The Social Construction of Reality. The Social Construction of Reality is a book about the sociology of knowledge written by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann and published in 1966. The work introduced the term social construction into the social sciences and was strongly influenced by the work of Alfred Schütz. The central concept of Social Construction of Reality is that persons and groups interacting in a social system create, over time, concepts or mental representations of each others actions, and that these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other.
When these roles are made available to other members of society to enter into and play out, the reciprocal interactions are said to be institutionalized. In the process of this institutionalization, meaning is embedded in society. Knowledge and people's conception (and belief) of what reality is becomes embedded in the institutional fabric of society. Basic concepts of the book[edit] Semantic fields[edit] What is new about Connectivism (rev1) 2009? « Suifaijohnmak’s Weblog. In The Recognition Factor by Stephen Downes Knowledge is like recognition Learning is like perception the acquisition of new patterns of connectivity through experience Connectivism is new in that it is: about the distribution of knowledge in the network and oneself (including our brain – your and my brain), and the solution lies in one’s brain.
All problems and solutions are there in the brain – your brain if you want to solve the problem, and my brain if it is my problem and solution. This relates back to what connectivism is: Knowledge distributed, learning as networked process (i.e. forming connections), principles form base of all design. About choices: The focus is on choice of connections and the network process, rather than just the outcome. About and around the learner: education, learning is now related back to the learner, with teaching and/or facilitating as a support and network, technology as enabler. Like this: Like Loading... Defining the Big Shift. Signs of epistemic disruption: transformations in the knowledge system of the academic journal. Technology | Web tool 'as important as Google' A web tool that "could be as important as Google", according to some experts, has been shown off to the public.
Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram. The free program aims to answer questions directly, rather than display web pages in response to a query like a search engine. The "computational knowledge engine", as the technology is known, will be available to the public from the middle of May this year. "Our goal is to make expert knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime," said Dr Wolfram at the demonstration at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The tool computes many of the answers "on the fly" by grabbing raw data from public and licensed databases, along with live feeds such as share prices and weather information. People can use the system to look up simple facts - such as the height of Mount Everest - or crunch several data sets together to produce new results, such as a country's GDP. Learning language.