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One thought on "How does it feel to think?"

Profile photo of Yin Wah Kreher Yin Wah Kreher
January 19, 2015 at 3:45 pm Edit

I don't think in music. It's fascinating that you can identify a particular tune that guides (facilitates?) thinking. When I need heavy mental effort, I need total silence. :-) It's interesting how different people think and feel when they think. Like you, I've never thought about my feelings when I think. It's after thinking that I may feel various emotions, or not. Feel free to drop by my thoughts on this. I wrote a post on it: http://justywk.blogspot.com/2014/06/thought-vectors-how-thinkaholic-feels.html

Yin Wah Kreher says: February 13, 2015 at 8:10 pm Edit I love how you are thinking. I can see your thoughts connecting from "I used to think…" to "Now I think…" There is also other dimensions of comparative thinking going on here. Keep on thinking and sharing your thoughts!

"A GIF, in many ways, can be an even more effective form of visual communication than emoji because of the movement in an animation that provides a greater range of expression."

"Meet Diigo Outliner - the best way to structurally organize your information and thoughts "

60 second adventures in thought from The Open University.

FWIW, I think Mike Caulfield is one of the brightest and most thoughtful people in higher ed. I like this post very much.

""We do not face a choice between tradition and change, between the familiar and the new. We face an opportunity and an imperative both to embrace thoughtful change and to affirm our core values in ways that fulfill this extraordinary university's enduring promise to its students and to the world.""

"And without a common language for describing what works and what doesn't, our work isn't being pushed or explored further. I see example after example appearing online, that people have clearly spent time and thought into making, which cover the same ground and also share the same mistakes. Experimentation is great if you're learning. If you're not, it's just expensive. The words we've been using so far, like "intuitive" and "immersive," are overloaded with meaning. Let's drop them. What are we really trying to say? By pulling these words apart, we may find more precise ways that pinpoint the different problems we are trying to solve. "

"The Science of Online Discussions Our working knowledge regarding distance education suggests that productive discussions are essential to learning in an asynchronous online environment. Online discussions effectively take the place of face-to-face classroom discussion. It has even been suggested that, if well facilitated, online discussions may allow for more in-depth and thoughtful learning than is possible in a face-to-face setting (Hawkes, 2006). Gao, Wang, and Sun (2009) contend that in a productive online discussion, it is essential for participants to embrace the following four dispositions:"

Blogging is a platform for free people. We've seen people distort what blogging means to the point where blogging is a job for some. I never thought of it that way. It's a way to tell your story, to share what you see, to process it, draw conclusions, and move on. It's like a fresco painting. Or an interview with a reporter. It's quick, it's over, and it's done with"

It's a bit insane to me this was a conversation but it's one that ought to happen much more. Are we practicing what we preach? "One of my undergrads came up to me and said, 'You know, Professor, your ideas about games as models for learning environments are really interesting, but I'm curious, why don't you teach your class following those ideas?'" Mr. Fishman says. "And I thought, Well, that's a really excellent question."

"The emerging digital media ecology is opening/will open indeterminate capacities for thought and action that will shift (again, in a non-determining way) practices of rhetoric/communication, social institutions, the production of knowledge, and our sense of what it means to be human." PONDER THAT FOR A MOMENT...

"Giving a syllabus a profound inside-out reorganization is more than just window dressing. It involves deep thought about your course content and how a student encounters it. Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message" and while the traditional medium for a syllabus is a portrait-oriented 8.5×11 text document printed on paper and handed out the first day of class… it needn't be the only possibility.

Key element in instructional design as well. "When I reflected on what I wanted people to understand, what the core thing was, it wasn't a technique. It wasn't a visual style. It wasn't learning a certain program. The core thing was making sure that you never thought about the product from your point of view, but from somebody else's point of view. That's what prompted the [The Paradox of Empathy] post. "

"What's neat about this is that I didn't have to use any special software while I was writing to make this "video" possible. I was working in plain old vanilla Google Docs. And to show you this one paragraph I liked, I didn't have to present you with the whole document (all 39,154 revisions of it) - I could extract bits and pieces that I thought were interesting, and interleave them in a blog post. Imagine what a high school English teacher could do with that. Imagine what you could do with that if instead of a minor effort by ol' Somers here you had, say, a piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (I've always wanted to watch how TNC writes. If he's ever used Google Docs, it's now possible.)"

I love this: "I worry that most people aren't as good writers as they should be. One thing is that they just don't write enough. Another is that they don't realize it's supposed to be hard; they think that good writers are talented, when the truth is that good writers get good the way good programmers get good, the way good anythings get good: by running into the spike. Maybe folks would understand that better if they had vivid evidence that a good writer actually spends most of his time fighting himself."

I/we need to consider this with our team and education more broadly. "Theory 1: Nothing we "know" about software development should be assumed to be true. Most of our tools, our mental models, and our practices are remnants of an era (possibly fictional) where software was written by solo practitioners, but modern software is a team sport. Theory 2: Technology is the product of the culture that builds it. Great technology is the product of a great culture. Culture gives us the ability to act in a loosely coupled way; it allows us to pursue a diversity of tactics. Uncertainty is the mind-killer and culture creates certainty in the face of the yawning shapeless void of possible solutions that is software engineering. Culture is what you do, not what you say. It starts at the top. It affects everything. You have a choice about the culture you promote, not about the culture you have. Theory 3: Software development should be thought of as a cycle of continual learning and improvement rather a progression from start to finish, or a search for correctness. If you aren't shipping, you aren't learning. If it slows down shipping, it probably isn't worth it. Maturity is knowing when to make the trade off and when not to. I had some experience with this at Flickr, and I wanted to see how far you could scale it. My private bet was that we'd make it to 50 engineers before things broke down. Theory 4: You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. Your improvement, over time, as a team, with shared tools, practices and beliefs is more important than individual pockets of brilliance. And more satisfying. Theory 5: If you want to build for the long term, the only guarantee is change. Invest in your people and your ability to ask questions, not your current answers. Your current answers are wrong, or they will be soon. "

"A common phenomenon at the time was that people would start blogging on Blogger - because it was free, popular, and easy to set up - and then "graduate" to more powerful tools. Movable Type, Greymatter, and, later, Wordpress, had a much higher barrier to entry (before WP had turnkey hosting). But once someone had discovered the joys of sharing thoughts on the Internet, they were willing to invest the effort in order to get the added features and flexibility that the install-on-your-server software afforded."

""Twitter is really useful for simultaneous monitoring of events in real time," says Witze (who is also on TON's Board of Directors). At another meeting, the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston in March 2015, she went to a session about the MAVEN mission to Mars. She used real-time Twitter feeds to get a sense of what the scientists in the room thought was important, and wrote up this story while the speakers were still talking. The real-time feedback she got from Twitter was "like having a small army of smart people helping out," Witze says. And following the live tweets provides "a whole other level of commentary" that can be valuable for identifying sources to interview for a story. "

What we're seeing most recently, and what I'm very excited about, is going from that linear model to a much more non-linear idea. The digital learning experience is becoming really a collection of inter-related learning nuggets, that you might take very different paths through, depending who you are and what your needs are, and how you learn most effectively.

" [This approach] is really not trying to mimic what we would do in the physical world, but starting from an entirely digital form, and really being very thoughtful about what the learning outcomes are that we're trying to achieve, and how can the technology enable us to achieve those outcomes. There are many things that are very different about how you would design learning and work, if you really are doing it from a digital-first standpoint. In trying to do the latter, what are some of the principles you keep coming back to? "