This lecture on neursocience (the search for a "unitary brain algorithm") makes this statement about 9 minutes in: "All cortex is the same". Basically, we have sections of our brain that perform certain functions...but if an area is damaged, other areas of the cortex can be repurposed to serve those functions. The cortex is the ecology in which networks form?
We are due for some serious criticism of web 2.0, user-created content, wisdom of the crowds, and all that fun stuff. Conferences, instructional designers, bloggers, newspapers, etc. are consumed with these tools. I personally have high hopes for collaborative social software...but blind use and adoption without understanding the nuances of the tools and the implications they create isn't the way forward. The web is dead; long live the web is not a great critique of web 2.0...but at least it's an attempt. As with any network, diverse nodes (even contradictory) are important. One dimensional views (the techno-evangelical zeal of "we have found the answer in blogs, wikis") require the presence of an opposing view to foster critical thinking. In the end, we may well still settle on blogs/wikis/social software...but at least we will have done so through significant thinking, not blind acceptance.
I received a link to this wonderful resource - Visualization Methods - from Jay Kay. It's a bit slow loading...but once the page opens, mouse over each element for a small graphic of the visualization type.
I've posted the slides from my elluminate presentation on slideshare version ...powerpoint slides.
The direct link to the session recording is available here...or the overview page is here.
Basic message: Visualization of information is not the end itself. Visualization is a gateway to greater understanding, especially when the quantity of information gets to be overwhelming.
I will be presenting Patterns And Sensemaking: Information Visualization durinng a live (online) elluminate event this week Wednesday, April 25 at 2 PM EDT. Registration is free, if you're interested in attending.
heh. From YouTube to YouNiversity: "To educate such students, we don't so much need a faculty as we need an intellectual network."
I posted an article on data visualization on the connectivism blog...and just now came across a stunning set of images that portray how data visualization is able to communicate and impact at an emotional level: An American Self-Portrait: "Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books."
Gender Genie is an online analysis tool that determines the gender of an author by a sample of her/his writing (via Everything is Miscellaneous). After several text submissions, I'm still male. Which is accurate. So that means it works, right?
This morning, at the rather unpleasant time of 5:30, I delivered an online presentation (audio here) on views of learning as constructions and connections. Thanks to Teemu Arina (who was recently interviewed by Robin Good...video: part 1 and part 2) for the invite and making the arrangements. I will say, however, that I need to consume at least one cup of coffee before doing a presentations. My neurons were not connecting well. Hope I didn't come across as too incoherent. The Q & A session (not recorded) started with the typical "it's all been said before" (i.e. our existing theories of learning address concerns of abundance, patterning, and filtering). My view: if it takes three combined theories to say approximately one thing, you have a new theory.
Saw this via slashdot - Fora.tv: "...delivers discourse, discussions and debates on the world's most interesting political, social and cultural issues, and enables viewers to join the conversation. It provides deep, unfiltered content, tools for self-expression and a place for the interactive community to gather online."
The video quality is quite good...but, in reality, not everyone is suited to be a presenter in the online video medium - especially when we are looking at 40+ minute lectures. Boredom sets in quickly. Perhaps I'd be more inclined to watch on a video iPod while travelling.
When I speak of connectivism, I'm focusing on initial cracks of change where light is seen through the traditional wall of content, knowledge, and learning. I've used the example of blogs and wikis - which originated in the fast-paced world technology - as first generation tools and approaches to manage abundance. Abundance changes how we relate to each other and to content. This initial change is still largely seen through traditional views of knowing. As change becomes more rapid, we start to see that the smaller level changes we are now seeing in abundance are not so consequential as what that the changes, once extended a decade or so into the future, mean. The shadows of what we are seeing now, as they become more illuminated, form the basis for a connective view of knowledge and learning. This article addresses some of what that future may look like (but, as always, context plays a role...numerous trends may change the direction...which, in a networked view of the world, is just fine, as networks are about adaptation): Meet the metaverse: "The Internet in 2016 will be an all-encompassing digital playground where people will be immersed in an always-on flood of digital information, whether wandering through physical spaces or diving into virtual worlds."
Is Google too powerful?: " Googlezon, GoogleWorld, just plain Google—whatever you call it, it's scaring the wits out of everyone from the power lunchers of Hollywood to Madison Avenue ad moguls to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs...More than anyone else, Google is defining the new architecture of media and commerce in the digital world. The unruly expanse of the Internet and its opportunities cries out for a map, and that's what Google is building out of tens of thousands of server computers around the world that handle quadrillions of bytes of data. With each new search whose data refine that map, with each new business that links its own digital explorations to the search engine, Google gains more knowledge and more power."
Duncan Watts has an article on the cumulative effects of popularity: "Ultimately, we’re all social beings, and without one another to rely on, life would be not only intolerable but meaningless. Yet our mutual dependence has unexpected consequences, one of which is that if people do not make decisions independently — if even in part they like things because other people like them — then predicting hits is not only difficult but actually impossible, no matter how much you know about individual tastes.
The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory."
Somedays I feel as if our cause-effect world has turned completely random...and as is stated in the article - "Our desire to believe in an orderly universe leads us to interpret the uncertainty we feel about the future as nothing but a consequence of our current state of ignorance, to be dispelled by greater knowledge or better analysis. But even a modest amount of randomness can play havoc with our intuitions."
Yesterday, as I heard the news unfolding on the Virginia Tech tragedy, I had a familiar sinking feeling - encountered and even conditioned by events over the last ten years of tragedy and life lost: tsunamis, terrorism, hurricanes, and school shootings. Natural disasters produce questions of "why" and “what could have been done differently”. But when a person (or group of people) takes the lives of others, it pushes to the front self-evaluations of "what does it mean to be human"? How can someone be so possessed with anger/rage/hatred? The daily optimism I feel for new approaches in education, technology, and the creation of a more humane and equitable world suddenly feel like child's play and wishful thinking. The duality of humanity – capacity for great love and great evil - tear at my ability to filter the world through my existing cognitive make up. My daily activities feel small.
My heart and prayers go out to those affected. David Carter-Todd - one of the first bloggers I followed - reports he and family are safe. Greg Ritter shares personal reflections as a former student of Virginia Tech...and concludes: "And as miserable and helpless as I feel, I can't imagine how horrible it is for those living through it."
...and, on a personal note, I find few things more distasteful than the premature desire for people to lay blame and start to promote personal agendas. Too quickly, the conversation has moved from human tragedy to gun control - for and against. I've read accounts of a student representative who put forward the notion that this tragedy could have been averted if everyone had been carrying a gun (assuming someone would have shot the shooter)…and others who state that if stricter gun control were in place, this could have been prevented. This is not the time for those discussions. Let people mourn. We'll have time to step up to pulpits to express our ideologies. For now, it's not about us or our own views about guns and culture. It's about the people who lost loved ones.
Brian Lamb offers a model of content publishing representative of how I think our educational models should move forward: "Content is created in whatever environment the author feels most comfortable with -- so long as it generates full RSS feeds. Content is then syndicated, maybe remixed with other feeds, and then republished wherever the readers are, in as many places as is desirable."
The challenge with the distributed content model (the notion that educational content comes to the learner's space, rather than the learner coming to a space decided by the educational facility) is that it runs against the in-grained assumptions of our value point in higher education or corporate environments. Conversations around content (which leads to greater understanding of the content) is where we need to invest our time. But the most expensive aspect of education and training currently rests in creating and distributing content (from instructional design, to content development, to content presentation). Conversation and dialogue - where the real learning happens - is treated as an after thought. What Brian suggests with distributed content syndication and publishing doesn't address the challenge of moving from content to conversation/connections, but it creates the space in which it can happen more readily than our current model.
Alan Levine on personal learning environments: "But in researching it, beyond papers, presentations, and digrams, I could not really find something I could say, “This is a PLE” — not discounting successful deployments of learning environments using a network of blogs +/- wikis, but is every instance of using a suite of web tools a PLE? In that case, my definition of a PLE is the Internet. And what does that get us?"
PLEs aren't an entity, structural object or software program in the sense of a learning management system. Essentially, they are a collection of tools, brought together under the conceptual notion of openness, interoperability, and learner control. As such, they are comprised of two elements - the tools and the conceptual notions that drive how and why we select individual parts. PLEs are a concept-entity. Problem is, however, that we are discussing PLEs as if they were solely an entity - so we compare PLEs with an LMS and other entity-based learning tools...but if PLEs exist at all, they are very personalized and individual (hey, maybe that's why they are called personal learning environments!). My PLE may consist of an entirely different combination and set of tools than a colleague’s. The complexity is raised when we consider the environment aspect of the definition. Theoretically, that means, as we move forward with technology adoption, the ongoing use of technology and information in devices - such as a Blackberry or RFID tags - comprise the overall notion of a PLE (i.e. there is room for growth in our definition of PLEs). Personally, I prefer the notion of an ecology that demonstrates that it's not just us imposing order on the world around, but the ecology itself influences what is able and what we actually do.
This is important: Weinberger states: "Truth is a property of networks...It is, of course, an unowned, self-contradictory, unsettled truth that is too big to be contained by any individual. It is outside of us and among us. It is gained not by trying to contain it but by traveling through it."
I agree...it's inline with what Stephen Downes has been saying, though his focus is more on the emergent nature of meaning as a function of networks.
This gets back to some conversations (and here...and here) I've had in the past on the objective/subjective nature of knowledge. If, as Weinberger asserts, truth is a property of networks, it generates, partly, the notion of synchronization advocated by Steven Strogatz. Simply - some physical items do not connect unless they share some capacity or similarity to enable connection/synchronization. This capacity to synchronize is based on clear attributes contained in physical entities, outside of our interpretation as humans (i.e. an item is more than our perception of it, it possesses something in itself that is acknowledged by the item which seeks to synchronize with it), as reflected by organism's (or atoms or other physical entity) ability to recognize and meaningfully relate to the attributes contained in "the other". Truth, then, as a function/attribute/property of networks, also suggests that the objective attributes of entities extend beyond what they are in themselves and what is created as these entities are combined in a myriad of possible ways. The truth represented by the network is a repurposing of the attributes held in an entity...a creation of something new, but that possesses, in part, the attributes each entity held prior to being consummated into a network. This doesn't say anything about understanding and meaning - at this level, subjectivity becomes more prominent. Do ideas or people possess the same self-organizing elements that are reflected in nature? What happens when people inject volition and will into the nature of connection forming? A self-forming network based on synchronization of similarity and recognition of attributes inherent in the items involved, is different from people injecting subjectivity through choice and reflection. Put another way, an entity "is", but when influenced by our choice in connecting and organizing, it becomes what we "will it" to be and only then shifts to subjectivity.
Update: David updates the post: "It would have been clearer for me to say understanding is a property of networks. Then I wouldn't have left the impression that I think facts are a matter of majority opinion. Facts are facts. That's pretty much their essence. Understanding, however, is plural, at least in many domains — less so in the sciences, more so in the humanities."
The state of social networking software for the enterprise: "Applying social networks in the enterprise is a sweet spot that has massive potential value. At the heart of the issue is how you tap the true potential of an organization, by bringing its most relevant expertise and resources to where they can be of most value."
Two things come to mind with enterprise use of social tools:
1) Organizations that I've worked with are generally too unaware of themselves and their strengths and expertise. Social software can greatly aid the "coming to know oneself" that most larger corporations need...but too often, hierarchy and information secrecy reduce it's effectiveness.
2) Expertise and knowledge are not "database-able". They reside in people. And tools are required that initiate and sustain dialogue that translates into deeper levels of understanding. Software, like social networking tools, is an enabler, but often clashes against the existing culture of the organization. Software implementation is a change process...
Time Update: On Thursday, April 12 at 11:00 am, Peter Tittenberger and I will be presenting on the Virtual Learning Commons project at University of Manitoba. We'll discuss the vision behind the project, what it is, lessons learned, and current research. VLC is our "MySpace meets 43 Things meet library" project...trying to provide services in a format that learners today will use. Consider this your open invitation to attend (you can access the session here)!
A few recordings of recent presentations:
Last year, I presented at OnlineEduca in Berlin. The video of the session is now available...and last week I chatted with Women of the Web 2.0. The audio of the session is also available.
Five ways to mark up the web suggests some tools for annotating websites. I've played around with a few (heard quite a bit about Trailfire, but haven't used it) different annotation tools - StumbleUpon being the one I've spent the most time with (though it's focused more on social connections and comments/ratings on sites in general, less about specific annotation). The ability to "write into" the contexts of others muddies the already hazy lines of content creator and consumer.
I used to spend my day managing email. Then, it was RSS feeds. Now, it's trying to stay current with friends in Facebook, Linkedin, Explode, Elgg, Twitter, and, occasionally, friends in real life. I now have the joy of filing out profiles with each new service I join. Decentralizing friends, relationships, and knowledge is great. But I prefer to have my ID centralized. It's like database redundancy. Why not just keep unique data in one place? If it's repeated in numerous locations, accuracy becomes an issue. One profile, fed into many systems - seems simple.
While not quite what I'm looking for, the challenge of following friends from other sites can be attended to with Loopster: "Loopster enables you to import your friends from various social networks, connect them together and watch how they change." While that's great, soon I'll need an aggregator to aggregate my aggregations. Then I will be fulfilled. Until the next iteration.
TechCrunch lists a few other options for profile management.
CNET has a short video on (first you have to watch a 15 second commercial) robots designed (at a very prelimenary level) to function in dangerous environments. Question: why are robots generally designed in human form? Do we view them as less threatening? Arms, legs, head...no bonus points for creativity.
A Methodology for Complex Problems: "The great challenge we have in any open, self-managed process is that the more informed you are about a subject, the more likely you are to have already formed conclusions about approaches and even answers to the problems it presents."
Terry Anderson posts on McLuhan and Personal Learning Environments: "[McLuhan] argued that every new media Enhances through new affordances, Obsoletes through improvements in form, function and cost; Retrieves older patterns of behaviour and Reverses when over stressed into older, non functional patterns."
I agree in principle with personal learning environments (PLE's) sharing some attributes of new media (with media/medium being loosely defined as means of sharing/communicating something...a newspaper is a medium of communicating via print, TV via images, a sculptor via physical medium, a photographer via images, the web via bits). In the simple sense of communicating and sharing, PLEs are a medium. But there is an additional dimension in play. Yes, all media, in McLuhan's world, work us over completely. Education is more than media, at least partly due to how it impacts us internally. Learning, while facilitated by media like blogs, podcasts, and wikis, has an internal dimension (the neural networks formed in our brains). PLEs are ecologies that utilize media elements, but in themselves are not media ("media as extensions of man" suggests that we use media to enlarge our capacity...at this level, we could say that PLEs have some attributes of media, but possess additional elements that lift them to a more aggregated level - namely that spaces that hold the media). At least in my world. But then again, when would McLuhan say something that simplified, rather than confused a situation?
Adoption of emerging tools and approaches: "McKinsey cites that fully 48% of the nearly 3,000 leading executives surveyed are actively investing in collective intelligence approaches. What makes this interesting is that this number is a good bit more than executives are currently reporting that they are investing in other well known Web 2.0 approaches including social networking, RSS, podcasting, and even wikis and blogs, which come in about 1/3 lower in overall interest. In fact, out of all the Web 2.0 trends surveyed, only Web services has a bigger footprint than collective intelligence in terms of current investment."
Obviously investment flows where results are anticipated. RSS, podcasting, and blogs don't provide the same immediate results that "collective intelligence" does. What is the value of a corporate blogger? Perhaps long term PR or relationship building. Get five people to start working together more effectively, and you can have immediate results. This is partly due to the interconnected need of any organization. We have to work together to get anything significant accomplished. Wikis lower the barriers to participation we may have had previously.
Occasionally, I encounter articles which captures a certain spirit of change - the gap between what is happening and what is being left behind in the transformation. Pearls before Breakfast is such an article. The key question being asked: What happens when we take a spectacularly talented musician (the violinist, Joshua Bell) and remove him from the context of a symphony hall and have him perform in a public space instead. Do we recognize (or have time for) brilliance when we encounter it in unusual contexts? (via Anecdote)
Mind Games: "How would you like to rearrange the famous sarsens of Stonehenge just by thinking about it? Or improve your virtual golf by focusing your attention on the ball for a few moments before taking your next putt on the green-on-the-screen?"
I've mentioned previously that I was going on a Google diet. I don't want to be too tied into one product. So I tried A9for a while. Went back to Google. Tried Yahoo mail. Went back to Google. I'm gaining weight on my Google diet. Anyway, so Google now announced a new service called "MyMaps" - you can create and save personal maps - an excellent tool that I imagine conference organizers, geography teachers, tourist attractions, etc. will find immediate use for. I spent exactly two minutes putting together a personalized map of where I was born and where I work. Incredibly simple. The Google Blog has a series of great examples (done by people with more discipline than I possess) of MyMaps, including use of pictures to highlight key attractions. People have been doing this with Google Maps for a while, but not with the drop-dead simplicity available here. Awesome stuff. I hate Google.
Bill Tripp links to an article on the print death watch: "A small handful of publishers made recent announcements on their decisions to cease publishing in print and move to sole digital content delivery."
Doc Searls states: "The Static Web is what holds still long enough for Google and Yahoo to send out spiders to the entire universe and index what they find. The Live Web is is what's happening right now."
...and Dave Winer weighs in with: "Eventually new businesses will form out of the messy brew of sources, editors and reporters you'll be supporting and in some cases, employing. The publishers and owners must also keep their eyes and minds open, be creative, no one knows the future, but there certainly is one, even if some days it feels like there isn't."
The challenges of media are providing valuable lessons for education. Any industry that has formerly viewed content as the key value point - media, newspapers, education, museums, libraries - are in the middle of a substantial shift. As I've stated with connectivism...and in Knowing Knowledge...content changes too rapidly to be our value point. Connections and conversations - processes which mediate and create content - coupled with context is the basis of our future knowledge creation cycle.
Research is great. It allows us to find support for the answers we already have: Multi-tasking. Contrast with Times - Multitasking Generation. As Doug Belshaw notes, it's really about context. Multi-tasking while driving in a car (and shaving, doing make up) is quite different from checking email, writing a report, and replying to an instant message. Common sense and balance are virtues.
Numerous sites have linked to this, but it's worth highlighting - 23 Learning 2.0 Things. Once you've completed the list, you will be cool.
While in Calgary a few weeks ago, Marc Arellano interviewed me for his Crucial Conversations podcast series. Our podcast is available here.
I'll be chatting with Women of Web 2.0 tonight...feel free to stop by. Sharon Peters has posted on "connectivism for dummies" as an intro to the session.
A Second Life for Your Museum: 3D Multi-User Virtual Environments and Museums: "This paper presents a selection of the results from our work that attempts to understand the nature, diversity and evolution of current museum and museum-like activities in Second Life. Drawing on the experience and lessons learned from past museum virtual environments, non-museum collaborative spaces, and recent research on learning in multiplayer on-line games, this research can serve as a guide for museums interested in establishing a virtual presence in Second Life."
While at a recent conference I made the statement that "Second Life does more harm than good for games and learning". Quite simply, SL is a simple tool to get started with games, but for those who have participated in truly collaborative games, it's a pale representation of what is possible. Games are so much more than what we see in SL - in fact, effective games for learning don't even need to be technology-based. If I controlled an organizational budget for training and learning, SL would not be on my radar. Yes, it's a neat tool and has a high "coolness factor"...and Mark Oehlert is correct is saying: "So stop carping about it being boring and create something interesting." But as a financial investment, SL is in the category of "experimentation", not "deployment". For implementation of games and learning, many other, more developed and effective tools, are available. The value of SL is the simplicity of getting started and demonstrating "what is possible" with virtual worlds. But I find more compelling learning in an email conversation than spending a few hours sprucing up my avatar (though my SL identity is now sporting a fashionable new outfit). Perhaps I don't focus well - and I find SL too distracting...whereas single modality mediums like blogs, wikis, and emails don't pull on my attention as significantly. I have a 3 month habit with SL - every 3 months I go in, hang out, chat, and then don't come back for another three months. I'll keep trying. Maybe the bug will yet bite.
Information Illiteracy: "But while the problems of “information literacy” and the limitations of otherwise tech-savvy students’ abilities to differentiate between legitimate and unacceptable sources are well known, there is yet to be a unified, coherent approach to combating them."
While I agree that it's important to teach people how to function in information-rich environments, the bigger part of the challenge relates to helping people understand the changed landscape itself (and what it means). It's not enough to teach people basic skills of validating a source, using the right tool to find needed information, etc. We need to go beyond teaching learners how to "recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information." That's a start. The bigger challenge relates to understanding what our new method of information access means to us - as individuals, as a society. Information literacy skills are important, but shouldn't be seen outside of a meta-understanding (implications, how information flows, how changed flow forces a re-creation of our institutions) of information and knowledge.