The Future of Learning This is a brilliant explanation of where #gamification and #education intersect, and why the internet has suddenly rendered hundreds of years of institutional education obsolete. I very strongly think that the teacher-student dynamic is absolutely essential in the educational process. This video emphasizes the places where teachers should step aside, and I agree with everything said here. But I think we should still be thinking about what role teachers (not just programmers and game designers) should have in overseeing and managing the development of the students. I’ve been running web-based courses from within a brick-and-mortar university setting since 2005, first at the University of Illinois, and then at Illinois state. Nothing too fancy; we ran a collaborative WordPress blog with regular posting and commenting requirements. I set due dates and formats, but I usually let the students pick their own topics to write on. You can see the blog from my last phil mind class here: http://phil238s12.http://fractionalactorssub.madeofrobots.com/blog/ The most recent posts were scrambles for extra credit, but there’s lots of student engagement on the blog, and I think the format was a huge success. I stayed pretty hands-off on the website, but that’s because I had 3 hours a week of their undivided attention in the classroom. I used that time to keep the learning community unified as a community; it was the lectures that set the tone and issues that informed their own free blogging activity. I think this kind of unified learning community is important, and I think the teacher has an important role to play in its unification. So although there are great models being discussed in this video, I think they might be made that much stronger by finding ways to adapt the teaching process to the future of learning. I have […]

Social Networks Over Time and the Invariants of Interaction Just as there are certain cognitive limits to the number of individuals one can have as part of one’s social network, it also appears that there are cognitive and temporal considerations for how humans manage their interactions. In particular, we find that the reported average closeness to all friends decreases as the number of one’s friends increases, suggesting an invariant total expenditure on social interaction [emphasis added]. An increase of one in the number of close social contacts was associated with a decrease of 0.03 in the average closeness of each individual contact on a scale where 0 = do not know and 1 = extremely close. An increase of two close contacts was associated with a decrease in closeness of nearly 0.06 (a substantial reduction on this scale). Because, in prior research, ties are typically modeled as either present or absent, with no strength information, these findings are some of the first of their kind. … We are embedded within networks, which are related to how we help others, and even to our health. But these network connections are not unbounded: we have a finite social attention span. As we gain more friends, we become less close to all of them. So this embeddedness in networks is a precious thing. Understand the implications of social connections and use them wisely. More: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/social-networks-over-time-and-the-invariants-of-interaction/ Article: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036250 via +Kyle Crider

Reposted a comment below __ There is something very strange about the idea of “forcing someone to share”. While it is certainly one way to look at the issue, there is something obviously contradictory about it, and I think it results in anomalies and mistakes when thinking about how networks develop. So let me give what I think is a more natural reading of what’s going on here. When you disable comments, you are limiting your own power to control the conversation. Far from forcing anyone to do anything, you are instead restraining your control over the situation. Limiting your own power is what makes room for others to fill that vacuum and take power themselves, which is what they are doing when they reshare. This isn’t a comfortable position from the old capitalist perspectives. Capitalists think success is purely a matter of control. So if success comes from getting others to reshare your work, and they reshare because you disable comments, then disabling comments must be a way of controlling the audience, right? That’s the logic behind the idea of “forcing to share”. That’s a capitalist approach to networks, but of course this logic is silly. The more obvious reading is that people don’t like to be controlled, so we have to learn to stop forcing them to do things because that’s not an effective organizational strategy. If they think you are forcing them to do anything they will be far less engaged and motivated to cooperate than if they are in control. If they feel like they are in control, then they will be far more willing to identify themselves with their labor. What this suggests is that a strategy of forcing users to share will probably backfire pretty seriously, especially if it is obvious that this method […]

Morals and the Machine The Economist One way of dealing with these difficult questions is to avoid them altogether, by banning autonomous battlefield robots and requiring cars to have the full attention of a human driver at all times. Campaign groups such as the International Committee for Robot Arms Control have been formed in opposition to the growing use of drones. But autonomous robots could do much more good than harm. Robot soldiers would not commit rape, burn down a village in anger or become erratic decision-makers amid the stress of combat. Driverless cars are very likely to be safer than ordinary vehicles, as autopilots have made planes safer. Sebastian Thrun, a pioneer in the field, reckons driverless cars could save 1m lives a year. Instead, society needs to develop ways of dealing with the ethics of robotics—and get going fast. In America states have been scrambling to pass laws covering driverless cars, which have been operating in a legal grey area as the technology runs ahead of legislation. It is clear that rules of the road are required in this difficult area, and not just for robots with wheels. More: http://www.economist.com/node/21556234 See also: http://www.economist.com/node/21556103 via Peter Asaro

Three days ago, I packed all my earthly possessions into my car and moved to California. Most of the packing was books and papers; the amount of student debt I hold exceeds the monetary value of these objects by at least two orders of magnitude. That debt and these books are the remains of almost a decade of study and teaching in Illinois. I left my teaching position at Illinois State at the end of the spring semester to do human-cyborg relations full time. I have big plans for stepping up my blogging and engagement, and I’m excited about a major educational project I’ll be announcing shortly. I’m not entirely settled in and it will be a few more days before I can return to normal blogging schedule, but things will start popping soon. Until I return, here’s something to tide you over. I left the comment below on +Jonathan Langdale‘s post, while at a rest stop outside Vegas during my drive out west. It describes a method of visualizing the attention economy in a way that might be instructive or useful for others looking to do the same. It was something of a derail for the original thread; maybe it can find better resonance here. _____________ https://plus.google.com/u/0/109667384864782087641/posts/KvbZW9vVR7H In any case, you are definitely keying in on a developing hurdle to UI design, which is figuring out how to inform users without distracting them from doing other things, including just moving around. A lot of AR concept designs have data displayed as huge, intrusive graphical text overlays which usually require some reading and processing to benefit from. That processing time is time not spent processing other data. If this overlay is on your windshield as you are driving, this difference could be a matter of life and death. Designing UIs […]

+Beth Harris and +Steven Zucker‘s conversations on art history for the +Khan Academy are really great. I’m especially enjoying their discussions of art during the French and Spanish revolutions, and I can’t wait to hear what they have to say about 20th century! The Goya piece below is terrifying, and the commentary is a great example of the whole expansive and entertaining video collection. I love the dynamic between the two scholars. Their enthusiasm for art is absolutely contagious. I’ve been thinking about producing some educational content for my stream, with the goal of producing content for Khan. Watching these videos is both instructive and inspiring for my own projects. More on Goya’s Saturn here: http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/goya-saturn-devouring-one-of-his-children http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son Khan Academy’s entire Art History Collection: http://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/art-history/ Goya, Saturn Devouring One Of His Sons

The featured video on this post is absolutely wonderful. It highlights just one of the major issues with Enlightenment models of individuals, and the dreadfully absurd consequences it has for the way we raise our children. Highly recommended if you are interested in #education and #digitalculture . James Wood originally shared this post: A collection of insightful videos about the present state of education and future prospects. “Changing Education Paradigms” (below) as you would imagine focusses directly on this issue. Additionally, these give a well-rounded set of perspectives: Salman Khan at TED Talks (founder of Khan Academy)– Salman Khan: Let’s use video to reinvent education Sir Ken Robinson at TED Talks (“Do Schools Kill Creativity”)– Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? RSA animate “The Secret Powers of Time”– RSA Animate – The Secret Powers of Time More from Sir Robinson (if you can sit through 55 min of witty British humor, with occasional digression into discussion about changing paradigms) Sir Ken Robinson – Changing Paradigms

Habits (customs, rituals) are the psychological and behavioral basis for culture. Hence, digital culture just are the patterns of habituated behaviors of digital peoples. When left to their own devices, communities of humans tend to synchronize their habits in ways that might look unusual from the perspective of people who don’t participate in those cultures. Lots of people, including smart and forward thinking techies like +Robert Scoble, tend to immediately implicate the adoption of such habits as a negative trait by referring to them as “addictions”. Addictions are real things, of course, but cultures are real things to, and there is something deeply inhumane about treating the latter like the former. Talking about technology addiction is a growing media and academic niche industry. Using the vocabulary of addiction to talk about technology has just the right mix of hype, science jargon, gossip, and self-loathing to make the meme spread successfully, even among people who should know better. Unfortunately, this is a situation where our concepts are too weak for the phenomena they attempt to analyze. Both technology and habit are deeply fundamental aspects of humanity; treating technology as a disease (or worse, a symptom of some further disease) is categorically the wrong approach to understanding the relations between these processes, and how their dynamics give rise to the full scope of human experience. Alex Schleber originally shared this post: Must-read post on this key metric: “… mastery of the mechanics of habit design is increasingly deciding startup winners and losers. Not only because habits cement user behavior in an increasingly cluttered digital world, but because a high-engagement product is also a high-growth product. The two are one and the same. A high DAU [Daily Active Users] to MAU [Monthly…] ratio is a great indicator of the strength of user habits […]

TECHNICS ? originally shared this post: Quasicrystals as sums of waves in the plane. This quasicrystal is full of emergent patterns, but it can be described in a simple way. Each frame of the animation is a summation of such waves at evenly-spaced rotations. The animation occurs as each wave moves forward. More ? http://goo.gl/vyccv Quasicrystal ? http://goo.gl/uoHjI

Over the last few weeks we’ve seen an explosion of blog posts, videos, and journals publishing on this major developing paradigm shift in social organization. Of course, it is 2012 and networks are hardly new. Facebook’s IPO already seems like old news; no one doubts the importance of networks. We’ve been living on them and in them for decades. What’s changed is our understanding of how #networks behave. Our mathematics and computer science has made tremendous progress over the last few years. Our ability to visualize #bigdata in instructive and useful ways it in a golden age. Until now, the Internet has been mostly flopping along blindly, confident that we were doing good work but not entirely understanding how we were doing it. But over the last month or so our #science has grown strong. When our science is strong, we can be deliberate about how we use our tools. +Bruno Gonçalves and his colleagues gave a vivid but somehow unsurprising demonstration of this power just this week. They predicted the winner of +American Idol by doing nothing more elaborate than counting tweets. This was almost a trivial exercise, but the authors are explicit that this is simply a demonstration of the potential of these techniques: On a more general basis, our results highlight that *the aggregate preferences and behaviors of large numbers of people can nowadays be observed in real time, or even forecasted, through open source data freely available in the web*. The task of keeping them private, even for a short time, has therefore become extremely hard (if not impossible), and this trend is likely to become more and more evident in the future years. Although the success of the prediction isn’t itself surprising, the consequences of the result are not only surprising but fundamentally revolutionary for […]

The Networked Paradigm volume one Over the last few weeks we’ve seen an explosion of blog posts, videos, and journals publishing on this major developing paradigm shift in social organization. Of course, it is 2012 and networks are hardly new. Facebook’s IPO already seems like old news; no one doubts the importance of networks. We’ve been living on them and in them for decades. What’s changed is our understanding of how #networks behave. Our mathematics and computer science has made tremendous progress over the last few years. Our ability to visualize #bigdata in instructive and useful ways it in a golden age. Until now, the Internet has been mostly flopping along blindly, confident that we were doing good work but not entirely understanding how we were doing it. But over the last month or so our #science has grown strong. When our science is strong, we can be deliberate about how we use our tools. +Bruno Gonçalves and his colleagues gave a vivid but somehow unsurprising demonstration of this power just this week. They predicted the winner of +American Idol by doing nothing more elaborate than counting tweets. https://plus.google.com/u/0/117828903900236363024/posts/aSUDwAggmgz This was almost a trivial exercise, but the authors are explicit that this is simply a demonstration of the potential of these techniques: “On a more general basis, our results highlight that the aggregate preferences and behaviors of large numbers of people can nowadays be observed in real time, or even forecasted, through open source data freely available in the web. The task of keeping them private, even for a short time, has therefore become extremely hard (if not impossible), and this trend is likely to become more and more evident in the future years.” Although the success of the prediction isn’t itself surprising, the consequences of the result are not […]