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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Overload! →

“The tragedy of the news media in the infor­ma­tion age is that in their strug­gle to find a finan­cial foothold,” writes Bree Nor­den­son, “they have neglected to look hard enough at the larger impli­ca­tions of the new infor­ma­tion land­scape — and more gen­er­ally, of mod­ern life.” That is, infor­ma­tion over­load. Most of us lack the skills — not to men­tion the time, atten­tion, and moti­va­tion — to make sense of today’s unre­lent­ing tor­rent of infor­ma­tion. Far from pre­cip­i­tat­ing the demise of jour­nal­ists and news orga­ni­za­tions, it spells out why jour­nal­ism won’t dis­ap­pear. Paul Duguid explains: “[Infor­ma­tion] needs a rec­om­men­da­tion, a seal of approval, some­thing that says this is reli­able or true or what­ever. And so jour­nal­ists, but also the insti­tu­tions of jour­nal­ism as one aspect of this, become very important.”

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Social Networks and Happiness →

It seems to be the case, online as well as offline, that when you smile, the world smiles with you:

We found that social net­works have clus­ters of happy and unhappy peo­ple within them that reach out to three degrees of sep­a­ra­tion. A person’s hap­pi­ness is related to the hap­pi­ness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends — that is, to peo­ple well beyond their social hori­zon. We found that happy peo­ple tend to be located in the cen­ter of their social net­works and to be located in large clus­ters of other happy peo­ple. And we found that each addi­tional happy friend increases a person’s prob­a­bil­ity of being happy by about 9%.

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Obama In Your Heart →

Ele­va­tion is one of a class of emo­tions that we feel when other peo­ple do good, skill­ful, or admirable things. These emo­tions are unusual in that they are not pri­mar­ily about our­selves, our goals, and our nor­mal petty con­cerns; rather, they make us feel like bet­ter peo­ple. Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term ele­va­tion, writes, “Pow­er­ful moments of ele­va­tion some­times seem to push a men­tal ‘reset but­ton,’ wip­ing out feel­ings of cyn­i­cism and replac­ing them with feel­ings of hope, love, and opti­mism, and a sense of moral inspi­ra­tion.” Barack Obama is appar­ently an off-the-charts ele­va­tion inducer. Haidt’s research shows that ele­va­tion is good at pro­vok­ing a desire to make a dif­fer­ence but not so good at moti­vat­ing real action. But he says the ele­va­tion effect is pow­er­ful nonethe­less. “It does appear to change peo­ple cog­ni­tively; it opens hearts and minds to new pos­si­bil­i­ties. This will be cru­cial for Obama.”

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Procrastinating Again? →

Pro­cras­ti­na­tion is not a time-management prob­lem. It’s a com­plex prob­lem involv­ing per­son­al­ity, sit­u­a­tions and moti­va­tion. Every­one occa­sion­ally pro­cras­ti­nates, 15 to 20 per­cent of adults rou­tinely put off activ­i­ties that would be bet­ter accom­plished right away, and a whop­ping 80 to 95 per­cent of col­lege stu­dents have a pen­chant for post­pone­ment. Trisha Guru cov­ers con­tem­po­rary views on and advice for kick­ing the pro­cras­ti­na­tion habit.

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Technology Traps →

I have a love/hate rela­tion­ship with tech­nol­ogy, much of my tur­moil stems from the fact that I do not always have the lux­ury of say­ing no or even, let me think about it, before it becomes a tech­nol­ogy I depend on. This is a symp­tom of what Peter Crabb calls tech­no­log­i­cal traps, con­se­quences of every­day deci­sions to use tech­no­log­i­cal devices that make us feel good when in fact these devices are not good for us or the planet at all:

With the help of human enthu­si­asts and enablers, tech­nol­ogy cre­ates its own self-affirming ide­ol­ogy. It is widely believed that tech­nol­ogy is infal­li­ble. Tech­nol­ogy must not be ques­tioned or crit­i­cized. Human needs are sub­or­di­nate to the needs of devices and sys­tems. If some­thing goes wrong, it must be due to “human error.” The solu­tion to technology-induced prob­lems is always more and bet­ter tech­nol­ogy. In fact, every arena of human activ­ity is always improved when the lat­est, most com­plex tech­nolo­gies are applied. As a con­se­quence of the ascen­dancy of tech­nol­ogy, humans have become demeaned and pow­er­less – second-class cit­i­zens in their own societies.

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The Ambassadors →

The Ambas­sadors by Hans Hol­bein the Younger, is a por­trait of two French­men, one an ambas­sador to the court of King Henry VIII, the other a cleric. They are lean­ing on a cup­board with dis­plays — on the upper shelf objects refer­ring to the heav­ens; on the lower shelf, objects indi­cat­ing their earthly inter­ests. There are many hid­den mes­sages and mean­ings in this work, notes Don­ald Clark, includ­ing the large anamor­phic skull, which he has cho­sen to inter­pret in terms of learn­ing. The paint­ing reveals a 1533 cur­ricu­lum of the emerg­ing split between the voca­tional arts and acad­e­mia, and the retreat­ing role of reli­gion, a cur­ricu­lum whose influ­ence is clearly still felt some 500 years later.

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Group Think →

The explo­sion of online mate­ri­als has two, some­what con­tra­dic­tory effects. The scope of avail­able infor­ma­tion expands, remark­ably so; but as a con­se­quence, the infor­ma­tion needs to be fil­tered some­how, and the fil­ter is either reverse chrono­log­i­cal order or popularity:

Many Inter­net users cus­tomize their con­sump­tion of news sources and other infor­ma­tion in a way that fos­ters polar­iza­tion. This, it could be argued, has ele­ments both of the nar­row­ing effect and the long tail. Amer­i­cans seek out sources that reflect their per­sonal beliefs, con­sis­tent with Anderson’s vision. But, akin to the nar­row­ing Evans observes, large groups — lib­er­als and con­ser­v­a­tives — con­verge on dif­fer­ent ref­er­ence points, result­ing in mutu­ally unrec­og­niz­able ver­sions of real­ity. The com­mon les­son of all of these phe­nom­ena is to be cog­nizant that the tools we use affect us in ways we may not fully appre­ci­ate. We should always be search­ing, the find­ings sug­gest, for new ways to search.

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Becoming Screen Literate →

We are peo­ple of the screen now, says Kevin Kelly. When we were peo­ple of the writ­ten word, we devel­oped a long list of inno­va­tions and tech­niques to per­mit ordi­nary read­ers and writ­ers to manip­u­late text in ways that made it use­ful (think: quo­ta­tion sym­bols, tables of con­tents, page num­bers, indices, foot­notes, bib­li­o­graphic cita­tions, and of course, hyper­links). We will do the same to sup­port screen fluency:

With our fin­gers we will drag objects out of films and cast them in our own movies. A click of our phone cam­era will cap­ture a land­scape, then dis­play its his­tory, which we can use to anno­tate the image. Text, sound, motion will con­tinue to merge into a sin­gle inter­me­dia as they flow through the always-on net­work. With the assis­tance of screen flu­ency tools we might even be able to sum­mon up real­is­tic fan­tasies spon­ta­neously. Stand­ing before a screen, we could cre­ate the visual image of a turquoise rose, glis­ten­ing with dew, poised in a trim ruby vase, as fast as we could write these words. If we were truly screen lit­er­ate, maybe even faster. And that is just the open­ing scene.

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How To Run a Con →

The key to a con is not that you trust the con­man, but that he shows he trusts you. Con­men ply their trade by appear­ing frag­ile or need­ing help, by seem­ing vul­ner­a­ble. Because of THOMAS, the human brain makes us feel good when we help oth­ers – this is the basis for attach­ment to fam­ily and friends and coop­er­a­tion with strangers. “I need your help” is a potent stim­u­lus for action.

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Amoebae Family Values →

Single-celled organ­isms stick with rel­a­tives to avoid being duped when food becomes scarce. Sci­en­tists say the amoe­boid coop­er­a­tion con­tributes to our under­stand­ing of how some of the ear­li­est organ­isms may have bal­anced coop­er­a­tion with self-interest, essen­tial traits for social behav­iour.

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