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06 Nov 09

Edge In Frankfurt: THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE— A Talk with Frank Schirrmacher

"We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on."

www.edge.org/...schirrmacher09_index.html - Preview

shifts mustread09 quoteable

thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body. And that's the Internet and it's the cloud. And very soon we will have the brain in the cloud. And this raises the question of the importance of thoughts. For centuries, what was important for me was decided in my brain. But now, apparently, it will be decided somewhere else.
We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on.
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- "What if the price of machines that think is people who don't?"
- We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember.
- we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.
- And so what interests me is that we are, because we have the Internet, now entering a phase where Darwinian structures, where Darwinian dynamics, Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker.
- And so this question of what survives, which idea survives, and which idea drowns, which idea starves to death, is something which, in our whole system of thought, is very, very known, and is quite an issue. And now we encounter this structure, this phenomenon, in everyday thinking.
- we have a crisis of all the systems that somehow are linked to either thinking or to knowledge. It's the publishing companies, it's the newspapers, it's the media, it's TV. But it's as well the university, and the whole school system, where it is not a normal crisis of too few teachers, too many pupils, or whatever; too small universities; too big universities.
  
  Now, it's totally different. When you follow the discussions, there's the question of what to teach, what to learn, and how to learn. Even for universities and schools, suddenly they are confronted with the question how can we teach? What is the brain actually taking? Or the problems which we have with attention deficit and all that, which are reflections and, of course, results, in a way, of the technical revolution?
- thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body. And that's the Internet and it's the cloud. And very soon we will have the brain in the cloud. And this raises the question of the importance of thoughts. For centuries, what was important for me was decided in my brain. But now, apparently, it will be decided somewhere else.
- the concept of the informavores, the human being as somebody eating information
- So you can, in a way, see that the Internet and that the information overload we are faced with at this very moment has a lot to do with food chains, has a lot to do with food you take or not to take, with food which has many calories and doesn't do you any good, and with food that is very healthy and is good for you.
- The tool is not only a tool, it shapes the human who uses it.
- But now, when you have a generation — in the next evolutionary stages, the child of today — which are adapted to systems such as the iTunes "Genius", which not only know which book or which music file they like, and which goes farther and farther in predictive certain things, like predicting whether the concert I am watching tonight is good or bad. Google will know it beforehand, because they know how people talk about it.
- The way we predict our own life, the way we are predicted by others, through the cloud, through the way we are linked to the Internet, will be matters that impact every aspect of our lives.
- This is Darwinism, the whole question. And, in a very real sense, look at the problem with Google and the newspapers. Darwinism, but as well the whole question of who survives in the net, in the thinking; who gets more traffic; who gets less traffic, and so.
- The question is to understand which is important. What is important, what is not important is something very linear, it's something which needs time, at least the structure of time. Now, you have simultaneity, you have everything happening in real time. And this impacts politics in a way which might be considered for the good, but also for the bad.
- Google, he saw all the books they were scanning, and noted that they said they are not scanning these books for humans to read, but for the artificial intelligence to read.
- Take the intellectual values that are timeless and indisputable: objectivity, truth, factual discovery, soundness of argument, insight, explanatory depth, openness to challenging ideas, scrutiny of received dogma, overturning of myth and superstition. Now ask, are new technologies enhancing or undermining those values? And as you answer, take care to judge the old and new eras objectively, rather than giving a free pass to whatever you got used to when you were in your 20s.
  
  One way to attain this objectivity is to run the clock backwards and imagine that old technologies are new and vice-versa. Suppose someone announced: "Here is a development that will replace the way you’ve been doing things. From now on, you won’t be able to use Wikipedia. Instead you’ll use an invention called The Encyclopedia Britannica. You pay several thousand dollars for a shelf-groaning collection of hard copies whose articles are restricted to academic topics, commissioned by a small committee, written by a single author, searchable only by their titles, and never change until you throw the entire set and buy new ones." Would anyone argue that this scenario would make us collectively smarter?
- The fact is that most of our longstanding, prestigious informational institutions are, despite their pretentions, systematically counter-intellectual.
- For all their flaws, media such as Wikipedia, news feeds, blogs, website aggregators, and reader reviews offer the potential for great advances over the status quo — not just in convenience but in intellectual desiderata like breadth, rigor, diversity of viewpoints, and responsibility to the factual record. Our intellectual culture today reflects this advance — contrary to the Cassandras, scientific progress is dizzying; serious commentary on the internet exceeds the capacity of any mortal reader; the flow of philosophical, historical, and literary books (many of doorstop length) has not ebbed; and there is probably more fact-checking, from TV news to dinner tables, than an any time in history. Our collective challenge in dealing with the Internet is to nurture these kinds of progress.
- If the Internet is a massive work of art, as I believe it is, it has modernist properties: it regularly promotes a feeling of unease and inadequacy (rather than jubilation, satisfaction, smugness, serenity, etc). As Schirrmacher's interview suggests, perhaps this is because the Internet user feels as though he is forever trying to eat or be eaten, and he's both undernourished and afraid.
- The way to get on top of all this, of course, would be to have some inkling of how these "thinking" devices were programmed — or even to have some input into the way they do so. Unlike our calculators, we don't even know what we are asking our machines to do, much less how they are going to go about doing it. Every Google search is — at least for most of us — a Hail Mary pass into the datasphere, requesting something from an opaque black box.
  
  So we continue to build and accept new technologies into our lives with little or no understanding of how these devices have been programmed. We do not know how to program our computers. We spend much more time and energy trying to figure out how to program one another, instead. And this is potentially a grave mistake.
- Convenient, cheap, and ubiquitous, the great shared computer
  that is the Internet is rapidly absorbing all our other media.
  It's like a great sponge, sucking up books, newspapers, magazines,
  TV and radio shows, movies, letters, telephone calls, even face-to-face
  conversations.
- Thoughts and ideas will need to be compressed if they're
  to survive in the new environment. Ambiguity and complexity, expansiveness
  of argument and narrative, will be winnowed out. We may find ourselves
  in the age of intellectual bittiness, which would certainly suit
  the computers we rely on. The metaphor of brain-as-computer becomes
  a self-fulfilling prophecy: To keep up with our computers, we have
  to think like our computers.
- It is not our fear of information overload that stalls our egos, it's the fear that we might be missing something.
- The new generation, born connected, does not feel the need to consume all the information available at their fingertips. They consume what they want and then affect or change it, they add to it or negate it, they share it and then swiftly move along the path. They rely on their community, their swarm, to filter and share information and in turn they do the same; it's a communism of content. True ideology at it's best. They, or should I say I, feel the same comfort from a pack of informavores rummaging together through the ever-growing pile of information while the analog generation still feels towards an edited newspaper or the neatly packaged one-hour nightly news show.
- importance is individualism. What is important to me is not important to you, and vice-a-versa.
- The interview vividly expresses the sense many of us are getting that when we are bathed in information (it is not really snippets of information, we need the metaphor of living in a liquid that is constantly changing in flavor and feel) we no longer know precisely what we have learned, nor do we know where our thoughts come from, or indeed whether the thoughts are our own or absorbed from the bath.

20 Aug 09

apophenia: some thoughts on technophilia

There are also no such things as "digital natives." Just because many of today's youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don't. Most of you have a better sense of how to get information from Google than the average youth. Most of you know how to navigate privacy settings of a social media tool better than the average teen. Understanding technology requires learning. Sure, there are countless youth engaged in informal learning every day when they go online. But what about all of the youth who lack access? Or who live in a community where learning how to use technology is not valued? Or who tries to engage alone? There's an ever-increasing participation gap emerging between the haves and the have-nots. What distinguishes the groups is not just a question of access, although that is an issue; it's also a question of community and education and opportunities for exploration. Youth learn through active participation, but phrases like "digital natives" obscure the considerable learning that occurs to enable some youth to be technologically fluent while others fail to engage.

www.zephoria.org/...some_thoughts_o_1.html - Preview

mustread09 shifts learning network_literacy

There are also no such things as "digital natives." Just because many of today's youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don't. Most of you have a better sense of how to get information from Google than the average youth. Most of you know how to navigate privacy settings of a social media tool better than the average teen. Understanding technology requires learning. Sure, there are countless youth engaged in informal learning every day when they go online. But what about all of the youth who lack access? Or who live in a community where learning how to use technology is not valued? Or who tries to engage alone? There's an ever-increasing participation gap emerging between the haves and the have-nots. What distinguishes the groups is not just a question of access, although that is an issue; it's also a question of community and education and opportunities for exploration. Youth learn through active participation, but phrases like "digital natives" obscure the considerable learning that occurs to enable some youth to be technologically fluent while others fail to engage.

22 Apr 09

How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com

I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.

online.wsj.com/...SB123980920727621353.html - Preview

connective_reading connective_writing mustread09 books kindle literacy ebooks

The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.'s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business
I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways.
- Really echoes Kevin Kelly in "Scan this Book" http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html?pagewanted=1 - on 2009-04-22
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- I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.
  - Great paragraph - on 2009-04-21
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- It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.
  - Some potetntially profound changes right here. But just as I am using Diigo to mark this up for myself and others, I am most interested in the social aspects of reading. I hadn't thought much about the Diigo connection to that until I read this article. - on 2009-04-22
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- Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?
  - Does form matter? - on 2009-04-22
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- In our always-connected, everything-linked world, we sometimes forget that books are the dark matter of the information universe.
  - Echoes of Dov Siedman's "How" - on 2009-04-22
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- That's because the modern infosphere is both organized and navigated through hyperlinked pages of digital text, with the most-linked pages rising to the top of Google Inc.'s all-powerful search-results page.
- But because books have largely been excluded from Google's index -- distant planets of unlinked analog text -- that vast trove of knowledge can't compete with its hyperlinked rivals.
  - Really interesting way of putting this, that analog can't compete with hypertext. I wonder how many traditional teachers would argue with that? - on 2009-04-22
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- As a result, 2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.
  - And perhaps another tipping point in the public's understanding and perception of the "tectonic shift" that's occuring. - on 2009-04-22
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- Now, the ability to digitally search millions of books instantly will make finding all that information easier yet again. Expect ideas to proliferate -- and innovation to bloom -- just as it did in the centuries after Gutenberg.
  - Sounds like Shirky. - on 2009-04-22
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- Before too long, you'll be able to create a kind of shadow version of your entire library, including every book you've ever read -- as a child, as a teenager, as a college student, as an adult. Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. Entirely new forms of discovery will be possible. Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you've read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven't encountered yet.
  - The question I keep coming back to is how do we make this simply a part of our practice and not some "Wow!" process? These concepts and others (when you add the work of the social group around information collection, selection and dissemination) are going to be profound shifts in the process. - on 2009-04-22
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- The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go
  - Some are really going to hate reading that line... - on 2009-04-22
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- In other words, an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.
  - Knew that was coming. I'm wondering if this shift in attention is better or worse or simply different. Can the brain (or will the brain) process information differently, in spurts and snippets, in ways that can be similar in "value" to they ways we now consider continuous attention? - on 2009-04-22
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- Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article -- sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.
  - And here I wonder what the pedagogical and curricular implications are of these shifts to linked reading environments. When I think of the process (ineffective as it may be) that I use to capture and store and link information (as in taking these notes right now) and how different it is or, really how absent that is from classroom teaching, it's scary on some level. - on 2009-04-22
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- As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.
  - And, so? Again, I'm not convinced this is a bad thing, just different. Look at how reading has evolved over the ages. Is this just another step, albeit huge one, in that evolution. - on 2009-04-22
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- Putting books online will also change how we find books -- and talk about them
  - Yes. Imagine doing this to books. - on 2009-04-22
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- - I'm just struck at this moment how badly I want to be able to engage in a conversation with others about these ideas. The idea that I'm using Diigo to add these meta thoughts creates an expectation of response that is pretty strong. I want a disucssion to happen here, on the page. I'm thinking that I'd almost like to be able to save these threads and the contextual highlights as a blog post, but it would be too disjointed. Guessing I will have to Tweet out this undertaking to see if others might join in. - on 2009-04-22
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- With books becoming part of this universe, "booklogs" will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, "In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.") You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning.
  - I find this to be a compelling vision. Others, not so much I'm sure. - on 2009-04-22
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- Think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.
  - Again, this can certainly be cool or chaotic. But I love the way Diigo allows you to do this in small groups. Wouldn't it be cool if we had a diverse "must read article" group where once a week we just came in a picked apart an article from many sides? - on 2009-04-22
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- Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention.
  - And then connect those ideas to every blog post, Tweet, etc. Navigating all that meta data will be a hugely different reading skill. Is THAT a new literacy? - on 2009-04-22
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- permanent annuity for the author
  - Love that thought, and the implications that it holds for public writing. - on 2009-04-22
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- Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.
  - This idea kind of tweaks me, I'll admit. That shift in the motivation for writing, for the audience of Google, draws some interesting parallels to writing for the teacher and not oneself or one's audience. As I write these notes, for instance, I am primarily writing for myself, but I am also concious of the potential audience that might read them when I blog about it and tweet it out. This is not for Google, at least not yet. - on 2009-04-22
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- Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers;
  - Tagging on the sentence level. Now that is cool, I think, and I've asked Diigo to allow tagging on the comment or the highlight level in that way. - on 2009-04-22
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- Perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind.
  - Yuk. And I don't think it would work, necessarily, as readers would be less apt to promote that prose, right? - on 2009-04-22
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- It's not hard to imagine, for instance, how introductions will be transformed in this new world. Right now, introductions are written with the assumption that people have already bought the book. That won't be the case in the future, when the introduction is given away. It will, no doubt, be written more to entice readers to buy the whole book.
- The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.
  - Isn't O'Reilly already doing this? - on 2009-04-22
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14 Apr 09

New Rules for Mass Collaboration | Leading Change | Fast Company

We are experiencing the most dramatic shift in the nature of business and work since the industrial revolution. The traditional management model is based on the premise that large organizations are about bringing together large numbers of people in central locations and then organizing their work. In the last 15 years with the rise of the Internet and electronic technology we are seeing the rise of mass collaboration and globalization. The premise that large numbers of people are gathered in one place is no longer true.

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collaboration shifts quoteable mustread09 social

We are experiencing the most dramatic shift in the nature of business and work since the industrial revolution. The traditional management model is based on the premise that large organizations are about bringing together large numbers of people in central locations and then organizing their work. In the last 15 years with the rise of the Internet and electronic technology we are seeing the rise of mass collaboration and globalization. The premise that large numbers of people are gathered in one place is no longer true.
Collective learning needs to replace central planning as the foundation of strategy, and self-organization of knowledge workers needs to replace the hierarchical organization of workers.
- Interesting turn of the phrase, collective learning. - on 2009-04-14
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- Organizations need to tap into their collective learning. When organizations do this, they can move far faster than through traditional debate-style meetings. The most untapped resource in America today is the collective knowledge of its workers. It’s all fully paid for. What organizations lack are processes to tap into it. A hierarchical organization is a tremendous obstacle.
- Organizations are going to learn that if they don't have quick access to their collective knowledge, they are not going to be able to keep up with the market, the competition.
  - Pretty powerful line. Inherent in that statement is that we are able to produce and publish that knowledge in transparent and effective ways. - on 2009-04-14
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12 Feb 09

Publications: SRN LEADS

Every year, nine in 10 of the nation’s three million teachers participate in professional development designed to improve their content knowledge, transform their teaching, and help them respond to student needs. These activities, which can include workshops, study groups, mentoring, classroom observations, and numerous other formal and informal learning experiences, have mixed results in how they effect student achievement.

Research shows that professional learning can have a powerful effect on teacher skills and knowledge and on student learning. To be effective, however, it must be sustained, focused on important content, and embedded in the work of collaborative professional learning teams that support ongoing improvements in teachers’ practice and student achievement.

A comprehensive new report released today by researchers from Stanford University and the National Staff Development Council (NSDC) finds that while the United States is making progress in providing support and mentoring for new teachers and focusing on bolstering content knowledge, the type of support and on-the-job training most teachers receive is episodic, often fragmented, and disconnected from real problems of practice.

www.srnleads.org/...nsdc.html - Preview

mustread09 parentbook njplp21 oceplp21 indplp21 advisplp21 pearlsplp internationalplp21 illohioplp21 professional_development plpresearch

Research shows that professional learning can have a powerful effect on teacher skills and knowledge and on student learning. To be effective, however, it must be sustained, focused on important content, and embedded in the work of collaborative professional learning teams that support ongoing improvements in teachers’ practice and student achievement.
“Most states and districts are still not providing the kind of professional learning that research suggests improves teaching practice and student outcomes,” says Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommon Professor of Teaching and Teacher Education at Stanford University, who wrote the report along with a team of researchers from Stanford’s School Redesign Network. “The research tells us that teachers need to learn the way other professionals do—continually, collaboratively, and on the job.

03 Jan 09

LRB · John Lanchester: Is it Art?

There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which eith

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shifts plpresearch videogames mustread09