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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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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Never Say Die: Why We Can’t Imagine Death →

Jesse Bering on why so many of us think our minds con­tinue on after we die; rather than being a by-product of reli­gion or an emo­tional secu­rity blan­ket, such beliefs stem from the very nature of our consciousness.

And so per­son per­ma­nence may be the final cog­ni­tive hur­dle that gets in the way of our effec­tively real­iz­ing the dead as they truly are — infi­nitely in situ, inan­i­mate car­bon residue. Instead it’s much more “nat­ural” to imag­ine them as exist­ing in some vague, unob­serv­able locale, very much liv­ing their dead lives.

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You’re Sick. Now What? Knowledge is Power. →

Oncol­o­gist Marisa Weiss’s advice to those inclined to research their own med­ical care: it’s manda­tory. “The time you have with your doc­tor is get­ting pro­gres­sively shorter, yet there’s so much more to talk about. You have to pre­pare for this impor­tant meet­ing.” This New York Times spe­cial sec­tion, Decod­ing Your Health, offers use­ful advice on eval­u­at­ing what you might find: a primer on inter­pret­ing med­ical stud­ies shows that “no mat­ter how com­pelling and excit­ing a hypoth­e­sis is, we don’t know whether it works with­out clin­i­cal tri­als”; and self-diagnosis via the inter­net may well prove you have a fool for a doc­tor.

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Ocean View →

Jesse Smith’s review of the recently ren­o­vated US National Museum of Nat­ural His­tory points out the meta­mor­pho­sis from stuffy sci­ence insti­tu­tion to mod­ern entity that must “edu­cate with­out bor­ing, elu­ci­date with­out offend­ing, and advo­cate with­out annoy­ing.” For exam­ple, the museum offers no lin­ear pro­gres­sion through the exhibit, but rather any num­ber of nat­ural courses that reflect the chaos of the ocean itself:

Earth’s oceans, we are reminded, form a sin­gle inter­con­nected body of water. Its species and cur­rents are not con­strained by labels such as Atlantic and Pacific, so why should their inter­pre­ta­tion? Sec­tions meld seam­lessly into one another, but infor­ma­tion in each is pre­sented in a con­strained man­ner so that if you do, say, jump from a stuffed pen­guin in Poles to a pre­served Coela­canth (the giant fish con­sid­ered extinct until a fish­er­man found one off the coast of South African in 1938), a vis­i­tor can still learn or expe­ri­ence at each. With the excep­tion of the Jour­ney Through Time exhibit — which explores the slow march of evo­lu­tion that began under­wa­ter — there is never a pro­gres­sion to fol­low, no order by which a vis­i­tor must read or look. In this way, tour­ing the hall feels a lot like surf­ing the Web.

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Taking the Earth’s Temperature →

How do we mea­sure our planet’s global mean tem­per­a­ture, and com­pare it to a record dat­ing back hun­dreds of thou­sands of years, a com­par­i­son cen­tral to dis­cus­sions about cli­mate change? Jor­dan R. Raney’s descrip­tion of the inge­nious but impaired proxy mea­sures from tree rings to coral reefs are meant to encour­age skep­ti­cism for some of the more extreme claims that have been made. Unfor­tu­nately, we still need to make deci­sions about cli­mate change, how­ever incom­plete, uncer­tain the data we have is. In fact, that is the challenge.

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Why is laughter almost non-existent in ancient Greek sculpture? →

Elec­tri­cal Engi­neer­ing pro­fes­sor Yan­nis Tsi­vidis inno­cently asks, why is it that we very rarely see laugh­ter depicted in ancient Greek sculp­ture? From the range of schol­arly answers, you get the pecu­liar sense that we “mod­erns” are not in a posi­tion to give an answer.

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No Heaven on Earth →

Why are so many of us so skep­ti­cal when con­fronted with the over­whelm­ing evi­dence for envi­ron­men­tal con­se­quences of destroy­ing every­thing we come in con­tact with? In her review of Amer­i­can Earth, an anthol­ogy of Amer­i­can envi­ron­men­tal­ist views, Ver­lyn Klinkenborg has this reac­tion to the bar­rage of evi­dence and entreaties to recon­nect with nature:

After a day or two, I found myself read­ing this anthol­ogy as if it were a series of reports from a dis­tant planet in a dis­tant time — as an appen­dix, per­haps, to Doris Lessing’s Cano­pus in Argos nov­els. Read­ing Amer­i­can Earth in that light helped make sev­eral things clear. First, each doc­u­ment in the vol­ume is a minor­ity report — some­times a minor­ity of one. The assump­tions, the hopes, the argu­ments in nearly every one of these pieces, no mat­ter when they were writ­ten, are con­tra­dicted by the way the vast major­ity of Amer­i­cans live and by the polit­i­cal and eco­nomic struc­tures that deter­mine that lifestyle. Sec­ond, the fun­da­men­tal envi­ron­men­tal­ist argu­ments — the fun­da­men­tal per­cep­tions — are unchang­ing over time; only the details vary. We are still catch­ing up to Thoreau, still com­ing to terms with the out­rage George Perkins Marsh expressed in 1864, his wor­ries about “cli­matic excess” and our “rest­less love of change.” Third, writ­ers in every gen­er­a­tion take a crack at find­ing the crys­talline argu­ment that will induce an epiphany in skep­ti­cal read­ers — for noth­ing less than an epiphany will do to per­suade them to change the way they go about liv­ing. Yet every gen­er­a­tion fails, in part because skep­ti­cal read­ers so sel­dom pick up this kind of writ­ing or sub­mit to its evidence.

Her con­clu­sion is also worth not­ing. She reaches for Kafka (There is infi­nite hope, but not for us.) and writes regret­fully: I would say some­thing dif­fer­ent if I could. I have every faith in nature’s recu­per­a­tive powers.…What I doubt is our abil­ity, as a species, to see and, hav­ing seen, to con­tinue to pay attention.

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