Knowledge and Learning In The News - 3/26/2006

iPod 301: Advanced Applications of Your MP3 Player - Fast Company
Now it's iPods on campus that make me envious of students today. Not for tuning out a mind-numbing lecture but for tuning in the subject matter outside of class. When the fashionable white earbuds showed up at Georgia College & State University, administrators saw an opportunity for innovation.

Find a Need & Fill It, Using Iteration & the Wisdom of Crowds - Dave Pollard
A recent article in Business Week describes the importance of getting your new technology product approximately right fast, and fine tuning it once it's out in the market. Traditional product developers would be aghast at such an idea, since it sounds hasty and unprofessional.

iPods Let Students Crack Books on the Go - Tech News World
"There is no substitute for the energy exchanged one-on-one in a living classroom," says Dave Collins, a marketing lecturer at the University of Northern Iowa. "I would compare it to listening to a CD or podcast of Dave Matthews as opposed to being at a concert

Are kids too plugged in? - CNN
Although multitasking kids may be better prepared in some ways for today's frenzied workplace, many cognitive scientists are positively alarmed by the trend. "Kids that are instant messaging while doing homework, playing games online and watching TV, I predict, aren't going to do well in the long run," says Jordan Grafman, chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Personal Learning for Learning Professionals - Using Web 2.0 Tools to Make Reading & Research More Effective - Tony Karrer
Unfortunately, there seems to be a little information that really helps us understand how we can take control of our personal learning more effectively.

Open, but not as usual - Economist
As open-source models move beyond software into other businesses, their limitations are becoming apparent

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 3/19/2006

An Interview with John Battelle - UC Berkeley School of Information
In a world where, thanks to search, information is freely available, the most valuable skill is to make sense of information - for yourself and for others. Companies that do that are refining information into knowledge, and people who are good at that - the architects and builders - will be in high demand.

An Excerpt from The New Argonauts Regional Advantage in a Global Economy - AnnaLee Saxenian Like the Greeks who sailed with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, the new Argonauts--foreign-born, technically skilled entrepreneurs who travel back and forth between Silicon Valley and their home countries--seek their fortune in distant lands by launching companies far from established centers of skill and technology. Excerpt - PDF

Thoughts on Freakonomics - Malcolm Gladwell
A number of people have asked me what I think of the bestselling book "Freakonomics" written by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. On the front of the book, there is a glowing blurb by me which would suggest that I love it.

Electronic Portfolios: What Are They? - Robin Good
e-portfolios are gaining increasing media attention as potentially highly valuable learning, evaluation and assessment tools for educators, learners and academic organizations.

When big corporations enter the blog world - Dateline
Blogs, the very symbol of the Internet counter-culture have become just another tool of corporate marketing.

The dreaded pop quiz
Students who self-test frequently while studying on their own may be able to learn more, in much less time, than they might by simply studying the material over and over again

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 3/11/2006

March 11, 2006

How to be an expert - Passionate
For the superior performer the goal isn't just repeating the same thing again and again but achieving higher levels of control over every aspect of their performance. That's why they don't find practice boring. Each practice session they are working on doing something better than they did the last time.

This is Your Brain on Poverty - Learning Circuits
When a brain is worried, it's just thinking about survival. It isn't interested in investing in new cells for the future.

The Learning Team - Herrmann-Nehdi
Heterogeneous groups are capable of significantly greater creative output than unbalanced or homogeneous groups. Four major creative approaches that you should be able to recognize among your workers are: 1) Those driven by purpose look at work from a "factual, rigorous, research, analytical, financial" perspective; 2) possibility-driven employees are "holistic, playful, intuitive, visionary, experimental;" 3) those attracted to process are "disciplined and organized and primarily interested in capturing, verifying and planning;" and 4) workers who are mainly drawn to the "people" aspect of any project tend to like the "interpersonal, aesthetic, spiritual, sensual and tactile."

Gaming for Education - Beverley Ferrell, EdD
A geat set of links that lead to a variety of game sites for the learning professional.

More on the USB drive as a mobile platform - Wordpress on a stick - blogoehlert
The USB drive is quickly becoming one of the more adaptable and powerful mobile learning platforms.

How To Create A RSS Feed From Any Web Page - ROBIN GOOD
Today, thanks to new "html scraping" services available to everyone, RSS feeds can be automatically generated for just about any web site, no matter what kind of layout, coding or language it is written in. In some situations, to create a standard RSS feed from any web page that does not have one may take less than a minute, while in other cases, where your needs for customization are higher, you may need to spend a little more time.

Knowledge and Learning In The News - 3/8/2006

March 8, 2006

VisualComplexity - Manuel Lima
A unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. Readers of this blog will proably be most interested in the visualizations of knowledge networks.

Video Literacy - Michael Fieldstein
Take a look at this satirical rendition of how Microsoft would design the iPod box. And while you are watching it, imagine that it is a student-submitted video compare/contrast assignment.

Web 2.0: Mashups - IT Conversations (podcast)
Mashups are a good example of what some Internet insiders are calling "Web 2.0," a relatively undefined term that sort of means something like the Web serving as a platform with sites that take advantage of -- among other things -- user supplied content. The best place to find Mashups is at programmableweb.com which currently lists more than 450 mashups, 50 of which are classifies as "popular."

A reading list for aspiring knowledge workers - Corante
A bibliography of books for the knowledge worker.

How to be an expert - Passionate Users
For the superior performer the goal isn't just repeating the same thing again and again but achieving higher levels of control over every aspect of their performance. That's why they don't find practice boring. Each practice session they are working on doing something better than they did the last time.

eLearning Technology - Tony Karrer
Clarify a couple of aspects of eLearning 2.0, especially in terms of differences in terms of authoring.