Category Archives: Linking Thinking

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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A
The Brain at the Edge of Chaos →

It seems pre­car­i­ous to have a brain that oper­ates on the edge of chaos, one that vac­il­lates ran­domly between states of qui­es­cence and an avalanche of neural activ­ity. Yet, accord­ing to a review of recent stud­ies in the New Sci­en­tist, hov­er­ing near dis­or­der is actu­ally essen­tial to the brain’s capac­ity to process infor­ma­tion and react to an ever-changing envi­ron­ment, and has even been linked to mem­ory and intel­li­gence. This vital bal­ance makes me won­der what hap­pens if we stray too far towards sta­bil­ity or chaos? Are we also hov­er­ing pre­car­i­ously near men­tal insta­bil­ity? They say it’s a fine line between genius and mad­ness, acknowl­edges neu­ro­sci­en­tist David Liley. Maybe we’re finally begin­ning to under­stand the wis­dom of this statement.

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A
How Our Internal Clock Ticks →

Time helps us to infer rela­tion­ships of cause and effect, to make sense of the world and to learn. But our abil­ity to per­ceive time and use time is rather faulty. We reg­u­larly mis­es­ti­mate sec­onds, min­utes and hours by 15% to 25% in either direc­tion. We see and move within an opti­mal now period, about 2 1/2 sec­onds long (give or take 1 to 2 sec­onds). Neu­ro­sur­geon Jamshid Gha­jar also makes this inter­est­ing claim: You can explain a lot of patholo­gies, includ­ing schiz­o­phre­nia, autism and ADHD, as prob­lems of time per­cep­tion..

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N
On Teasing and Playful Provocation →

Sur­vival of the fittest is often mis­in­ter­preted to mean sur­vival of the most cut­throat. But fit­ness means so much more than that. In this inter­view, Dacher Kelt­ner points out that kind­ness, play, gen­eros­ity, rev­er­ence and self-sacrifice are also vital to the tasks of evo­lu­tion. And so is teas­ing, which sur­prised me because we tend to be against teas­ing of any sort in our schools and work­places. Kelt­ner calls teas­ing the art of play­ful provo­ca­tion and sug­gests that we use our play­ful voices and bod­ies to pro­voke oth­ers to avoid inap­pro­pri­ate behaviours:

Teas­ing (in the right way, which is what most peo­ple do) … is a way to play and express affec­tion. It is a way of nego­ti­at­ing con­flicts at work and in the fam­ily. Teas­ing exchanges teach chil­dren how to use their voices in innu­mer­able ways — such an impor­tant medium of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In teas­ing, chil­dren learn bound­aries between harm and play. And chil­dren learn empa­thy in teas­ing, and how to appre­ci­ate oth­ers’ feel­ings (for exam­ple, in going too far). And in teas­ing we have fun. All of this ben­e­fit is accom­plished in this remark­able modal­ity of play.

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N
In the Ants’ Footsteps →

For those who rarely give ants a sec­ond thought, Tim Flan­nery offers imme­di­ate rel­e­vance for any­one inter­ested in the trends now shap­ing our own soci­eties. In his book review of Super­or­gan­ism, he points to the strik­ing par­al­lels between the progress of human evo­lu­tion and the progress of ants some ten mil­lion years earlier:

Begin­ning as sim­ple hunter-gatherers, some ants have learned to herd and milk bugs, just as we milk cat­tle and sheep. There are ants that take slaves, ants that lay their eggs in the nests of for­eign ants … leav­ing the upbring­ing of their young to oth­ers, and there are even ants that have dis­cov­ered agri­cul­ture .… One can hardly help but admire the intel­li­gence of the ant colony, yet theirs is an intel­li­gence of a very par­tic­u­lar kind. Noth­ing in the brain of a worker ant rep­re­sents a blue­print of the social order,Holl­dobler and Wil­son tell us, and there is no over­seer or brain caste that car­ries such a mas­ter plan in its head. Instead, the ants have dis­cov­ered how to cre­ate strength from weak­ness, by pool­ing their indi­vid­u­ally lim­ited capac­i­ties into a col­lec­tive decision-making sys­tem that bears an uncanny resem­blance to our own demo­c­ra­tic processes.

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A
How To Save New Brain Cells →

There may be some neu­ro­log­i­cal truth to those claims that mem­o­riz­ing lists or daily Sudoku encour­ages men­tal lim­ber­ness. Even more impor­tantly, the results lend some sup­port that peo­ple in early stages of Alzheimers dis­ease may slow their cog­ni­tive decline by keep­ing their minds actively engaged. Tracey J. Shors maps some of the promis­ing ter­ri­tory that con­nects learn­ing, mem­ory and neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis (the process by which new neu­rons are generated).

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