David McGavock's List: howard rheingold

• Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively.
• The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - on knowing how to look at it.

• My reasons:

    

  Openness - anyone can join, and anyone can follow anyone else
• Immediacy - it is a rolling present. You won't get the sense of Twitter if you just check in once a week. You need to hang out for minutes and hours, every day, to get in the groove.
• I don't have to listen to noise, but filtering it out requires attention. You are responsible for whoever else's babble you are going to direct into your awareness.
• Reciprocity - people give and ask freely for information they need
• A channel to multiple publics - I'm a communicator and have a following that I want to grow and feed. I can get the word out about a new book or vlog post in seconds - and each of the people who follow me might also feed my memes to their own networks.
• Asymmetry - very interesting, because nobody sees the same sample of the Twitter population. Few people follow exactly the same people who follow them.
• A way to meet new people - it happens every day. Connecting with people who share interests has been the most powerful social driver of the Internet since day one. I follow people I don't know otherwise but who share enthusiasm
• A window on what is happening in multiple worlds
• Community-forming - Twitter is not a community, but it's an ecology in which communities can emerge.
• A platform for mass collaboration:
• Searchability - the ability to follow searches for phrases like "swine flu" or "Howard Rheingold" in real time provides a kind of ambient information radar on topics that interest me.
• successful use of Twitter comes down to tuning and feeding.
• If it isn't fun, it won't be useful. If you don't put out, you don't get back. But you have to spend some time tuning and feeding if Twitter is going to be more than an idle amusement to you
• Twitter is a flow, not a queue like your email inbox, to be sampled judiciously is only one part of the attention literacy
• My students who learn about the presentation of self and construction of identity in the psychology and sociology literature see the theories they are reading come to life on the Twitter
• successful use of Twitter means knowing how to tune the network of people you follow, and how to feed the network of people who follow you.
• It's about knowing how and knowing who and knowing who knows who knows what.
• use of media to be productive and to foster authentic interpersonal connection, rather than waste of time and attention on phony, banal, alienated pseudo-communication. Know-how is where the difference lies.

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• PLNs -- which she calls "passionate learning networks" and defines simply as "the people you choose to connect with and learn from."
• Shelly has a list of resources for educators who want to use Skype and videoskype to go global with their classrooms.
• "I get them to start with blogs, show them how to participate by commenting. They see how the conversation evolves. After they get comfortable, I encourage them to begin looking at other tools. Like our students, teachers evolve at different paces...You have to participate to build community.
• Asking for help is important -- just as we teach our students every day. It opens a conversation. Be willing to listen. Be willing to let the conversation take you where it's going to take you, because often it takes you to a completely different place than you originally imagined.”

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• A New Culture of Learning
• what strikes me is the second part of the title Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.
• I love seeing a child's imagination being captivated
• I am challenged by many who see social-media as the next project rather than a shift in the paradigm of existence.
• I believe that dissatisfaction with the factory model of school, along with the growing number, ubiquity, and accessiblity, of tools (for connection, collaboration and creation) will tip the balance toward new models and cultures of learning.
• I love to see teachers and student figuring out how to use technology together; asking questions, trying stuff, "messing around" as Brown would say.
• The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
• Can I just say that it is amazingly prescient and still relevant even a decade later? I'm interested in comparing it to his more recent book in discussion here.
• Howard reponds with an idea on assignments (and the power of assignments). I found the questions (or in other courses the assignements) to really good at directing my brain. 1.Read the question 2. go to sleep 3. stare at the ceiling for hours 4. brush teeth 5. eureka
  These methods are also used in action learning and action research
• I'm reading the book "the myth of management" (which is not related to learning), and I found out that finding "faults" is actually a dirty consultant trick, as it expands the window through which you can sell your solution. I hacked that idea and replaced solution with learning.
•  The role of the instructor in balancing freedom and structure -- setting enough structure so that the unlimited freedom doesn't become vertiginous and overwhelming -- resonates with my experiences with Rheingold U. so far. Assignments seem to help, but they can't be too onerous.
•  Very nice article comparing Thomas/JSB ideas to John Dewey's:
•  http://charlestkerchner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/DeweyThomas.pdf
• Ernst - I am particularly interested in Action Research of the "plan, act, observe,reflect" variety where we never really arrive at conclusions but start again in a new cycle of teaching and learning.
• that idea of teaching people to fail is very important - I notice that this is acceptable very often in business especially in the contexts of 'start-ups' but unacceptable in most schools. Here in Europe, the work of the Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg gets a lot of attention - one of his motifs is learning to be wrong.
• Knowing who to listen to in the 'noise' of all the information overload is important - I'm looking forward to our continuing review of how we all re-imagine that new culture of learning.
• Can You, and if yes, How,  Change a system from within? This is one of the key issues of our time. Learning, PLN, Community support structures, activism, Social media, cooperation.. are all part of that... so it is realIy at the heart of our SMC Alumni topics. 
• I would suggest, we should be dialoguing in depth about the question, and how to formulate it, before jumping to solutions...
• The work of social and developmental psychologist, Carol Dweck can inform our discussion about failure,
• Her book, Mindset, posits that some students have growth mindsets and some have fixed mindsets.
• Ernst, I adore your description of problem-solving (especially the enumerated part). Downtime is essential for processing information and I agree, even subtle shifts within group dynamics can cause huge internal vistas to open up.
• The idea of structuring for failure in itself is a whole new take on creative thinking.
• 1. Schools reward success.  That's our measurement system, our "leaderboard".  Some winners at school go on to run schools.
   
  2. Schools punish failure deeply, systematically.  Remember dunce caps?
   
   

  So taking failure as a good thing is, at the very least, weird and defamiliarizing!
• Chapter Two of Thomas and Seely-Brown's book  is so short - just five pages - They conclude with the idea ....the point is to embrace what we don't know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more and more, both incrementally and exponentially. I wonder do the authors want us to reflect repeatedly on the contents of the chapter given its brevity.
• is it certain type of people who fail, who are subsequently allowed to start again?
• book's first chapter
• Two key elements: network ("a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources", sounds like mobile + Web) and environments ("bounded and structural") (19).
• what do you make of the examples they present?  What do they suggest about the theory they exemplify?

• ohn Seely Brown is particularly interested in the idea of tinkering. He suggests one of the best 'tinkering' models is the architectural studio -- the place where students work together trying to solve each others' problems, and a mentor or master can also take part in open criticism. Find out why this is a model for us all.

   

   http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bydesign/stories/2011/3147776.htm
• The first chapter is a pretty rosy, and might I say westernized, view of the power of Internet access + play in learning.* It manages to enlighten and engage using a few choice narratives (I imagine we will get to the power of those at some point in the book, too) and sets us up for the rationale to come.
• * I'm looking for some reaction with regards to that comment
• based on WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) concepts. (An aside, here's a truly wonderful post unpacking of the idea of WEIRD in social science research.)
• I can only talk for myself but there are contradictions between what I think is best to do with the students I teach and what I actually do. This "living contradiction" is something I consider in my own studies - I noticed a Tweet last night from Howard: Online and blended learning is NOT about automating delivery of knowledge, but about encouraging peer learning, inquiry, discourse.

• The sentence I liked most from Chapter One reads

   

  "One of the metaphors we adopt to describe this process is cultivation. A farmer for example takes the nearly unlimited resources of sunlight, wind, water, earth, and biology and consolidates them into the bounded and structured environment of garden or farm. We see a new culture of learning as a similar kind of process - but cultivating minds instead of plants"
• Everyone - you may have seen the piece below - if not please take 12 minutes to view it - it fits nicely with our current discussion

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• We hope that cities are serendipity engines. By putting a diverse set of people and things together in a confined place, we increase the chances that we’re going to stumble onto the unexpected. It’s worth asking the question: do cities actually work this way?
• Most of us are fairly predictable
• Nathan Eagle, who has worked with Sandy Pentland at MIT’s Media Lab on the idea of “reality mining”, digesting huge sets of data like mobile phone records, estimates that he can predict the location of “low-entropy individuals” with 90-95% accuracy based on this type of data
• “Census data can describe the segregation of my block, but how about telling me how segregated my life is? Location data points in that direction.
• We all filter the places we live into the places where we’re regulars and the ones we avoid, the parts of town where we feel familiar and where we feel foreign. We do this based on where we live, where we work, and who we like to spend time with.
• We hope for random encounter with a diverse citizenry to build a web of weak ties that increases our sense of involvement in the community, as Bob Putnam suggested in Bowling Alone. And we worry that we may instead isolate and cocoon ourselves when faced with a situation where we feel like outsiders, as Putnam’s recent research suggests.
• I’m less interested in the ways in which we limit our paths through cities than in how we constrain what we do and don’t encounter online.

  • key point
• through the design of the systems we use and our behavior with those systems, I see reasons to worry that our use of the internet may be less cosmopolitan and more isolated that we would hope.
• I’m less concerned about left-right polarization in the US, and more concerned about us/them polarization around the world
• Countries that have more than 40 million or more internet users generally have a very strong bias towards local sources – the mean is roughly 95%/5%, which makes Americans look (slightly) cosmopolitan in comparison.
• US broadcast media focuses much more on entertainment stories than on international news.)
• What’s striking to me about this preference data is that there’s so little effort required to access international news sources like BBC, the Times of India or the Mail and Guardian – they’re one click away and don’t require crossing a language barrier – and how strong the “local” bias for national news sources appears to be.
• on January 12th, I published “What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?“… and I got a lot of phone calls when Ben Ali fled the country two days later.
• The revolution in Tunisia caught intelligence and diplomatic services around the world flat-footed. It didn’t have to – there was a wealth of information being published on Tunisian Facebook pages
• I’m forced to admit that there’s no way I would have known about the revolution brewing if I didn’t have close Tunisian friends.
• There were – and are – reasons to distrust curators, but there’s a critical aspect of their work I believe we need to preserve as we move towards new models for organizing news.

  • interesting view of curation
• On the other hand, curators invariably have biases
• We need mechanisms to ensure that search gets complemented with serendipity.

  • Point we have been discussing. Filter bubbles
• Facebook offers a different answer to the question, “What do I need to know?” – “You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not.”

  • Facebook world = ummm....
• The problem, of course, is that if your friends don’t know about a revolution in Tunisia or a great new Vietnamese restaurant, you may not know either.
• there’s a decent chance that their collective intelligence has some blind spots
• It’s worth asking whether that bubble is able to provide us with the serendipity we hope for from the web.
• Serendipity, at first glance, looks like the positive side of unintended consequences, the happy accident. But that’s not what the term meant, at least originally.
• The word was coined by Horace Walpole, an 18th century British aristocrat,
• he refers to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the titular characters were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
• A Google search turns up 11 million pages with the term, including restaurants, movies and gift shops named “serendipity”, but very few on unexpected discovery through sagacity.

  • Serendipity vs. Sagacity
• Louis Pasteur observed, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”
• In “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity”, he and Barber explore discovery in a General Electric laboratory under the leadership of Willis Whitney, who encouraged a work environment that focused as much on fun as it did on discovery.

  • Sounds like Google. Tinkering, time to play, time to work.
• Our loss, I believe, is that we’ve lost sight of the idea that we could prepare ourselves for serendipity, both personally and structurally.
• If we want to create online spaces to encourage serendipity, we might start by learning from cities.

  • Moving to the point of online learning
• vibrancy comes from the ongoing chance encounter between people using a neighborhood for different purposes, encountering one another as their paths intersect and cross.
• The neighborhoods Jacobs celebrates are certainly not the most efficient in terms of an individual’s ability to move quickly and independently. Vibrancy and efficiency may not be diametrically opposed, but it’s likely that the forces are in tension.
• Cities embody political decisions make by their designers.
• It’s much harder to get the architects behind Facebook or Foursquare articulate the behaviors they’re trying to enable and the political assumptions that underly those decisions.
• An urban planner who wants to make changes to a city’s structure is held in check by a matrix of forces: a desire to preserve history, the needs and interests of businesses and residents in existing communities, the costs associated with executing new projects. Progress is slow,
• For those planning the future of Facebook, it’s hard to study what’s succeeded and failed for MySpace, in part because an exodus of users to Facebook is gradually turning MySpace into a ghost town.
• If we learn from real-world cities instead of abandoned digital ones, what lessons might we take?
• The Jacobs/Moses debate suggests we need to be cautious of architectures that offer convenience and charge isolation as a price of admission. This is the concern Eli Pariser articulates in his (excellent) new book, “The Filter Bubble“.
• He worries that between Google’s personalized search and the algorithmic decisions Facebook makes in displaying news from our friends, our online experience is an increasingly isolated one,
• They’re cars, rather than public transit or busy sidewalks.
• A map of Vancouver overlaid with my friends’ recommendations is one thing; one that recommends restaurants based on paid advertisements and doesn’t reveal this practice is another entirely.
• The map I want is the one that lets me shuffle not just through my friends’ preferences but through annotations from different groups: first time visitors to the city; long-time Vancouverites; foodies; visitors from Japan, Korea or China.

  • A diverse sampling of taste
• People’s actions inscribe their intentions onto a city.
• Online spaces are often so anxious to show me how my friends are using a space that they obscure how other audiences are using it.
• It’s possible to find out what’s popular on Facebook to an audience broader than that of your friends.
• One of the reasons curation is such a helpful strategy for wandering is that it reveals community maxima. It can be helpful to know that Times Square is the most popular tourist destination in New York if only so we can avoid it.
• knowing where Haitian taxi cab drivers go for goat soup is often useful data on where the best Haitian food is to be found.
• If you want to explore beyond the places your friends think are the most enjoyable, or those the general public thinks are enjoyable, you need to seek out curators who are sufficiently far from you in cultural terms and who’ve annotated their cities in their own ways.
• Geocaching is its own peculiar form of community annotation, where the immediate goal is leaving your signature on someone else’s logbook, but the deeper goal is encouraging you to explore in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.
• SF0, founded by a trio of Chicagoans transplanted to San Francisco, was designed to encourage players to discover things they’d never seen or done in the city, in a way that encouraged independence and exploration.
• Combining the insights we may find from studying the organization of cities with the ability to reshuffle and sort digitally may let us think about designing online spaces for serendipity in different and powerful ways.
• - How do we design physical spaces to encourage serendipity?
   - What lessons about serendipity in physical spaces can we bring into the virtual realm?
   - How can we annotate the physical world, digitally, in ways that expand our encounters with the world, rather than limiting them?

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