Category Archives: Linking Thinking

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

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Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance →

Anders Albrecht­slund looks at the social aspects of sur­veil­lance, and sug­gests it can be seen as empow­er­ing and par­tic­i­pa­tory. An inter­est­ing alter­na­tive to the usual empha­sis on poten­tial dan­gers live pri­vacy inva­sion and fraud.

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The Transformation of Culture →

Ron asks if Anthony is build­ing a new lan­guage: “It is my own feel­ing that the ubiq­uity of com­put­ers and dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies means that all cul­tural phe­nom­ena are now avail­able for use by Anthony and his gen­er­a­tion and they are pro­duc­ing a new frame­work of com­mu­ni­ca­tions within which writ­ing is only a piece and not the whole.”

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Growing Up With Google: What It Means To Education →

Diana Oblinger on what it means to be edu­cated in the dig­i­tal age: “Learn­ers need skills that go far beyond read­ing, mem­o­ri­sa­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions have an oblig­a­tion to help stu­dents cul­ti­vate those skills that learn­ers have the most dif­fi­culty attain­ing on their own…judgement, syn­the­sis, research, prac­tice and negotiation.”

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Tighten Your Belt, Strengthen Your Mind →

The brain has a lim­ited capac­ity for self-regulation, so exert­ing willpower in one area often leads to back­slid­ing in oth­ers. The good news, how­ever, is that prac­tice increases willpower capacity.

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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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