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David McGavock

Berkeley Center for New Media - 3 views

bcnm.berkeley.edu/?p=1869

Rheingold peeragogy berkeley Infotention education

shared by David McGavock on 29 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 29 Jan 12
     
    "Howard Rheingold offers an abstract on what will be addressed in his UC Berkeley Regents Lecture: "My career-long compulsion has been to take new media to their limits. In the field of learning, this means developing a method of teaching and learning that amplifies the affordances of online media to depart from the millennia-old model of professor-lecture-texts-tests. The first stage of this evolution was the application of online media to classroom teaching. The second stage was the transformation of my teaching because of the affordances and biases of social media. The third stage was to move from blended learning that combines face to face classes and online engagement. The fourth stage was to deliver mini-courses that took place entirely online, with an emphasis on cultivating a community of co-learners. The next and most radical stage, which I hope to initiate with the Regent's lecture and accompanying master-class and seminar, is to use the same media for a purely peer-organized pedagogy.""
Alex Grech

Social Media's Slow Slog Into the Ivory Towers of Academia - Josh Sternberg - Technolog... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...244483

PhD Disruption Academia rheingold

shared by Alex Grech on 11 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • If you took a soldier from a thousand years ago and put them on a battlefield, they'd be dead,"
  • "If you took a doctor from a thousand years ago and put them in a modern surgical theater, they would have no idea what to do. Take a professor from a thousand years ago and put them in a modern classroom, they would know where to stand and what to do."
  • So they went back to school to learn how to create Facebook campaigns, how to incorporate SEO best-practices, how to blog, and how to create social media strategies.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • But as social interactions and technologies mature, there has been a swing in the pendulum. Professors are now approaching the teaching of social media from a pedagogical perspective, as much as a practical one.
  • the theories behind social media: why do things go viral, the social theories of how people act and how they communicate to a network, or one person at a time, and why do certain tools work they way they do for us
  • Instead of understanding social media as products, students are encouraged to treat status updates as part of a larger information ecosystem.
  • With social media being a pervasive, if not invasive, aspect of our lives, it makes perfect sense for the Ivory Tower to embrace social media from a theoretical perspective to help students understand the technology and its effect on their daily lives, as well as the epistemological question of "how do we know what we know?"
  • The medium is relatively new enough that there's no canon shaping social media, just conceptual frameworks for looking at the effects of social media on students' lives and communities and on society as a whole. The task of academics is to give students a vocabulary to understand these perspectives, tools to make sense of the theoretical discussions and think critically about social media.
  • "I don't think you have the credibility of doing research, of writing about, unless you get to really know that culture. And the best way of knowing the culture is to actually be immersed in it."
  • "no positive incentives for innovating in pedagogy."
  • Rheingold puts it,
  • Underpinning a disdain for social media in higher education is the assumption that incoming students already have an inherent aptitude for new technologies
  • Terms like "digital native" (those born during or after the introduction of digital technology -- computer, Internet, etc. -- and have an assumed greater understanding of how technology works because they've been using digital technology their entire lives) and "digital immigrant" (those born before this introduction and have had to adapt and adopt the technology at a later point in life) have been bandied around by experts and marketers as ways of classifying and differentiating between generations, and, more importantly, the expectations of those who fall into either category.
  • it has stopped educators from teaching what they need to teach. It has scared educators into thinking students know more than us. God forbid we learn something from our students. And, so, we assumed these kids already know, and we don't teach them. And we expect them to know things and we grade them; we evaluate them; we hire them based on what we think, we assume, they know. And they don't. How would you know this stuff if no one ever bothered to point it out to you that this is something you should be learning, because everyone assumes you already know?"
  • the lack of critical literacy.
  • ce students of the Digital Age have not had to acclimate to this sweeping change from analog to digi
  • al and are assumed to possess some innate technological knowledge based solely on the year they were born, they don't necessarily have to acclimate to the sheer velocity of recent innovations.
  • "We have on our hands the last generation of educators who do remember life before these tools, and so therefore, we have an opportunity to teach some critical literacy that these students may not get otherwise; this generation may not get otherwise
  • Rheingold puts the onus on the students to learn not just from him, but from each other. Instructors can serve as a facilitator, but the student has to want to be there, process that information, and use that information in a productive way.
  • "The issues around social media -- community, identity, presentation of self, social capital, public sphere, collective action; a lot of important topics from other disciplines -- aren't really being raised in academia," said Rheingold. "They ought to be because these topics, not only academically, in terms of the shifts in media and literacy that they're triggering in the world, are where the students live and work."
Charles van der Haegen

Geoff Mulgan: A short intro to the Studio School - YouTube - 2 views

www.youtube.com/watch

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 28 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 28 Sep 11
     
    "Some kids learn by listening; others learn by doing. Geoff Mulgan gives a short introduction to the Studio School, a new kind of school in the UK where small teams of kids learn by working on projects that are, as Mulgan puts it, "for real." TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate. Category: People & Blogs Tags: TED TEDTalks TEDGlobal Geoff Mulgan Creativity Culture Design Education Work learning learn Studio School projects active learning participatory License: Standard YouTube License 223 likes, 4 dislikes Top Comments 1) 0:15 (to skip intro) 2) I'm sending this to my all my professors and even my old high school teachers too! More people need to hear about this idea! It may not be perfect now, but with more minds working together, it can be fine-tuned into something to suite ALL students (not just those in Media and Arts). Thanks TED! jerrylittlemars 14 hours ago 28 @merkowaty1 additional: just about ANYTHING is going to be more fun than traditional school as we have them today. ion010101 13 hours ago 6 see all All Comments (58) Reactions (2) Respond to this video... we do indeed learn by doing yet we are watchin
  • Charles van der Haegen on 28 Sep 11
     
    This is a really great initiative, worth watching. Sometimes I feel a bit unsettled, so much things happening in every corner of society at large... accelerating at such a fast pace... Whare, When, will this lead us towards... What can I do?
David McGavock

A New Culture of Learning | Social Media Classroom - 3 views

socialmediaclassroom.com/...a-new-culture-learning

culture learning mistakes WIERD JSB mindamp learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 21 May 11 - No Cached
  • A New Culture of Learning
  • what strikes me is the second part of the title Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.
  • I love seeing a child's imagination being captivated
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • I am challenged by many who see social-media as the next project rather than a shift in the paradigm of existence.
  • I believe that dissatisfaction with the factory model of school, along with the growing number, ubiquity, and accessiblity, of tools (for connection, collaboration and creation) will tip the balance toward new models and cultures of learning.
  • I love to see teachers and student figuring out how to use technology together; asking questions, trying stuff, "messing around" as Brown would say.
  • The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
  • Can I just say that it is amazingly prescient and still relevant even a decade later? I'm interested in comparing it to his more recent book in discussion here.
  • Howard reponds with an idea on assignments (and the power of assignments). I found the questions (or in other courses the assignements) to really good at directing my brain. 1.Read the question 2. go to sleep 3. stare at the ceiling for hours 4. brush teeth 5. eurekaThese methods are also used in action learning and action research
  • I'm reading the book "the myth of management" (which is not related to learning), and I found out that finding "faults" is actually a dirty consultant trick, as it expands the window through which you can sell your solution. I hacked that idea and replaced solution with learning.
  •  The role of the instructor in balancing freedom and structure -- setting enough structure so that the unlimited freedom doesn't become vertiginous and overwhelming -- resonates with my experiences with Rheingold U. so far. Assignments seem to help, but they can't be too onerous.
  •  Very nice article comparing Thomas/JSB ideas to John Dewey's:
  •  http://charlestkerchner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/DeweyThomas.pdf
  • Ernst - I am particularly interested in Action Research of the "plan, act, observe,reflect" variety where we never really arrive at conclusions but start again in a new cycle of teaching and learning.
  • that idea of teaching people to fail is very important - I notice that this is acceptable very often in business especially in the contexts of 'start-ups' but unacceptable in most schools. Here in Europe, the work of the Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg gets a lot of attention - one of his motifs is learning to be wrong.
  • Knowing who to listen to in the 'noise' of all the information overload is important - I'm looking forward to our continuing review of how we all re-imagine that new culture of learning.
  • Can You, and if yes, How,  Change a system from within? This is one of the key issues of our time. Learning, PLN, Community support structures, activism, Social media, cooperation.. are all part of that... so it is realIy at the heart of our SMC Alumni topics. 
  • I would suggest, we should be dialoguing in depth about the question, and how to formulate it, before jumping to solutions...
  • The work of social and developmental psychologist, Carol Dweck can inform our discussion about failure,
  • Her book, Mindset, posits that some students have growth mindsets and some have fixed mindsets.
  • Ernst, I adore your description of problem-solving (especially the enumerated part). Downtime is essential for processing information and I agree, even subtle shifts within group dynamics can cause huge internal vistas to open up.
  • The idea of structuring for failure in itself is a whole new take on creative thinking.
  • Schools reward success.  That's our measurement system, our "leaderboard".  Some winners at school go on to run schools. Schools punish failure deeply, systematically.  Remember dunce caps? So taking failure as a good thing is, at the very least, weird and defamiliarizing!
  • Chapter Two of Thomas and Seely-Brown's book  is so short - just five pages - They conclude with the idea ....the point is to embrace what we don't know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more and more, both incrementally and exponentially. I wonder do the authors want us to reflect repeatedly on the contents of the chapter given its brevity.
  • is it certain type of people who fail, who are subsequently allowed to start again?
  • book's first chapter
  • Two key elements: network ("a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources", sounds like mobile + Web) and environments ("bounded and structural") (19).
  • what do you make of the examples they present?  What do they suggest about the theory they exemplify?
  • ohn Seely Brown is particularly interested in the idea of tinkering. He suggests one of the best 'tinkering' models is the architectural studio -- the place where students work together trying to solve each others' problems, and a mentor or master can also take part in open criticism. Find out why this is a model for us all.  http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bydesign/stories/2011/3147776.htm
  • The first chapter is a pretty rosy, and might I say westernized, view of the power of Internet access + play in learning.* It manages to enlighten and engage using a few choice narratives (I imagine we will get to the power of those at some point in the book, too) and sets us up for the rationale to come.
  • * I'm looking for some reaction with regards to that comment
  • based on WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) concepts. (An aside, here's a truly wonderful post unpacking of the idea of WEIRD in social science research.)
  • I can only talk for myself but there are contradictions between what I think is best to do with the students I teach and what I actually do. This "living contradiction" is something I consider in my own studies - I noticed a Tweet last night from Howard: Online and blended learning is NOT about automating delivery of knowledge, but about encouraging peer learning, inquiry, discourse.
  • The sentence I liked most from Chapter One reads "One of the metaphors we adopt to describe this process is cultivation. A farmer for example takes the nearly unlimited resources of sunlight, wind, water, earth, and biology and consolidates them into the bounded and structured environment of garden or farm. We see a new culture of learning as a similar kind of process - but cultivating minds instead of plants"
  • Everyone - you may have seen the piece below - if not please take 12 minutes to view it - it fits nicely with our current discussion
  • David McGavock on 21 May 11
     
    This is the first capture of the conversation from the thread "A New Culture of Learning". We'll see how this goes
  • Howard Rheingold on 21 May 11
     
    I read the book almost cover to cover. It led me to think more about pushing what I've been doing closer to pure p2p. One of the co-learners in the latest Mindamp told me about "paragogy." That one is worth bookmarking.
David McGavock

Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal on Teaching & Technology | Concordance - 1 views

www.hybridpedagogy.com/concordance.html

learning culture hybrid pedagogy technology edtech

shared by David McGavock on 02 May 12 - No Cached
  • On this page, we compile a growing list of useful tools for extending conversation or activities outside the boundaries of the traditional online or on-ground classroom.
  • David McGavock on 02 May 12
     
    Valuable teaching always involves contact with students in a way that makes their learning meaningful. A variety of tools enhance contact between teachers and their students in digital environments. On this page, we compile a growing list of useful tools for extending conversation or activities outside the boundaries of the traditional online or on-ground classroom.
David McGavock

Digital Skills Can Be Quickly Acquired - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-can-be-quickly-acquired.html

skills Infotention Personal learning network twitter literacy learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 24 Dec 12 - No Cached
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 24 Dec 12
       
      Literacy for professionals.
  • In 2007, there were 150 workshops and courses about digital media and technology but none specifically about social media, according to Carmen Scheidel, Mediabistro’s vice president for education and events.
  • “In general, the digital natives are earlier in their careers, and they are not the ones taking these types of classes,” Ms. Scheidel said. “It tends to be people who are very accomplished in their careers but are new to social media. It is an interesting mix.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • To deliver social media training in a more effective way, Ms. Scheidel said that Mediabistro last year introduced a new approach. Instead of offering mostly small workshops with 15 to 20 students, they began offering what she described as an online social media conference.
  • For midcareer executives, particularly in the media and related industries, knowing how to use Twitter, update your timeline on Facebook, pin on Pinterest, check in on Foursquare and upload images on Instagram are among the digital skills that some employers expect people to have to land a job or to flourish in a current role.
  • Pamela Tate, president and chief executive of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, based in Chicago, said digital literacy, including understanding social networking, is now a required skill.
  • To help bridge the gap, major universities, community colleges, online educational businesses from Lynda.com to ed2go.com offer continuing education classes in digital media, including social media skills, Web design, search optimization and Web analytics.
  • The University of San Francisco
  • Harvard’s Extension School
  • Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism
  • It is a place of business. It is a place where your career will be enhanced or degraded, depending on your use of these tools and services.”
  • Professor Sreenivasan and Ernest R. Sotomayor, assistant dean, career services and continuing education, organized a weekend of panels and workshops in late January for 500 people after a similar weekend conference approach drew 300 students last May.
  • For those participants, who wanted one-on-one attention from an experienced social media user, the “social media doctors” were in the house.
  • The idea behind the “doctors” was to give people some individual instruction at a conference setting
  • Educators also say skills classes have to help translate what seems to be a different language — hashtags, mentions, heart.
David McGavock

Imagine K12 - Home - 1 views

www.imaginek12.com/index.html

culture learning learning culture Cooperation school reform innovation

shared by David McGavock on 27 May 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 27 May 11
     
    "We believe technology is transforming K-12 education. The infrastructure, hardware, software, and platforms are either available or being developed that will change the nature of how we teach our children in profound and far-reaching ways. A high-tech wave is beginning to sweep through the educational world largely driven by technology entrepreneurship. But the impact of those entrepreneurs will depend on the quality of their ideas, their ability to execute, and their ability to get funded. Imagine K12 is a for-profit enterprise looking to invest time, experience, energy and resources in entrepreneurs who have a passion for education and the technical know-how to create their vision."
Charles van der Haegen

MIT TechTV - Pecha Kucha RFK-LA - 0 views

techtv.mit.edu/...9275-pecha-kucha-rfk-la

new media litteracies blue sky propositions pecha kucha RFK community schools

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 16 May 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 16 May 11
     
    "RFK-Legacy in Action, LAUSD, RFK Community Schools, New Media Literacies and other USC departments join at The Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism Dean's Forum to explore a series of "blue sky" propositions about how we might spark new forms of teaching and learning in conjunction with the philosophy the RFK Community Schools were envisioned to epitomize."
David McGavock

critical-thinking - home - 3 views

critical-thinking.iste.wikispaces.net

wiki critical-thinking diigo tools resources

shared by David McGavock on 12 Jun 11 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 12 Jun 11
     
    "Welcome to the Critical Thinking Compendium! Join Howard Rheingold and other noted educators in creating a world-class resource for teaching critical thinking and Internet literacies."
Charles van der Haegen

Meary Douglas retraces the origins of the Theory od Socio-cultural Viability - 1 views

projects.chass.utoronto.ca/...douglas1.pdf

cultural theory socio-cultural viability rationalities social science mary douglas history origin

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 22 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 22 Jul 11
     
    IThis article, written at the end of her life, presents the Historical Origins of The theory of Socio-cultural Viability by Mary Douglas, who is to be seen as the inspirator of the theory, and to have established the foundational ideas who have been further developped by her students, and later further developped and applied by many scholars across a wide range of disciplines. The first paragraph will hopefully provide some incentive to dig further: Introduction: What is Grid and Group Cultural Theory? How Useful can it be in the Modern World? It is a pleasure for me to reflect on the history of Grid-Group. I first described the idea in Natural Symbols ( Douglas 1970), a kind of necessary sequel to Purity and Danger (1966). I now realise that it was a simple idea presented in a complicated way. After a late start it has been radically redesigned by creative collaborators whose work I will describe. Back in the 1960's social anthropologists still felt it was necessary to vindicate the intelligence of colonial peoples, then known as "natives" or "primitives." A major objective of teaching and writing in anthropology was to attack something described by Levy Bruhl as "primitive mentality," which seemed to mean "primitive irrationality." Malinowski had started in the 1920's showing that the Trobrianders had rational customs and laws. In the 1930's Raymond Firth was original in focusing on the "primitive economics" of the Polynesians and found that the basic laws of supply, demand, and price applied in the rustic economies he studied. Evans-Pritchard made a frontal defence of Azande rationality. After World War II, Nadel and Gluckman followed up with the complexities of Nubian and Barotse legal systems. The very idea that the concept of "jurisprudence" could apply to "the natives" was innovative. In the 1950's and 60's we continued to dismantle intellectual barriers assumed to distinguish "Them" from "Us." The following ex
  • Charles van der Haegen on 22 Jul 11
     
    I believe this to be a helpfull introduction to the study od the Theory od Socio-cultural viability, which, it seems to me, is a usefull framework to look from a new angle to cooperation theory, institutional decision making, democracy and many other fields of social sciences
David McGavock

Pop-Up University | DMLcentral - 0 views

dmlcentral.net/...pop-university

rheingold university pop up Cooperation learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 01 May 11 - No Cached
  • Networked social learning is most effective and truly magical when students who don't know one another one day start scouring the world for knowledge to bestow on each other the next day and spend their time contributing to each other's learning. It’s the unpredictable synergy that can happen when a group of strangers assembles online to learn together.
  • But the knowledge-sharing gift economy is a human creation – one that can't be predicted, commanded, or summoned but has to be nurtured, cultivated, and facilitated.
  • Michael Wesch's "A Portal to Media Literacy" made clear to me something I had been feeling my way toward -- a pedagogy that is more about collaboration than technology, in which the technology is central, but is a vehicle for co-discovery.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Henry Jenkins taught me about participatory culture and the importance of teaching skills of credibility (what I call "crap detection") transmedia storytelling, collective intelligence, and network smarts.
  • I learned from Mizuko Ito that young people use digital skills and knowledge exchange as social currency in fan cultures – using social media to learn about things that really matter to them, such as multiplayer games, Pokemon, mashups and fan videos.
  • Cathy Davidson's bold experiments in peer-to-peer learning, including "crowd-sourcing grading," gave me a working model to emulate and appropriate.
  • it only made sense to begin by mobilizing social media skills in parallel with introducing the subject matter. Teaching about social media doesn't make a lot of sense unless students can use social media in their learning
  • The choice to participate in creating and not just consuming the culture in which we live is crucial, and presenting that choice in terms that can engage students is critical.
  • The first acts on the first day of class are crucial – what chaos theorists call "sensitive dependence on initial conditions."
  • As one of my mentors, Lisa Kimball, taught me, a good online facilitator pays heed to the containers, but also thinks in terms of tempo. I knew the importance of engaging as many of the co-learners as possible in the first live session and the first weekend of forum and blog discussion.
  • David McGavock on 01 May 11
     
    If Rheingold U, my current experiment in cultivating wholly online, multimedia, unaccredited, for-not-much-pay learning communities, originally germinated out of fun and impulse, the next stage was more scary-serious. As soon as I took people's money and started telling the world about my intentions, I was obligated as well as motivated to make it work - not just to deliver a rich set of learning materials, but to conjure actual social learning magic
David McGavock

Free and Unlimited Web Conferencing | Free Video Conferencing | Online Web Meeting | Mu... - 0 views

www.bigmarker.com/about

web conferencing

shared by David McGavock on 02 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Share contents interactively Use internet desktop sharing, interactive whiteboards, instant messaging system, and live audio and video chat to conduct online web meeting that can be as collaborative and productive as in-person meetings
  • Multipoint video conferencing
  • Whiteboards
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Screen sharing
  • Unique meeting room UR
  • public or remain private
  • David McGavock on 02 Jul 11
     
    "About BigMarker.com BigMarker provides fully-featured web conferencing solution for free to everyone. Here you can host web conferences with friends, family or colleagues, teach online training seminars to students, practice presentation skills, or broadcast events in real time - all free and unlimited! There are no trial period and no monthly fee. BigMarker is also an online virtual community and a hub for live information exchange, providing you a powerful platform to host video web conferences and present to the world. Use BigMarker to connect with others live online, share contents collaboratively, spread ideas, conduct live webinar, or promote business online. Expect instant feedback and responses! "
David McGavock

Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal on Teaching & Technology | Home - 1 views

www.hybridpedagogy.com

Personal learning network learning culture hybrid pedagogy technology

shared by David McGavock on 02 May 12 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 02 May 12
     
    Hybrid Pedagogy | [What is Hybrid Pedagogy?] : combines the strands of critical and digital pedagogy to arrive at the best social and civil uses for technology and digital media in on-ground and online classrooms. : avoids valorizing educational technology, but seeks to interrogate and investigate technological tools to determine their most progressive applications. : invites you to an ongoing discussion that is networked and participant-driven, to an open peer reviewed journal that is both academic and collective.
David McGavock

The dreams of readers | ROUGH TYPE - 1 views

www.roughtype.com/?p=4120

reading neuroscience mirror regions meditation

shared by David McGavock on 21 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Psychologists and neurobiologists have begun studying what goes on in our minds as we read literature, and what they’re discovering lends scientific weight to Emerson’s observation.
  • “aesthetic emotions” that we feel when we view art from a distance, as a spectator:
  • We create our own version of the piece of fiction, our own dream, our own enactment.” Making sense of what transpires in a book’s imagined reality appears to depend on “making a version of the action ourselves, inwardly.”
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • The scholars used brain scans to examine the cellular activity that occurs inside people’s heads as they read stories. They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.”
  • When, for example, a character in a story puts a pencil down on a desk, the neurons that control muscle movements fire in a reader’s brain. When a character goes through a door to enter a room, electrical charges begin to flow through the areas in a reader’s brain that are involved in spatial representation and navigation.
  • More than mere replication is going on.
  • we really do enter, so far as our brains are concerned, a new world — one conjured not just out of the author’s words but out of our own memories and desires — and it is our cognitive immersion in that world that gives reading its emotional force.
  • ” A work of literature, particularly narrative literature, takes hold of the brain in curious and powerful ways.
  • there are the “narrative emotions” we experience when, through the sympathetic actions of our nervous system, we become part of a story, when the distance between the attendee and the attended evaporates
  • A 2009 experiment conducted by Oatley and three colleagues suggests that the emotions stirred by literature can even alter, in subtle but real ways, people’s personalities.
  • Norman Holland, a scholar at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, has been studying literature’s psychological effects for many years, and he offers a provocative answer to that question.
  • when we open a book, our expectations and attitudes change. Because we understand that “we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions,” we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence can “disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions.”
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 21 Jan 14
       
      Theory of mind 
  • The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations.
  • reading tends to make us at least a little more empathetic, a little more alert to the inner lives of others.
  • can strengthen a person’s “theory of mind,” which is what psychologists call the ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling.
  • That frees us to become absorbed in the imaginary world of the literary work.
  • Jeff Jarvis, a media consultant who teaches journalism at the City University of New York, gave voice to this way of thinking in a post on his blog. Claiming that printed pages “create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader,” he concluded that, in the internet era, “the book is an outdated means of communicating information.” He declared that “print is where words go to die.”
  • Society is growing ever more skeptical of the value of solitude. The status quo treats with suspicion  even the briefest of withdrawals into inactivity and apparent purposelessness. We see it in the redefinition of receptive states of mind as passive states of mind.
  • the arts of production and consumption, of getting stuff done, to which most of us devote most of our waking hours.
  • In a 2003 lecture, Andrew Louth, a theology professor at the University of Durham in England, drew a distinction between “the free arts” and “the servile arts.” The servile arts, he said, are those “to which a man is bound if he has in mind a limited task.”
  • free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by “the search for knowledge for its own sake.”
  • We open ourselves to aesthetic and spiritual possibilities.
  • It may be that readers have to enter a state of languid pleasure, a dream, before they can experience the full spermatic vitality of a book. Far from being a sign of passivity, the reader’s outward repose signals the most profound kind of inner activity, the kind that goes unregistered by society’s sensors.
  • David McGavock on 21 Jan 14
     
    "The free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by "the search for knowledge for its own sake." "
David McGavock

Create more than you consume  - Medium - 1 views

medium.com/...-than-you-consume-9c1bc89dc71d

Infotention thinking tools learning culture creation consumption Learning pyramid tinker

shared by David McGavock on 24 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The Learning Pyramid states that people retain:90% of what they learn when they teach someone else/use immediately.75% of what they learn when they practice what they learned.50% of what they learn when engaged in a group discussion.30% of what they learn when they see a demonstration.20% of what they learn from audio-visual.10% of what they learn when they’ve learned from reading.5% of what they learn when they’ve learned from lecture.
  • One of the studies reviewed by our lab was on meditation and how being in the moment decreases the noise in your brain, leading to improved scores on working memory and intelligence tests.
  • When you tie an emotion to an experience, a hormone is released that greases the wheels at certain chemical locations in the brain where nerves rewire to form new memory circuits:
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • When you consume in a passive way, by skimming and moving to the next thing, you’re at a learning disadvantage.
  • When I was in University, I worked at a psychology research center under the direction of one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 most influential people, Dr. Richie Davidson.
  • Self-taught individuals, also called autodidacts, are masters of retaining information largely because of their ability to reflect and put into action most of what they consume.
  • Instead of just trying to get to the end of your Twitter feed or articles that you saved for later, read each article as if you would need to tell a friend about it after.
  • 1-page summary immediately after every chapter he reads.
  • Nothing will help you absorb more of what you consume than trying to do. It’s through the mistakes made where the real learning happens.
  • David McGavock on 24 Jun 14
     
    Great article on creation, consumption, learning, memory
David McGavock

Babies help unlock the origins of morality - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...unlock-the-origins-of-morality

babies morality cbs origins neuroscience

shared by David McGavock on 04 May 14 - No Cached
  • It's a question people have asked for as long as there have been people: are human beings inherently good? Are we born with a sense of morality or do we arrive blank slates, waiting for the world to teach us right from wrong? Or could it be worse: do we start out nasty, selfish devils, who need our parents, teachers, and religions to whip us into shape?
  • The philosopher Rousseau considered babies "perfect idiots...Knowing nothing,"
  • for most of its history, her field agreed.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • discovered seemingly simple ways to probe what's really going on in those adorable little heads.
  • Babies, even at three months, looked towards the nice character and looked hardly at all, much, much, much shorter times, towards the unhelpful character.
  • David McGavock on 04 May 14
     
    CBS story with Leslie Stahl
hansel molly

Great Remote Computer Support Services - 2 views

Computer Support Professional offers unrivaled online computer support services that gave me the assurance that my computer is in good hands. Every time I needed the help of their computer support ...

computer support

started by hansel molly on 06 Jun 11 no follow-up yet
Alex Grech

Visions of Students Today - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

PhD Personal learning network Infotention

shared by Alex Grech on 19 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Alex Grech on 19 Jun 11
     
    Another in Michael Wesch's series of videos.  There's a lot of catching up for academia to do now that we have ubiquitous access to self-publishing tools, online repositories of knowledge, clusters of niche networks and are putting our cognitive surplus to better use than watching TV.  And we are all perennial, life-long students and teachers.  
Donal O' Mahony

Microblogging - 2 views

blog.slideshare.net/...ng-microblogging-into-learning

Microblogging Twitter

shared by Donal O' Mahony on 07 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Bryan Alexander on 08 Sep 11
     
    Loved the title for slide 4. "Still..." :) Good intro sketch.
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