Is the Internet making us smart or stupid? Venkatesh Rao is an entrepreneur-in-residence in the Xerox Innovation Group and manager of the Trailmeme project. Nicholas Carr, a writer devoted to exploring the social and business implications of technology, came out with his latest book last month. It’s called The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains and is a book-length elaboration of his much-discussed 2008 Atlantic feature, “Is Google Making us Stupid?.” It’s a must-read for Web technologists — not because Carr’s so right, but because he’s so wrong. If you don’t have good answers to the questions Carr raises, you aren’t thinking hard enough about what you are doing. The book extends the modest and relatively defensible argument of the article into an ambitious and fatally-flawed one. Carr’s argument is roughly this: 1. When Carr’s article first appeared, I enthusiastically co-opted it into the pitch for Trailmeme, the beta project I manage at Xerox. Reading The Shallows had me going, “Whoa! I have a problem with this.
Social Networking: The Future Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part guest post by venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners on “Social Networking: The Past, Present, And Future.” Read Part I and Part II first. This series is an adaptation of a recent talk Suster gave at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking.” In my first post I talked about the history of social networking from 1985-2002 dominated by CompuServe, AOL & Yahoo! 1. Right now our social graph (whom we are connected to and their key information like email addresses) is mostly held captive by Facebook. Facebook will succumb to pressure and over time make this available to us to allow us more choice in being part of several social networks without having to spam all of our friends again. 2. Since 2006 I have been lamenting what I see as “the Facebook problem” – they are trying to lump me into one big social network. 3. Facebook made a deal with us that our social network was private. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
5 Strategies for Supporting Bottom-Up Social Media Use Jane Hart writes an interesting post on top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to nurturing social media in organizations, making the excellent point that bottom up support of existing social media activities will work better than imposing social media use from the top down. What I've been observing in my work with clients, though, is a tendency to use top-down strategies to support bottom-up initiatives, especially in organizations where they're just delving into social media use. For example, one organization with which I've been working identified a project where employees had expressed interest in using Facebook as a strategy for sharing information and connecting with stakeholders. Management rightly concluded that it made sense to experiment with social media by supporting this project. Reading Jane's post it occurred to me that we need to have a better understanding of the questions and strategies that will nurture bottom-up participation in social media.
Was ist Konnektivismus? | Silke Hinrichs' Blog Hallo und herzlich willkommen beim Kurs „Konnektivismus und konnektives Wissen” von George Siemens und Stephen Downes. Ich bin Stephen Downes. Im Verlauf dieses Kurses werden wir feststellen, dass Konnektivismus viele der Konzepte in Frage stellt, die in den Bereich von Paul Churchlands Alltagspsychologie fallen. eine Idee haben,von etwas überzeugt sein,etwas als wahr erkennen. Diese Dinge, diese Überzeugungen und andere psychische Zustände findet man in der Psychologie schon seit eh und je, heute aber gibt es ganz neue Theorien zu Wissen, Lernen und Technik. Was ist also Konnektivismus? Lernen ist somit die Fähigkeit, diese Verknüpfungen herzustellen, die Fähigkeit, diese Verbindungen zu nutzen, Informationen über sie zu schicken. Wenn man sich Wissen als ein Geflecht aus Verknüpfungen vorstellt, dann kann man sich jedes Verknüpfungsgeflecht als etwas Lernendes vorstellen. Außerdem sagt der Konnektivismus, dass Wissen nicht propositional ist. (English transcript here).
Khan Academy Social Networking: The Present Editor’s note: This is the second of a three-part guest post by venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners on “Social Networking: The Past, Present, And Future.” Read Part I first, this one, and then Part III. Follow him on Twitter @msuster. This series is an adaptation of a recent talk he gave at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking.” You can watch the video here , or you can scroll quickly through the Powerpoint slides embedded at the bottom of the post or here on DocStoc. Social Networking in Web 2.0: Plaxo & LinkedIn In my last post, I discussed the origins of social networking online, beginning with CompuServe, Prodigy, the Well, then the rise of AOL, Geocities and Yahoo Groups. And come after they did. And importantly Web 2.0 ushered in the era of “participation” – we all know that. But the masses didn’t want to blog. Modern Social Networking: Friendster, MySpace & Facebook Except that MySpace didn’t handle images or video well. Enter Facebook.
An operational attitude towards learning You've probably heard me say this before, but I am increasingly of the view that the workplace training/learning/L&D (whatever they're called in your organisation) team should be moved out of HR and into Operations. Why? Well, HR is responsible for looking after people: their payroll, their working conditions, their treatment under employment law, etc. and has no direct accountability in terms of the organisation's business objectives. L&D's job is all about performance, and performance is an operational thing. Our job is to help the organisation meet its business objectives by helping people do their jobs. While L&D remains under the umbrella of HR, it remains okay to take people out of their workspace and put them into a learning space, and then to put them back into their working space again at the end of it. An operational view of learning means that learning needs to be situated in the workspace, because it's part of the job. In fact, the whole process was a learning process.
Open Online Course – Aufwand von Dozent/innen Fontanefan merkte in seinem Kommentar in meinem Artikel über die Reflexion meiner Abschlussarbeit über den ocwl11, den imensen Arbeitsaufwand bei der Initiierung eines Open Online Courses von Dozent/innen, in diesem Fall von Herrn Moskaliuk beim ocwl11, an. Ich trage hier nochmal die wesentlichen Punkte, die ich in der Arbeit (öffentlich zugänglich) genannt habe zusammen: “Sollen OOCs im Rahmen formaler Lernsettings einer Hochschule realisiert werden, kommt es unwillkürlich zu veränderten bzw. erhöhten Anforderungen an die Dozenten und Studenten.” (Stragies 2012:23) : Anforderungen an Dozent/innen: Habe ich etwas vergessen? Literatur: Spannagel, Christian/Schimpf, Florian (2009): Öffentliche Seminare im Web 2.0. Stragies, Yvonne (2012): Open Course als Lernszenarium für eine Hochschule – lassen sich die Potentiale von lose gekoppelten Netzwerken für formale Lernsettings nutzen?
Q & A: Ask the Van - How to build a model atom. | Department of Physics | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign I need to make a 3 dimensional model of an atom. Can you help with some ideas of constructing this. Thanks- Troy ReynoldsJenkins Middle School, Palatka, Florida USA Troy - Cool project! The basic structure of an atom is that it has little things called neutrons and protons that are stuck together in a ball (called a nucleus) in the middle, with electrons in a bigger fuzzy ball around that. An interesting fact is that although the "cloud" of electrons that surround the nucleus is much much much bigger than the nucleus itself, most of the mass of the atom (more than 99%) is due to the nucleus. The number of protons that an atom has is called its atomic number. As for what to build your atom out of, be creative! -Tamara /(mods by mbw) (republished on 07/21/06) Follow-Up #1: models of atoms i am not sure how to do this project my teacher asked of the class. i am searching on the internet to find a step by step insructional paper on how to make a 3-D model of an atom. Mike W. LeeH OK, we disagree.
Social Networking: The Past Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part guest post by venture capitalist Mark Suster of GRP Partners on “Social Networking: The Past, Present, And Future.” Be sure to also read Part II and Part III. This series is an adaptaion of a recent talk he gave at the Caltech / MIT Enterprise Forum on “the future of social networking.” You can watch the video here , or you can scroll quickly through the Powerpoint slides embedded at the bottom of the post or here on DocStoc. Social Networking 25 Years Ago: CompuServ, Prodigy & The Well Listening to young people talk about social networking as a new phenomenon is a bit like hearing people talk about a remake of a famous song from my youth as though it was the original version. Yes, I was doing it when I was a teenager and yes, it was online, too. In in the early 90′s I was in my early 20′s and I programmed on mainframe computers using COBOL, CICS and DB2. The Bridge Between Online Services & The Internet: AOL And then came AOL. Yahoo!
Overcoming Bipolar Thinking Learning is a continuum of degrees of formality • BY JAY CROSS In the five years since the publication of Informal Learning, I’ve become the Johnny Appleseed of informal learning. I didn’t invent the concept. Informal learning is older than civilization. Formal learning is characterized by a curriculum, i.e., content chosen by someone other than the learner. Often, formal learning is delivered to many people at once. The analogy breaks down because you can ride a bus or a bike, but not both at once. Learning is a continuum of degrees of formality. Permit me to answer the critics of informal learning, usually people who confuse learning and schooling. Question: How do we know that informal learning works? Question: Isn’t informal learning an erosion of discipline and control? Question: What’s the ROI? Question: Where is the evidence that 80 percent of job learning is informal? Formal learning is ideal for novices. Formal learning doesn’t work so well for accomplished practitioners.
Lernen 2.0: Didaktik der Autodidaktik | shift. “Lernen gelernt” zu haben, wird häufig gesagt, ist wichtiger als einzelnen “Stoff” auf Abruf gespeichert zu haben. Klar: Zu wissen, wo und wie ich alles das bekomme, was ich wissen will, ist viel mehr Wert als das einzelne Wissensobjekt. (Von der relativen Nutzlosigkeit von Datensammlungen oder Einzelinformationen im Kopf gar nicht zu reden.) “was ich wissen will” ist dabei übrigens der am meisten ignorierte und meistens unterschätzte Satzteil. Dazu sagt Andreas Schleicher: „[Es kommt] vor allem [auf] die Kompetenz [an], Informationen aus den unterschiedlichsten Bereichen so zu verknüpfen, dass etwas Neues entsteht – eine neue Erkenntnis, eine Entdeckung oder ein neues Produkt. [...] Trotzdem geht es mir heute nicht um Sinnbildungslernen, Freiwilligkeit und Selbststeuerung beim Lernen, wie sonst immer. 1. 2. 3. 4. Es ist nicht wichtig zu wissen, wie diese Medienformen aktuell in zehn Jahren aussehen. Mit einer solchen Persönlichen Lernumgebung (PLE) bzw. Gefällt mir: Gefällt mir Lade...