Knowledge and Learning In The News - 12/17/2006

December 17, 2006

Person of the Year: You - Time Magazine
The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace.

Definitions of Informal Learning - Mohamed Amine Chatti's ongoing research on Technology Enhanced Learning
The notion of informal learning is becoming increasingly important. In a corporate context, learning is much more than formal training. And, our academic learning also comes from different informal channels; e.g. through games, simulations, experiments, story-telling, discovery.

Survey: Not All Workers Consider BlackBerry a Ball and Chain - eWeek
Even though workers acknowledge that their wireless devices are eroding the boundary between the office and their outside-work lives, the survey found them focusing more on the benefits than drawbacks.

Web 2.0 and the AJAX - Open Source Tecnnology Web 2.0 is a strange thing in that it doesn't really exist. You can't buy Web 2.0; you can't buy a Web 2.0 programming language, and you can't buy Web 2.0 hardware. In many ways, the phrase "Web 2.0" is a marketing phrase like "paradigm shift" or "the big picture".

Tech lessons learned from the wisdom of crowds - c/net n a 1945 paper, the great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek described how prices set by a free market are really "a mechanism for communicating information" about the probability of future events.