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Barbara Lindsey

Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution | Magazine - 0 views

  • Somehow, watching television became a part-time job for every citizen in the developed world. But once we stop thinking of all that time as individual minutes to be whiled away and start thinking of it as a social asset that can be harnessed, it all looks very different. The buildup of this free time among the world’s educated population—maybe a trillion hours per year—is a new resource. It’s what I refer to as the cognitive surplus.
  • Shirky:
  • Pink: A surplus that post-TV media—blogs, wikis, and Twitter—can tap for other, often more valuable, uses.
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  • he very nature of these new technologies fosters social connection—creating, contributing, sharing. When someone buys a TV, the number of consumers goes up by one, but the number of producers stays the same. When someone buys a computer or mobile phone, the number of consumers and producers both increase by one. This lets ordinary citizens, who’ve previously been locked out, pool their free time for activities they like and care about. So instead of that free time seeping away in front of the television set, the cognitive surplus is going to be poured into everything from goofy enterprises like lolcats, where people stick captions on cat photos, to serious political activities like Ushahidi.com, where people report human rights abuses.
  • All the time that people devote to Wikipedia—which that guy considered weird and wasteful—is really a tiny portion of our worldwide cognitive surplus. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total.
  • Our third drive—our intrinsic motivation—can be even more powerful.
  • Shirky: Right—because television crowded out other forms of social engagement. Look, behavior is motivation filtered through opportunity. So if you see people behaving in new ways, like with Wikipedia and whatnot, it’s very unlikely that their motivations have changed, because human nature doesn’t change that quickly. It’s quite likely that the opportunities have changed.
  • When we lacked the ability to efficiently connect and collaborate with each other, that intrinsic motivation often didn’t surface. So we assumed that productive, public activities revolved around extrinsic motivation and external rewards. And we assumed that all rewards were substitutable for all other rewards. So I can pay you more or I can praise you or I can put a Lucite brick on your desk and it all works the same way.
  • When Deci took people who enjoyed solving complicated puzzles for fun and began paying them if they did the puzzles, they no longer wanted to play with those puzzles during their free time. And the science is overwhelming that for creative, conceptual tasks, those if-then rewards rarely work and often do harm.
  • Pink: Yes, often these outside motivators can give us less of what we want and more of what we don’t want. Think about that study of Israeli day care centers, which we both write about. When day care centers fined parents for being late to pick up their kids, the result was that more parents ended up coming late. People no longer felt a social obligation to behave well. Shirky: If you assume bad faith from the average participant, you’ll probably get it. In social media, the design principle that has worked remarkably well is to treat good faith as the normal case and to regard defections from that as essentially a special case to be solved.
  • Shirky: Well, organizations that are founded to solve problems end up committed to the preservation of the problems. So Trentway-Wagar, an Ontario-based bus company, sues PickupPal, an online ride-sharing service, because T-W isn’t committed to solving transportation problems. It’s committed to solving transportation problems with buses. In the media world, Britannica is now committed to making reference works that can’t easily be referred to, and the music industry is now distributing music that can’t easily be shared because new ways of distributing music undermine the old business model.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      Does the same hold true for education?
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    Pink and Shirky talk about the shift in technology-enabled human interaction.
Barbara Lindsey

Bill Ferriter | Teacher Leaders Network - 0 views

  • Doesn’t Pink talk about this in A Whole New Mind?  Here’s a quote: “While detailed knowledge of a single area once guaranteed success, today the top rewards go to those who can operate with equal aplomb in starkly different realms. I call these people “boundary crossers.” They develop expertise in multiple spheres, they speak in different languages, and they find joy in the rich variety of human experience. They live multi lives—because that’s more interesting, and nowadays more effective.” (Kindle Location 1692)
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      This is where we should shine!
  • Recently, I've tinkered with a system to assess my students' participation in Voicethread conversations.  Essentially mirroring the reflective aspects of Konrad's blogging handouts, I've decided to ask my students the following four questions while we're working with a new Voicethread: Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that closely matches your own thinking.   Why does this comment resonate---or make sense to---you? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that you respectfully disagree with.  If you were to engage in a conversation with the commenter, what evidence/argument would you use to persuade them to change their point of view? Highlight a comment from our Voicethread conversation that challenged your thinking in a good way and/or made you rethink one of your original ideas.  What about the new comment was challenging?  What are you going to do now that your original belief was challenged?  Will you change yoru mind?  Will you do more researching/thinking/talking with others?
  • The cool part about assessing Voicethread presentations this way is that each question essenitally forces my students to interact with our conversation in a really meaningful way.  To craft careful answers, they must truly consider the comments of others---an essential skill for promoting collaborative versus competitive dialogue---and compare those comments against their own beliefs and preconceived notions.  That's metacognition at its best! What's even better is that when students know that these questions form the basis of our Voicethread assessment from the beginning of a conversation, participation level rise remarkably.  While students are looking for project reflection comments, they often end up highly motivated to share their thinking with peers. 
Barbara Lindsey

Teaching: The Unthinking Profession | Eat.Sleep.Teach. - 0 views

  • Few people have heard of or seen Sir Ken Robinson, hardly anyone has read Geoff Petty or John Hattie, let alone slightly leftfield texts like those by Steven Johnson or Daniel Pink.
    • Barbara Lindsey
       
      How is this theory?
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