Group items tagged

"It's becoming increasingly useful to think of all the people and computers on the planet as a kind of global brain,"

collective human intelligence

emergent phenomenon

They also observed three consistent factors that impact how effective a group is: The average social perceptiveness of the group members The evenness of conversational participation The proportion of women in the group

All three factors were linked - the women in the group were shown to be more socially perceptive and conversation was more even, as a result, the groups with a higher number of women were more collectively more productive. 

Several biologically inspired paths are being explored by computer scientists in universities and corporate laboratories worldwide. But researchers from I.B.M. and four universities — Cornell, Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California, Merced — are engaged in a project that seems particularly intriguing. The project, a collaboration of computer scientists and neuroscientists begun three years ago, has been encouraging enough that in August it won a $21 million round of government financing from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, bringing the total to $41 million in three rounds. In recent months, the team has developed prototype “neurosynaptic” microprocessors, or chips that operate more like neurons and synapses than like conventional semiconductors.

The technology produced, according to the guidelines, should have the characteristics of being self-organizing, able to “learn” instead of merely responding to conventional programming commands, and consuming very little power.

The fading ranks of middle management have lost their edge, thanks to revolutions in both technology and globalization. Indeed, the latest wave of technology advances—cloud computing, advanced mobile applications and devices, and rapidly expanding social networks to name a few—have greatly eased access to knowledge work. Nowhere is this change seen more dramatically than with the rapidly ascending workforce in high-growth markets outside the United States. Business writer Seth Godin remarks ominously, “If you're the average person out there doing average work, there's going to be someone else out there doing the exact same thing as you, but cheaper.” The game has shifted to a far more competitive, globally-connected field of play, requiring individuals to differentiate themselves in authentic, compelling ways like never before. Godin concludes, “If you're different somehow and have made yourself unique, people will find you and pay you more.”

How We Will Learn: Technology-Enabled Informal LearningWhen we talk about fostering agility, curiosity and continuous learning, we’re fortunate because today we have a host of Web-based technologies (including social, mobile, video, games, and personalized portals) that can serve as perfect tools to support the self-directed learner.By utilizing technology-enabled informal learning resources, collaborative learners can easily share and exchange knowledge, and self-directed learners can continuously teach themselves. These tools allow us to gain and share knowledge when, where and how we want it.Technology-enabled informal learning (that is, technology-based learning that takes place outside a formal classroom environment) also makes sense for organizations because we know that people learn in a variety of ways, and they usually like to learn on their own terms. This insight is derived from Howard Gardner, the influential educational thinker, who has argued that all of us have multiple intelligences. Adjusting and adapting to this cognitive norm, Gardner explains, will generally result in greater skill development and sharper problem solving.

According to ASTD’s Learning Executive’s Confidence Index for the fourth quarter of 2011, almost 55% of learning executives expect an increase in the use of informal learning and Web 2.0 tools in their organizations over the next 6 months.

First, semantic technology helps us “Find more relevant and useful information because it enables us to search information from disparate sources (federated search) and automatically refine our searches (faceted search).”

Second, semantic technology helps us “Better understand what is happening because it enables us to use the relationships between concepts to predict and interpret change.”

“Build more transparent systems and communications because it is based on common meanings and mutual understanding of the key concepts and relationships that govern our business ecosystems.”

“Collectively, people spend more than 70 billion hours a year trying to make sense of information they have gathered online,”

“Yet in most cases, when someone finishes a project, that work is essentially lost, benefitting no one else and perhaps even being forgotten by that person. If we could somehow share those efforts, however, all of us might learn faster.”

Using eye tracking, the researchers showed that as knowledge maps are modified successively by multiple users, new users spend less time looking at specific content elements, shifting a greater balance of their attention to structural elements like labels. “This suggests that distributed sensemaking facilitates the process of ‘schema induction,’ or forming a mental model of the information being considered,” Counts said.

I recently discussed the idea of interest graphs with Gravity CTO Jim Benedetto, who described how his company determines visitors’ interests so its content-industry customers can deliver personalized experiences.