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David McGavock

JOURNAL: Is Scanning and Situational Awareness a cure for Multitasking Drift? - Global ... - 0 views

globalguerrillas.typepad.com/...re-for-multitasking-drift.html

scanning awareness multitasking drift thinking tools Personal learning network

shared by David McGavock on 12 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • If you are like me, you interact with a flood of information, online networks, and people everyday.  To handle it all, we multitask.  Unfortunately, it's easy to get off track or drift off course while multi-tasking.  
  • the act of multi-tasking -- responding to an e-mail/tweet/phone call, adding a new post/picture, etc. -- becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.
  • How do you build a scan for online multitasking?  Build a checklist. List the online tasks you want/need to keep up with.    Organize the list from the most important task to the least.  Repeat important tasks in the list if the intervening tasks take you away too long from that important task. After you go through enough scans to clear the deck, take a break to work on items that require long term thinking. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Some people even drive their careers, businesses and lives off a cliff interacting with it.  They think they are getting things done, but they aren't getting anything done at all. The way to fight this is situational awareness. The little part of your brain that is ALWAYS asking you the questions: Where am I and what am I doing? Am I progressing towards my goal? Am I in any danger or is there a way to get to the goal faster?
  • A set of overarching goals that guide your behavior.  To apply this to online multi-tasking you need to train a part of your brain to ask these questions.
  • You can simulate that with: Asking a friend to lambast you every 10-30 minutes with these questions until you nail it every time.   Setting a random alarm that forces you to lift yourself out of your multi-tasking stupor to ask yourself these questions. Or, and this is the most difficult way, do your entire scan with intentional, conscious thought.  Justifying each and every step until it becomes second nature.
  • David McGavock on 12 Jul 11
     
    "JOURNAL: Is Scanning and Situational Awareness a cure for Multitasking Drift?"
David McGavock

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...306868

Nicholas Carr Scientific Management Information distracted

shared by David McGavock on 13 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.
  • I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
  • The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.
  • For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
  • As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
  • The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
  • “I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      Unlikely. He hasn't lost the ability but the desire.
  • new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
  • recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.
  • we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s
  • “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.
  • the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.
  • The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      So the net has ethics?? This anthropomorphism takes away our responsibility
  • Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.”
  • In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
  • The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
  • The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.
  • even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
  • The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”
  • In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
  • their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.
  • there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
  • The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      I find this the most compelling argument. "Business" has an interest in selling things. Moving us faster, increasing our "seeking" instinct is one of the keys to this consumption frenzy. The individual needs to understand and manage these forces.
  • The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.
  • we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.
  • As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      I like this metaphor. Pancake people
David McGavock

Shambhala Sun - Wisdom 2.0: The Digital World Connects (July 2011) - 3 views

www.shambhalasun.com/index.php

wisdom thinking tools meditation neuroscience Wisdom 2.0

shared by David McGavock on 10 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Soren Gordhamer, author of Wisdom 2.0: Ancient Secrets for the Creative and Constantly Connected, has made it his business to explore how technology alters our patterns of living and how we can work creatively with those changes.
  • Wisdom 2.0 is a conversation among people who have accepted technology and its benefits, but who are also deeply concerned about the inner life.
  • Gordhamer says that Wisdom 2.0 is occurring whenever people realize that “each of us longs for wisdom, and that is what’s really important in life. It’s easy to get caught in the speed of life and forget what we’re here for, our true path.”
  • David McGavock on 10 Jun 11
     
    "Unprecedented communication and information-but also speed, stress, and 24/7 distraction. BARRY BOYCE reports on a group of far-thinking digital leaders who are using mindfulness to humanize the brave new world they have created. "
  • Howard Rheingold on 12 Jun 11
     
    Soren Gordhamer's book, Wisdom 2.0 is a very good read in t his regard.
Charles van der Haegen

When Did We Become Mentally Modern? : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...story.php

evolution darwin mental development modern alex spiegel symbolic thinking

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 08 May 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 08 May 11
     
    "Ever since Darwin came up with the whole idea of evolution, there's been one dominant picture of the moment we truly became human. It's that cartoon sequence: You see a hairy ape man with a heavy brow hunched in profile. Then, bit by bit, his back uncurls and straightens until all of a sudden there is he, upright, truly a man. Recently I've been thinking about this image, because I've decided that we somehow ended up with the wrong one - that there's something much more fundamental to being human than our ability to stand upright."
David McGavock

The Forward Foundation - http://forwardfound.org/ - 1 views

forwardfound.org/About

Cooperation forwardfound.org commons OpenSource foundation

shared by David McGavock on 29 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • About the Forward Foundation   Forward Foundation is a Foresight/Futures studies not for profit research and development group. Our members in the past have worked in the past with http://www.iftf.org/, MacArthur Foundation, Stanford University, MIT Press, MITE, USDA, and hundreds of small groups and networks across the globe. We produce research and forecasting like most "futures studies think tanks", but we also produce open source software and code, open source hardware and designs, and open licensed education materials. Examples include http://code.google.com/p/flows-dev/ http://flows.panarchy.com/ http://socialmediaclassroom.com and some of us have worked on http://cooperationcommons.com with http://iftf.org
  • Our Wealth Generating Ecology building skills and experience includes:   Working with meta and alternative currencies, local economy and social enterprise development, network-based project management, collaborative food, energy, creative output and physical object production, envrionmental scanning for network collaboration ecologies, and more.
  • Our design philosophy is to share not just the rendered output of the education package, but also the standard model that was used to produce the output.  We believe that it is important to design for interoperability first, then to address what works best for you. 
  • David McGavock on 29 Jun 11
     
    "About the Forward Foundation Forward Foundation is a Foresight/Futures studies not for profit research and development group. Our members in the past have worked in the past with http://www.iftf.org/, MacArthur Foundation, Stanford University, MIT Press, MITE, USDA, and hundreds of small groups and networks across the globe. We produce research and forecasting like most "futures studies think tanks", but we also produce open source software and code, open source hardware and designs, and open licensed education materials. Examples include http://code.google.com/p/flows-dev/ http://flows.panarchy.com/ http://socialmediaclassroom.com and some of us have worked on http://cooperationcommons.com with http://iftf.org"
David McGavock

…My heart's in Accra » CHI keynote: Desperately Seeking Serendipity - 1 views

www.ethanzuckerman.com/...esperately-seeking-serendipity

filter bubble diversity bias cosmopolitan global local

shared by David McGavock on 07 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Cities embody political decisions make by their designers.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like program or be programmed to me
  • It’s much harder to get the architects behind Facebook or Foursquare articulate the behaviors they’re trying to enable and the political assumptions that underly those decisions.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Again - Programmers!
  • An urban planner who wants to make changes to a city’s structure is held in check by a matrix of forces: a desire to preserve history, the needs and interests of businesses and residents in existing communities, the costs associated with executing new projects. Progress is slow,
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • For those planning the future of Facebook, it’s hard to study what’s succeeded and failed for MySpace, in part because an exodus of users to Facebook is gradually turning MySpace into a ghost town.
  • If we learn from real-world cities instead of abandoned digital ones, what lessons might we take?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusions
  • The Jacobs/Moses debate suggests we need to be cautious of architectures that offer convenience and charge isolation as a price of admission. This is the concern Eli Pariser articulates in his (excellent) new book, “The Filter Bubble“.
  • He worries that between Google’s personalized search and the algorithmic decisions Facebook makes in displaying news from our friends, our online experience is an increasingly isolated one,
  • They’re cars, rather than public transit or busy sidewalks.
  • A map of Vancouver overlaid with my friends’ recommendations is one thing; one that recommends restaurants based on paid advertisements and doesn’t reveal this practice is another entirely.
  • The map I want is the one that lets me shuffle not just through my friends’ preferences but through annotations from different groups: first time visitors to the city; long-time Vancouverites; foodies; visitors from Japan, Korea or China.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      A diverse sampling of taste
  • People’s actions inscribe their intentions onto a city.
  • Online spaces are often so anxious to show me how my friends are using a space that they obscure how other audiences are using it.
  • It’s possible to find out what’s popular on Facebook to an audience broader than that of your friends.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Something Google+ should consider
  • One of the reasons curation is such a helpful strategy for wandering is that it reveals community maxima. It can be helpful to know that Times Square is the most popular tourist destination in New York if only so we can avoid it.
  • knowing where Haitian taxi cab drivers go for goat soup is often useful data on where the best Haitian food is to be found.
  • If you want to explore beyond the places your friends think are the most enjoyable, or those the general public thinks are enjoyable, you need to seek out curators who are sufficiently far from you in cultural terms and who’ve annotated their cities in their own ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key to breaking the filter bubbles
  • Geocaching is its own peculiar form of community annotation, where the immediate goal is leaving your signature on someone else’s logbook, but the deeper goal is encouraging you to explore in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.
  • SF0, founded by a trio of Chicagoans transplanted to San Francisco, was designed to encourage players to discover things they’d never seen or done in the city, in a way that encouraged independence and exploration.
  • Combining the insights we may find from studying the organization of cities with the ability to reshuffle and sort digitally may let us think about designing online spaces for serendipity in different and powerful ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusion?
  • - How do we design physical spaces to encourage serendipity? - What lessons about serendipity in physical spaces can we bring into the virtual realm? - How can we annotate the physical world, digitally, in ways that expand our encounters with the world, rather than limiting them?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Questions over conclusion
  • We hope that cities are serendipity engines. By putting a diverse set of people and things together in a confined place, we increase the chances that we’re going to stumble onto the unexpected. It’s worth asking the question: do cities actually work this way?
  • Most of us are fairly predictable
  • We hope for random encounter with a diverse citizenry to build a web of weak ties that increases our sense of involvement in the community, as Bob Putnam suggested in Bowling Alone. And we worry that we may instead isolate and cocoon ourselves when faced with a situation where we feel like outsiders, as Putnam’s recent research suggests.
  • “Census data can describe the segregation of my block, but how about telling me how segregated my life is? Location data points in that direction.
  • Nathan Eagle, who has worked with Sandy Pentland at MIT’s Media Lab on the idea of “reality mining”, digesting huge sets of data like mobile phone records, estimates that he can predict the location of “low-entropy individuals” with 90-95% accuracy based on this type of data
  • We all filter the places we live into the places where we’re regulars and the ones we avoid, the parts of town where we feel familiar and where we feel foreign. We do this based on where we live, where we work, and who we like to spend time with.
  • I’m less concerned about left-right polarization in the US, and more concerned about us/them polarization around the world
  • through the design of the systems we use and our behavior with those systems, I see reasons to worry that our use of the internet may be less cosmopolitan and more isolated that we would hope.
  • There were – and are – reasons to distrust curators, but there’s a critical aspect of their work I believe we need to preserve as we move towards new models for organizing news.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      interesting view of curation
  • Countries that have more than 40 million or more internet users generally have a very strong bias towards local sources – the mean is roughly 95%/5%, which makes Americans look (slightly) cosmopolitan in comparison.
  • US broadcast media focuses much more on entertainment stories than on international news.)
  • What’s striking to me about this preference data is that there’s so little effort required to access international news sources like BBC, the Times of India or the Mail and Guardian – they’re one click away and don’t require crossing a language barrier – and how strong the “local” bias for national news sources appears to be.
  • on January 12th, I published “What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?“… and I got a lot of phone calls when Ben Ali fled the country two days later.
  • The revolution in Tunisia caught intelligence and diplomatic services around the world flat-footed. It didn’t have to – there was a wealth of information being published on Tunisian Facebook pages
  • I’m forced to admit that there’s no way I would have known about the revolution brewing if I didn’t have close Tunisian friends.
  • I’m less interested in the ways in which we limit our paths through cities than in how we constrain what we do and don’t encounter online.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key point
  • On the other hand, curators invariably have biases
  • We need mechanisms to ensure that search gets complemented with serendipity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Point we have been discussing. Filter bubbles
  • Facebook offers a different answer to the question, “What do I need to know?” – “You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not.”
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Facebook world = ummm....
  • there’s a decent chance that their collective intelligence has some blind spots
  • The problem, of course, is that if your friends don’t know about a revolution in Tunisia or a great new Vietnamese restaurant, you may not know either.
  • It’s worth asking whether that bubble is able to provide us with the serendipity we hope for from the web.
  • Serendipity, at first glance, looks like the positive side of unintended consequences, the happy accident. But that’s not what the term meant, at least originally.
  • The word was coined by Horace Walpole, an 18th century British aristocrat,
  • A Google search turns up 11 million pages with the term, including restaurants, movies and gift shops named “serendipity”, but very few on unexpected discovery through sagacity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Serendipity vs. Sagacity
  • he refers to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the titular characters were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
  • Louis Pasteur observed, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”
  • In “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity”, he and Barber explore discovery in a General Electric laboratory under the leadership of Willis Whitney, who encouraged a work environment that focused as much on fun as it did on discovery.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like Google. Tinkering, time to play, time to work.
  • If we want to create online spaces to encourage serendipity, we might start by learning from cities.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Moving to the point of online learning
  • Our loss, I believe, is that we’ve lost sight of the idea that we could prepare ourselves for serendipity, both personally and structurally.
  • vibrancy comes from the ongoing chance encounter between people using a neighborhood for different purposes, encountering one another as their paths intersect and cross.
  • The neighborhoods Jacobs celebrates are certainly not the most efficient in terms of an individual’s ability to move quickly and independently. Vibrancy and efficiency may not be diametrically opposed, but it’s likely that the forces are in tension.
David McGavock

Seth Godin on the tribes we lead | Video on TED.com - 2 views

www.ted.com/...din_on_the_tribes_we_lead.html

ted tribes sethgodin learning culture commons socialmedia leadership

shared by David McGavock on 27 Apr 12 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 27 Apr 12
     
    "Seth Godin argues the Internet has ended mass marketing and revived a human social unit from the distant past: tribes. Founded on shared ideas and values, tribes give ordinary people the power to lead and make big change. He urges us to do so. Seth Godin is an entrepreneur and blogger who thinks about the marketing of ideas in the digital age. His newest interest: the tribes we lead. Full bio »"
  • David McGavock on 27 Apr 12
     
    Godin enjoins us to organize tribes for doing good.
David McGavock

You Media :: About Us - 0 views

youmediachicago.org/...2-about-us

education socialmedia Cooperation digital media

shared by David McGavock on 28 Apr 12 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 28 Apr 12
     
    YOUmedia is an innovative, 21st century teen learning space housed at the Chicago Public Library's downtown Harold Washington Library Center. YOUmedia was created to connect young adults, books, media, mentors, and institutions throughout the city of Chicago in one dynamic space designed to inspire collaboration and creativity. High school age teens engaging with YOUmedia can access thousands of books, over 100 laptop and desktop computers, and a variety of media creation tools and software, all of which allow them to stretch their imaginations and their digital media skills. By working both in teams and individually, teens have an opportunity to engage in projects that promote critical thinking, creativity, and skill-building.
Antonio Lopez

Practically Nonideological: A Chat with Ethan Zuckerman | Motherboard - 2 views

motherboard.vice.com/...al-a-chat-with-ethan-zuckerman

shared by Antonio Lopez on 02 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • One of the things that I thought was very interesting with Occupy early on was not just the desire to occupy physical spaces, but the desire to occupy media.
  • Now, instead of it being difficult to get footage, what’s really difficult is to edit it down into a narrative in one fashion or another.
  • One thing I’m fairly well known for in my work is trying to be critical about whether we’re adopting technologies because they’re practical, or because they’re ideological.
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  • The reason I push back against this and say, ‘There’s some pretty good tech in Wimax, which probably is an easier way to put a pretty big cloud over an Occupy encampment, and then connect it into the Internet,’ is that I think it’s the Utopian technological politics that have people pursuing a very ground-up, very ad-hoc solution that may or may be the right technological solution.
  • There are two groups right now that are fighting for influence over the Internet. One groups is the guys who’ve run the Internet for a very long time. And I do mean guys. It’s mostly engineers – some with major tech companies, some with major telecom companies – who dominate meetings of things like the IETF, who are representatives of organizations like ICANN.
  • There’s a second camp in all this that is represented by governments, particularly governments of China, Russia, some governments from the global South, that are essentially saying ‘Look, this needs to be run through something closer to the UN system. It needs to be multi-national. It needs to be more representative.’
  • It’s interesting to think about how popular movements might insert themselves in that space. The truth is that with SOPA/PIPA, the traditional tech guys were on one side fighting more or less against Hollywood. And they pulled in support from millions of Internet users who signed up and said ‘We’re with you on this. We’re going to participate.’
  • I don’t see that popular movement [OWS] as the main actor in this space. I see companies like Tumblr, and Twitter, and Google doing a pretty good job of motivating their users. But whether that group of motivated Internet users actually maps onto Occupy…
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

Babies help unlock the origins of morality - Page 3 - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...3

babies origins morality neuroscience cbs

shared by David McGavock on 04 May 14 - No Cached
  • From this Wynn concludes that infants prefer those "who harm... others" who are unlike them.
  • We are predisposed to break the world up into different human groups based on the most subtle and seemingly irrelevant cues, and that, to some extent, is the dark side of morality.
  • Karen Wynn: I think, we are built to, you know, at the drop of a hat, create us and them.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Lesley Stahl: Sounds to me like the experiment show they are little bigots. Paul Bloom: I think to some extent, a bias to favor the self, where the self could be people who look like me, people who act like me, people who have the same taste as me, is a very strong human bias.
  • David McGavock on 04 May 14
     
    Page 3
David McGavock

Are Babies Born Good? | Science | Smithsonian - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...are-babies-born-good-165443013

babies moral compass debate neuroscience Cooperation Smithsonian

shared by David McGavock on 06 May 14 - No Cached
  • The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn’t there.
  • “When our infant was only four months old I thought that he tried to imitate sounds; but I may have deceived myself,” Charles Darwin wrote in “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” his classic study of his own son.
  • Even well-behaved babies are notoriously tough to read: Their most meditative expressions are often the sign of an impending bowel movement.
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  • “People who’ve spent their whole careers studying perception are now turning toward social life, because that’s where the bio-behavioral rubber meets the evolutionary road,” Konner says. “Natural selection has operated as much or more on social behavior as on more basic things like perception. In our evolution, survival and reproduction depended more and more on social competence as you went from basic mammals to primates to human ancestors to humans.”
  • The lab’s initial study along these lines, published in 2007 in the journal Nature, startled the scientific world by showing that in a series of simple morality plays, 6- and 10-month-olds overwhelmingly preferred “good guys” to “bad guys.” “This capacity may serve as the foundation for moral thought and action,” the authors wrote. It “may form an essential basis for...more abstract concepts of right and wrong.”
  • spate of related studies hinting that, far from being born a “perfect idiot,” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, or a selfish brute, as Thomas Hobbes feared, a child arrives in the world provisioned with rich, broadly pro-social tendencies and seems predisposed to care about other people.
  • No seasoned parent can believe that nurture doesn’t make a difference, or that nature trumps all. The question is where the balance lies.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 06 May 14
       
      Key thought - where is the balance?
  • Wynn and her husband, the psychologist Paul Bloom, collaborated on much of Hamlin’s research, and Wynn remembers being a bit more optimistic: “Do babies have attitudes, render judgments? I just found that to be a very intuitively gripping question,” she says.
  • Infant morality studies are so new that the field’s grand dame is 29-year-old J. Kiley Hamlin, who was a graduate student at the Yale lab in the mid-2000s.
  • she stumbled on animated presentations that one of her predecessors had made, in which a “climber” (say, a red circle with goggle eyes) attempted to mount a hill, and a “helper” (a triangle in some trials) assisted him, or a “hinderer” (a square) knocked him down.
  • When I visited, Tasimi was recreating versions of Hamlin’s puppet shows as background work for a new project.
  • The child shot her a woebegone look before dutifully hauling himself out of the ball pit, picking up the pen and returning it to the researcher.
  • When babies at the Yale lab turn 2, their parents are tactfully invited to return to the university after the child’s third birthday.
  • The next lab I visited was at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it has made this age group something of a specialty, through work on toddler altruism (a phrase that, admittedly, rings rather hollow in parental ears).
  • One advantage of testing slightly older babies and children is that they are able to perform relatively complicated tasks. In the Laboratory for Developmental  Studies, the toddlers don’t watch puppets help: They themselves are asked to help.
  • Warneken was initially interested in how little children read the intentions of others, and the question of whether toddlers would assist others in reaching their goals. He wanted to sound out these behaviors in novel helping experiments—“accidentally” dropping a hat, for instance, and seeing if the kids would return it.
  • prominent psychologists had previously argued that children are selfish until they are socialized; they acquire altruistic behaviors only as childhood progresses and they are rewarded for following civilization’s rules, or punished for breaking them.
  • One day he and a toddler were bouncing a ball together. Truly by accident, the ball rolled away—“the moment of serendipity,” as Warneken now calls it. His first impulse was to retrieve the toy and carry on, but he stopped himself.
  • The little boy watched him struggle, then after a moment heaved himself up, waddled over to the toy and—defying the scientific community’s uncharitable expectations—stretched out his own chubby little arm to hand the ball to his gigantic playmate.
  • In the following months, Warneken designed experiments for 18-month-olds, in which a hapless adult (often played by him) attempted to perform a variety of tasks, to no avail, as the toddlers looked on. The toddlers gallantly rescued Warneken’s dropped teaspoons and clothespins, stacked his books and pried open stubborn cabinet doors so he could reach inside.
  • videotaped experiment of a toddler wallowing in a wading pool full of plastic balls.
  • But the elements that underpin morality—altruism, sympathy for others, the understanding of other people’s goals—are in place much earlier than we thought, and clearly in place before children turn 2.”
  • Because they were manifested in 18-month-olds, Warneken believed that the helping behaviors might be innate, not taught or imitated. To test his assumption, he turned to one of our two nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzee.
  • The first chimps Warneken studied, nursery-raised in a German zoo
  • as the caretaker dropped the first object: As if on cue, the chimp bounded over and breezily handed it back.
  • Warneken wondered if perhaps human-reared chimps had been conditioned to be helpful to their food providers
  • They would consistently help when the person was reaching for the object,” even in the absence of any payoff.
  • The final step was to see if chimps would assist each other. So Warneken rigged apparatuses where one caged chimp could help a neighbor reach an inaccessible banana or piece of watermelon. There was no hope of getting a bite for themselves, yet the empowered chimps fed their fellow apes regardless.
  • But under what circumstances are toddlers altruistic?
  • Some recent chimp studies suggest that chimps won’t help others unless they witness the dismay of the creature in need. Are human children likewise “reactive” helpers, or can they come to another’s assistance without social cues?
  • “You can see the birth of this proactive helping behavior from around 1.5 to 2.5 years of age,” Warneken explains. “The children don’t need solicitation for helping. They do it voluntarily.” Proactive helping may be a uniquely human skill.
  • Criticisms of the “nice baby” research are varied, and the work with the youngest kids is perhaps the most controversial.
  • such method­o­­­logical worries are never far from baby researchers’ minds.
  • Other critics, meanwhile, fault the developmental philosophy behind the experiments.
  • these researchers argue, but actually they start from scratch with only senses and reflexes, and, largely through interaction with their mothers, learn about the social world in an astonishingly short period of time.
  • And still other scientists think the baby studies underestimate the power of regional culture.
  • Ideas of the public good and appropriate punishment, for instance, are not fixed across societies: Among the Matsigenka people of the Peruvian Amazon, where Henrich works, helping rarely occurs outside of the immediate household, if only because members of the tribe tend to live with relatives.
  • Plenty of bleak observations complicate the discovery of children’s nobler impulses. Kids are intensely tribal: 3-month-olds like people of their own race more than others, experiments have shown, and 1-year-olds prefer native speakers to those of another tongue.
  • Babies, in addition, are big fans of punishment. Hamlin likes to show a video of a young vigilante who doesn’t just choose between the good and bad puppets; he whacks the bad guy over the head.
  • Perhaps babies are not really trying to help in a particular moment, per se, as much as they are expressing their obliging nature to the powerful adults who control their worlds—behaving less like Mother Teresa, in a sense, than a Renaissance courtier. Maybe parents really would invest more in a helpful child, who as an adult might contribute to the family’s welfare, than they would in a selfish loafer—or so the evolutionary logic goes.
  • A different interpretation, Warneken says, is that in a simpler world maybe toddlers really could help, pitching in to the productivity of a hunter-gatherer group in proportion to their relatively meager calorie intake.
  • For many researchers, these complexities and contradictions make baby studies all the more worthwhile.
  • “I’m trying to think of a lesser-of-two evils study,” he says. “Yes, we have our categories of good and bad, but those categories involve many different things—stealing $20 versus raping versus killing. Clearly I can’t use those sorts of cases with, you know, 13-month-olds. But you can come up with morality plays along a continuum to see...whether they form preferences about whether they like the guy who wasn’t as bad as the other bad guy.”
  • David McGavock on 06 May 14
     
    "The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn't there."
Kathy Gill

Stock and flow « Snarkmarket - 0 views

snarkmarket.com/4890

digital information economics metaphors media media-literacy Infotention

shared by Kathy Gill on 30 May 11 - Cached
  • Kathy Gill on 30 May 11
     
    Thinking of the economics concepts in terms of today's digital idea space. 
Charles van der Haegen

BoardGameGeek | Gaming Unplugged Since 2000 - 0 views

boardgamegeek.com

boardgames gaming game boardgamegeek learning boardgame review unplugged Entertainment

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 30 May 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 30 May 11
     
    Co-learner Gregor McNish poqsted on the MindAmp 3 discussion board about Cooperation theory and social dilemmas the following comment: Board games As mentioned in the live session, I find some interesting examples of exploring these tensions in modern boardgames. A strong element of the fun for me in playing these games is exploring the system presented by each game. In the context of our enquiry, I think that games can be a good (and safe) way of practically exploring the decision spaces of different cooperative structures. There are pure cooperative games, where the gamers are working together against the game. "Pandemic" is an example; gamers are trying to save the world from disease. Each person has a special power, the fun comes from working out as a group how to use everyone's powers to group advantage on each turn. Probably more interesting for our purposes are games whose principal mechanic is "negotiation". Negotiating deals, or forming temporary alliances is an important part of play. It's important in these games to have a sense of the relative benefit people are gaining from deals; it's fine to be gaining less than your trading partner, if you end up gaining more across all your trades, etc. There's lots of scope for metagaming -- you help me this time because I helped you last time, or will next time, etc. Whether or not deals are binding depends on the game, which leads to interesting tensions. Some games even allow group wins. "Dune" is a good example of this. "Intrige" is a very pure example, but apparently has been the cause of friendship break ups. "Diplomacy" would be a classic example. One I've always wanted to try is "Republic of Rome"; players are Senators, who must cooperate to defend Rome from the barbarian hordes, but who are otherwise trying to improve their own position relative to each other. Another interesting example people may have come across is "Werewolf" (also called "Mafia"). In a group (usually 9-15 or so), a couple of p
  • Charles van der Haegen on 30 May 11
     
    A great contribution of Gregor McNish in MindAmp 3 as a comment to section Cooperation theory & social dilemmas
  • Bryan Alexander on 30 May 11
     
    Werewolf is a terrific game, especially because of the wild performance aspects. Coop games: I recommend Pandemic.
Donal O' Mahony

21 Things That Will Be Obsolete by 2020 | MindShift - EdTech Leadership - 3 views

edtech.nathansandberg.me/will-be-obsolete-by-2020-minds

2020 learning culture

shared by Donal O' Mahony on 29 May 11 - No Cached
  • Donal O' Mahony on 29 May 11
     
    some interesting observations
  • Antonio Lopez on 30 May 11
     
    Great ink. I posted the following comment on the article's Website: On point 18, why not organic food in the cafeteria? Seems like if we are smart enough to adapt all the trends you are discussing, a farm-to-school lunch program would make sense as well. I like all the suggestions you are making, but I also find them to be too technologically oriented, and not necessarily grounded in the needs of the current reality we are facing: can we even educate for a world that no longer has the carrying capacity for civilization? I think the tools you mention are all useful and can be applied sustainably, but I would suggest a conscious push to incorporate sustainability as an educational value that is integrated into the technology. And I'm not just talking about information literacy about environmental issues, but actual sustainable cultural practice, which includes many of the things you have listed here. Additionally, it would be good to argue for Green IT. What good is a digital cloud if the ones outside the classroom are wrecking havoc on our surroundings? Again, I like your ideas, I just think they will be more feasible in a habitable world. We should put our minds together to make this so.
David McGavock

Jennifer Lynn Aaker | Creating Infectious Action - 1 views

itc.conversationsnetwork.org/...detail4834.html

aaker jennifer Cooperation augmentation infectious actions audio podcast

shared by David McGavock on 14 May 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 14 May 11
     
    "in one class she conducted a crowdsourced experiment which literally changed the way Jennifer views and thinks about social media. In her class one of her students gave her a set of slides that told a very compelling story. She shares that story and explains how it led her to come up with a new theory for creating infectious action."
Charles van der Haegen

Overview | Research | Institute of Noetic Sciences - 0 views

www.noetic.org/overview

consiousness human potential societal healing worldview transformation extended human capacities collective

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 15 May 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 15 May 11
     
    Research at IONS From its inception, the Institute of Noetic Sciences has blazed new trails in exploring big questions: Who are we? What is consciousness, and how does it impact the physical world? What are our human potentials, and how can we achieve those potentials? What leads to personal and societal healing and transformation? Because limitations in our human consciousness underlie many of the problems we face as a global community, research at IONS focuses on exploring the fundamental nature of consciousness, investigating how it interacts with the physical world, and studying how consciousness can dramatically transform in beneficial ways.
  • Charles van der Haegen on 15 May 11
     
    Consciousness research with impact on societal and personal healing, worldview transformation with what personal and sociatal transformation effects and how extended human capoacities interact with the physical world... all good themes in our thinking about mind amplification, learning communities, and cooperation... What would you think?
  • Howard Rheingold on 22 May 11
     
    I was the staff writer for IONS in the earl 1980s. An interesting outfit.
Donal O' Mahony

2aAbove And Beyond 2c 0f - YouTube - 4 views

www.youtube.com/watch

Cooperation

shared by Donal O' Mahony on 10 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • Donal O' Mahony on 10 Aug 11
     
    An interesting take on communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. more on the social less on the media;)
David McGavock

BPS Research Digest: Has the Internet become an external hard drive for the brain? - 2 views

bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/...ecome-external-hard-drive.html

shared by David McGavock on 03 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • It's as if we've become adept at using computers to store knowledge for us, and we're better at remembering where information is stored than the information itself.
  • it's important to keep these new findings in perspective: they hint at how the Internet could be altering our memory habits, but they haven't demonstrated that this is any different from other forms of memory support.
  • similar results might have been obtained if trivia statements had been written in notebooks or told to friends, as opposed to typed into a computer.
  • David McGavock on 03 Aug 11
     
    Last year's annual question posed by Edge was "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" Several psychologists answered that it was becoming an extension of their minds. "The Internet is a kind of collective memory,' wrote Stephen Kosslyn (Harvard University). "When I write with a browser open in the background, it feels like the browser is an extension of myself."
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