http://feeds.feedburner.com/monkeymagic/iISo

Sorry for any inconvenience ...

Essentially, it's a mix of a wiki, directory a social bookmarking site and maps. Something that Will Davies said a while back sums it up really:

"ICT can localise and delocalise communication; our public discussions can descend upon places, and then depart, and then descend again, like a stone skimming across a lake."

Like all these things, it's by no means a finished article. There's more coming in the way of helping mums actually connect with each other (groups, messaging and the like). Anyway, I'd love to hear any feedback you have so we can find out what we're doing wrong, what we could improve, and where we're on the right track.

And of course, if you think it's at all useful for anyone you know, do pass it on.

Thanks.

So I thought I'd reread it and post some notes.

1: Raising Leviathan

• The Scientific Revolution did not just affect the sciences. It affected politics too.
• Various thinkers, such as More, Grotius and Bacon began to imagine societies based on scientific reasoning. They were "Utopians"; in many ways descendants of Plato in that they gathered some first principles, and tried to deduce what sort of societies would work given those principles
• Hobbes was an especially mechanistic Utopian. He fell in love with geometry and the way mathematicians could build on simple assumptions to find more complex, and sometimes surprising truths.
• With his Leviathan, he aimed for

  "a theory of governance as unimpeachable as those of Euclid's geometry".

• Traces of his approach can be found in Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx and other political theorists.
• That's one trajectory, but it's not particularly scientific one.

  "Political theorists tend to concern themselves with what they think ought to be; scientists concentrate on the way things are

• "There are few political thinkers who have defined a social model with the logical precision of Hobbes, and none who have carried those precepts through to their conclusions in a truly scientific way."

• Physicists have developed tools since then that, however unintentionally, add rigour to the sorts of scientific models a modern day Hobbes might want. The same tools that allow physicists to understand the behaviour of atoms can be used to begin to model the behaviour of people.

There are 3 golden rules:

1. Move around
   As you move around the classroom, you spread your influence and it's easier to stop children switching off. Moving your questions around, i.e. not always asking the same children, keeps everyone involved.


2. Vary your delivery
   Whispers, sharp yelps, different visual cues all keep children on their toes and focused on what's coming next.


3. Balance criticism and praise
   If you have to reprimand a child make sure you come back to them later, and find something good to say about what they've said, how they're behaving. It stops children making a virtue of being naughty.

Gold dust, really. What she missed out, I think, was to say how much her enthusiasm for what she teaches engages the children, but then she's modest like that.

I'd always assumed that invention of the printing press increased the ability of people to pamphleteer, to disseminate new ideas, and to bypass, and sometimes to topple, existing power structures.

And I'd always assumed that the Scientific Revolution was helped enormously by this new invention. People were suddenly able to share the results of their sometimes homebrewn experiments and a wave of new discovery was unleashed.

I'd always assumed that the scientific method was another one of these positive discoveries. But perhaps things aren't quite so rosy-tinted. Presumably scientific method, peer review, empirical testing et al. could have become prized because they were the best way people found to cope with the boom in quack theories and amateur views.