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30 October 2006 - Allan Jones - William Shockley: the transistor and eugenics

William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, Nobel prize winner and founding father of silicon valley, was a controversial figure in the last twenty-five years of his life. His ideas on IQ, race and eugenics made him a pariah in the scientific world, and led to estrangement from many of his colleagues. My talk will survey his life, from his pre-war pioneering work in quantum mechanics, to his increasingly cranky later years in which he routinely tape-recorded telephone conversations, kept voluminous cuttings files on race and intelligence, and appeared in an Open University course!

17 November 2005 - Hazel Johnson & Gordon Wilson - Knowledge sharing & problem solving: using ICTs to support sustainable development

This talk explains the background to a new research project that will investigate how ICTs can be used to support communities of practice in Ugandan municipalities. We outline some earlier research into the use of ICTs for sustainability in African local government and how the practice of using ICTs has enhanced learning on technology and knowledge within the Open University course, U213. Our proposition is that ICTs can facilitate distributed communities of practice and that such a process can enable fragmented actors within African local government to build coherence in policy development.

27 July 2005 - Allan Jones - Podding and podcasting: a Beginner's Guide

This talk will be more of a practical demonstration than a talk. It will be quite short.

Podding is a way of downloading MP3 (audio) files automatically or semi-automatically from podcasters. The terms 'podding' and 'podcasting' unfortunately suggest a connection with the Apple i-Pod. In fact in order to receive and listen to podcasts all you need is a computer with an internet connection and a piece of free software, as I will show in the talk.

The educational potential of podding seems to be little explored. I will mention features of the system that distinguish it from other methods of audio-delivery and which might have educational potential.

25 May 2005 - Ciara Muldoon - Physicists' Use of Analogy to Acquire and Promote Insight

11 May 2005 - John Monk - Science parks, education, lanterns, earthquakes and metamaterials

I recently visited Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, where I attended an international conference on engineering education, a workshop on international recognition of engineering qualifications, an international workshop on antennas, gave conference presentations, gave a lecture, interviewed professional engineer candidates, managed to meet a number of educationalists, industrialists and civic leaders, visited two Taiwanese science parks, some universities and research centres.
I will try to give an overall impression of technological education developments that I discovered, describe something of about industrial development, explain a little politics and geography, illustrate some of the sights and cultural encounters and elaborate on two things that impressed me greatly: the Taiwanese science parks and engineering developments in the field of meta materials which have strange properties relevant to wireless and optical communication.

27 April 2005 - Melanie Keene - 'Every boy and girl a scientist': Constructing Construments communities in inter-war Britain

In the 1930s, Construments Ltd. produced and marketed optical construction kits with which children could build a wide variety of instruments from a series of standardised parts. Invented by C.W. Hansel, science master at Bedford School, the company was founded in and responded to contemporary educational practices and debates over 'General Science'. Though claiming it was a novel enterprise, Construments drew on traditions of natural magic and rational entertainment to fulfil its didactic purpose. Reinforcing the continuities between industrial, academic and domestic spheres at this time, Construments sets were manufactured by the British Thomson-Houston company, which also supplied Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory. Through an exploration of the company's instruments, promotional literature, and Construments' accompanying magazine, the 'Construmag', and drawing on the memories of 1930s' users, I reconstruct the contexts in which Construments were used, emphasising the creation of heterogeneous communities vital for the transmission of bodily skills and scientific knowledge.

26 January 2005 - Michael Lewis - 'The Personal Equation: mathematics, models and 'men on the spot' in Indian hydraulic engineering'

Historians have argued that colonial engineers in the late-nineteenth century, trained in a newly self-confident discipline which regarded hydraulic engineering as founded in universal mathematical knowledge about nature, instigated a regime of scientific management on India's canals that rejected local and contingent knowledge about agrarian society and environment, concentrating on hydraulic problems rather than economic and social ones. Examining these engineers' actual procedures, however, reveal that their idealised mathematical models and predictive theories actually generated a series of technical problems which imbued hydraulic science with precisely the sorts of social discretion, agrarian negotiation and local knowledge which ostensibly lay outside the colonial engineer's narrow concrete vision, and in practice collapsed the distinction between social and economic administration, and scientific practice.