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Ed Webb

Social Media is Killing the LMS Star - A Bootleg of Bryan Alexander's Lost Presentation... - 0 views

openedconference.org/...1037

lms education Web2.0 socialmedia NITLE bryanalexander

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Note that this isn’t just a technological alternate history. It also describes a different set of social and cultural practices.
  • CMSes lumber along like radio, still playing into the air as they continue to gradually shift ever farther away on the margins. In comparison, Web 2.0 is like movies and tv combined, plus printed books and magazines. That’s where the sheer scale, creative ferment, and wife-ranging influence reside. This is the necessary background for discussing how to integrate learning and the digital world.
  • These virtual classes are like musical practice rooms, small chambers where one may try out the instrument in silent isolation. It is not connectivism but disconnectivism.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • CMSes shift from being merely retrograde to being actively regressive if we consider the broader, subtler changes in the digital teaching landscape. Web 2.0 has rapidly grown an enormous amount of content through what Yochai Benkler calls “peer-based commons production.” One effect of this has been to grow a large area for informal learning, which students (and staff) access without our benign interference. Students (and staff) also contribute to this peering world; more on this later. For now, we can observe that as teachers we grapple with this mechanism of change through many means, but the CMS in its silo’d isolation is not a useful tool.
  • those curious about teaching with social media have easy access to a growing, accessible community of experienced staff by means of those very media. A meta-community of Web 2.0 academic practitioners is now too vast to catalogue. Academics in every discipline blog about their work. Wikis record their efforts and thoughts, as do podcasts. The reverse is true of the CMS, the very architecture of which forbids such peer-to-peer information sharing. For example, the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (RCCS) has for many years maintained a descriptive listing of courses about digital culture across the disciplines. During the 1990s that number grew with each semester. But after the explosive growth of CMSes that number dwindled. Not the number of classes taught, but the number of classes which could even be described. According to the RCCS’ founder, David Silver (University of San Francisco), this is due to the isolation of class content in CMS containers.
  • unless we consider the CMS environment to be a sort of corporate intranet simulation, the CMS set of community skills is unusual, rarely applicable to post-graduation examples. In other words, while a CMS might help privacy concerns, it is at best a partial, not sufficient solution, and can even be inappropriate for already online students.
  • That experiential, teachable moment of selecting one’s copyright stance is eliminated by the CMS.
  • Another argument in favor of CMSes over Web 2.0 concerns the latter’s open nature. It is too open, goes the thought, constituting a “Wild West” experience of unfettered information flow and unpleasant forms of access. Campuses should run CMSes to create shielded environments, iPhone-style walled gardens that protect the learning process from the Lovecraftian chaos without.
  • social sifting, information literacy, using the wisdom of crowds, and others. Such strategies are widely discussed, easily accessed, and continually revised and honed.
  • at present, radio CMS is the Clear Channel of online learning.
  • For now, the CMS landsape is a multi-institutional dark Web, an invisible, unsearchable, un-mash-up-able archipelago of hidden learning content.
  • Can the practice of using a CMS prepare either teacher or student to think critically about this new shape for information literacy? Moreover, can we use the traditional CMS to share thoughts and practices about this topic?
  • The internet of things refers to a vastly more challenging concept, the association of digital information with the physical world. It covers such diverse instances as RFID chips attached to books or shipping pallets, connecting a product’s scanned UPC code to a Web-based database, assigning unique digital identifiers to physical locations, and the broader enterprise of augmented reality. It includes problems as varied as building search that covers both the World Wide Web and one’s mobile device, revising copyright to include digital content associated with private locations, and trying to salvage what’s left of privacy. How does this connect with our topic? Consider a recent article by Tim O’Reilly and John Battle, where they argue that the internet of things is actually growing knowledge about itself. The combination of people, networks, and objects is building descriptions about objects, largely in folksonomic form. That is, people are tagging the world, and sharing those tags. It’s worth quoting a passage in full: “It’s also possible to give structure to what appears to be unstructured data by teaching an application how to recognize the connection between the two. For example, You R Here, an iPhone app, neatly combines these two approaches. You use your iPhone camera to take a photo of a map that contains details not found on generic mapping applications such as Google maps – say a trailhead map in a park, or another hiking map. Use the phone’s GPS to set your current location on the map. Walk a distance away, and set a second point. Now your iPhone can track your position on that custom map image as easily as it can on Google maps.” (http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194) What world is better placed to connect academia productively with such projects, the open social Web or the CMS?
  • imagine the CMS function of every class much like class email, a necessary feature, but not by any means the broadest technological element. Similarly the e-reserves function is of immense practical value. There may be no better way to share copyrighted academic materials with a class, at this point. These logistical functions could well play on.
Lisa M Lane

The Technological Dimension of a Massive Open Online Course: The Case of the CCK08 Cour... - 7 views

www.irrodl.org/...1402

articles research

shared by Lisa M Lane on 17 Nov 09 - Cached
  • highlighting the purpose of the tools (e.g., skill-building) and stating clearly that the learners can choose their preferred tools
  • Although formal attendance seemed to be the main driver for completing assignments and the course, the main reason for not completing the course was a lack of time
  • Learners, in the absence of a stronger motivation, attend only partially
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • students attend the course without expecting a certificate
  • Furthermore, a “hand-made” or “hacked” certificate issued by the instructor (not by the institution) (Young, 2008) only partially affects the motivation to finish the course:
  • comments confirm the need for increased attention to usability since users do not want to deal with confusing interfaces
  • Lisa M Lane on 17 Nov 09
     
    The Technological Dimension of a Massive Open Online Course: The Case of the CCK08 Course Tools Problematic study of CCK08 -- sample size was way too small, would have been more interesting to examine ways in which instructor choices of tools influenced student tool use -- choices are exclusive, so can't put "confusing" and "overwhelming" at the same time.
gobibijou

Stephen Downes - 0 views

www.blip.tv/840097

downes elearning education web2.0

shared by gobibijou on 24 Sep 09 - Cached
  • ning 2.0 and the
    • gobibijou
      gobibijou on 24 Sep 09
       
      S. Downes: http://www.blip.tv/file/840097 2 approaches to learning - tradiotional (AI): old artifitial technology. Expert system organises. Old managnement systems. Focus on: - Goal orientated. - Competencies. - Efficency (from A to B in the most efficient). Requieres: - an expert - knowledge representation (VS. Siemens: the knowledge that we have CAN'T be represented) for expl. language -- Problem: it creates a simplification of the knowledge. - learning activities are set up by an expert. -network approach: (???IDF). Conectivism (born 40 years ago Pappert &?). Computational system is NOT set up as a representational system BUT is set up as a NETWORK (like a brain). The connectivist system: - is unnorganized - is unstructured (previously) - looks messy and unorganised - can NOT be predicted HOw Knowledge is represented in the system? DISTRIBUTED. Our concept of X is not a symbolic representation but a set up of active connections also in a neuronal level (?) Model of learning NOt based in deduction and inference BUT on ASSOCIATION based on: - concurrency. - proximity. - back propagation (economics: supply and demand market is based on that) - ???Amealing the way form networks/community in society work in THE SAME WAY that they do in a neuronal level and a personal level. Communities ARE networks that work through distributed connections. How should be the network? - DIVERSITY (wide representation of different points of views) Knowledge in a network is: EMERGENT - AUTONOMY : each individual is self-directed. Each individual works as his own guide. - CONNECTEDNESS (or interactivities). Knowledge produced by mechanism of interaction is produced by the nature/properties of the network. The way/organization of connections are formed is essential. - OPENESS (there's no inside/outside the "system"). Connection FLOWS freely. RECOGNITION of patterns (clustter). LEARNERS: Learners have different things they want to learn and the system
  • 2.0 and the impact of web 2
    • gobibijou
      gobibijou on 24 Sep 09
       
      S. Downes: http://www.blip.tv/file/840097 NOtes (need to be double checked) 2 approaches to learning 1. traditional (AI): old artifitial technology. Expert system organises. Old managnement systems. Focus on: - Goal orientated. - Competencies. - Efficency (from A to B in the most efficient). Requieres: - an expert - knowledge representation (VS. Siemens: the knowledge that we have CAN'T be represented) for expl. language -- Problem: it creates a simplification of the knowledge. - learning activities are set up by an expert. 2.-network approach: (???IDF). Conectivism (born 40 years ago Pappert &?). Computational system is NOT set up as a representational system BUT is set up as a NETWORK (like a brain). The connectivist system: - is unnorganized - is unstructured (previously) - looks messy and unorganised - can NOT be predicted HOw Knowledge is represented in the system? DISTRIBUTED. Our concept of X is not a symbolic representation but a set up of active connections also in a neuronal level (?) Model of learning NOt based in deduction and inference BUT on ASSOCIATION based on: - concurrency. - proximity. - back propagation (economics: supply and demand market is based on that) - ???Amealing the way form networks/community in society work in THE SAME WAY that they do in a neuronal level and a personal level. Communities ARE networks that work through distributed connections. How should be the network? - DIVERSITY (wide representation of different points of views) Knowledge in a network is: EMERGENT - AUTONOMY : each individual is self-directed. Each individual works as his own guide. - CONNECTEDNESS (or interactivities). Knowledge produced by mechanism of interaction is produced by the nature/properties of the network. The way/organization of connections are formed is essential. - OPENESS (there's no inside/outside the "system"). Connection FLOWS freely. RECOGNITION of patterns (clustter). LEARNERS: Learners have different thin
  • gobibijou on 24 Sep 09
     
    downes talking about approaches in education. Web 2.0, elearning...
Keith Hamon

Reflections on open courses « Connectivism - 4 views

www.connectivism.ca/?p=267

connectivism open education collaboration pedagogy technology

shared by Keith Hamon on 22 Aug 10 - Cached
  • In education, content can easily be produced (it’s important but has limited economic value). Lectures also have limited value (easy to record and to duplicate). Teaching – as done in most universities – can be duplicated. Learning, on the other hand, can’t be duplicated. Learning is personal, it has to occur one learner at a time. The support needed for learners to learn is a critical value point.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 22 Aug 10
       
      Excellent insight!
    • Keith Hamon
      Keith Hamon on 26 Aug 10
       
      Here's the key: if what we are typically doing in our classrooms can be easily duplicated, then it has lost its value in both the wider economy and in the educational ecosystem. We university professors must redefine the way we add value to our students' personal learning networks.
  • Learning, however, requires a human, social element: both peer-based and through interaction with subject area experts
  • Content is readily duplicated, reducing its value economically. It is still critical for learning – all fields have core elements that learners must master before they can advance (research in expertise supports this notion). - Teaching can be duplicated (lectures can be recorded, Elluminate or similar webconferencing system can bring people from around the world into a class). Assisting learners in the learning process, correcting misconceptions (see Private Universe), and providing social support and brokering introductions to other people and ideas in the discipline is critical. - Accreditation is a value statement – it is required when people don’t know each other. Content was the first area of focus in open education. Teaching (i.e. MOOCs) are the second. Accreditation will be next, but, before progress can be made, profile, identity, and peer-rating systems will need to improve dramatically. The underlying trust mechanism on which accreditation is based cannot yet be duplicated in open spaces (at least, it can’t be duplicated to such a degree that people who do not know each other will trust the mediating agent of open accreditation)
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  • The skills that are privileged and rewarded in a MOOC are similar to those that are needed to be effective in communicating with others and interacting with information online (specifically, social media and information sources like journals, databases, videos, lectures, etc.). Creative skills are the most critical. Facilitators and learners need something to “point to”. When a participant creates an insightful blog post, a video, a concept map, or other resource/artifact it generally gets attention.
  • Intentional diversity – not necessarily a digital skill, but the ability to self-evaluate ones network and ensure diversity of ideologies is critical when information is fragmented and is at risk of being sorted by single perspectives/ideologies.
  • The volume of information is very disorienting in a MOOC. For example, in CCK08, the initial flow of postings in Moodle, three weekly live sessions, Daily newsletter, and weekly readings and assignments proved to be overwhelming for many participants. Stephen and I somewhat intentionally structured the course for this disorienting experience. Deciding who to follow, which course concepts are important, and how to form sub-networks and sub-systems to assist in sensemaking are required to respond to information abundance. The process of coping and wayfinding (ontology) is as much a lesson in the learning process as mastering the content (epistemology). Learners often find it difficult to let go of the urge to master all content, read all the comments and blog posts.
  • e. Learning is a social trust-based process.
  • Patience, tolerance, suspension of judgment, and openness to other cultures and ideas are required to form social connections and negotiating misunderstandings.
  • An effective digital citizenry needs the skills to participate in important conversations. The growth of digital content and social networks raises the need citizens to have the technical and conceptual skills to express their ideas and engage with others in those spaces. MOOCs are a first generation testing grounds for knowledge growth in a distributed, global, digital world. Their role in developing a digital citizenry is still unclear, but democratic societies require a populace with the skills to participate in growing a society’s knowledge. As such, MOOCs, or similar open transparent learning experiences that foster the development of citizens confidence engage and create collaboratively, are important for the future of society.
Ed Webb

The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" - There is No Crowd - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...t_the_wisdom_of_the_crowds.php

crowdsourcing connectivism opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Wikipedia isn't written and edited by the "crowd" at all. In fact, 1% of Wikipedia users are responsible for half of the site's edits. Even Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has been quoted as saying that the site is really written by a community, "a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers."
  • I think your headline is misleading and Vassilis Kostakos should read the book before poking holes. Surowiecki is very clear about the conditions necessary for a wise crowd to prevail and those conditions are: 1. Diversity of opinion 2. Independence 3. Decentralization 4. Aggregation If your crowd possesses those qualities then it is wise and then it will be better at making decisions under Surowiecki's paradigm. The crowds used in the research (and the crowd in general) doesn't possess those qualities and therefore is an unfit data set. We should be trying to create the ideal crowd before we can obtain superlative results and not try to get good results from any random crowd.
  • Limitations in predictions market are well documented (and include Muhammad's points above), and constrain their practical application to a well-defined number of situation. Crowdsourcing suffers from the same limitations, which is not a problem, as long as you limit its application correspondingly. The problem occur when you stretch it outside the required constraints and yet present the results as "scientific", i.e. as a good proxy for what the crowd thinks. That's what professor Vassilis Kostakos's theory ultimately comes down to (or should - I don't know, I haven't read his report). Apps like Digg or Amazon's review are not scientific applications of crowdsourcing, and thus their results should not be seen as precise representation of our collective thinking.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Wisdom of Crowds is a crypto-fascist idea; there is no objective truth, there are no facts, truth is what "the crowd" decides it is. You get these unhealthy echo chambers of "activists" setting the agenda. This article said it best, over three years ago: DIGITAL MAOISM The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier
  • What I'd like to see is non-fakeable metrics on ecommerce sites: return rates or reorder rates (as appropriate), for example. Or for apps, how many times users open the app per day/week or whatever.
  • the research is interesting if linked to ideas of unrepresentative or illiberal democracy, as posited by Fareed Zakaria that suggests small interest groups can hijack democratic systems.
Ed Webb

Neuro-tweets: #hashtagging the brain - Research - University of Cambridge - 4 views

www.cam.ac.uk/...o-tweets-hashtagging-the-brain

neuroscience twitter networks connectivism connectiveknowledge

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • human brain networks represent a balance between high efficiency of information transfer and low connection cost
  • Members of the audience and other Twitter users were asked to tweet during the lecture about the concepts that were being discussed, using the hashtag #csftwitterbrain. At the end of the talk Professor Bullmore displayed the resulting image showing the interconnectivity of the hashtagged tweets, and explained how Twitter networks can be compared to the human brain network. “We found that the #twitterbrain network was somewhat like the brain network in being small-world and modular with highly connected hub nodes; however the brain network was more clustered and less efficient than the twitter network. So at first sight there were some points in common and some points of difference between these two information processing networks.”
  • “It has been intriguing to see the spectacle of watching the twitter network grow or evolve over the course of several days. And I have learnt a lot about the power of new media to engage and communicate, and the potential scientific value of using Twitter to map and measure social networks.”
Ed Webb

Free Online Courses, at a Very High Price - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 3 views

chronicle.com/...48777

open open-ed OCR openaccess distance onlineeducation MIT Yale future Chronice

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Oct 09 - Cached
  • A success for college-made free online courses—except that Mr. Ziegler, who works for a restaurant-equipment company in Pennsylvania, is on the verge of losing his job. And those classes failed to provide what his résumé real ly needs: a college credential.
  • the recession and disappearing grant money are forcing colleges to confront a difficult question: What business model can support the high cost of giving away your "free" content?
  • David Wiley, open education's Everywhere Man
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • The education oracle offers another prophecy for open courseware. "Every OCW initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit," he has blogged, "will be dead by the end of calendar 2012."
  • ventures around the country are seriously exploring new business strategies. For some, it's fund raising à la National Public Radio; for others, hooking open content to core operations by dangling it as a gateway to paid courses.
  • "Given that exclusivity has come to be seen by some as a question of how many students a university can turn away, I don't see what's going to make the selective universities increase their appetite for risking their brands by offering credits for online versions of core undergraduate courses,"
  • the unbundling of higher education.
  • MIT, where students pay about $50,000 a year for a tightly knit package of course content, learning experiences, certification, and social life. MIT OpenCourseWare has lopped off the content and dumped it in cyberspace. Eventually, according to Mr. Carson's take on the unbundling story, online learning experiences will emerge that go beyond just content. Consider Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative, another darling of the movement, whose multimedia courses track students' progress and teach them with built-in tutors—no professor required.
  • "Social life we'll just forget about because there's Facebook," Mr. Wiley says. "Nobody believes that people have to go to university to have a social life anymore."
  • "It doesn't shift what's happening in some of the very stable traditional institutions of higher education. But there are huge numbers of others who aren't being served. And it's with those that I think we'll begin to see new forms."
  • University of the People
  • Western Governors University—a nonprofit, accredited online institution that typically charges $2,890 per six-month term—where students advance by showing what they've learned, not how much time they've spent in class. It's called competency-based education. It means you can fast-forward your degree by testing out of stuff you've already mastered. Some see a marriage of open content and competency-based learning as a model for the small-pieces-loosely-joined chain of cheaper, fragmented education.
  • much open courseware is "lousy,"
  • "There's a pretty significant fraction of the population that learns better with instructor-led kinds of activities than purely self-paced activities,"
  • Peer 2 Peer University
  • The model boils down to six words: Do you like this? Enroll now!
  • a Korean university where students competed to produce open lecture notes. The prize was an iPod and lunch with the university president.
  • Carnegie Mellon is trying a different model. When its courses are good enough, with other colleges assigning them as e-textbooks, it asks students to pay a fee as low as $15, says Joel M. Smith, vice provost. "That would be a very, very, very cheap textbook," he says. "If it were used by a large number of colleges and universities, it could sustain the project."
  • the free courses taught him one thing, something important when you've been out of school so long: He can do it. He can follow a Yale class. He has nothing to fear.
Ed Webb

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody - 1 views

www.shirky.com/...looking-for-the-mouse.html

technology web2.0 shirky Culture future Media sociology history connectiveknowledge crowdsourcing networks

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Sep 09 - Cached
  • television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.
  • The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity.
  • The normal case of social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.
  • media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.
  • Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.
Lisa Durff

Here we are…there we are going « Connectivism - 0 views

www.connectivism.ca/?p=151

siemens education future OER openness connectivism connectiveknowledge

shared by Lisa Durff on 14 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Learning consists of weaving together coherent (personal) narratives of fragmented information. The narrative can be now created through social sensemaking systems (such as blogs and social networks), instead of centrally organized courses. Courses can be global, with many educators and participants (i.e. CCK08). Courses, unlike universities, are not directly integrated into the power system of a society. Can decentralized networks of autonomous agents serve the same function as organized institutions? But who loses, and what is lost, if the teaching role of universities decline?
    • Lisa Durff
      Lisa Durff on 31 Dec 09
       
      So learning is developing a story from one's schema of a thing!
    • Lisa Durff
      Lisa Durff on 31 Dec 09
       
      "But who loses, and what is lost, if the teaching role of universities decline?" My concern surrounds the word teaching. Who said that is their primary role? Isn't it licensing, formally sanctioning persons so they can enter the world of work with the "proper" credentials? Did you learn anything in your college days?
    • Lisa Durff
      Lisa Durff on 31 Dec 09
       
      So what really needs to change is not the university, but the culture it serves...
  • The virtues that a society finds desirable are systematized in its institutions. However futile this activity, it helps society, and media, to hold people accountable, to devise strategies, and create laws so people feel safe. Similarly, results that are desirable (financial, educationally, etc) are systematized to ensure the ability to manage and duplicate results. I shared some thoughts on this systematization last year as a reason for the currently limited impact of personal learning environments (PLEs). Quite simply, even revolutionaries conserve.
  • Teaching is what is most at risk. Can a social network - loosely connected, driven by humanistic ideals - serve a similar role to what university classrooms serve today? I hope so, but I don’t think so. At least not with our current mindsets and skillsets. We associate with those who are similar. We do not pursue diversity. In fact, we shy away from it. We surround ourselves with people and ideas that resonate with our own, not with those that cause us stress or internal conflict. Secondly, until all of society becomes fully networked (not technologically networked, but networked on the principles of flows, connections, feedback), a networked entity always risks being subverted by hierarchy. Today, rightly or wrongly, hierarchy holds power in society.
    • Gina Minks
      Gina Minks on 14 Aug 09
       
      What if the social network serves to exlude information from other groups? Who can fight against disenfranchisement if no one can see it any more because its filtered away?
  • Ed Webb on 14 Aug 09
     
    Oh, George, so gloomy!
Lisa M Lane

Towards More Effective Online Reading | edfoc.us - 0 views

edfoc.us/?p=208

articles

shared by Lisa M Lane on 15 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Educators should give the act of online reading equal importance.  Why not?  If teachers want students to “slow read” digital texts, then shouldn’t we employ some of the same reading methodologies that work with physical books and printed words?  Should we just say, “Forget it, our students are just going to read online material in the same manner that they read chat scripts and text messages?”  Explicit teaching is the answer IMHO.  Explicitly teaching the act of online reading using tools that support effective, proven techniques.
  • Lisa M Lane on 15 Sep 09
     
    Educators should give the act of online reading equal importance. Why not? If teachers want students to "slow read" digital texts, then shouldn't we employ some of the same reading methodologies that work with physical books and printed words? Should we just say, "Forget it, our students are just going to read online material in the same manner that they read chat scripts and text messages?" Explicit teaching is the answer IMHO. Explicitly teaching the act of online reading using tools that support effective, proven techniques.
Ed Webb

Networks are Killing Science - 0 views

www.scientificblogging.com/...networks_are_killing_science

science method networks complexity

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Aug 09 - Cached
  • At the heart of scientific thinking has to be a strong desire not to fool yourself, coupled by an understanding of how to actually put that desire into practice.
  • this emerging scientific culture that bizarrely believes that if you can produce a model that fits the data that inspired you to build the model, you've actually shown that your model accurately captures the system. This culture floods the scientific literature with zero-impact papers, dazzles the computationally naïve, captures a lot of air time in the news.
  • The computer models can be dazzling, but unless they produce a demonstrated string of successes that end up changing the way everyone in the field thinks - the molecular biologists, the sociologists, the economists, then the sciences of complexity will be dismissed as unfruitful. In the end, your model has to inspire a someone to pick up a pipette and design an experiment.
Ed Webb

It's Time To Hide The Noise - 5 views

www.techcrunch.com/...its-time-to-hide-the-noise

noise signal twitter filtering apps tweetdeck seesmic twhirl techcrunch opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Oct 09 - Cached
  • the noise is worse than ever. Indeed, it is being magnified every day as more people pile onto Twitter and Facebook and new apps yet to crest like Google Wave. The data stream is growing stronger, but so too is the danger of drowning in all that information.
  • the fact that Seesmic or TweetDeck or any of these apps can display 1,200 Tweets at once is not a feature, it’s a bug
  • if you think Twitter is noisy, wait until you see Google Wave, which doesn’t hide anything at all.  Imagine that Twhirl image below with a million dialog boxes on your screen, except you see as other people type in their messages and add new files and images to the conversation, all at once as it is happening.  It’s enough to make your brain explode.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • all I need is two columns: the most recent Tweets from everyone I follow (the standard) and the the most interesting tweets I need to pay attention to.  Recent and Interesting.  This second column is the tricky one.  It needs to be automatically generated and personalized to my interests at that moment.
    • Lisa Durff
      Lisa Durff on 04 Oct 09
       
      How do you determine which are the most interesting tweets? What is your criteria?
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 04 Oct 09
       
      Aye, there's the rub. This is where those clever algorithms come in that monitor your activity and make suggestions. Like Amazon recommendations. Er, which are always brilliantly spot-on. Or something.
  • search is broken on Twitter.  Unless you know the exact word you are looking for, Tweets with related terms won’t show up.  And there is no way to sort searches by relevance, it is just sorted by chronology.
  • Ed Webb on 04 Oct 09
     
    Signal/noise ratio is an issue in networks
Ed Webb

The Transducer » Blog Archive » Brain Behavior and Behaving like Brains - 2 views

transducer.ontoligent.com/...599

transducer cognition education learning

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Oct 09 - Cached
  • boundaries are inserted where the brain experiences what Zacks calls “prediction error” — when things break a pattern of repetition and thus signal to the brain a boundary that is used to construct the temporal model for the event — its typical sequence. 
  • the response of the audience — comprised mainly of educational experts — and of Zacks himself is that one practical lesson from his research is that creators of narrative content, such as film, should make an effort to provide more obvious segmentation in their products.  Clearly, if this is how the brain works, we should work this way too. I think this is a major fallacy that pervades the reception of brain science research.  People tend to assume that if the brain works a certain way, then so should we.
  • the lesson is to get good at perceiving and creating event boundaries, which requires not pre-segmented media, but the opposite — hard to grasp art, stuff that violates expectations and rewards the perciever with a different perspective.   In fact, giving students media with well defined boundaries may cause their capacity to construct boundaries to atrophy, much as caffeine causes our adrenal glands to shrink. (I know, it’s a good reason to stop drinking coffee.)
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • So, what is the pedagogical and media design lesson here?  Learning Teaching is not about making content easy to ingest, it’s about creating environments where students can play this game of meaning formation, which isn’t always stress-free.  Marketers may disagree, but they are in the business of indoctrination, not teaching.
Ed Webb

Web 2.0 Expo: Harshtags, Twecklers and the Silence of the Death Star | BatchBlue: Blog - 4 views

blog.batchblue.com/-the-silence-of-the-death-star

conferences web socialmedia web2.0

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Nov 09 - Cached
  • something seems to be changing in the conference world. In the past, they’ve been great places not only to learn from the leaders in your industry but to make connections, spark new friendships and form potential new partnerships. That sense of the hallway conversations being as important as the sessions themselves seems to be receding, largely because the conversations…aren’t really happening.
  • I’m all for the back-channel and having a spirited conversation about a presentation, but I can tell you that as a presenter, to have it broadcasted while you are presenting sucks, especially once the spammers and the trolls join in. There’s even a term now, “harshtag”, which is when people start tagging their related tweets with something insulting in order to get it to trend.
  • There’s something seriously wrong about a thousand people who won’t talk to each other in the hallways bonding together to silently mock presenters, who have taken time, energy and in many cases personal expense to come speak.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Choose your venue carefully
  • Don’t post the back-channel or moderate it if you do
  • Attendees, find a more constructive way to voice dissent
  • Put down your devices
  • Ed Webb on 30 Nov 09
     
    When connections don't happen...
Lisa M Lane

The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind - 0 views

books.google.co.uk/books

books copyright

shared by Lisa M Lane on 09 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Lisa M Lane on 09 Sep 09
     
    In this enlightening book James Boyle describes what he calls the range wars of the information age-today's heated battles over intellectual property. Boyle argues that just as every informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment or civil rights, every citizen should also understand intellectual property law. Why? Because intellectual property rights mark out the ground rules of the information society, and today's policies are unbalanced, unsupported by evidence, and often detrimental to cultural access, free speech, digital creativity, and scientific innovation.
anonymous

Carsonified » Meet @HelloApp, Making Conferences More Fun - 0 views

carsonified.com/...pp-making-conferences-more-fun

i3tools eci831 cck09 i3cs21 twitterapp

shared by anonymous on 22 Sep 09 - Cached
  • anonymous on 22 Sep 09
     
    After four tiring-exciting-stressful-fun days, we'd like to introduce you to our new little buddy, HelloApp. The idea is simple: When you arrive at a conference, you just say where you're sitting, via Twitter. Once you do that, you can … 1. Search for people with a certain skill-set (ie PHP, jQuery, CSS3, marketing, etc) and see where they're sitting 2. View the seating diagram colored based on Twitter follower count 3. Search for a specific person in the audience and find out where they're sitting 4. View the seating diagram colored based on whether people are Designers, Developers or Businessmen 5. Earn badges and points by meeting people and completing tasks. If you earn a high enough rank, you'll be able to post public messages to the entire audience and win prizes.
Ed Webb

M.I.T. Lets Student Bloggers Post Without Censoring - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...02blogs.html

bloggers blogging education MIT admissions

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Oct 09 - Cached
  • M.I.T.’s bloggers, who are paid $10 an hour for up to four hours a week, offer thoughts on anything that might interest a prospective student.
  • “High school students read the blogs, and they come in and say ‘I can’t believe Haverford students get to do such interesting things with their summers,’ ” he said. “There’s no better way for students to learn about a college than from other students.”
  • “We saw very quickly that prospective students were engaging with each other and building their own community,”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • annual “Meet the Bloggers” session at Campus Preview Weekend.
  • “The annual blogger selection is like the admissions office’s own running of the bulls,”
  • Ms. Kim once wrote about how the resident advising system was making it impossible for her to move out of her housing — expressing enough irritation that the housing office requested that the admissions office take her post down. Officials refused, instead having the housing office post a rebuttal of her accusations; eventually, the system was changed.
Benjamin L. Stewart, PhD

What Connectivism Is ~ Stephen's Web ~ by Stephen Downes - 0 views

www.downes.ca/38653

shared by Benjamin L. Stewart, PhD on 03 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Connectivism is, by contrast, 'connectionist'. Knowledge is, on this theory, literally the set of connections formed by actions and experience. It may consist in part of linguistic structures, but it is not essentially based in linguistic structures, and the properties and constraints of linguistic structures are not the properties and constraints of connectivism.
  • Benjamin L. Stewart, PhD on 03 Aug 09
     
    Connectivism is, by contrast, 'connectionist'. Knowledge is, on this theory, literally the set of connections formed by actions and experience. It may consist in part of linguistic structures, but it is not essentially based in linguistic structures, and the properties and constraints of linguistic structures are not the properties and constraints of connectivism.
Lisa Durff

2¢ Worth » Personal Learning Networks - The Beginning - 2 views

davidwarlick.com/2cents

PLN warlick CCK0809 EC&I831

shared by Lisa Durff on 05 Oct 09 - Cached
  • the phrase, as we typically use it today, was most likely coined by George Siemens in his discriptions of connectivism,
  • The term ‘Personal Learning Network’ is directly derived from ‘Personal Learning Environment’, which as history shows was first used at the The Personal Learning Environments Session at a JISC/CETIS Conference in 2004.
  • http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/learning_communities.htm – but it is the first time I believe I used the term “personal learning network” (2003)
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The most important inspiration for PLE was Illich’s four learning networks in Deschooling Society
  • Lisa Durff on 05 Oct 09
     
    Warlick's take on the PLN
roland legrand

academhack » Blog Archive » The University and the Future of Knowledge - 0 views

academhack.outsidethetext.com/...ty-and-the-future-of-knowledge

education learning universities media businessmodel

shared by roland legrand on 25 Sep 09 - Cached
  • My central claim is that the organization of the University is based on a factory/print broadcast, model of knowledge creation and dissemination, and thus is ill prepared (or perhaps cannot make the transition) into the new knowledge landscape.
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