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David McGavock

A People's History of the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 2 views

en.wikipedia.org/...s_History_of_the_United_States

history people's Howard zinn United States

shared by David McGavock on 30 Dec 10 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 30 Dec 10
     
    "A People's History of the United States - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A People's History of the United States Author Howard Zinn Country United States Publisher Harper & Row; HarperCollins Publication date 1980 (1st edition); 2003 (most recent edition) Pages 729 pp (2003 edition) ISBN see Current editions section A People's History of the United States is a 1980 non-fiction book by late American historian and political scientist Howard Zinn. In the book, Zinn seeks to present American history through the eyes of the common people rather than political and economic elites. A People's History has become a major success and was a runner-up in 1980 for the National Book Award. It has been adopted for reading in some high schools and colleges across the United States and has been frequently revised, with the most recent edition covering events through 2005. In 2003, Zinn was awarded the Prix des Amis du Monde Diplomatique for the French version of this book, Une histoire populaire des Etats-Unis.[1] Over one million copies have been sold."
  • David McGavock on 30 Dec 10
     
    Howard Zinn writes history from an alternative perspective - an important and essential skill if we intend to think critically.
David McGavock

A Brief History of the Habits of Mind | Institute For Habits of Mind - 1 views

www.instituteforhabitsofmind.com/brief-history-habits-mind

crap detection information_literacy truth teaching critical_thinking evaluate

shared by David McGavock on 31 May 10 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 31 May 10
     
    "A Brief History of the Habits of Mind HABITS OF MIND ARE･….dispositions that are skillfully and mindfully employed by characteristically intelligent, successful people when they are confronted with problems, the solutions to which are not immediately apparent. The Habits of Mind were derived from studies of effective, skillful problem-solvers and decision makers from, many walks of life. They are synthesized from the works of such leaders from the fields of education, philosophy, psychology and the arts as Alan Glatthorn and Jonathan Baron[i], Reuven Feuerstein[ii], Edward de Bono[iii], Robert Ennis[iv] Arthur Whimbey[v], Robert Sternberg, [vi] and David Perkins[vii]. While each of these authors have different labels for describing the characteristics of thinking, their intentions were similar: to describe how people behave intelligently by becoming more flexible and open in thinking, monitoring one's own thoughts, being curious and having a questioning attitude. Gradually these studies were synthesized by Arthur Costa into what was originally titled, "Intelligent Behaviors" and described 7 behaviors. With further reading and research, the list expanded from the original 7 to 12 then 14 and now 16 and there could be more."
David McGavock

Making Science by Serendipity. A review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Tra... - 0 views

jetpress.org/campa.htm

Barber information_literacy critical skills evaluate serendipity

shared by David McGavock on 09 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept.
  • Barbano (1968: 65) notices that one of Merton’s constant preoccupations is with language and the definition of concepts and recognizes that the function of the latter is for him anything but ornamental.
  • Merton proposes an articulated technical language now widely used by sociologists and is perfectly aware of the strategic importance of this work.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • Walpole tried to illustrate the concept of serendipity with other examples, but basically failed to do it in an unequivocal way.
  • It was in the 1930s that Merton first came upon the concept-and-term of serendipity in the Oxford English Dictionary. Here, he discovered that the word had been coined by Walpole, and was based on the title of the fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, the heroes of which “were always making discoveries by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
  • As Rob Norton (2002) recognizes: “The first and most complete analysis of the concept of unintended consequences was done in 1936 by the American sociologist Robert K. Merton.” In this way, the combined etymological and sociological quest began that resulted in The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
  • it was to serve as a propedeutic to Merton’s seminal work – On the Shoulders of Giants, acronymised to OTSOG and published in 1965.
  • Merton provides interesting statistics to illustrate how quickly the word had spread since 1958. By that time, serendipity had been used in print only 135 times. But between 1958 and 2000, serendipity had appeared in the titles of 57 books. Furthermore, the word was used in newspapers 13,000 times during the 1990s and in 636,000 documents on the World Wide Web in 2001.
  • The Italian version was published in 2002, after Barber’s death. Two years later and a year after Merton’s death, we could welcome the appearance of the original English version.
  •  Now let us focus on an analysis of the content of the book and its theoretical consequences, that is, on the history of this term-and-concept and its significance to the sociology of science.
  • The first few chapters elucidate the origin of the word, beginning with the 1557 publication of The Three Princes of Serendip in Venice.
  •  In a letter to Horace Mann dated January 28, 1754, Walpole described an amazing discovery as being “of that kind which I call Serendipity.”
  • in 1833, Walpole’s correspondence with Horace Mann was published.
  • As Mario Bunge (1998: 232) remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by training, is the real founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession; his predecessors had been isolated scholars or amateurs.”
  • Serendipity was used in print for the first time by another writer forty-two years after the publication of Walpole’s letters.
  • Edward Solly had the honor
  • Solly defined serendipity as “a particular kind of natural cleverness”
  • he stressed Walpole’s implication that serendipity was a kind of innate gift or trait.
  • Walpole was also talking of serendipity as a kind of discovery.
  • The ambiguity was never overcome and serendipity still indicates both a personal attribute and an event or phenomenon
  • the word appeared in all the “big” and medium-sized English and American dictionaries between 1909 and 1934.
  • authors reveal disparities in definition
  • To avoid both the ambiguities of the meaning and the disappearance of one of the meanings, Piotr Zielonka and I (2003) decided to translate serendipity into Polish by using two different neologisms: “serendypizm” and “serendypicja” – to refer to the event and the personal attribute respectively.
  •  Even if Merton waited four decades to publish his book on serendipity, he made wide use of the concept in his theorizing.
  •  It is worth now turning our attention to the theoretical aspects of serendipity and examining the sociological and philosophical implications of this idea.
  • “Everything of importance has been said before by someone who did not discover it.”
  •  It is true that the American sociologist studies mainly institutions of science, not laboratory life and the products of science (e.g., theories). But he never said that sociologists cannot or should not study other aspects of science.
  • His attention to the concept of serendipity is the best evidence
  • Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159)
  • “Intuition, scriptures, chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the psychological source of an idea.
  • Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164)
  • Indeed if you are clever enough to take advantage of the opportunity, you may capture a fox thanks to accidental circumstances while searching for hares.
  • This descriptive model has many important implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the historian of science, but it raises further problems for research administrators.
  • If this is true, it is necessary to create the environment, the social conditions for serendipity. These aspects are explored in Chapter 10 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
  • The solution appears to be a Golden Mean between total anarchy and authoritarianism. Too much planning in science is harmful.
  • Whitney supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking: “Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt, without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:
  • If scientists are determined by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.
  • David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
     
    Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (English-language translation 2004) is the history of a word and its related concept. The choice of writing a book about a word may surprise those who are not acquainted with Merton's work, but certainly not those sociologists that have chosen him as a master. Searching, defining, and formulating concepts has always been Merton's main intellectual activity.
David McGavock

Child Development Research - 1 views

www.childdevelopmentmedia.com/hild-development-research.html

thinking critical_thinking lowest common denominator resources child development research

shared by David McGavock on 04 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 04 Jan 12
     
    "Child Development Research Child Development Videos » History, Theory & Research » Child Development Research Child development research encompasses a broad range of topics, and included here are titles illustrating some of the many branches of developmental psychology and child development theory. Methods of research and observation have changed dramatically in the past century, allowing for vast amounts of new information to be compiled and assessed. Our collective knowledge of how children grow has grown exponentially, thanks to researchers from around the world. Titles in this section offer an in-depth look at this new and compelling research, and the lives of the individuals who founded them. "
David McGavock

Bing Community - 2 views

www.bing.com/...s-critical-thinking-today.aspx

crap detection criticalthinking evaluate resources skills bing

shared by David McGavock on 19 Jul 10 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 19 Jul 10
     
    "Professor Michael Eisenberg Talks Critical Thinking Today Betsynote: I first ran into Professor Michael Eisenberg last fall when he was introduced to me by multiple folks - the MacArthur Foundation, local Seattle educators, and the NCCE conference organizers. When I chatted with him in his office (yes, I got lost, even though it was Mary Gates Hall as a landmark) I realized he had a long history of working with Internet literacy and critical thinking, and his pro-library/reference stance provided another insight into the discussion. He has his hand in many projects - university academia, educational research, his own company that creates educational resources, and a startup. Here's what he has to say on various issues around search and critical thinking…. Tell us a little about yourself and what you do now. I am currently Professor at the Information School of the University of Washington. I am the founding dean of the School, having stepped aside in 2006. I keep pretty busy these days-teaching (grads and undergrads); being principal investigator on 2 funded research projects - Project Information Literacy (funded by ProQuest and MacArthur), a large-scale study of the information habits of college students and Virtual Information Behavior Environments (funded by the MacArthur Foundation), studying information problem-solving in virtual worlds; giving numerous workshops and keynote presentations on information literacy, technology, and the information field; advising a number of doctoral students; and hanging out with my family, especially my 2 grandkids - ages 5 and 7."
David McGavock

Sherry Turkle - 0 views

www.mit.edu/~sturkle

turkle sherry thinking information_literacy skills resources

shared by David McGavock on 03 Jan 11 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 03 Jan 11
     
    "Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist. Professor Turkle is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, 1995; Touchstone paper, 1997); and Simulation and Its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009). She is the editor of three books about things and thinking, all published by the MIT Press: Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007); Falling for Science: Objects in Mind (2008); and The Inner History of Devices (2008). "
David McGavock

#53 - How to detect bullshit « Scott Berkun - 3 views

www.scottberkun.com/...53-how-to-detect-bullshit

bullshit thinking crap detection evaluate lies

shared by David McGavock on 25 Dec 11 - Cached
  • The first detection tool is a question: How do you know what you know?
  • People so rarely have their claims challenged, that asking someone to explain how they know sheds light on whatever ignorance they’re hiding.
  • Even credible thinkers need time to sort through their logic, separating assumptions from facts: an an exercise that works in everyone’s favor.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The second tool is also a question: What is the counter argument?
  • Similarly useful questions include: Who besides you shares this opinion? What are your biggest concerns, and what will you do to address them? What would need to change for you to have a different (opposite) opinion?
  • Anyone creating BS knows this, and will tend towards urgency. They’ll resist reviews, breaks, consultations or the suggestion of sleeping on decisions before they’re made. Use time & pressure, the third tool of BS detection, in your favor: never allow big decisions to be mismanaged to the point where they must be made urgently.
  • Especially in business and technology, jargon and obfuscation hide huge quantities of BS. Inflated language is a technique of intimidation.
  • The fourth tool of BS detection (derived from the rule of expecting BS) is careful assignment of your trust. Never agree to more than your trust allows. Who cares how confident they are: the question is how confident are you in them? It’s rare that there isn’t time for trust to be earned. Divide requests, projects or commitments into pieces. It’s not offensive to refuse to take someone’s word if they have no history of living up to it before (especially if they’re trying to sell you something).
  • But lies, serious lies, should not be encouraged as they destroy trust, the binding force in all relationships. One particularly troublesome kind of lie is known as Bullshit (BS). These are unnecessary deceptions, committed in the gray area between polite white lies and complete malicious fabrications.
  • David McGavock on 25 Dec 11
     
    "Be like Socrates: assume people are unaware of their own ignorance (including yourself) and politely, warmly, probe to sort out the difference."
andrewyaz

Genius.com - 0 views

I received this email last week from the creators of Genius.com - originally of Rapgenius.com - a site where people can annotate all types of primary sources: Hey (screen name), Last Friday we to...

critical_thinking thinking information_literacy evaluate resources crap detection skills criticalthinking critical thinking critical

started by andrewyaz on 19 Jul 14 no follow-up yet
David McGavock

The New Toolkit | the human network - 3 views

blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/...the-new-toolkit

toolkit network hyperconnectivity hyperdistribution hyperintelligence hyperempowerment McLuhan Dunbar MIlgram

shared by David McGavock on 21 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Everyone is directly connected, as in the tribe, but in unknowably vast numbers, as in the city.
  • there are roughly 5.4 billion directly addressable individuals on the planet, individuals who can be reached with the correct series of numbers.
  • 5,400,000,000 / 6,900,000,000 or 0.7826
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • deeper into the 21st century, this figure will approach 1.0:
  • This type of connectivity is not simply unprecedented, nor just a unique feature in human history, this is the kind of qualitative change that leads to a fundamental reorganization in human culture. 
  • can be termed hyperconnectivity, because it represents the absolute amplification of all the pre-extant characteristics in human communication, extending them to ubiquity and speed-of-light instantaneity.
  • II: Hyperdistribution What happens after we are all connected?
  • Language is a distribution medium, a mechanism to replicate the experience of one person throughout a community.
  • any culture which develops effective new mechanisms for knowledge sharing will have greater selection fitness than others that do not, forcing those relatively less fit cultures to either adopt the innovation, in order to preserve themselves, or find themselves pushed to the extreme margins of human existence.
  • Where humans are hyperconnected via mobile, a recapitulation of primate ‘grooming behaviors’ appears almost immediately. 
  • The human instinct is to share that which piques our interest with those to whom we are connected, to reinforce our relations, and to increase our credibility within our networks of relations, both recapitulations of the dual nature of the original human behaviors of sharing.
  • III: Hyperintelligence
  • Those who possess knowledge also hold power.  The desire to conserve that power led the guilds to become increasingly zealous in the defense of their knowledge domains, their ‘secrets of the craft’.
  • The advent of Gutenberg’s moveable-type printing press made it effectively impossible to keep secrets in perpetuity.
  • he professions of medicine, law, engineering, architecture, etc., emerged from this transition from the guilds into modernity.  These professional associations exist for one reason: they assign place, either within the boundaries of the organization, or outside of it.  An unlicensed doctor, a lawyer who has not ‘passed the bar’, an uncredentialed architect all represent modern instances of violations of ritual structures that have been with us for at least fifty thousand years.
  • Hyperconnectivity does not acknowledge the presence of these ritual structures;
  • There is neither inside nor outside.  The entire space of human connection collapses to a point, as everyone connects directly to everyone else, without mediation.
  • Both Kenyan farmers and Kerala fishermen9 quickly became irrevocable devotees of the mobile handset that provided them accurate and timely information about competing market prices for their goods.
  • Once hyperdistribution acquires a focal point, and becomes synonymous with a knowledge domain, it crosses over into hyperintelligence: the dedicated, hyperconnected hyperdistribution of domain-specific knowledge.
  • IV: Hyperempowerment A group of hyperconnected individuals choosing to hyperdistribute their knowledge around an identified domain can engender hyperintelligence. 
  • David McGavock on 21 Feb 11
     
    The Age of Connection now takes its place alongside these earlier epochs in humanity's story. We are being retribalized, in the midst of rising urbanization. The dynamic individuality of the city confronts the static conformity of the tribe. This basic tension forms the fuel of 21st century culture, and will continue to generate both heat and light for at least the next generation. Human behavior, human beliefs and human relations are all reorganizing themselves around connectivity. It is here, therefore, that we must begin our analysis of the toolkit.
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