Portable Learner, n., an individual who carries their knowledge and skills in their memory or in their social networks, spec. so that it can be employed in all sorts of circumstances. learning, particularly the self-directed variety, design generally, but specifically learning, information and participatory design, social media, social behaviours online, usability, user controls, privacy, identity, content creation, cognitive science, psychology, creativity, publishing, sharing, the commons, social theories, collaboration, mindfulness, equity, social networks, social metrics, trust metrics, digital literacies, critical pedagogy, and paradigm shifting, particularly my own.

A website by Shanta Rohse as an ongoing experiment in education, technology & design.

Portable Learner chihuahua

The continuing education of an educator

Information Abundance
Half Notes

Information Abundance

A read­ing list that deals with the con­se­quences of infor­ma­tion abun­dance and infor­ma­tion cocoons, with­out the histrionics.

♦ ♦ ♦

A
Real body language

Natalie Ang­ier reviews recent stud­ies in the field of embod­ied cog­ni­tion, which rec­og­nizes that we process infor­ma­tion not only with our minds but with our entire bod­ies. For exam­ple, a per­son who think­ing about the future may lean for­ward slightly, and per­son reflect­ing on the past my tip back­wards. It seems the body can be very literal-minded. Some­one hold­ing a warm drink is more likely to think well of other peo­ple than if they were hold­ing a cold drink. Ges­tur­ing can help chil­dren mas­ter math. Our Carte­sian mind­set insists that think­ing is the brain’s domain, but these stud­ies hint at a nuanced two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the body.

♦ ♦ ♦

A
Surprising gaps in your self-knowledge

Jeremy Dean fre­quently high­lights clas­sic social psy­chol­ogy research that helps us under­stand why we think and act the way we do. He turns to self-schema the­ory and a 1977 study by Hazel Markus for insight into why many of us are bliss­fully unaware of cer­tain aspects of our per­son­al­i­ties. Self-schema refer to the beliefs we have about our­selves. We use them to under­stand and explain our behav­iour, espe­cially when that behav­iour is sig­nif­i­cant to our self-conception. Once we have devel­oped a schema, it is remark­ably resilient. In this study Markus exam­ined women who iden­ti­fied with independent/dependent schema and those who did not (that is, aschematic). Some of the par­tic­i­pants believed they were inde­pen­dent, some did not, and the oth­ers didn’t know or, appar­ently, did not care. The aschemat­ics are the most inter­est­ing cat­e­gory because they did not seam to real­ize whether or not they were inde­pen­dent  —   a sur­pris­ing gap in their self-knowledge. Markus’s orig­i­nal paper is avail­able at PyscNET.

♦ ♦ ♦

E
Atoms to bits

Tuned in as I am to A His­tory of the World in 100 Objects and the notion that humans make tools and tools remake humans, I couldn’t help but notice Chris Ander­son claim that every­one now has the power to make com­plex things. In the DIY cul­ture of the inter­net, man­u­fac­tur­ing will be rad­i­cally democ­ra­tized; in the next indus­trial rev­o­lu­tions, “atoms are the new bits.” What was once mass pro­duced will become mass per­son­al­ized. Think on the ways in which we man­age our daily lives, through our edu­ca­tion sys­tems, work prac­tices, com­mu­nity ser­vices and gov­er­nance, all of which are designed and coor­di­nated with tools we have had at our dis­posal. What will these tools look like in the DIY model when col­lab­o­ra­tion, crowd­sourc­ing and great ideas attract­ing like-minded indi­vid­u­als? The garage/basement exam­ples Chris Ander­son pro­vides remind us that the man­u­fac­tur­ing rev­o­lu­tion is very much con­fined to hob­by­ist and bou­tique mar­kets, not main­stream indus­try. But the whole notion of mov­ing from mass pro­duc­tion to mass per­son­al­iza­tion is rather intoxicating.

♦ ♦ ♦

R
The cold hard facts of freezing to death

Peter Stark could have sim­ply defined hypother­mia as the con­di­tion in which the body is at abnor­mally low body tem­per­a­tures, one that needs treat­ment at body tem­per­a­tures of 35℃ and becomes life threat­en­ing below 32.2℃. Cer­tainly that is what most train­ers would do. Instead he embeds the cold hard facts of freez­ing to death in a story that begins:

When your Jeep spins lazily off the moun­tain road and slams back­ward into a snow­bank, you don’t worry imme­di­ately about the cold. Your first thought is that you’ve just dented your bumper. Your sec­ond is that you’ve failed to bring a shovel. Your third is that you’ll be late for din­ner. Friends are expect­ing you at their cabin around eight for a moon­light ski, a late din­ner, a sauna. Noth­ing can keep you from that.

It is an engross­ing read. Nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ences can be so pow­er­ful. Some will trans­port you to another place and time in a way that is so com­pelling it seems real. A nar­ra­tive like this could pro­vide the struc­ture for an entire train­ing pro­gram. The story offers an orga­niz­ing struc­ture for new expe­ri­ences and knowl­edge. It could shift the focus from a rote mem­o­riza­tion of facts in a text­book to a diag­no­sis of a real-world condition.

♦ ♦ ♦

N
Telling a history of the world with objects

This past week I’ve been tak­ing A His­tory of the World in 100 Objects for a spin in my mp3 player. It is an extra­or­di­nary, inspir­ing, and slightly crazy British Muse­umm/BBC co-production based on the belief that objects can open up news ways of under­stand­ing two mil­lion years of human his­tory. It revolves around a series of 15 minute radio spots that take one arte­fact, tell its story about the peo­ple who made it, and tell new sto­ries rein­ter­preted by sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions. I’m at episode four, and the nar­ra­tives are grip­ping. The plot emerg­ing is not the his­tory of any one nation or peo­ple, but rather of the inter­con­nec­tions and com­mon ground they all share. Amartya Sen explains this in the first episode:

I think what is really very impor­tant to rec­og­nize is that, when we look at the his­tory of the world, we’re not look­ing at the his­tory of dif­fer­ent civ­i­liza­tions trun­cated and sep­a­rated from each other. They’ve a huge amount of con­tact with each other, there is a kind of inter-connectedness. So I’ve always felt, not to think of the his­tory of the world as a his­tory of civ­i­liza­tions, but as a his­tory of world civ­i­liza­tions evolv­ing in often sim­i­lar, often diverse ways, always inter­act­ing with each other. And this is a very dif­fer­ent view from the clash of civ­i­liza­tions to which we were exposed some years ago, as a way to under­stand enmity in the world. Enmity has not been the gen­eral con­di­tion of the rela­tion­ship between peo­ple across the world in history.

The pro­gramme is fully socially medi­ated, both online and offline with regional museum pro­grams; it will be inter­est­ing to see if the sto­ries sus­tain the momen­tum gen­er­ated in these first episodes.

♦ ♦ ♦

N
Democratic, but dangerous too: how the web changed our world

What will our planet look like when we are all truly and well-connected? In her speech on inter­net free­dom at the New­seum in Wash­ing­ton last Thurs­day, Hilary Clin­ton declared that inter­net users must be “assured cer­tain basic freedoms”  –  freedom of expres­sion and of wor­ship, free­dom from want and from fear and, most intrigu­ingly, “free­dom to con­nect”. In sharp con­trast, we have the author­i­tar­ian approaches of coun­tries like China, Iran and Egypt, an over­whelm­ing com­mer­cial web that exploits the vast trails of per­sonal infor­ma­tion we leave behind, and the nar­row­ing prospects of infor­ma­tion we may wish to see when these inter­ests serve up what they think we want to see. Aleks Kro­to­ski looks at the social and psy­cho­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions of con­nect­ing and con­cludes that our rela­tion­ship with the web is a syn­ergy. “… as it draws us into its net­works and its hyper­links, we will shape them in our global image.” It is the most rev­o­lu­tion­ary evo­lu­tion that we have ever par­tic­i­pated in:

…who we are on the web is sim­ply a reflec­tion of who we already are offline. We project hier­ar­chi­cal sys­tems into the vir­tual world. We extend our inter­ests and make them hap­pen using the tools the web pro­vides. We seek out things that make us feel good about our­selves. The web is a mir­ror, and we have to face it in con­fi­dence, warts and all.

♦ ♦ ♦

V
When the media is the disaster: Covering Haiti

The Los Ange­les Times ran a series of pho­tographs of des­per­ate Haitians cop­ing in the after­math of a dev­as­tat­ing earth­quake with cap­tions that kept deploy­ing words like “loot­ing.” Would you enter a col­lapsed super­mar­ket to take food to starv­ing chil­dren and babies? Then you too are a looter. These pic­tures do con­vey des­per­a­tion, says Rebecca Sol­nit, but they don’t con­vey crime. She argues that the media tend to be obsessed with prop­erty and head­lines about assaults on prop­erty, and mis­rep­re­sent events as loot­ing or panic, need­lessly incit­ing hos­til­ity and hys­te­ria on the part of local author­i­ties and caus­ing more suf­fer­ing. When the rest of us con­tem­plate the Haitians’ plight through media reports, we need to remem­ber that:

…what is absolutely accu­rate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life mat­ters more than prop­erty, that the sur­vivors of a cat­a­stro­phe deserve our com­pas­sion and our under­stand­ing of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it mat­ters des­per­ately that we get them right.

♦ ♦ ♦

L
Knowledge is Out, Focus is In, and People are Everywhere

David Dal­rym­ple thinks that in the net age, fil­ter­ing, not remem­ber­ing is the most impor­tant skill. In his response to Edge’s annual ques­tion for 2010, How is the Inter­net chang­ing the way you think?, he says that those who are able to resist the dis­trac­tions posed by a del­uge of unre­lated infor­ma­tion and focus on what is impor­tant are bet­ter equipped than those who are knowl­edge­able. “Knowl­edge was once an inter­nal prop­erty of a per­son, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed exter­nally, but with the Inter­net, knowl­edge can be sup­plied exter­nally, but focus must be forced inter­nally.” The idea that an exter­nal infor­ma­tion repos­i­tory can replace human mem­ory is inter­est­ing, but the dichotomy strikes me as a lit­tle extreme. We can’t turn off our mem­o­ries, and there is value in serendip­i­tous find­ings. Focus and dis­trac­tion work in con­cert in any under­tak­ing. We’ll just have to be more mind­ful of which one is lead­ing the quest for knowl­edge. via Idea of the Day

♦ ♦ ♦