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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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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The End of Journalism →

There have always been reporters, but will there always be pro­fes­sion­als? George Brock in his review of Robert Fox’s Eye­wit­ness to His­tory:

The idea and ideal of jour­nal­ism has been smudged and blurred by wor­ries about eco­nom­ics and the means of deliv­ery. The vehi­cles for report­ing have to adapt. The rivalry between print and the screen may evap­o­rate as screens become thin­ner, more flex­i­ble and more portable. The tra­di­tional bun­dle that is the news­pa­per, mag­a­zine or news bul­letin may morph into many dif­fer­ent ver­sions. But dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tions have not dam­aged lan­guage or its power. On the con­trary, screens and key­boards have allowed words to be pro­duced and con­sumed more widely and in greater quan­ti­ties than ever before. Ama­teurs and pro­fes­sional wit­nesses to events may com­pete, but together they enrich the writ­ten record. Per­haps Eye­wit­ness to His­tory stops at the dawn of a golden age of writing.“

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The maturing human network →

This oth­er­wise unin­spir­ing white paper from Deloitte Con­sult­ing on the inter­est­ing topic of social net­work­ing in the enter­prise makes the sig­nif­i­cant point that orga­ni­za­tions are increas­ingly invest­ing in Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies as a way to retain knowl­edge and solve problems:

A big part of knowl­edge is under­stand­ing where to find the answers. In today’s world, global organ­i­sa­tions are con­stantly chal­lenged with dis­parate pock­ets of infor­ma­tion cre­ated within dif­fer­ent func­tional silos and busi­ness units. They find it increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to locate spe­cific sub­ject mat­ter experts quickly and effi­ciently. Social net­work­ing tools with pow­er­ful search capa­bil­i­ties pro­vide a plat­form to expe­dite these con­nec­tions. If organ­i­sa­tions can­not effec­tively con­nect peo­ple and resources across regions, func­tions and net­works, they can­not increase ser­vice capabilities.

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How do you find what you want and how do you know it is true? →

Judy Breck quotes Howard Rhein­gold on the infor­ma­tion morass that is seek­ing what you want and know­ing if it is true:

All of the world’s knowl­edge is in the air to be plucked down by our tele­phone. Of course it’s also all the world’s dis­in­for­ma­tion, mis­in­for­ma­tion, spam, porn, Niger­ian frauds, urban leg­ends, hoaxes. So how do you find what you want and how do you know that it’s true? Those seem like to me both extremely impor­tant ques­tions today .…

The answer, says Judy Breck, is noth­ing less than to change both where we look and the way we ascer­tain truthfulness.

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Debunking Psychological Stages →

Elis­a­beth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief. Sig­mund Freud’s five stages of psy­cho­sex­ual devel­op­ment. Lawrence Kohlberg’s six stages of moral devel­op­ment. The urge to com­press the com­plex­i­ties of life into neat, tidy stages is irresistible…and has very lit­tle to do with real­ity.

Those stage the­o­ries reflected a time when most peo­ple marched through life pre­dictably: mar­ry­ing at an early age; then hav­ing chil­dren when young; then work, work, work; then maybe a midlife cri­sis; then retire­ment; then death. Those ‘pas­sages’ the­o­ries evap­o­rated with chang­ing social and eco­nomic con­di­tions that blew the pre­dictabil­ity of our lives to hell.

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