And one thing I’ve learned is that everything is interesting if looked at at the appropriate level of detail.
Now, it used to be that you’d have to seek out places to plunge in over your head. But now, in the age of the Internets, all we have to do is stand still and the flood waters rise over our heads. We usually call this “information overload,” and we’re told to fear it. But I think that’s based on an old idea we need to get rid of.
Here’s what I mean. So, you know Flickr, the photo sharing site? If you go there and search for photos tagged “vista,” you’ll get two million photos, more vistas than you could look at if you made it your full time job.
If you go to Google and search for apple pie recipes, you’ll get over 1.3 million of them. Want to try them all out to find the best one. Not gonna happen.
If you go to Google Images and search for “cute cats,” you’ll get over seven million photos of the most adorable kittens ever, as well as some ads and porn, of course, because Internet.
So that’s two million vista photos. 1.3 million apple pie recipes. 7.6 million cute cat photos. We’re constantly warned about information overload, yet we never hear one word single word about the dangers of Vista Overload, Apple Pie Overload, or Cute Kitten overload. How have the media missed these overloads! It’s a scandal!
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May « 2014 « Too Big to Know - 0 views
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For example, in the old days if you watched the daily half hour broadcast news or spent twenty minutes with a newspaper, you had done your civic duty: you had kept up with The News. Now we can see before our eyes what an illusion that sense of mastery was. There’s too much happening on our diverse and too-interesting planet to master it, and we can see it all happening within our browsers
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t Wikipedia, the articles are often relatively short, but they typically have dozens or even hundreds of links. So rather than trying to get everything about, say, Shakespeare into a couple of thousand words, Wikipedia lets you click on links to other articles about what it mention — to Stratford-on-Avon, or iambic pentameter, or about the history of women in the theater.
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And it’s not just the quantity of information that makes true mastery impossible in the Age of the I
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And just one more thing about these messy webs. They’re full of disagreement, contradiction, argument, differences in perspective. Just a few minutes on the Web reveals a fundamental truth: We don’t agree about anything. And we never will. My proof of that broad statement is all of human history. How do you master a field, even if you could define its edges, when the field doesn’t agree with itself?
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Week 3 Reflection on Me as a student | Learning to learn with NGL - 1 views
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In my last post, I introduced Helsper and Enyon’s (2009) idea that exposure to, and experience using, various digital technologies can have more of an influence that generation age on determining whether a person has the characteristics of a digital immigrant or a digital native. Of course, nothing is ever so clear cut. In his blog, Wesley Fryer discusses this, and expands the immigrant vs native classification into four categories, as shown below.
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Personally, I think even this is a simplification, and that a person’s classification may vary depending on the technology referred to. For example, until recently I was a digital refugee with regards to smart phones and associated apps – and yet reading news report on-line is an integral component of my daily routine. I would probably class as a Voyeur with regards to Twitter and Flickr in that I am aware of them, and will use them to gain information but I do not follow anyone, or actively participate myself. Thus there are multiple shades of grey.
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Goodyear, Carvalho and Dohn (2014, p 140) state that networked learning “ is no longer exotic”, however, I would argue that this very much depends on on one’s own perspective, which in turn would be shaped by personal experience and knowledge (aka the whole digital landscape debate).
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I would generally agree that as a student, I tend to be quite focused, like an ordered approach, and work better as an individual than as part of a community. The concepts of ‘shared learning’ is quite alien to me – as is the concept of allowing the “mess” to be apparent. It is quite contradictory to my scientific researcher – the data is analysed, the results and interpretation finalised, and the presentation polished before the work is released to the world at large (typically via a published paper or article). Only those directly collaborating on the work see the mess, being asked to share this process on-line is really quite intimidating to me, and conflicts with my view of professionalism (as well as my tendency towards perfectionism).
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So, as a student, I think I challenges on several fronts, not just learning the technology, and associated pedagogy, but also challenges to how I perceive and present myself to the world, and what that means to me as a person, and as a collaborator.
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So, as a student, I think I face challenges on several fronts, not just learning the technology, and associated pedagogy, but also challenges to how I perceive and present myself to the world, and what that means to me as a person, and as a collaborator
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An attempt to demonstrate how (if) I am meeting the assessment criteria for Assignment 1. I think the grading is rather oblique - how does one distinguish between acceptable and exemplary? Where does this post fit? Feedback or thoughts on this would be welcome.
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An attempt to demonstrate how (if) I am meeting the assessment criteria for Assignment 1. I think the grading is rather oblique - how does one distinguish between acceptable and exemplary? Where does this post fit? Feedback or thoughts on this would be welcome.