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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How To Succeed In Business Without Putting People Last →

At some point in your surf­ing escapades you begin to grasp that the pro­found impact of the inter­net on learn­ing is not its vast stores of con­tent, but its abil­ity to sup­port the var­i­ous facets of social learn­ing. You begin to appre­ci­ate that knowl­edge is not just a lump of some­thing that is passed on via var­i­ous ped­a­gog­i­cal tac­tics, and your atten­tion begins to shift from the con­tent of a sub­ject to the learn­ing activ­i­ties and human inter­ven­tions around which that con­tent is sit­u­ated. John Seely Brown iden­ti­fies this as a shift from “learn­ing about” to “learn­ing to be.” And “learn­ing to be” calls for inter­per­sonal skills not eas­ily acquired by text­book learn­ing. It’s in this con­text I found myself read­ing back issues of In Char­ac­ter, which exam­ines virtues within our com­mu­ni­ties our fam­i­lies and our­selves. The cur­rent issue delves into com­pas­sion; this obser­va­tion from Howard Behar who empha­sizes com­pas­sion as a vital com­po­nent of acquir­ing per­sonal lead­er­ship skills caught my attention:

Peo­ple are not assets. Car­ing isn’t just about admir­ing the charis­matic lead­ers, the peo­ple that every­body likes, or the in crowd. This is the big car­ing we do that shows we “care, like we really mean it.” It’s about words and actions that every­body sees and rec­og­nizes. There’s an old adage that says, “Peo­ple don’t care how much you know, they want to know how much you care.”

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Memories, Emotion and the Nose →

Natalie Ang­ier reports from the Inter­na­tional Sym­po­sium on Olfac­tion and Taste held in San Fran­cisco, includ­ing this insight into how smells, feel­ings and mem­o­ries become so eas­ily and inti­mately entan­gled: “With a phone num­ber, if you get a new one, a week later you may have for­got­ten the old one,” Dr. Herz said. “With smells, it’s the other way around. The first asso­ci­a­tion is bet­ter than the second.”

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Making Decisions Tires Your Brain →

Mar­ket­ing research involv­ing mak­ing choices reveals the brain as a mus­cle: when depleted it comes less effec­tive. Mak­ing choices exhausts what is known as exec­u­tive resources, and “down­stream” deci­sions are affected adversely when we are forced to choose with a fatigued brain. Not only does this explain why I always pick plain yogurt in the refrig­er­a­tor isle, but sug­gests that if we’ve just spent lots of time focus­ing on a par­tic­u­lar task, exer­cis­ing self-control or even if we’ve just made lots of seem­ingly minor choices, then we prob­a­bly shouldn’t try to make a major decision.

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Don’t Share — Build →

Vic­tor New­man on the futil­ity of every­one shar­ing every­thing in an orga­ni­za­tion: The first prob­lem is the implicit eco­nomic par­a­digm peo­ple apply to ideas and knowl­edge: if every­thing is shared, it will be per­ceived to have lit­tle or no value. Sec­ond, you can spend as much time inter­pret­ing shared things of low value as high. Third, peo­ple will only share with those whom they respect and from whom they can expect a return or who share the same prob­lem of pre­serv­ing or rein­vent­ing iden­tity. These peo­ple don’t always work in the same orga­ni­za­tion. And fourth, not every­one is either pre-disposed or equipped to cre­ate (leave alone share) knowledge.

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How To Write With Style →

“Pity the read­ers,” advises Kurt Von­negut, whom he calls “imper­fect artists,” strug­gling to mas­ter the dif­fi­cult task of mak­ing sense of thou­sands of scrib­bles on the page. This is my favourite bit advice from Kurt Vonnegut’s “How to Write With Style” (orig­i­nally pub­lished in Palm Sun­day, 1981) that remains rel­e­vant in the net­worked age: “Our audi­ence requires us to be sym­pa­thetic and patient read­ers, ever will­ing to sim­plify and clar­ify — whereas we would rather soar high above the crowd, singing like nightin­gales. This is the bad news.” The good news? We can write about what­ever we please.

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The Weird Science of Stock Photography →

Adver­tis­ing decon­structed: Stock pho­tog­ra­phy sup­pli­ers must be able to guess which abstract con­cepts clients want to illus­trate, and then have pho­tos and video on hand that res­onates. So,what can we glean from the ubiq­ui­tous “Every­where Girl” and mid-ocean oil rig in a storm?

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Shortening the Tail of Scientific Expertise? →

Is the web nar­row­ing sci­en­tists’ exper­tise? Soci­ol­o­gist James Evans’ work iden­ti­fies that as more jour­nals become avail­able online, dra­mat­i­cally fewer arti­cles are being cited in the research papers within them. “Rather than mea­sur­ing the length of the tail, it seems that mod­ern sci­ence is actu­ally focus­ing on a tiny bit of it.” The rea­sons for this phe­nom­e­non are unclear, but he does sug­gest that online data­bases make it less likely now than in the past for researchers to inte­grate serendip­i­tous gems of dis­cov­er­ies into their research. Per­haps prov­ing the old adage that, an “expert is some­one who knows more and more about less and less until, even­tu­ally, he knows every­thing about nothing.”

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The Importance of Being There →

Bill Thompson’s thought­ful con­clu­sions on attend­ing a sem­i­nar to see Clay Shirky think out loud about social tools, a sem­i­nar that he might just as eas­ily have attended online, but one he was dri­ven to attend in per­son by an ‘inner need’:

What is clear, how­ever, is that the bound­aries between the online and offline worlds are blur­ring as we put our hands through the looking-glass of the screen to shake hands with those on the other side, occa­sion­ally pulling them back through into what we still like to call “real life”.

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Cultural Evolution →

Paul Ehrlich makes some obser­va­tions on the daunt­ing task of build­ing a com­pre­hen­sive the­ory of cul­tural change. He dis­misses Richard Dawkins’ brave but flawed con­jec­ture about “memes” (gene analogs of cul­tural inher­i­tance), but does sup­port the con­tentious notion that nat­ural selec­tion can oper­ate in cul­tural evo­lu­tion as well as in genetic evo­lu­tion, although not likely as a cen­tral force. He paints a daunt­ing but hope­ful and cer­tainly vital under­tak­ing. “…since every­thing from weapons of mass destruc­tion to global heat­ing are the results of changes in human cul­ture over time, acquir­ing a fun­da­men­tal under­stand­ing of cul­tural evo­lu­tion just might be the key to sav­ing civ­i­liza­tion from itself.”

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The Next Renaissance →

In his keynote address at the Per­sonal Democ­racy Forum 2008, Dou­glas Rushkoff points out that there is in fact noth­ing per­sonal about democ­racy. Rather, it is about tran­scend­ing the self and act­ing col­lec­tively. Sadly, even though the social media tools we use cede cen­tral author­ity to decen­tral­ized groups and give us a way to par­tic­i­pate in small ways, we tend to miss the real oppor­tu­nity to recon­fig­ure how democ­racy oper­ates (cf. the first Renais­sance). The oppor­tu­nity is not to blog about pol­i­tics, but rather to reclaim our role as cit­i­zens who par­tic­i­pate in the cre­ation of the soci­ety in which we want to live:

If Obama is indeed elected the first truly Internet-enabled can­di­date, we should take him at his word. He does not offer him­self as the agent of change, but as an advo­cate of the change that could be enacted by peo­ple. It is not for gov­ern­ment to cre­ate solar power, for exam­ple, but to get out of the way of all those peo­ple who are ready to imple­ment solar power, them­selves. Respond­ing to the will­ing­ness of peo­ple to act, he can remove reg­u­la­tions devel­oped on behalf of the oil indus­try to restrict its proliferation.

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