Still, every session has its own “vibe” and after 30 years of training, there is still something new that can happen to surprise me.

So I was quite amused by this video Every Presentation Ever: Communication FAIL

If you run training sessions or make presentations yourself, you’ll probably laugh out loud…

Picture credit (top of post): Mark Gregory’s pictures from ALT-C, which are published under a Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales” license. For commercial reuse, contact ALT.

Friends on Facebook – fake contacts?
I and others were concerned in 2010 with whether or not Facebook was a worthwhile activity for professionals and those in education. I guess nowadays Facebook is pretty entrenched – but these arguments are still valid. Nowadays I find I don’t use Facebook a lot, but for some situations it is now the only way to contact people.

6 key tips on how to write a blog post
How to turn ideas into effective blog posts (2010)

Features of eportfolios
I was musing on some features of eportfolios which sit between one’s personal space/personal learning space and the institutional learning space (eg VLE) (2009)

Avoiding RSI
Perhaps the post I should have taken note of though was the one on Avoiding RSI. Three years later, I have been crippled for weeks with RSI. Luckily my employer is supporting me in finding alternative ways to work and alternative products to mitigate the effects.

I’ve tried these courses before and (inevitably?) dropped out due to pressure of time. I plan this time to participate at a level which matches my schedule, so that I dip in and do as much as I can around what interests me or is currently relevant to my work. Happily this kind of approach is welcomed in MOOC type learning. There some excellent thought leaders chairing weekly sessions in this course, and I can see that some weeks will have more interest than others.

Looking forward to it.

I’ve always been inspired by William Morris’s dictum:

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”.

I like to be inspired by quotations and maxims and on this new journey another that seems appropriate is:

“He who would travel happily must travel light.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I’m attached to my objects that have memories attached. I’ll have to see if I can thin them out in a way I won’t regret.

Reading Jean Auel’s latest book, The Land of Painted Caves, I became interested in finding a photograph of the hand stencils she mentions in her novel in which she describes quite a lot of cave art.

‘Negative’ hand stencils are a common feature of rock art around the world. They are created using the hand as a stencil and spraying or painting the hand around it (other ‘positive’ hand paintings are made by painting the hand and applying it to the rock). It is likely a coloured liquid or paint was blown from the mouth, sprayed around the hand. The hands are painted in red, black or ochre.

In Chauvet, France, red ochre hand prints and stencils are found in chambers throughout the cave. These were painted during the Aurignacian culture, possibly 31,000 years ago. There are others in caves in Argentina, Borneo, Australia, Spain, Saudi Arabia, North Africa, Scandinavia and the USA. They come in all sizes and appear to have been made by men, women, children and even babies.

In some places, such as Grotte de Gargas in the French Pyrenees, the hand stencils (created around 27,000 BC) show apparently missing or deformed fingers: “mutilated hands”. These were analysed by Dr Ali Sahly and out of this came a theory of pathologic mutilations – that the missing fingers are due to diseases such as rheumatism or leprosy, or by accidents or frostbite – the hand prints were made during an era of great cold. He also suggested that the amputations were ritual (cultural reasons for finger sacrifice being recorded in a number of early populations in many regions of the world).

This pathological mutilation hypothesis, however, has largely been rejected in favour of a theory that the stencils were made by bending the fingers. The signs created from these folded fingers may have been for the purpose of communication relating to hunting. Easy to see how this might work! Further, a study of (rather more recent) Australian aboriginal hand stencils in Central Queensland by Bruce Wright demonstrated that they constituted an ideographic system paralleling the sign language known to be in use in the area studied.

Hand stencils with incomplete fingers had until recently only been found in very few caves, mostly in the Pyrénées. With the discoveries in other caves, it becomes clear that the phenomenon of hand stencils with incomplete fingers is far more widespread than had originally been thought. Jean Clottes, Jean Courtin and Luc Vanrell write at the Bradshaw Foundation about The Cave Art Paintings of the Cosquer Cave now beneath the sea at Marseille, France. They found 65 hand stencils, many with incomplete fingers, and conclude: “The now established fact that roughly at the same time such hand stencils were being made in sites hundreds of miles apart should deal a death blow to the theory of pathologic mutilations: how likely would it be that human groups living at such distances from one another should independently develop the same crippling diseases and should react in the same way by immortalizing them on the walls of the caves by means of the same techniques?”

TED fellow Genevieve von Petzinger has created a database of geometric signs from 146 painted prehistoric caves. These include both the positive hand and the negative hand. The signs used across geological boundaries suggest there may have been a common iconography before people first moved out of Africa. It looks like abstract markings and signs were the first type of expression even before the cave artists started drawing animals. And the animals are probably as symbolic as the signs. Von Petzinger found that over time and space there was a high degree of repetition of a limited number of shapes, with some being replicated throughout the 20,000 year time span of her study. She concludes that “this continuity arguably removes any previous speculation that these signs were random doodles.”

I’m glad that original theory has been superseded. Calculations about the number of mutilated hands in a prehistoric population based on the French cave stencils are horrific and macabre. The ingenuity of early humans in communicating before written language is a wonderful explanation.

So what can I learn from this to apply in my daily life and work – my justification for following this train of research, if you remember? I guess it’s that you have to be careful not to use results to prove what you want to prove – to avoid the ‘pet theory’. There may be more than one explanation and perhaps it’s that people are more inventive than it’s sometimes possible to believe!

Bibliography
The Cave Art Paintings of the Cosquer Cave: Prehistoric Images and Medicines Under the Sea, Jean Clottes, Jean Courtin, Luc Vanrell . http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/cosquer/

Geometric Signs – A New Understanding by Genevieve von Petzinger http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/geometric_signs/

Hand Paintings and Symbols in Rock Art, Bradshaw Foundation http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/hand_paintings_rock_art.php

Probing Prehistoric Cultures: Data, Dates and Narratives, Paul Bouissac, http://www.semioticon.com/frontline/probing_prehistoric_cultures.htm

Hand prints, footprints and the imprints of evolution, Ahmed Achrati,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_6922/is_1_25/ai_n31187305/

Twitter in Universities: How much use is an official University Twitter account?

Dropbox security breach illustrates dangers of the cloud

How online learning is revolutionising education: a thought-provoking infographic

Maximising Online Resource Effectiveness

Invitation to webinar Tuesday 7th June: Student peer coaching for personal development

Key questions about capturing your lectures

My favourite post in May was Video recording conferences with the Kodak Zi8 in which I review the mini video camera Kodak Zi8 and compare it with the Flip Cam (which is being withdrawn from production). Summary: excellent value for money!

Some of my April posts have been:

Why I like Moodle

Spirituality, syrup & sacred calendars

Creating passwords and security questions

Open Nottingham Seminar: First Thoughts

Creating learning materials online with Xerte Online Toolkits #1

Epic failures in vision happen to the most sage people sometimes…

Thomas Watson, "The world will never need any more than about 5 computers."

Western Union, "The telephone has too many shortcomings to make it a useful tool for communications."

Marshall Foche "Airplanes are interesting, but of no real military value."

Ken Olsen "There is no reason why people would want a computer in their home."