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Barbara Lindsey

Open university: Joi Ito plans a radical reinvention of MIT's Media Lab (Wired UK) - 0 views

  • They have a maker space in a church, a place where the kids can learn how to build a computer, a bike shop where they can learn how to do repairs. The kid who runs this place, Jeff Sturges, is awesome.We're sending a bunch of Media Lab people to Detroit to work with local innovators already doing stuff on the ground."
  • in which any bright talent anywhere, academically qualified or not, can be part of the world's leading "antidisciplinary" research lab. "Opening up the lab is more about expanding our reach and creating our network," explains Ito, appointed director in April 2011.
  • as Ito sees it, the formal channels of academia today inhibit progress. "In the old days, being relevant was writing academic papers. Today, if people can't find you on the internet, if they're not talking about you in Rwanda, you're irrelevant. That's the worst thing in the world for any researcher. The people inventing things might be in Kenya, and they go to the internet and search. Funders do the same thing. The old, traditional academic channel is not a good channel for attracting attention, funding, people, or preventing other people from competing with you.
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  • You can't actually tell people to think for themselves, or be creative. You have to work with them and have them learn it themselves."
  • "Being open, you're much less likely to have someone competitive emerge and you're also much more likely to find somebody who wants to come to work with you. Innovation is happening everywhere -- not just in the Ivy League schools. And that's why we're working with you guys [at Wired] too -- in the old days, academics didn't want to be in popular magazines. Openness is a survival trait."
  • It was, according to a 1984 briefing document by Negroponte, "designed to be a place where people of dramatically different backgrounds can simultaneously use and invent new media, and where the computer itself is seen as a medium -- part of a communications network of people and machines -- not just an object in front of which one sits."
  • As Ito sees it, the lab's mission "is to come up with ideas that would never be able to occur anywhere else because most places are incremental, directed and disciplinary".
  • There are lots of kids who are not happy with this massive consumerism, this unsustainable growth, but who have really smart science and technology values. That's a type of person we can draw into what I think will become a movement."
  • "We aim to capture serendipity. You don't get lucky if you plan everything -- and you don't get serendipity unless you have peripheral vision and creativity.
  • Our funding model allows our students to do anything they want without asking permission. It's like venture capital: we don't expect every experiment to succeed -- in fact, a lot are failures. But that's great -- failure is another word for discovery. We're very much against incrementalism -- we look for unexplored spaces, and our key metrics for defining a good project are uniqueness, impact and magic."
  • Ito set out some of his key principles. These included: "Encourage rebellion instead of compliance"; "Practice instead of theory"; " Constant learning instead of education"; "Compass over map". "The key principles include disobedience -- no one ever won a Nobel prize by doing as they're told," he explains later. "And it's about resilience versus strength -- you don't try to resist failure, you allow failure and bounce back. And compass over map is important -- you need to know where you're going, but the cost of planning often exceeds the cost of actually trying. The maps you have are often wrong. These principles affect and apply to just about any organisation."
  • In the old days, you needed hundreds of millions of dollars and armies of people to do anything that mattered. Today a couple of kids using open-source software, a generic PC and the internet can create a Google, a Yahoo! and a Facebook in their dorm room, and plug it in and it's working even before they've raised money. That takes all the innovation from the centre and pushes it to the edges -- into the little labs inside the Media Lab; inside dorm rooms; even inside terrorist cells. Suddenly the world is out of control -- the people innovating, disrupting, creating these tools, they're not scholars. They don't care about disciplines. They're antidisciplinary."
  • So when Ito was appointed, Negroponte wanted the press release headlined: "University dropout named director of Media Lab". "But," he says with raised eyebrows, "the fact that he didn't have a degree was buried near the last paragraph. That's the good Peter Thiel -- if you do drop out and do something creative, more power to you."
Barbara Lindsey

Next Gen Learning Challenges - 0 views

  • This fall, NGLC will host a “Back to Campus” series of webinars targeting the underlying challenges facing higher education today and IT’s role as an enabler of change. Each web seminar is free and open to the public, with virtual seating offered on a first-come, first-served basis.
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    This fall, NGLC will host a "Back to Campus" series of webinars targeting the underlying challenges facing higher education today and IT's role as an enabler of change. Each web seminar is free and open to the public
Barbara Lindsey

Open university: Joi Ito plans a radical reinvention of MIT's Media Lab (Wired UK) - 0 views

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    "the formal channels of academia today inhibit progress"
Barbara Lindsey

YouTube - Classical Conditioning at BGSU - 0 views

  • we had it shown in class aswell to explain us pavlovs theory (Belgium) big ups!
  • hahaha this photo also got shown in my pyschology lecture in brisbane, australia! everyone was pissing themselves laughing! too funny!!
  • haha this also got shown in my psychology lecture infront of 500 students in australia :p good effort, way too funny!!
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  • yeah my psychology professor showed this to our class today too XD
  • My psych teacher showed this tonight. Lol. Great work man.
  • LMAO!!!! My psychology teacher showed this to our class on tuesday (GMT Time, LONDON) everybody was laughing and thanks to this video we all understood what classical conditioning was, thanks for the vid it was gr8! LOL XD
  • Wow, you are really, really cute. :] I watched this in my psychology class today. The whole class laughed x]
  • 2 weeks ago Hahaha i guess everyone watched this in psychology!! everyone laughed in class at this.
Barbara Lindsey

Wiki-Centric Learning -- THE Journal - 0 views

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    Discusses ways in which wikis are being used in classrooms today. Gives Vicki Davis of Flatclassroom Project as example
Barbara Lindsey

Information overload, the early years - The Boston Globe - 0 views

  • The larger printed books became, the more they needed to offer guidance through their own texts. The tables of contents and alphabetical indexes developed by printers and authors to accompany them are still recognizable today.
  • More effective to modern eyes, though not as widespread, were tables of contents that outlined layers of subdivisions with successive indentations, as a PowerPoint slide might today (but without the bullet points).
  • These slips were cut from a full page and soon glued onto a new sheet, but in the mid-17th century for the first time one scholar advocated using the slips themselves as an information-storage system.
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  • The slips, ordered and sorted, would eventually inspire both the index card and the library card catalog.
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    Page 3 of article
Barbara Lindsey

Information overload, the early years - The Boston Globe - 0 views

  • In many ways, our key methods of coping with overload haven’t changed since the 16th century: We still need to select, summarize, and sort, and ultimately need human judgment and attention to guide the process.
  • Early modern compilers were driven by this enthusiasm, even beyond their hopes for acquiring reputation or financial gain. Today, we see the same impulse in the proliferation of cooperative information sharing on the Internet, such as the many designers and programmers sharing new ways to visualize and efficiently use huge quantities of data. In democratizing our ability to contribute to a universal encyclopedia of experience and information, the Internet has shown just how widespread that long-running ambition remains today.
  • Overload has long been fueled by our own enthusiasm — the enthusiasm for accumulating and sharing knowledge and information, and also for experimenting with new forms of organizing and presenting it.
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    Final page of article
Barbara Lindsey

Unmasking the Digital Truth / FrontPage - 0 views

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    The goal of this collaborative wiki is to "unmask the digital truth" with respect to the reasons some leaders today are overfiltering and overblocking web 2.0 sites in schools and libraries, and provide reasonable alternatives which support broader student and teacher access to these sites.
Barbara Lindsey

Weblogg-ed » Continuing the Educon Conversation - 0 views

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    Will Richardson posts educon list of big questions regarding schools and learning today and asks everyone to chime in.
Barbara Lindsey

Deliberate Engagement of Laptops in Large Lecture Classes to Improve Attentiveness and ... - 0 views

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    The value of in-class Internet technologies to student attentiveness, engagement, and learning remains both controversial and filled with promising potential. In this study, students were given the option to use LectureTools, an interactive suite of tools designed specifically for larger classes. The availability of these tools dramatically changed the mechanics of the course as over 90% of students attending lecture voluntarily brought their laptops to class. On one hand, surveys over multiple semesters show that students believe the availability of a laptop is more likely to increase their time on tasks unrelated to the conduct of the course. On the other hand, the surveys also ascertained that students felt more attentive with the technology, significantly more engaged, and able to learn more with the technology than in similar classes without it. LectureTools also led to a dramatic increase in the number of students posing questions during class time, with more than half posing at least one question during class over the course of a semester, a percentage far higher than achieved in semesters prior to the use of this technology. These results suggest that while having laptops in the classroom can be a distraction to students, students of today show confidence that they are capable of productive multitasking, showing that they not only can handle this technology when applied through "deliberate engagement" using tools like LectureTools, but thrive with it, as seen through improved attentiveness, learning, and overall engagement even in larger classes.
Barbara Lindsey

Enroll in MIT's First Free Certificate Course Today | Open Culture - 0 views

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    Fall 2012 syllabus
Barbara Lindsey

Cell phone novels come of age › Japan Today: Japan News and Discussion - 0 views

  • “Teenage girls began messaging with pagers in the early ’90s,” says Mizuko Ito, a research scientist who studies cell phone use among Japanese youth. “Because of this, Japan was the first country to have widespread mobile communications, even before mobile phones became affordable and popular.” Ito sees in the rise of cell phone novels a high degree of media and gadget literacy, a cultural willingness to experiment with new technologies, and a desire for private space and intimate communication.
  • The way it works is this: novels are posted by members of cell phone community sites to be downloaded for free and read on other cell phones. Reading often takes place in crowded trains during long commutes. The works are published in 70-word installments, or abbreviated chapters that are the ideal length to be read between shorter train stops. This means that, despite small cell phone screens, lots of white space is left for ease of reading. Multiple short lines of compressed sentences, mostly composed of fragmentary dialogue, are strung together with lots of cell phone-only symbols. The resulting works are emotional, fast-paced and highly visual, with an impact not unlike manga.
  • Following Starts, other publishers like Goma and Asuki Media Works moved in to cherry pick cell phone novel sites online and put out the next big hit. The number of cell phone novels in print began skyrocketing in 2006, when 22 books hit the shelves; the following year, there were 98. Even a no-name author with a cell phone novel publishing deal enjoyed a first run of between 50,000 and 100,000 copies.
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  • Indeed, cell phone novels do not go through the editorial selection process; they first become popular with readers and then are published based on their ability to please a crowd. This rawness is at once their appeal and a major hurdle keeping the emergent genre from maturing.
Barbara Lindsey

2020 Forecast | KnowledgeWorks - 0 views

  • Over the next decade, the most vibrant innovations in education will take place outside traditional institutions.
  • The forecast does not predict what will happen, but rather serves as a guide to the as-yet-unwritten future. It is designed to help you see connections among things that once seemed unrelated and to help you consider the changes and challenges that you are facing today within the context of wider patterns of change.
  • a critical dilemma facing these institutions: how to reconcile bottom-up developments in education with the traditional top-down hierarchy that is currently in place.
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    Over the next decade, the most vibrant innovations in education will take place outside traditional institutions.
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