InsightNG

Critical thinking clarifies goals, examines assumptions, discerns hidden values, evaluates evidence, accomplishes actions, and assesses conclusions.

Over the past five years we've been told repeatedly that business needs more collaboration.  Over the past 18 months we've rediscovered the value of competition. Gamification is the ungainly name for its re-emergence in the social sphere. What does it mean for how we view marketing and HR strategy?

With the unprecedented levels of published information, it is very difficult for Internet users to stay up to date on what matters to them. This situation is especially dramatic for information professionals that must remain aware of new happenings in order to stay ahead of the curve. Content curation is the process of picking the most relevant and valuable content for a specific audience. There is an important human component to content discovery and curation because only users can fully understand the context of the information they are working with. Technology can support content curation by computing large volumes of information on behalf of the user by helping to discover new pieces of Web information.

Reading is changing. And arguably, even more than e-readers, tablets, or "readers' tablets," smartphones are changing it.

Visualized content is popping up all over the web lately, and it's no surprise. Visual content is pleasing to the eye, stimulating, entertaining, and much more interesting than plain old text. Haven't you noticed how much more frequently infographics seem to be making their way onto blogs and websites lately? There's a very reasonable explanation: people love visual content.

Here are the five social media trends I think marketers need to be aware of in the next year as we grow and change along with technology and consumer demand.

One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints. Although we imagine the imagination as requiring total freedom, the reality of the creative process is that it's often entangled with strict conventions and formal requirements. Pop songs have choruses and refrains; symphonies have four movements; plays have five acts; painters still rely on the tropes of portraiture.

Some of the key findings from the 2011 State of Tooling for Semantic Technologies are: As of the date of this article, there are 1010 tools in the Sweet Tools listing, the first it has passed 1000 total tools A total of 158 new tools have been added to the listing in the last six months, an increase of 17% 75 tools have been abandoned or retired, the most removed at any period over the past five years A further 6%, or 55 tools, have been updated since the last listing Though open source has always been an important component of the listing, it now constitutes more than 80% of all listings; with dual licenses, open source availability is about 83%. Online systems contribute another 9% Key application areas for growth have been in SPARQL, ontology-related areas and linked data Java continues to dominate as the most important language.

Social networks seemed poised to take over the Web. This year, Facebook reached 800 million users. LinkedIn went public in a blockbuster stock offering. Twitter produced a billion tweets per week. And Google launched its own social network, Google+, attracting 25 million users in one month. Amid the continued growth of these social networks, there has been much excitement about how the rest of the Web would soon be infused with all things "social": social search, social commerce, social deals and more. And yet the effort to socialize the rest of the Web has so far failed to live up to its promise. Why?

The crux of using social media in any endeavor, as Gina Schreck has said, is, "Social media invites and allows interaction from others. How are you inviting that interaction?" The popularity of social media tools means that sooner, rather than later, those of us in the field will need to examine what this means for us. Among other things, as noted by Taleo's Tom Stone, use of social media tools is an excellent means of making learning more transparent. As he says, "It's captured, searchable, and has much greater reach beyond the two people talking in the hallway."

Cognitive computing, as the new field is called, takes computing concepts to a whole new level.  Earlier this week, Dharmendra Modha, who works at IBM's Almaden Research Center, regaled a roomful of analysts with what cognitive computing can do and how IBM is going about making a machine that thinks the way we do.  His own blog on the subject is here.

Leaders are expected to operate at such a rapid pace and high level in this business environment that critical-thinking skills are paramount for success. Even though critical thinking may seem like a soft or unquantifiable skill, it's actually a key competency for leaders who operate in today's business climate. In fact, the lack of critical thinking can lead to questionable decisions, which in turn could potentially tarnish a business' reputation.

To what extent are you responsible for innovation in your company? The reality is that unless they're in research or product development, most people in organizations don't think of themselves as innovators. In fact, many managers discourage their people from inventing new ways of doing things - pushing them instead to follow procedures and stay within established guidelines.

LinkedEducation.org is an open platform aimed at further promoting the use of Linked Data for educational purposes.

Dr. Bernhard Haslhofer works as instructor on Web Information Systems at Cornell Information Science. Just recently he gave a course which examined technologies for building data-centric information systems on the World Wide Web. Semantic Web Company (SWC) had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Haslhofer to examine the question "How to teach Linked Data?".

Howard Gardner of Harvard has identified seven distinct intelligences. This theory has emerged from recent cognitive research and "documents the extent to which students possess different kinds of minds and therefore learn, remember, perform, and understand in different ways," according to Gardner (1991). According to this theory, "we are all able to know the world through language, logical-mathematical analysis, spatial representation, musical thinking, the use of the body to solve problems or to make things, an understanding of other individuals, and an understanding of ourselves. Where individuals differ is in the strength of these intelligences - the so-called profile of intelligences -and in the ways in which such intelligences are invoked and combined to carry out different tasks, solve diverse problems, and progress in various domains." Gardner says that these differences "challenge an educational system that assumes that everyone can learn the same materials in the same way and that a uniform, universal measure suffices to test student learning. Indeed, as currently constituted, our educational system is heavily biased toward linguistic modes of instruction and assessment and, to a somewhat lesser degree, toward logical-quantitative modes as well." Gardner argues that "a contrasting set of assumptions is more likely to be educationally effective. Students learn in ways that are identifiably distinctive. The broad spectrum of students - and perhaps the society as a whole - would be better served if disciplines could be presented in a numbers of ways and learning could be assessed through a variety of means."

Any aspect of your daily life - most importantly your projects, business, or career - can be helped by critical thinking. You just need to practice it constantly. What's Critical Thinking? Your brain thinks diversely. It can be affected by various factors too, plus the problem of relationships, for example, exactly what the heart says usually overwhelms exactly what the mind suggests.

Gamification is the latest buzzword on the street. It ranked a keynote panel session at Enterprise 2.0 in November and it was one of two main topics discussed at the recent Institute for Social, Search and Mobile Marketing (ISSMM) K1 Executive Roundtable.  

Social media are talk technologies. They are the means of production in an age of communication. They aid in the production and exchange of knowledge and information and culture, based on human interests. They are media in which people see themselves represented. Their impact is as much psychological and social as it is technical. In recent years, social media have come off the page. Social tools have become more talkative, mobile, and real-time. They have taken a conversational turn. And as these social tools increasingly facilitate relationships and communication, their role in these deeply personal and social dynamics has become a matter for design. The need for a deeper understanding of the fit between tools and social interactions calls for a new design practice. This is social interaction design

The New Media Consortia has been publishing their annual Horizon report on trends in higher education for ten years. To celebrate that effort NMC brought together 100 thought leaders in education for a three day convocation in Austin.  The group identified 28 megatrends in education and released a press release that documented the most important first 10.  Here from their press release (NMC) A wide lens was aimed at the world around education, and that lens had a uniquely global focus. What interested the group - which represented 20 countries from six continents - was what trends are truly international? Which are impacting learning and education worldwide, from the most advanced countries to the poorest?  From these discussions, 28 hugely important metatrends were identified. The ten most significant are listed here and will be the focus of the upcoming NMC Horizon Project 10th Anniversary Report: