The Black Horse of the Blog World

I know, I’m late to the party, but I just finished watching Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica.

They really tried to put 10 pounds of plot and cliffhangers into a 5 pound bag there, didn’t they?

Oh, and it was nice to see Badger again.

I often get questions from people wondering why it is I’m paid to sit in front of a computer and play around on the web much of the day, why I make a point of joining facebook, myspace, twitter, livejournal, etc, why I’ve installed and tried dozens of wiki engines, blog engines, rss agregators, audio, video, and other content creation software. I often sum up my job as straddling the divide between teaching and technology, that my job is to support faculty in bringing technology into the curriculum. But along the lines of show, not tell, I present to you the reader, a set of links to important and relevent works that sum things up nicely.

First, a YouTube video on the life of the current student. Technology is such a big part of their lives, it has to become part of their educational infrastructure as well.

Next, an article on the challenges of integrating technology into pedagogy (the art of teaching). This is an excellent article that sums up a lot of my daily frustrations, hurdles, and goals.

Educause Review Article (Educause is a great resource)

Lastly, another YouTube video, from the same group at KSU, about some of the results of technological integration.

Hey-o, for anyone curious and there, I’m now signed in to a Twitter account. I don’t pay it much attention when I’m not at work, so it isn’t a good way to get ahold of me. I wonder if I’m missing part of the point of Twitter because of that, but I also don’t really have the mindspace to spend on another stream of information, sorry.

Ok, there are a number of examples of ‘small robots/vehicles join together to form a large humanoid robot that kicks butt’. Voltron (Lions, please!), certain Transformers/Gobots/knockoffs, Dai-X from Brian May’s Starfleet, etc. I’m fond of them, partly as an artifact of my youth. It was always lots of fun to take toys and assemble them together like clever little mega-lego thingies. And of course, much like Power Rangers for a younger generation, the TV shows expressed the principle that teamwork could achieve more than individual efforts. I have no problems with that.

What I really want to know though, is what kind of technology enabled these things when locked together to be orders of magnitude stronger than when they were apart? I mean, if you’ve got kick butt shields and lasers when you are assembled, why wouldn’t you have them when disassembled? You could argue power requirements, but joining together doesn’t really give you more power, just more coordinated power. I guess joined together could give you more short term power, but then you’re setting yourself up to be in a really bad place when you run out your power supply (although those always seemed to be infinite, no?). In some cases, like Voltron, it was clear you needed a larger robot to wield a larger offense or defense (giant electric sword…). But looking at standard operations, I would think you’d be better off in most cases as separate but coordinated pieces. Smaller targets, faster movement, the ability to swarm, surround, and flank opponents, etc. Could it be that there is some sort of super-powered energy system when they are together, but it was broken up amongst the constituent parts to make it less likely the enemy would get their hands on all the components at once? A sort of distributed key system? Was it just that there was only one _really_ good pilot who could achieve more by controlling the whole joined unit instead of leaving it up to the lesser pilots to be effective (I’m looking at you Pidge.)? It just seems tome that there would be more effective ways of doing it than having to smush into, of all things, a humanoid conglomerate.