Monthly Archives: November 2007
The CTO Challenge: Building Your Personal Learning Network
Miguel Guhlin on the process of building personal learning networks: "..as we externalize our thinking, it becomes less of "I am an expert expounding on what I know" and more of "I am a learner, just like you, sharing what I'm learning so that we can learn together through our common errors and maximize our breakthroughs."
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Haman’s Investigator Questions
Gerald Haman's original instructional design question (What should people KNOW, and WHEN do they need to know it?) has evolved into a set of questions for approaching innovative design. "Haman's Investigator Questions" or HIQ: 1) What should people BE? 2) What should people KNOW? 3) What should people FEEL? 4) What should people HAVE? 5) What should people DO? 6) What should people THINK?
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Nomads At Last
Mobile phones and the internet, two revolutionary technologies in their own right, are merging to create a global nomadic culture based on permanent connectivity not mobility:
Humans have always migrated and travelled, without necessarily living nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing, says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
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Blogging Darwin
The theory of evolution is supported by so many facts that as far as science goes, it's as irrefutable as the theory of gravity. So, the widespread ignorance and denial of natural selection is baffling. Adam Rutherford: "So far, after a trifling 149 years, Darwin's theory of evolution has withstood all attacks. As scientists, we are obliged to continue to test it and to further scrutinise and modify its meaning. I think it is staggering how right Darwin actually is in this book."
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How the Truth Gets Framed for the Camera
Louis P. Masur reflects on the
devious lie of a snapshot:
It is not the photographer who is devious, but the nature of the snapshot itself, which isolates and freezes action, disconnecting it from context and sequence. Photographs seduce us into believing that they are objective records, but, in fact, all images are interpretations, texts that must be read.
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Are Aliens Among Us?
In pursuit of evidence that life arose on Earth more than once, scientists are searching for microbes that are radically different from all known organisms. Life of course is problematic to define. But the search for aliens hiding in plain sight is forcing us to broaden our ideas of what is biologically possible.
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Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World
Survey of of general public from six countries and library directors from the U.S. examining the values and social-networking habits of library users, sponsored by the Online Computer Center. It's not surprising that the respondents have security and privacy concerns: identity theft, ads/spam and protecting personal information are among the top concerns.
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What is Browsing–really?
Browsing is the act of engaging in a series of glimpses, each of which exposes you to objects of potential interest; depending on that interest, you may or may not examine more closely one of the objects. What's interesting is that browsing is not a smooth scan, but rather iterative fits and starts. A worthwhile read that in fact never mentions web browsing specifically.
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Trust in Digital Repositories
Trust in Digital Repositories provides material for managing intellectual property rights in e-learning for institutions who want to update their policies in e-learning programs. Everything someone in an institutional context would need to set up digital rights management systms in repositories of learning objects: policies, infrastructure, risk, evaluation and opportunity.
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Not Just a Pantomime
Did language evolve from manual gestures and then shift to vocal mode? Fox makes the case that the hands provide a more natural signaling system than the voice, and Armstrong and Wilcox propose that speech itself is a gestural system, which places language in the domain of cognition and biology.
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