Ted Talks

Where do ideas begin and end? Can ideas be ever completely “owned” as we do we property? Does it all come down to control of resources as a means to be powerful

Maybe ideas are like DNA, that can change and evolve, mutate and be of someone but never completely “theirs”. Maybe ideas, as DNA evolve in spite of us, rather that because of us.

This reminded me of  Kirby Ferguson’s Embracing the Remix

tug-of-war between our need for survival, which relies on safety and stability, and our desire to thrive, which engenders stimulation, exploration, and innovation.

The three affective foundations underpinning neophilia — surprise, curiosity, and interest — are referred to as “knowledge emotions,

why the filter bubble exists

why the Internet is wired to give us more of what we are already looking for, rather than surprise us with something we didn’t know existed but might find infinitely interesting

It reduces the complexity, yes, but more importantly it provides a starting point for a common process. Without it, we would be lost in theory. 

The same holds for learning to some degree. We look for structure, but if none exists on sight, we combine things until some structure emerges. That structure can be represented in a single symbol, but its foundation might shift as new understanding emerges. Occasionally, there is need to ditch the symbols or invent a new one altogether as emerging learning dictates. That is a healthy and complicated process. The MOOC captures this process a bit and adheres to an open structure to allow pattern language to emerge, a shared vocabulary, a knowledge construct (however ephemeral).

Feedback as friction as forces interact. A spark, a collision, waste, and occasionally a nova. A big (learning) bang. This makes me think a learner's responsibility (among many others) is to be open to this collision of actors, agents, feedback, waste, noise, and then, ideally, pattern, understanding. The only way out is through.

Disturbing- an ontological disturbance, an unknown, an uncanny sense of veering through uncharted, potentially treacherous waters. It is a good place to be as a learner, but it requires a strength and confidence that only an empowered learner could put forth. But in that disturbance, that mess, there is the friction, that meat-grinder of understanding.

This is learning as curiosity and sometimes it can be quite scary. 

Often we seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge (anyone subjected to my endless banal history lessons will understand this), but I do believe that most learning is action oriented. To learn not only to get a job, to live in a world, to subsist, but rather for acting as best as we can. For improvement, for progress, for self-actualization.

disaggregated, emotive, functional machine of interaction. One that has to be tinkered with constantly. 

2. Too many aspects of my sensemaking system are manua

Information is not something that has value in itself. We use it to do something

What tools do you use? Eric von Stackelberg Profile Edit profile icon Following Followers Market Posts Poll Pages Blog Files Photo Albums I have moved to fewer tools with the intention of increasing the depth of data held in those tools while reducing duplication.

You contribute to shaping and defining the course.

steps to participating in a MOOC:

first orient yourself to the environment and space of learning

Secondly, you have to orient yourself to the course content.

5. Think about how you’ll manage course informatio

1. Somewhat define your goals.

2. Declare/Define yourself

3. Plan your interaction habits

4. Build your network through participation and interaction with others

where can people find you?

6. Create and share

7. Fix what’s missing

8. Manage you expectations.

9. Persistence

Does this idea of having students frame questions about their papers and writing offer a solution? The faculty who tried the approach found that students struggled mightily with the task

It’s pretty easy to understand why students would find this task challenging. Most (especially beginning students) have little or no experience assessing their own work and then to have to frame a question that would elicit feedback helpful to improving your next paper—that’s a pretty complicated task. But it’s such a good one.

I wonder if there might be some ways to reframe the task that would make it easier initially. Maybe students need guidelines early on: Identify the part of the paper you had the most trouble with and ask a question about it. Identify the part of the paper you think turned out best and explain why you feel good about it

a potentially promising idea with the dual benefits of developing a great self-assessment skill and directing feedback

The 5 questions that I ask are: 1) What are you trying to say here (what's the thesis/main point)? 2) Why is what you are trying to say important? 3) What is working in the piece and why? 4) What is not working in the piece and why? 5) What questions do you have for me?

If students feel that they are graded on the writers that they currently are rather than the writer that they are trying to be, many will be hesitant to open an honest dialogue.

dialogical cover sheet dates back to the expressivist movement in composition studies in the 1980s. I first came across it through Peter Elbow's writing

scaffolding the feedback process by offering students the opportunity to identify aspects of the paper or parts of the paper they would like their instructor to respond to is empowering pedagogy

technology

‘complex’ phenomena as different from ‘complicated’ phenomena

dependence on a large number of ‘weak ties’ in knowledge networks

connectivist notion of knowledge and learning existing outside the individual human brain

web of nodes and connections

Bonkers.

transient content

Notes on some of the other resources

This one... a gonzo style interview with a dude who’s been in the industry

“more is different” it’s a classic. it says that… uh… more is different. Is short and approachable.

http://www.dataists.com/2010/09/the-data-science-venn-diagram/ A beginners guide to figuring out what the charts might mean

This week’s presentation – Ryan S.J.d Baker

a sense of what they actually do with the testing

This week’s activity SNAPP is uh… kind of a snap.

What is new with constructivism today is that these principles are being (have been) coupled with existing calls for educational reform

calls for increased learner control

From whence does connectivism originate?

1. Tools augment our ability to interact with each other and to act.

“carriers of patterns of previous reasoning”

all technology carries an ideology.

2. Contextual/situated nature of learning.

3. Social learning theory

4. Epistemological views: all learning theory is rooted in epistemology

5. Concept of mind.

6. We also find a compatible view of connectivism in the work of new media theorists such as McLuhan

7. We also find support for connectivism in the more nebulous theories of complextiy and systems-based thinking

8. Network theory

The Unique Ideas in Connectivism

1. Connectivism is the application of network principles to define both knowledge and the process of learning.

2. Connectivism addresses the principles of learning at numerous levels – biological/neural, conceptual, and social/external

3. Connectivism focuses on the inclusion of technology as part of our distribution of cognition and knowledge.

4. Context. While other theories pay partial attention to context, connectivism recognizes the fluid nature of knowledge and connections based on context

5. Understanding. Coherence. Sensemaking. Meaning.

impossible to follow every discussion

gravitational fields that people follow, and where they group together

fluidity of people between nodes

fixed points of stimulating weekly keynote presentations

strategy to manage my approach of accessing the knowledge spread across the course.

learners are a diverse group

uniformity of university program tracks masks the differences of learners.

In an open course, participants aren’t filtered in the same way.

Higher education generally homogenizes learners through pre-requisites or subject streams (programs).

we begin to connect with those who respond favorably, we gravitate toward those who we find interesting (but not so interesting that we feel no connection),

One of the primary ways of connecting with others in an open course is through creating and sharing artifacts of sensemaking.

When our learning is transparent, we become teachers.

Essentially, we form small sub-networks that connect (lattice-like) to other sub-networks

What about the information that is actually consumed?

households were bombarded with 3.6 zettabytes of information (or 34 gigabytes per person per day)

half of all bytes are received interactively

“information created by machines and used by other machines will probably grow faster than anything else,”

‘database to database’ information

Only 5% of the information that is created is “structured”, meaning it comes in a standard format of words or numbers that can be read by computers.

changing as content on the web is increasingly “tagged”, and facial-recognition and voice-recognition software can identify people and words in digital files.

How knowledge is “grown” as individuals interact with others

How individual learners develop their conceptual understanding of a topic

How teams solve complex problems

tools and activities that are most effective

How individual learners “eliminate” unneeded or irrelevant ideas and concepts

explore various methods for analyzing data

tools that aid that analysis.

Reflections on Open Courses: Curation, Ombuds, and Concierges

focus in LAK11 is to explore how we can better use data

methods for analyzing data produced by learners and numerous tools that aid that analysis

Google’s search algorithm has been ruined argues

What’s the solution? Well, a return to curation, of course.

What does this have to do with LAK11?

over the last five years, social networks and social media have taken over the web

We trust people we like, people with whom we feel a connection

All social interactions are information. Many information interactions are social.

urators – they present their views and spin existing stories within the framework of their beliefs

“temporary centres”.

problem of how to create temporary centres

ome commentary or facilitator posts

LAK11, we’ve taken a different approach. We’ve retained similar course design elements to previous open online courses (OOCs – I’m starting to think that M=Massive part of MOOCs is misleading or even off-putting

What we gain in our decision to run this course on various sites, using more or less accessible tools, is the demonstration that anyone with an interesting topic/idea and a willingness to experiment can open up a course for a broader audience.

What we lose – and I’m still uneasy about this trade off – is the integrated archive of activity in the course.

Complexity cannot be understood solely through algorithms

data mining, visualization

human aspect of data, sensemaking, curation, and trust