Graham Glass, etc.

An alternative theory for "subconsciousness", Part 1

I've entertained myself with quite a few fun thought experiments about consciousness recently, and here is one example that's inspired by split-brain patients.

Imagine that you have a way to disconnect/reconnect the two hemispheres of a brain by flipping a switch. What would it be like from the brain's perspective?

From what we know of split-brain patients, an individual hemisphere can be independently conscious when separated from its partner. So when you disconnect two hemispheres, each would continue to be conscious, albeit with a subset of its original senses, memories, and processing capacity. 

So you'd go instantly from a single, unified consciousness to two completely independent consciousnesses. Each hemisphere would have an unbroken experience of being conscious, perhaps experiencing a "dimming" effect when it's disconnected from the other hemisphere. Each hemisphere would be "dumber" than the original unified consciousness, and might experience monocular instead of binocular vision as well as mono audio instead of stereo.

Now imagine what would happen when you reconnected the hemispheres.

Each hemisphere would suddenly feel more intelligent and regain its original sensory capabilities. It would be opposite of the original "dimming" effect - perhaps more like a "brightening" of the world. Monocular vision would become binocular, and mono audio would become stereo.

I spent an hour lying on my bed trying to imagine the process from a particular hemisphere's perspective. I'd cover up one eye, cover up an ear, and pretended to forget certain facts and skills. Then I'd uncover the eye and ear, and experience "fullness" again.

This thought experiment underscores the relation between consciousness and integration. When two hemispheres are integrated, they form a single, unified mind and a single consciousness. When they're separated, they form two simpler minds, each with its own consciousness. And since the process is reversible, it's possible to recombine the two minds/consciousnesses into one.

And it's this thought experiment that led me to an alternative theory for subconsciousness.....

The Hard Problem

I've been interested in the "Hard Problem" of consciousness for a long time, and have decided to start blogging about my thoughts in this area.

In a nutshell, the "Hard Problem" is: why do brains experience anything?

Cognitive Science/A.I. specialists have lots of theories about how a brain can analyze a visual scene, set and accomplish goals, make predictions, etc. and this is the realm of information processing. The "Hard Problem", on the other hand, tackles what at first seems like a simpler question: why does a thinking machine "experience" the color red or the sound of a harp?

To the best of my knowledge, no-one has come close to answering this question, which is why it's so attractive. It's like Fermat's last theorem for cognitive scientists!

I'm going to try and regularly blog my theories, thought experiments, and ideas related to consciousness and the Hard Problem.

EDU 2.0 breezes by 250,000 members

EDU 2.0 recently breezed by 250,000 members, adding 10,000 new members in the last week. Here's a graph that shows the new growth rate for the past two months. At this rate it should pass 500,000 users sometime in 2011, with the upside of a lot more.

Exciting times!

PLE thoughts: #PLENK2010

I recently signed up to participate in Stephen Downe's PLENK 2010 (Personal Learning Environments, Networks and Knowledge) online course. The main reason for this is because I'm working on EDU20.NET, the EDU 2.0 personalized social learning network, and wanted to see what others are thinking about such environments. So far, most of the activity is taking place in forum discussions on Moodle. My own thoughts about this area are:

1. There is a huge benefit of having a community of enthusiastic learners that can share and interact with each other. Not only do you have interesting conversations, but the communicate can also accumulate resources, reviews, Q&A responses. I don't think of this is being a PERSONAL learning environment, more a personalized SOCIAL learning environment.

2. If you want lots of students, especially high school kids, to engage in some kind of personalized social learning, then it needs to be more structured than just a bunch of forums. For example, having self-assessment quizzes, badges you can earn, karma points for helping others, individual and group quests, resource library, ability to arrange your own personal favorite resources in a Flip-board like fashion, etc. There are a variety of game mechanics that these environments can use to be more engaging.

3. Social learning environments should exist independently of any particular institution or class.

4. Ideally, social learning environments can be used from within LMSs. For example, a Math class might connect its students to a Math learning circle for additional learning.

I'll post more thoughts as the course progresses.

Code stats update: EDU 2.0 vs. Moodle

About 8 months ago I did a comparison of EDU 2.0 lines of code vs. Moodle. Since then, we've added a huge amount of functionality, including:

- Facebook-like feeds for classes, groups, and per-user.
- Full customization of portals
- Major ease-of-use improvements
- Improvements to the class catalog and e-commerce features
- Improvements to the library functionality for reuse
- Simplified search

Here are the updated figures for our code base:

- 37,000 -> 47,000 lines of code (+27%)
- 742 -> 858 classes (+15%)
- 4977 -> 6192 methods (+24%)
- 6 -> 7 methods per class (+16%)
- 5 -> 5 lines per method (+0%)

So overall, the code base went up by about 25%, which is pretty good considering how much functionality we added. In addition, the platform got *faster* and the code is simpler to understand.

In contrast, Moodle 1.x is over 1,500,000 lines of PHP.

Analysis of EDU 2.0 Growth

I just did a little analysis of the EDU 2.0 growth rate. Below is a graph that shows growth over the 4 years that the site has been operational. I've drawn an "X" to mark the month before the start of each Fall semester.

Note there's a definite pattern. A month before the Fall semester starts, the growth accelerates and then holds steady (with predictable lulls during the vacations) for the next 12 months. Then the cycle repeats.

If this pattern continues, EDU 2.0 will pass the 300,000 member mark by the end of 2010, pass the 800,000 member mark during 2011, and pass the 1.5m mark during 2012.

New Desktop Picture

Here's my latest desktop picture - an artists's rendition of the GOCE gravity satellite.

EDU 2.0 growing FAST

We've added a tremendous number of improvements recently to EDU 2.0 , including Facebook-like news feeds, navigation improvements, numerous simplifications, and performance enhancements. One result of this investment is accelerated adoption. 

In the first year of EDU 2.0 (2007) we added a whopping 1000 members. In contrast, we added 20,000 new members in the last *week*, taking the total membership past 204,000.

At this rate, we'll pass the 250,000 mark quite soon, and should pass the 500,000 mark in early 2011. It's very exciting to see the adoption grow, especially as we prepare to release support for real-time audio, video conferencing and learning circles.

 

EDU 2.0: UI Customization

We're about to release color customization for EDU 2.0 that includes the ability to upload custom backgrounds and headers. It's not technical sophisticated, but it can make a big difference to how a site looks.

Here are some examples:

EDU 2.0 adds Social networking feeds

We just added Facebook-like features to EDU 2.0 such as home feeds and class feeds. This has effectively upgraded EDU 2.0 from an "LMS" to an "LMS+", because it's starting to blur the boundaries between an LMS and a social networking environment. This will become even more evident when we release support for "learning circles" in a month or so.

Here's what a typical new user home page looks like. Like Facebook, it shows a news feed of all the events, assignments, friend posts, and class posts from all the relevant activities in the EDU 2.0 learning network. It also provides a clear display of today's activities, upcoming events, notifications, online friends, etc. You can click in the top box to post to your blog, and all your friends automatically see the post in their feed by default.

Each class also has its own feed that only displays items that are relevant to that class. If you post to a class feed, it goes to your class blog instead of your personal blog.

In a nutshell, EDU 2.0 now includes a seamless blend of LMS and social networking features.