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In the Car with Barbara

22 May, 2012 by Keith Lyons

Yesterday I had an opportunity to spend an hour with Barbara Arrowsmith Young in my car.

She was being interviewed by Natasha Mitchell in Melbourne, I was driving to Canberra.

It was a fascinating discussion about personal change and neural plasticity.

I was particularly interested in the personalisation central to Barbara’s work and the role cognitive exercises play in the transformation of behaviour.

Her program is based on the philosophy that it is possible to treat learning disabilities by identifying and strengthening cognitive capacities. The program involves intensive and graduated cognitive exercises that are designed to strengthen the underlying weak cognitive capacities that are the source of the learning disabilities. Each student’s program is based on a careful assessment to identify the specific learning difficulties.

I listened to Barbara’s discussion of the seminal impact of the neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria on her thinking. After hearing of her admiration of his work I realised I must read about him too … and Mark Rosenzweig.

The interview was a reminder to me that as I explore transformative pedagogy I must extend my reading to areas I rarely visit. Perhaps this is my first cognitive exercise!

Photo Credit

The Night Before, setting Up for the Cognitive Cities Conference

Posted in Coaching, Communication, Education, Performance | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Performance Environments: Status and Immunity

21 May, 2012 by Keith Lyons

I listened to Sir Michael Marmot on Radio National yesterday.

He was talking about the social determinants of health.

In part of his conversation he discussed social status, well being and disease risk. I was intrigued by his mention of a study of macaques.

Jenny Tung and her colleagues propose that social environment is associated with gene regulatory variation in the rhesus macaque immune system.

They point out that:

  • In humans and other primates, adverse social environments often translate into lasting physiological costs.
  • Dominance rank results in a widespread, yet plastic, imprint on gene regulation, such that peripheral blood mononuclear cell gene expression data alone predict social status with 80% accuracy.
  • These results illuminate the importance of the molecular response to social conditions, particularly in the immune system, and demonstrate a key role for gene regulation in linking the social environment to individual physiology.

In the introduction to their paper they note:

Social status in nonhuman primates is encoded by dominance rank, which defines which individuals yield to other individuals during competitive encounters. In settings in which hierarchies are strongly enforced or subordinates have little social support, low dominance rank can lead to chronic stress, immune compromise, and reproductive dysregulation.

On reading the paper I started to think about the way status is established in sport performance environments. I am now wondering what arrangements should be made to induct athletes into any performance context and to monitor their long term well being, particularly those who move from team to team.

Jenny Tung and her colleagues point out that:

Our results reinforce the idea that sensitivity to the social environment is reflected in changes in gene expression in the immune system, supporting an increasingly widely recognized link between neural, endocrine, and immune function. Moreover, our results demonstrate that these associations also appear to be highly plastic. Not only were gene expression data sufficient to robustly predict relative dominance rank but gene expression profiles also tracked dominance rank shifts closely enough to allow us to predict different rank positions for the same individuals across time. These observations indicate that any causal relationship between dominance rank and gene regulation likely begins with rank, rather than vice versa.

This paper reinforces my thoughts about the support needed for the personal journey of athletes and has refocussed my consideration about the post-athlete career part of their lives.

Photo Credit

Crowds

Posted in Care, Community, Performance, Sport, Talent | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Down the Lane: Socialising and Socialisation

20 May, 2012 by Keith Lyons

Most Saturday mornings we have a family visit to Dojo Bakery in Braidwood.

I was particularly aware of it being a family occasion this Saturday.

My early morning read, thanks to my wife Sue’s find, was a story in The Guardian about Parent Gym.

In his post, Robert Booth pointed out that:

Parent Gym is one of 15 organisations that will deliver the lessons for mums and dads as part of a trial which is expected to reach over 50,000 parents. Others include Barnardo’s, Save the Children and the National Childbirth Trust.

He concluded his post with this observation:

A recent study led by the National University of Ireland involving academics from England and Wales examined the impact of parental training on 636 people involving children aged from three to 12. It concluded “group-based parenting programmes improve childhood behaviour problems and the development of positive parenting skills in the short-term, whilst also reducing parental anxiety, stress and depression”. The cost of around £1,700 per family was “modest when compared with the long-term social, educational and legal costs associated with childhood conduct problems”.

This post became a topic of conversation at Dojos.

It was a beautiful morning. Some people were sitting in the sun shooting the breeze:

 

Bronwyn and Helen were selling vegetables:

supporting shopping experience

and offering a tutorial on QR Codes!

I wondered if Saturday at Dojo’s could be a great example for the Parent Gym. There is socialising … and socialisation.

Young children play, people sit and chat whilst observing this play.

I think there is something magical about this and I often equate Dojo’s Lane with Diagon Alley.

Today there was an even stronger synergy. The Parent Gym founder is Octavius Black … a Harry Potter type name if ever I heard one.

Posted in Teaching and Learning, Australia, Community | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

(Lif)e-portfolio: listening and sharing

18 May, 2012 by Keith Lyons

I am reading lots of blogs at the moment.

Students on the Sport Coaching Pedagogy unit at the University of Canberra have submitted their blogs as part of the assessment for their course.

It has been fascinating seeing their take on the unit and on their experiences as teachers and coaches.

It was very timely, therefore, that Stephen Downes pointed to Lee Ballantyne’s post about (lif)e-learning and Jenny Mackness’s post about the First Steps in Higher Education MOOC.

Another link, shared with me by my wife Sue, alerted to me Anna Salleh’s post about listening. Anna reports work by Imran Dhamani that indicates that:

Some children find it hard to listen to conversations in a noisy environment because they are slow at switching their attention between different speakers.

… such children can fail to understand instructions, perform badly in subjects where class noise levels are high and quickly become the “black sheep” of the class.

Imran’s colleague Pia Gyldenkaerne has investigated the brain activity of children with listening difficulties, Auditory Processing Disorders (APD). These children had different brain activity when compared to children with no listening difficulties.

I was interested to read a summary of Lee’s conclusions about e-portfolios:

e-portfolio adoption must form part of a strategic approach and requires new practice due to their disruptive nature. Implementation has been planned for and with continued management should realise tangible benefits although it is acknowledged that this is a slow, iterative process and understanding will develop with experience and over time.

I am profoundly interested in the use of e-portfolios as a way of sharing life experiences as well as being an exciting assessment option. Today’s feeds have reminded me that listening is a fundamental issue I must address particularly if I use lecture theatres and SlideCasts as fora to share information and experience.

Photo Credit

Listening to Mystery

Posted in Teaching and Learning, Digital Media, Communication, Education | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Creating Space, Supporting Diversity

18 May, 2012 by Keith Lyons

I listened with interest earlier this week to a Radio National Bush Telegraph discussion.

Cameron White interviewed Hugh Possingham, the Director of the Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions at the University of Queensland about National Parks and Biodiversity.

The brief blog post about the program (with the podcast of the interview) notes that Hugh “argues that Australia’s conservation dollar is being spread to thinly. He believes we need to prioritise which national parks should be kept, and which ones can be sold off.”

In the interview Hugh drew attention to two fundamental issues:

  1. Do national parks support biodiversity?
  2. How do you manage 12% of Australia’s land mass with limited resources?

In addition to the interview some of Hugh’s thinking is shared in a University of Queensland press release. In that release Hugh observes that:

In the absence of major new sources of funds, we need to consider where the prospects of success are greatest and, indeed, what success in conservation actually consists of.

I found the combination of applied mathematics, decision science and economics in this discussion fascinating.

The Bush Telegraph interview prompted me to think about the spaces we create for high performance and the challenge to meet running costs. I thought too about all the conversations I have heard about a return on investment.

This has sent me off to ponder optimal training environments and how we might develop satiable and sustainable strategies for excellence. We have some lessons from biodiversity research to help focus our attention:

For all our present nationwide investment in conservation, we are still losing both species and ecosystem integrity. We clearly need better ways to decide what we can afford to save, because the current system plainly isn’t working as well as we’d hoped. The evidence indicates that Australian native species are still disappearing at a rate 100 to 1000 times faster than normal. Over the past 200 years, 22 mammal species have become extinct, over 100 are now on the threatened and endangered species list, and 6 more bird taxa were recently declared extinct.

Posted in Australia | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

@SydWritersFest: Private and Public

16 May, 2012 by Keith Lyons

The theme of this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival is the line between the public and the private.

The Festival has 300 events in a week’s program that is designed to stimulate, move, inspire and provoke.

In his welcome to the Festival, Chip Rolley observes:

Now, via Facebook and Twitter, we voluntarily tell the world things we previously might not have told even our loved ones. Investigative journalists thrive on leaks and finding out what others don’t want us to know.

He adds that:

The private and the personal are subjects that have always preoccupied writers and have been the focus of much fiction as well as memoir, biography, history and reportage.

He notes that “biographers, journalists and historians have long considered the rules of engagement when tackling their subjects” and asks:

 How deeply do you go into the private life of your subject? Where should a journalist draw the line in pursuit of a story?

It has been interesting to see the development of the Festival’s web presence.

This year there is an App to help track the diversity of the program and like many events there is a Twitter address and a tag (#SWF2012).

I have been following the Festival this week at the same time I have been looking at communication resources such as:

Cowbird

Kondoot

Storify

Scoop.it

Paper.li

All of which provide great opportunities to reflect upon private troubles and public issues.

Posted in Australia, Communication, Digital Media | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Enterprise Computing Conference: ECC@UC

15 May, 2012 by Keith Lyons

The Faculty of Information Sciences and Engineering is hosting with IBM an Enterprise Computing Conference in the Ann Harding Centre on the University campus (15-16 May).

The program is here.

Senator Kate Lundy opened the Conference. In her introduction she noted the growth of enterprise and cloud computing and their role in the digital economy. She underscored the transformational potential of these approaches.

Senator Lundy discussed the potential of the National Broadband Network infrastructure in supporting innovation. She reminded delegates about George Gilder’s Law: “bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power.”

In the next part of her talk Senator Lundy discussed the skills required to optimise connectivity. She noted the IBM and University of Melbourne partnership and indicated the potential of a Marist/IBM model at the University of Canberra.

In her conclusion Senator Lundy affirmed the importance of collaboration to develop the skills required for a digital economy to harvest the benefits of enterprise and cloud computing. She exhorted delegates to use the conference to explore the transformational opportunities available from a connected society.

 

Posted in Teaching and Learning, Radical Transparency, Digital Media, Australia, Public Sphere, Computer Science in Sport, Education | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

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