Group items tagged

Attention to this issue from this resource--Nature--is a breakthrough in its own right. Note the focus on "flourish in the long term...".

Blogs related to scientific topics from Nature.

"What Google has done with the Wave protocol is essentially create a new kind of social media format that is distinctively different from blogs, wikis, activity streams, RSS, or most familiar online communication models except possibly IM. Both blogs and wikis were created in the era of page-oriented Web applications and haven't changed much since. In contrast, Google Wave is designed for real-time participation and editing of shared conversations and documents and is more akin to the simultaneous multiuser experience of Google Docs than with traditional blogs and wiki editing. Though Google is sometimes criticized for missing the social aspect of the Web, that is patently not the case with waves, which are fundamentally social in nature. Participants can be added in real-time, new conversations forked off (via private replies), social media sharing is assumed to be the norm, and connection with a user's contextual server-side data is also a core feature including location, search, and more. The result is stored in a persistent document known as a wave, access to which can be embedded anywhere that HTML can be embedded, whether that's a Web page or an enterprise portal. Users can then discover and interact with the wave, joining the conversation, adding more information, etc. Google has also leveraged its investments in Google Gadgets and OpenSocial, two key technologies for spreading online services beyond the original boundaries of the sites they came from. All in all, Google Wave is a smart and well-constructed bundle of collaborative capabilities with many of the modern sensibilities we've come to expect in the Web 2.0 era including an acutely social nature, rapid interaction, and community-based technology."

"Weblogs written by scientists are relatively rare, but some of them are proving popular. Out of 46.7 million blogs indexed by the Technorati blog search engine, five scientists' sites make it into the top 3,500. Declan Butler asks the winners about the reasons for their success."

"Scientists know much more about their field than is ever published in peer-reviewed journals. Blogs can be a good medium with which to disseminate this tacit knowledge."

Read it and weep.

I think this reader comment captures it: Right--it's not about the students learning anything--it's about YOUR learning, and you let them come along for the ride. How could you fit that into learning objectives? Please. This is why people think all of us are navel-gazing, self-indulgent mopes.

Doesn't it depend on the nature of the learning objectives? I mean, you could list a set of facts and skills levels students should have attained. You could specify a number of discrete facts and skills to be attained within certain areas of the course curriculum. Or, you could do something more creative such as measure the number of claims with evidence in student writing that is within the subject matter of the course to demonstrate a level of articulation.

At CTLT, I never did become fully settled on certain subject types though, like mathematics and natural sciences. Depending on the subject matter, specific facts like natural laws and methods must be discretely learned and learned perfectly. And, indeed in some subjects, there is such a thing as perfect understanding where anything even slightly less is failure to learn. This is rigid, yes.. But I do not see the alternative in some subjects and teachers of those subjects certainly don't either. I do think that sometimes there can be more flexibility in the order of learning of discrete fundamentals. Learning out of order often convinced me of the importance of things skipped, causing me to go back and study more comprehensively on my own, in my own time, and according to my own interest.

The very forms of reason and enquiry employed in the classroom must change. Instead of seeking facts and underlying principles, students need to be able to recognize patterns and use things in novel ways. Instead of systematic methodical enquiry, such as might be characterized by Hempel's Deductive-Nomological method, students need to learn active and participative forms of enquiry. instead of deference to authority, students need to embrace diversity and recognize (and live with) multiple perspectives and points of view. I think that there is a new type of knowledge, that we recognize it - and are forced to recognize it - only because new technologies have enabled many perspectives, many points of view, to be expressed, to interact, to forge new realities, and that this form of knowledge is emerged from our cooperative interactions with each other, and not found in the doctrines or dictates of any one of us.

"In the face of an economic crisis of unprecedented and in many ways still not fully understood dimensions, there is a natural inclination to retrench, to stop considering what the next new thing might be, to slow down on innovation and experimentation. This is a mistake. This is the moment when we must confront the core assumptions of our educational enterprises, and to ask hard questions about why we do what we do, and how we can change in order to survive and perhaps even thrive. This symposium, which is part of the Future of Everything project hosted by Academic Commons (http://academiccommons.org/futureofeverything/), brings us together to consider the possible futures of a host of interconnected topics: the book, the library, our system of scholarly communication, classroom technology, software distribution, the lecture, the seminar, existing and future business models,and ultimately, the college and the university. You'll have a chance to hear from leading practitioners who are creating the next generation tools, resources, spaces, and policies, and to engage in on-line dialogue before, during, and after the event. The work of the symposium will be used to inform the publication of an on-line reader that we hope will be broadly useful for all engaged in re-imagining future services, facilities, and policies on campus. Date: May 19, 2009 Place: Norwood, MA"

Calais is an initiative by Thomson Reuters to connect the world's content by providing automated metadata (let's just call it tagging) services. The Calais service takes your text and uses sophisticated natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to extract the people, organizations, companies, geographies and events hidden within it.

Wikipedia, meet RNA. Anyone submitting to a section of the journal RNA Biology will, in the future, be required to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia.

Quote: "In doing so, my students move from superficial to elegant observations about their majors. English majors, who previously said they read literature and wrote papers, come to understand that an English major is also about perspective, and is simultaneously classical and progressive. History majors, who initially discussed reading and research skills, discovered that a prerequisite to the major is being "audaciously curious" and on a search for "truth," despite its elusive nature. They ponder how different the nightly news would be if newsrooms were fully staffed with history majors instead of communication majors. Most important, my students consistently tell me it's the first time they've ever focused on their education-what they've learned and how their majors have influenced their mind-sets, perceptions, and ways of thinking. Once they've had that epiphany, it's amazing how simple it is to teach them to articulate their knowledge to an employer or graduate-school admissions officer."

The shared nature of ecological intelligence makes it synergistic with social intelligence, which gives us the capacity to coordinate and harmonize our efforts. The art of working together effectively, as mastered by a star performing team, combines abilities like empathy and perspective taking, candor and cooperation, to create person-to-person links that let information gain added value as it travels. Collaboration and the exchange of information are vital to amassing the essential ecological insights and necessary database that allow us to act for the greater good.

The issues are taking root in disciplinary discussions, so perhaps awareness and response will sprout.

Collector's item.

The implications for feedback issues are pretty clear.

and at sub-group significance compared to interaction. She concludes: 'Readers should have a particularly high index of suspicion for controlled studies that fail to report between-group comparisons, because these likely represent attempts to "spin" null results."