Category Archives: Linking Thinking

Linking to what others are thinking about learning as a way to explore how we learn online.

R
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.

♦ ♦ ♦

N
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.

♦ ♦ ♦

V
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.

♦ ♦ ♦

N
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.

♦ ♦ ♦

E
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.

♦ ♦ ♦

A
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.

♦ ♦ ♦

N
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…”

♦ ♦ ♦

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.

♦ ♦ ♦