"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." — T.H. White, The Once and Future King

A website by Shanta Rohse on learning, technology and design

Recently in: Portable Learner

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Personal data tracking →

Mil­lions of us track our­selves all the time. We record our weight. We count calo­ries. We bal­ance our check­books. But as elec­tronic senors have got­ten smaller and bet­ter and as social media has made it nor­mal to share every­thing, the process of self-tracking is becom­ing more allur­ing and more mean­ing­ful: pedome­ters at our feet, breath­a­lyz­ers in our lungs, and glu­cose mon­i­tors in our veins. This isn’t the tra­di­tional, ther­a­peu­tic notion of per­sonal devel­op­ment, says Gary Wolf, but rather the self of our most triv­ial thoughts and actions that would go unno­ticed with­out tech­ni­cal help. “Their valid­ity may be nar­row, but it is beau­ti­fully rel­e­vant.” It all seemed a lit­tle too triv­ial to me, until Wolf tells the story of Bo Adler who suf­fers from sleep apnea and resisted the stan­dard course of treat­ment because he did not want to be treated as a stan­dard case until there was evi­dence that he was a stan­dard case. After all, are any of us really stan­dard cases:

Adler’s idea that we can — and should — defend our­selves against the imposed gen­er­al­i­ties of offi­cial knowl­edge is typ­i­cal of pio­neer­ing self-trackers, and it shows how closely the dream of a quan­ti­fied self resem­bles ther­a­peu­tic ideas of self-actualization, even as its meth­ods are star­tlingly dif­fer­ent. Track­ers focused on their health want to ensure that their med­ical prac­ti­tion­ers don’t miss the par­tic­u­lars of their con­di­tion; track­ers who record their men­tal states are often try­ing to find their own way to per­sonal ful­fill­ment amid the seduc­tions of mar­ket­ing and the errors of com­mon opin­ion; fit­ness track­ers are try­ing to tune their train­ing regimes to their own body types and com­pet­i­tive goals, but they are also look­ing to under­stand their strengths and weak­nesses, to uncover poten­tial they didn’t know they had. Self-tracking, in this way, is not really a tool of opti­miza­tion but of dis­cov­ery, and if track­ing regimes that we would once have thought bizarre are becom­ing nor­mal, one of the most inter­est­ing effects may be to make us re-evaluate what “nor­mal” means.

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Textual productivity →

The the­sis of Steven Johnson’s lec­ture, The Glass Box And The Com­mon­place Book is that a sin­gle piece of infor­ma­tion that is designed to flow through an entire ecosys­tem of news will cre­ate more value than a piece of infor­ma­tion sealed up in a glass box. He calls this the “tex­tual pro­duc­tiv­ity” of the ecosys­tem, and it may be the sin­gle most impor­tant fact about the Web’s growth in the last fif­teen years:

Think about it this way: let’s say it’s 1995, and you are cul­ti­vat­ing a page of “hot links” to inter­est­ing dis­cov­er­ies on the Web. You find an arti­cle about a Colum­bia jour­nal­ism lec­ture and you link to it on your page. The infor­ma­tion value you have cre­ated is use­ful exclu­sively to two groups: peo­ple inter­ested in jour­nal­ism who hap­pen to visit your page, and the peo­ple main­tain­ing the Colum­bia page, who ben­e­fit from the increased traf­fic. Fast for­ward to 2010, and you check-in at Foursquare for this lec­ture tonight, and tweet a link to a descrip­tion of the talk. What hap­pens to that infor­ma­tion? For starters, it goes out to friends of yours, and into your twit­ter feed, and into Google’s index. The geo-data embed­ded in the link alerts local busi­nesses who can offer your pro­mo­tions through foursquare; the link to the talk helps Google build its index of the web, which then attracts adver­tis­ers inter­ested in your loca­tion or the topic of jour­nal­ism itself. Because that tiny lit­tle snip­pet of infor­ma­tion is free to make new con­nec­tions, by check­ing in here you are help­ing your friends fig­ure out what to do tonight; you’re help­ing the Jour­nal­ism school in pro­mot­ing this venue; you’re help­ing the bar across Broad­way attract more cus­tomers, you’re help­ing Google orga­nize the web; you’re help­ing peo­ple search­ing google for infor­ma­tion about jour­nal­ism; you’re help­ing jour­nal­ism schools adver­tis­ing on Google to attract new stu­dents. Not bad for 140 characters.

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The Rules of Big Ideas →

Rule One: tell sto­ries and think by anal­ogy. Rule Two: make the point catchy, but make it ambigu­ous. Rule Three: sim­plify and exag­ger­ate. And the Fourth and Final Rule of Big Ideas: play on our nat­ural iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the under­dog by cast­ing the anec­dotes and your over­ar­ch­ing theme in a rebel­lious and rev­o­lu­tion­ary light. Tom Slee skew­ers Clay Shirky’s pop­u­lar essay, Col­lapse of Com­plex Busi­ness Mod­els, and, more gen­er­ally, all big Glad­wellian think-pieces which rely on anec­dote, anal­ogy, manip­u­la­tion, exaggeration.

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The internet is not an echo chamber →

Democ­racy works best when citizen’s are well-informed. The inter­net can either expose us to diverse views that chal­lenge our pre-existing ones, or it can offer end­less affir­ma­tion that the views we hold are the accu­rate ones. In 2001, Cass Sun­stein warned that spe­cial­iza­tion and frag­men­ta­tion char­ac­ter­is­tic of the inter­net favoured the lat­ter and threat­ened democracy:

If the pub­lic is balka­nized, and if dif­fer­ent groups design their own pre­ferred com­mu­ni­ca­tions pack­ages, the con­se­quence will be fur­ther balka­niza­tion, as group mem­bers move one another toward more extreme points in line with their ini­tial ten­den­cies. At the same time, dif­fer­ent delib­er­at­ing groups, each con­sist­ing of like-minded peo­ple, will be dri­ven increas­ingly far apart, sim­ply because most of their dis­cus­sions are with one another.

Yet, nearly ten years later, David Brooks points to new research sug­gest­ing that news con­sump­tion online is far from per­fectly seg­re­gated. Using method­olo­gies sim­i­lar to those used to iden­tify racial seg­re­ga­tion, researchers Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro tracked how peo­ple of dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal views move around the Web. Their main find­ing is that inter­net users do not stay within their com­mu­ni­ties; rather they spend their time on a few giant sites that serve polit­i­cally inte­grated audi­ences, like Yahoo News. Fur­ther­more, they found that the inter­net is actu­ally more ide­o­log­i­cally inte­grated than old-fashioned face-to-face inter­ac­tions in our work­place and neigh­bour­hoods. If democ­racy is being threat­ened — and it is — it seems that the inter­net is prob­a­bly not the culprit.

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Am I Part of the E-Learning Industry?
Field Notes

Am I Part of the E-Learning Industry? →

On choosing the professional industry you belong to in LinkedIn. more →
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Women and the Telephone
Field Notes

Women and the Telephone →

Today we celebrate the memory of Ada Lovelace, widely recognized as the world's first computer programmer. more →
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Introducing the mesofact →

There are facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Ever­est, and facts that change a lot, like the weather. Then there are meso­facts, facts that are nei­ther fast nor momen­tus, and so don’t receive the same scrutiny, but are still wor­thy of your atten­tion. For exam­ple, the Peri­odic table has added 12 ele­ments since 1970. 400 new extra­so­lar plan­ets have been dis­cov­ered since the first one in 1995. The world’s pop­u­la­tion stands at 6.8 mil­lion. Many dinosaurs were swift and warm-blooded. “Updat­ing your meso­facts,” says Samuel Arbesman, “can change how you think about the world.” (And, I’m always drawn to insights that change how I think about the world):

Do you know the per­cent­age of peo­ple in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 per­cent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 per­cent. The frac­tion of peo­ple who are mobile phone users is the kind of fact you might read in a mag­a­zine and quote at a cock­tail party. But years later the num­ber you would be quot­ing would not just be inac­cu­rate, it would be seri­ously wrong. The dif­fer­ence between a tiny frac­tion of the world and half the globe is star­tling, and com­pletely changes our view on global interconnectivity.

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Learning styles: Reports of demise exaggerated →

The idea that dif­fer­ent kinds of learn­ers (such as “audi­tory learn­ers” and “visual learn­ers”) learn best when they are taught in their pre­ferred learn­ing style modal­ity has had a tena­cious grip in class­room set­tings in recent decades. Here is yet another report, this one com­mis­sioned by Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence in the Pub­lic Inter­est, that con­demns the use of learn­ing styles in school set­tings. Frankly, it’s inter­est­ing if you are a teacher, trainer, par­ent or employed in the vast indus­try of learn­ing style assess­ments, but it is less inter­est­ing if you are a learner or inter­ested in per­son­al­ized learn­ing in non-structured set­tings. School is such a nar­row slice of the learn­ing land­scape, and it dis­tress­ing to hear of all the resources spent on pro­mot­ing a sus­pect propo­si­tion, then again to quell it. These find­ings are not rel­e­vant to unstruc­tured learn­ing envi­ron­ments, and the strict type of ran­dom­ized research designs advo­cated (e.g., clas­sify learn­ers into cat­e­gories, then ran­domly assign the learn­ers to use one of sev­eral dif­fer­ent learn­ing meth­ods and assess effec­tive­ness of the learn­ing meth­ods with a test given to all par­tic­i­pants) is a steep hur­dle. Thanks to Will Thal­heimer for point­ing to the study.

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The Internet Explorer 6 Dilemma
Tech Notes

The Internet Explorer 6 Dilemma →

Implementing Andy Clarke's elegant solution to the IE6 dilemma: designing for the modern browser and then figuring out what to do with IE6. more →
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Vaccines, The Lancet retraction and open scientific debate →

Last week, the promi­nent British med­ical jour­nal The Lancet for­mally retracted a deeply flawed 1998 study that linked child­hood measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vac­cine to autism. Despite a wealth of research that con­cludes there is no link, a decade of anti-vaccine sen­ti­ment is prov­ing more dif­fi­cult to retract. In an inter­view for On The Media, The Lancet’s edi­tor Dr. Richard Hor­ton weighs in on the state of open sci­en­tific debate:

We used to think that we could pub­lish spec­u­la­tive research which advanced inter­est­ing new ideas which may be wrong, but which were impor­tant to pro­voke debate and dis­cus­sion. We don’t think that now. We don’t seem able to have a ratio­nal con­ver­sa­tion in the pub­lic space about dif­fi­cult con­tro­ver­sial issues with­out peo­ple draw­ing a con­clu­sion which could be very averse.…The 19th-century days where you could sit in the salon at the Royal Soci­ety and have a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion amongst your fel­lows just doesn’t exist any­more. So I think yeah, too much infor­ma­tion in this par­tic­u­lar case is a bad thing, which seems to go against every kind of demo­c­ra­tic prin­ci­ple that we believe in. But in the case of sci­ence, it seems to be true.

But it is not. I can’t help but won­der if we had had this con­ver­sa­tion, in pub­lic, ten years ago when the study was still “spec­u­la­tive research” we may well have averted the flawed deci­sion to pub­lish it in the first place. We need more infor­ma­tion, not less, and more inclu­sive con­ver­sa­tions, not nar­rowly con­fined to the med­ical com­mu­nity. The pub­lic may well have to engage the med­ical com­mu­nity in the pub­lic space “dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tions with­out draw­ing a con­clu­sion that could be very averse…”

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