Group items tagged

How people work and function is altered when new tools are utilized.

The pipe is more important than the content within the pipe. Our ability to learn what we need for tomorrow is more important than what we know today.

An organizations ability to foster, nurture, and synthesize the impacts of varying views of information is critical to knowledge economy survival. Speed of “idea to implementation” is also improved in a systems view of learning.

Design of learning environments

The need to evaluate the worthiness of learning something is a meta-skill that is applied before learning itself begins.

These theories do not address learning that occurs outside of people (i.e. learning that is stored and manipulated by technology).

Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual.

Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known

Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism are the three broad learning theories most often utilized in the creation of instructional environments. These theories, however, were developed in a time when learning was not impacted through technology.

Learning needs and theories that describe learning principles and processes, should be reflective of underlying social environments

The “half-life of knowledge” is the time span from when knowledge is gained to when it becomes obsolete.

To combat the shrinking half-life of knowledge, organizations have been forced to develop new methods of deploying instruction.”

Multitasking is not a symptom of technology.   The problem is that I am having to learn everything from scratch, all the time, all at once.

The same, by the way, is also true when your worklife depends on technology and the technology changes.

I say that unlearning, in fact, makes us pay attention to the world in a new way.  George Lakoff says it is useful to become "reflective about our reflexes."

The graphs in Fig. 2 trace the influence of online access, estimated from the entire sample of articles, and illustrated for journals and subfields with the mean number of citations. Figure 2A shows the simultaneous effect of commercial and free online availability on the average age of citations

The first question was whether depth of citation—years between articles and the work they reference—is predicted by the depth of journal issues online—how many years back issues were electronically available during the previous year when scientists presumably drafted them into their papers.

Collectively, the models presented illustrate that as journal archives came online, either through commercial vendors or freely, citation patterns shifted. As deeper backfiles became available, more recent articles were referenced; as more articles became available, fewer were cited and citations became more concentrated within fewer articles. These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature. Moreover, hyperlinking through an online archive puts experts in touch with consensus about what is the most important prior work—what work is broadly discussed and referenced. With both strategies, experts online bypass many of the marginally related articles that print researchers skim. If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. Research on the extreme inequality of Internet hyperlinks (14), scientific citations (15, 16), and other forms of “preferential attachment” (17, 18) suggests that near-random differences in quality amplify when agents become aware of each other’s choices. Agents view others’ choices as relevant information—a signal of quality—and factor them into their own reading and citation selections. By enabling scientists to quickly reach and converge with prevailing opinion, electronic journals hasten scientific consensus. But haste may cost more than the subscription to an online archive: Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly .

This research ironically intimates that one of the chief values of print library research is poor indexing. Poor indexing—indexing by titles and authors, primarily within core journals— likely had unintended consequences that assisted the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers through unrelated articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and led researchers into the past. Modern graduate education parallels this shift in publication—shorter in years, more specialized in scope, culminating less frequently in a true dissertation than an album of articles (19)

As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.

“To the newsreaders who feel that mental illness is best viewed as an excuse, let me suggest instead that we might more effectually recognize it as a national priority for social policy,” he wrote on his blog shortly after the shootings.  “If we care to prevent the next mass shooting, we should concentrate our efforts on getting meaningful diagnoses and resources to the next Adam Lanza.”

Because we are able now to measure things we have never been able to measure before, this allows us potentially to customize sentencing and rehabilitation. The goal is to have the whole system be more just and have more utility.

Our system is built on the assumption that if you’re over 18 and over the IQ of 70, you’re a practical reasoner, free to choose how you act. But modern neuroscience suggests that those are not good assumptions.

I have to emphasize, though, that this is not about exculpation. I have to be very clear that this is really about customized sentencing and rehab that works.

It’s helpful to be able to talk about science in basic ways that anyone can understand. What I tell my students in my lab is that they need to be able explain their research to an 8th grader.

I’m an amateur history buff, and if I want to read about the Roman Empire, I don’t want to read an academic debate, but instead a narrative by a trusted guide who’s done their homework, who will offer the filter of how they understand the Roman Empire, to shepherd me through its history in only 200 pages.

Rather than “playful,” I’d say that my approach is simply the opposite of boring. It’s about looking for and then trying to answer questions that are poweful enough to get you out of bed at 5AM.

My intuition on this idea: being a good scientist or creative writer is about maintaining the wide-eyed wonder of a child and asking questions all the time. That’s what really makes discovery happen in any field.

Science is changing really rapidly. One way is that lots of scientists are moving into Big Data

Right now we’re involved with serious crunching to pull out statistical info on recidivism and crime. Our first challenge is visualizing it. So in this sense, creativity and art also relevant. Data visualization is really valuable stuff; you can discover a trend when you see, wow, I didn’t realize that bump would be there. To be able to tie together data in beautiful ways allows us to see and discover patterns.

I don’t have any fear about losing the mystery of creativity. If I explain every single chemical piece in the process of why you enjoy the taste of a soy latte, it wouldn’t diminish your enjoyment of a soy latte. It might even enhance it

Neuroscientists work on how to understand how brains construct reality in general, but we are in the position of fish trying to understand water. What I mean by that is that we only know one way of seeing the world very well, like a fish only knows water.  Learning about how synesthesia works allows us to get out of our fishbowl,

You don’t need to know anything about the brain to understand what shape or style will be appealing. We may come scrambling up behind advertisers and product designers and validate them. If Apple wanted to hire me, sure, I’d say yes immediately and do the best job I could! But honestly, they already know how to do it. They’re the design experts. We neuroscientists would in come with our fancy machines and theories and explain why what they do is already true.

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

How are new media being taken up by youth practices and agendas? Our analytic question follows from this: How do these practices change the dynamics of youth-adult negotiations over literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge?

We have developed an interdisciplinary analytic tool kit to investigate this complex set of relations between changing technology, kid-adult relations, and definitions of learning and literacy. Our key terms are “genres of participation,” “networked publics,” “peer-based learning,” and “new media literacy.”

The primary distinction we make is between friendship-driven and interest-driven genres of participation, which correspond to different genres of youth culture, social network structure, and modes of learning.

We use the term “peer” to refer to the people whom youth see as part of their lateral network of relations, whom they look to for affiliation, competition, as well as disaffiliation and distancing. Peers are the group of people to whom youth look to develop their sense of self, reputation, and status.

In contrast to friendship-driven practices, with interest-driven practices, specialized activities, interests, or niche and marginalized identities come first.

nterest-driven practices are what youth describe as the domain of the geeks, freaks, musicians, artists, and dorks, the kids who are identified as smart, different, or creative, who generally exist at the margins of teen social worlds.

Rather than relying on distinctions based on given categories such as gender, class, or ethnic identity, we have identified genres based on what we saw in our ethnographic material as the distinctions that emerge from youth practice and culture, and that help us interpret how media intersect with learning and participation

Genres of participation provide ways of identifying the sources of diversity in how youth engage with new media in a way that does not rely on a simple notion of “divides” or a ranking of more- or less-sophisticated media expertise. Instead, these genres represent different investments that youth make in particular forms of sociability and differing forms of identification with media genres.

Our work here, however, is to take more steps in applying situated approaches to learning to an understanding of mediated sociability, though not of the school-centered variety. This requires integrating approaches in public-culture studies with theories of learning and participation.

A growing body of ethnographic work documents how learning happens in informal settings, as a side effect of everyday life and social activity, rather than in an explicit instructional agenda.

Our interest, more specifically, is in documenting instances of learning that are centered around youth peer-based interaction, in which the agenda is not defined by parents and teachers.

What counts as learning and literacy is a question of collective values, values that are constantly being contested and negotiated between different social groups. Periods of cultural and technological flux open up new areas of debate about what should count as part of our common culture and literacy and what are appropriate ways for young people to participate in these new cultural forms.

While what is being defined as “new media literacy” is certainly not the exclusive province of youth, unlike in the case of “old” literacies youth are playing a more central role in the redefinition of these newer forms. In fact, the current anxiety over how new media erode literacy and writing standards could be read as an indicator of the marginalization of adult institutions that have traditionally defined literacy norms (whether that is the school or the family).

our work does not seek to define the components of new media literacy or to participate directly in the normalization of particular forms of literacy standards or practice. Rather, we see our contribution as describing the forms of competencies, skills, and literacy practices that youth are developing through media production and online communication in order to inform these broader debates.

Although the tradition of New Literacy Studies has described literacy in a more multicultural and multimodal frame, it is often silent as to the generational differences in how literacies are valued.

The chapters that follow are organized based on what emerged from our material as the core practices that structure youth engagement with new media.

Media Ecologies, frames the technological and social context in which young people are consuming, sharing, and producing new media.

introduces three genres of participation with new media that are an alternative to common ways of categorizing forms of media access: hanging out, messing around, and geeking out.

following two chapters focus on mainstream friendship-driven practices and networks.

instant messaging, social network sites, and mobile phones

making friendships, gossiping, bullying, and jockeying for status are reproduced online, but they are also reshaped

chapter on Intimacy

examines practices that are a long-standing and pervasive part of everyday youth sociality.

flirting, dating, and breaking up.

these norms largely mirror the existing practices of teen romance

The next chapter on Families also takes up a key “given” set of local social relationships by looking across the diverse families we have encountered in our research. The

use of physical space in the home, routines, rules, and shared production and play. The chapter also examines how the boundaries of home and family are extended through the use of new media.

final three chapters of the book focus primarily on interest-driven genres of participation, though they also describe the interface with more friendship-driven genres.

Gaming examines different genres of gaming practice: killing time, hanging out, recreational gaming, mobilizing and organizing, and augmented game play

Creative Production, looking across a range of different case studies of youth production, including podcasting, video blogging, video remix, hip-hop production, fan fiction, and fansubbing.

Work examines how youth are engaged in economic activity and other forms of labor using new media. The chapter suggests that new media are providing avenues to make the productive work of youth more visible and consequential.

Language, I argue, evolved to fill the gap because it allows us to use the time we have available for social interaction more efficiently.

circle back only people who post about things you are interested in or that relate to you.

you can just remove them.

How Do I Know Who Circles Me Back?

You can see if a specific person has circled you back by clicking on their profile. It will say “so-and-so has you in circles”You can also go to your main circles tab and click on “people who have added you”The final way is to use your Notifications to see who has added you to circles and who has added you back

I have “close” friends and family in a specific circle because I may share different types of content with them than with people I do not know intimately. I also have a circle for “prospects” or potential clients. If they become a client, I move them from “Prospects” to the “Clients” circle. I also create circles for some things not related to my business such as hobbies.

Can People See What Circles They Are In?No. They can only see that you have them in circles.

Do I Make My Posts Public?Making your posts public will increase the amount of people who will see your stream but be cautious of over sharing. You may overrun someone’s stream and they are likely to remove you for it.

you can go back and organize existing circles at any time you wish.

You can choose to post content to:PublicYour circlesExtended circlesAnd below those options you will see all of your circles listed by name

If you want to tag specific people in the post, you can do so using the +. For example, to tag me on Google+, you would type +LisaMason.

curate shared circles with other people.

you have the ability to share those groups with other friends

There are hundreds of shared circles already assembled for everything from Google employees, to social media , to photographers.

Curating circles specific to your niche is a networking strategy

finding pre-made circles for your favorite interests is the Shared Circles on G+ page

The rest of your available time will be used to monitor results, see who re-scooped or shared one of your items, connect to people on a nearly daily basis.

Buffer and Scoop.it can be linked. Which means that you can use Scoop.it as the listening hub and Buffer as a dispatching tool (Publication on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Groups).

The web allows people to decide when, where and how they want to discuss topics, brands, concerns, shopping items and policies.

f you want to start a conversation with your target audiences, you need to think about the  key messages (1 to 3 maximum), an editorial strategy, publishing platforms and sharing platforms.

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.

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.

we should decide that we need to make better tools to solve the problems caused by the initial tools

The world’s best IT is the alphabet

it can be used to compose Shakespearean sonnets

But you can also use the alphabet to compose hate speech

I’m interested in inspiring people to see the ways in which it has extended our possibilities for the better

we’re in need of a new narrative. I see my place as somebody who wants to help craft that narrative.

I begin by deciding on a specific idea I want to ecstatically explore

the videos are noncommercial, they are meant to be seen as mashups.

we map out the vibe and the “feeling” we want. We discuss examples, certain placement and “moments” I want to create, and then she sits on it, gets inspired, interprets and plugs it in. Then we discuss and exchange until we’re happy with it.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.