 by some generally accepted commodity, it is completely subject to the supply and demand schedules of the free market which determine a market interest rate by which banks lend, but do not lend more than they have. Governments then, seeing that participation is exceptionally lucrative, involve themselves within the monetary process. Paper money and debased coin currencies would often take the place of commodities as forms of money generally accepted for transactions. In ancient times, the face of a ruler, for example, would be placed on coins as a “stamp of validity” for use of commodities in transactions. In the United States this intervention ultimately took the form of a central bank in the Federal Reserve, which monopolized the nation’s money supply by the imposition of legal tender laws which force people to accept federal reserve notes for all debts public and private, controls the reserve requirements of banks across the nation and sets various interest rates for different purposes. In turn then, after some intervention has occurred and the imposition of a paper currency along with debased coin currency has been put into place the result is inflation. Although inflation is considered a normal phenomenon defined as a general growth in the price level by modern mainstream economists, it is defined by the Austrians as a growth in the money supply, something which, contrary to general economic though, can often be prevented. Woods, for example, describes the errors or misconceptions in preferring paper money to one backed entirely by a commodity, gold. In contrast to inflation there is also deflation. While seen as having a negative effect on the economy and as a precursor to depressions, Woods takes the time to explain how this general fall in the level of prices benefits the consumer, and is a necessary step in bringing a nation out of economic turmoil.
To conclude, the ideas of Thomas Woods show that it is important to consider a situation from different angles and from all perspectives before drawing a conclusion and taking action (my view of the material presented).Woods, devotes the final chapter of his book to looking towards the future and extrapolating at what can be done to solve our current economic crisis and prevent future ones of the same sort from occurring. In short, Woods emphasizes here, as he did throughout his entire book that in order to restore prosperity the nation must reduce its consumption and support more means towards voluntary savings, which is the basis of true growth in Austrian capital theory. In the long run, Woods also suggests the need to stop bailouts and to cut government spending, another important step towards growth and prosperity. Finally, Woods suggests that we end government manipulation of our currency, end the “monopoly money” a paper fiasco, and put the FED on table to be held accountable for its actions, and its misdeeds, should it be necessary. Woods ideas are, then, both rational and worthy of being considered in terms of his explanation for our current economic crisis today. Although there may not be validity in some of the ideas of the Austrian school of economic thought, the same must be said of Mainstream Economics. While neither alone may be able to predict with absolute and correct certainty what has caused today’s economic crisis, the ideas of both and others must be considered. It is only by combining our ideas, making concessions, and sometimes admitting that we are wrong, that we can ultimately achieve a solution to our economic problems.
Fun fact
M is the thirteenth letter in the alphabet…
Correspondence from afar
A colleague of mine, visiting Europe, gives his take on England, current events and other strange things.
Dear Bobby,
Happy birthday. Actually, by a startling coincidence, your parents were very nearly right; St. Robert Bellarmine died yesterday; we just celebrate his feast on a different date.
It feels like a nice day in January here right now, though regularly there have been some periods of cold and wet; not really cold and wet, but enough to be wretched. This is, however, north of Moscow, so it’s actually quite nice, given the circumstances. The people here are very friendly and generally comprehensible, and we have two student unions, one of which has nine bars and five world debate championships. And they have an Adam Smith building. The Glaswegians seem to have discovered, like the Houstonians, that zoning is idiotic and inefficient, for they have a strong tendency towards old, stone, four-story buildings with apartments on top and shops on the bottom. They have also discovered that kilts & bagpipes are not good fashion, and they made up some excellent coke that tastes like bananas, strawberries, & quinine. The quinine is the best part, because that way it’s good for you, even if they don’t actually have malaria here. They have not, however, discovered the value of adequate street signs; even walking around, it can difficult to discover where you are, and they are possessed by the foolish notion both of using too much SI, and of marking lane boundaries always with white paint, just with a little more white paint for a two-way street. They also use celsius for some perverse reason. Their church is old and small and full, and they sell very good tea afterwards for 20 pence. Unfortunately, my department had all their meetings Thursday, so I did not see the Pope. I did, however, see the National Gallery in Edinburgh when I first came, which has various famous paintings lying about like nothing special, including that skating guy in black.
Unfortunately, classes start on Monday. I’ll have to be in class for 6 whole hours every week to get 15 hours of credit. There were some problems with Classics chair, who cuts her hair suspiciously short, not wanting me to take classes because I won’t be here for their exams in May, but I got the intercession of the study abroad advisor, so I’ll get Greek Historiographers, Roman Drama, and another class that I still have to figure out because there was a time conflict with The Aesthetics & Philosophy of Music; maybe something in Philosophy, though Plato and I have a disagreement as well. But you wrote me a whole email and never said how your Linear Algebra was going. I hear the school is still somehow keeping its head above the water, unlike Greece; what about those fine souls upstairs on Sunday, and the Cougars and the band; you’re no. 23 according to ESPN, but you’re not playing any ranked teams; what’s with that?
Anyway, I wish you a blessed birthday and a fine cigar.
Mostly sincerely,
Gerard
Viral characteristics of internet videos
Everyone has probably seen one or two videos on YouTube over the course of their life, and of course a small handfull of these videos are so popular that even if one has not seen them, one has heard of them. Why is it that some of these videos become so popular over time while others do not? I will attempt to answer this question through the use of elementary algebra and some transcendental functions.
If one were to consider the function f(x) is equal to e^x , log(x), ln(x), x^n or P^x one would get a curve that begins at 0 and gradually begins to slope upward, ultimately becoming steeper and steeper (but never vertical) on towards posivite infinity in the y-direction, taking the normal axes. An equally valid representation to consider would be the function f(x)=sqrt(x) which again begins at 0 and gradually increases along the x-axis towards positive infinity, however unlike the previous 3 graphs the slope will tend towards zero instead of infinity.
IF one were to take time to be plotted on the x-axis and the number of viewers of any given interneto be plotted on the y-axis, it can be clearly seen from the first group of graphs one initially creates or posts at the origin which another watches, and having enjoyed this video enormously he or she passes it on to a set of friends and the process continues on towards infinity number of views, assuming popularity (an externality) remains constant. This can be represented at differnt rates by any of the functions in the first group to explain why some internet videos are well-known even to thse who have never seen them and why we today have are Fred’s (sorry I could not do the backwards R) and Justin Biebers.
If one were not to enjoy the video enormously, it becomes less likely that one would pass it on to such a large group of friends, and unlike in the previous set of functions, the number of viewers eventually levels off to a basically constant rate, again this is excluding externalities such as popularity. Such a phenomenon, as mentioned earlier, is represented by the curve y=sqrt(x).
As a conclusion, it is interesting to note that such functions and their permutations are often used to model the growth rate of bacteria or to compound interest on debt and loans thus describing that many internet videos spread in the the same manner as a contagious virus or a bacteria. I, myself am not implying anything, but the relationship itself IS thought provoking.
The “reign” of Windows XP
Having finished ALL of my homework for the week, a very rare occurences, my thoughts on this Sunday afternoon drifted to quite a spontaneous topic.
It came to mind that I am using a very old PC computer, built in 2002 when windows XP was only about a year old. Eight years later, that same computer is still serving the same purpose for me that it did when it was built. Granted I am not a programmer or a digital artist who may require the most sophisticated technology (graphics cards, media, and such) I do feel that I represent te average Joe Computer-User who gets on his PC every day for email, internet access and so-forth. Thus, I will attempt to answer why Windows XP has dominated the computer operating system market for so long, and what the future may be for windows XP given the not-so-recent release and success of Windows 7, which I have yet to try.
Prior to the release of XP, Microsoft had released approximately 4 editions of its popular operating systen on about a two year basis on average. The gap however between the release of Windows XP, and the Miscorsoft bust, Windows Vista was approximately5 years. Indeed this proves clearly that Microsoft had done something right when they creates XP, and if not, that surely some other externality led to this.
From my observation, it seems that XP was the first operating system released by Windows after the pop of the technology bubble in the financial markets in the summer of 2001. In the mid to late 1990s the effects of technolgy on society, culture and even business were still growing at a tremendous exponential rate, but it was not until after the millenium scare that these effects began to level off and the position of technology in business and society finally began to stabilize. Enter Windows XP, the first windows operating system to be released after this stabilization. XP became the first operating sysetm to be widely adopted by public schools, businesses, universities and government agencies across the country and ultimately across the world as a result of globalization. As technology grew to become more and more of a necessity for the tasks our daily lives and the novelty of things such as the internet, email and networking gradually died down, computers became more and more widely and widely accessible to the human population, and, simly by coincidence, they were running Windows XP.
Despite a stabilization in technology that occured approximately after the financial bubble popped in 2001, innovation still occured. The creation of things like broadband, wireless internet, social networking, webdesign and advanced file sharing and storage all occured during the”reign” of windows XP. As a result of these innovations, older operating systems simply were not able to keep up, and had Microsoft not offered constant updates and service packs (there are now 3) to keep its OS up to date, it very well may have likely suffered the same short-lived fate of its predecessors. For clarification, I would like to note that when technological innovations occured in the 1990s, the use of technology and computers was not the norm, however, as modern historians suggest, it became the norm after 2001 when computers gradually began to appear in more and more households. This explanation is offered to show why older versions of windows did not survive as long as XP has.
Finally, as Windows 7 grows in popularity and begins to dominate the PC market it appears as if the “reign” of Windows XP may soon be coming to an end. Despite its versatility, Windows will ultimately stop offering support services for this operating system, and software/hardware will no longer be compatible with the operating system (even though may programs are becoming web-based). To illustrate, several years from now, trying to upload your photos to a system that runs XP might be has hard as pugging your wireless adapter into a behemothfossil that still runs Windows 95. It simply will nto be possible. Additionally, with the growing popularity of apple products like the iPhone and the iPod the popularity of other apple products such as the MacBook, which runs its own MacOS, are also creating a challenge to windows and the PC Market.
It might be time for us all to move on. In the end, if all else fails though, there is always Linux.
My theory
I recently had an assignment for an education class called knowing and learning, where the methods and thought processes of students are explored, and I was asked to rate certain statements about education on a certain scale and then provide a justification for my response.
In an effort to keep this blog current through what is unfolding out as busy school year and stay true to my post “Trends in blogging” (which I have not done through the month of August) I plan on posting these statements/questions and responses as they have been called both insightful and interesting by others who have read them, and are certainly pertinent to this blog which is, after all, about nothing in particular.
Why we love Inception
A few days ago when the summer thriller movie Inception was released in theaters and my facebook news feed was flooded with status updates that had some connection to the movie (and as a matter of fact they are still coming), and I myself even added to them after I saw the movie for myself. The question then is “Why all the hype?” Through this article I will endeavor to explain my ideas on “Why we love Inception” and what has made this movie so popular in the facebook blogosphere, despite never being much of an entertainment columnist in my newspaper days.
To begin with, Inception was directed by Christopher Nolan who ascended the Hollywood fame ladder for his success in the direction of the two most recent Batman films, The Prestige and psychological thriller film Memento. In short, he has experience working with this type of movie, and the popularity and talent of a movie director that makes viewers want to go back for more. The film also places veteran actor Leonardo DiCaprio in its starring role as Dom Cobb an extractor who enters the dreams of others to extract information. Although we may know DiCaprio from his dramatic roles in films such as Titanic, Romeo and Juliet, and The Man in the Iron Mask, he has also proven he easily has the capability of mastering roles in action films like Inception as well, but more on DiCaprio and his role in the plot in a second.
Inception, of course, was aslo a thriller movie, part of a genre used by Hollywood to draw viewers to the theaters by a somewhat excessive use of guns, bombs, explosions, and of course nonstop actions. Needless to say, these traits could have been used in any run-of -the mill thriller to attract more viewers and increase box office gross, however it should be noted that it played only a small part in contributing to Inception, which certainly cannot be counted as one of Hollywood’s run-of -the mill movies.
Not to be excluded is the placement of some juicy drama amidst all of the bangs in booms in the movie. Throughout Inception, lead character Dominic Cobb struggles with himself to let go of his late wife Mal Cobb who commited suicide in the real world after spending a long period time living in a dream with her husband, making it her reality. Cobb himself feels indirectly responsible because he orignally planted the idea in her mind through the process of inception, where ideas are placed in the minds of others, a central part of the movie’s plot. Additionaly, the plot of the entire movie rotates around Cobb’s struggle to return home to his children (by performing an inception mission for a Japanese business named Saito) amidst his struggle with guilt.
Finally, Inception has all of the qualities of a movie that will one day be shown in English and media literacy classes across the country? Why? Not only is the film an original that is 10 years in the making with excellent elements of plot, theme, archetypical characters and elements, but it also poses the great philosophical question of what is the dream and what is the reality. In fact, the final scene shows a wobbling top that doesn’t fall (a top which in Cobb’s dreams never stops) leaving the viewer to wonder whether all of the events occuring within the entire movie were real or a dream. It is entirely likely that the movie will one day hold the same prestige as others with strong philosophical and literary elements such as Watchmen, Fight Club, and Dead Poets Society.
Before concluding, I would like to point out a comment one of my colleagues, Mr. Gerard Keiser an editorial writer for the University of Oklahoma and a major in Classics. Mr. Keiser pointed out what he believes would be of distaste in Inception to the Greek Philosopher Aristotle, who wrote in is Poetics that a movie should begin at the beginning and end at the end. Although, I fully concede the truth in this point to Mr. Keiser, I would also like to point out to him that Aristotle is the generally accepted convention in writing, and not the rule.
So to finish, very briefly, and somewat humorously, Inception is an excellent movie, and this article was not intended to be a review. Thats it.
Trends in blogging
Some trends I have begun to notice in my own blog as well as in the blogs of others is that posts seem to follow different patterns.
Posts seem to be produced in “clusters” where many are put out at once, after which the blogger seems to go into a period of recluse for some period of time, after which he or she gets an idea which “sparks” creativity and leads to another series of posts, after which the trend repeats itself. (As a good aside note, this trend can also explain why may bloggers create pages which later become abandoned dead zones that take up space on the internet proving how useless and meaningless most blogs really are.)
There are how ever some bloggers who, however, mantain a perfect consistency with their pages, some of which can provide very useful information, others that are just silly (pardon my lack of ”professionalism”).
It is safe then to conclude, based on these trends, that the only safe blogs to devote a substantial amount of time to reading are those that are both consistent and intellectual. I cite, but do not promote, that of Harvard economics professor and textbook writer Greg Mankiw, whos blog is both consistent and intellectual. Only these blogs have any truly useful information with which one look to better oneself.