knowledge and Learning In The News - 7/11/2006

Understanding Technology as Knowledge and Culture - Knowledge Board
This paper is about knowledge management, and it is about technology and innovation, its about technology as the knowledge of the operations of complex adaptive systems, but most of all its about making a new start, with a fresh new paradigmatic framework drawn from a little explored aspect of complexity science, the part Capra has referred to as the systems theories of life.

Friendster and Social Network Patent - blaugh
Millions of fans poured into the streets in celebration late last week, when the social networking megasite Friendster.com was awarded a patent on managing real-life relationships. Until now, relationships have been difficult to maintain.

The Mysterious Power of Context - Design Observer (via elearningpost)
More than anything, we want to proffer the promise of control: the control of communication, the control of meaning. To admit the truth - that so much is out of our hands - marginalizes our power to the point where it seems positively self-destructive.

Your Guide to RSS - Media Shift
You've probably seen the letters "RSS" or the orange icon at the left on your favorite blogs or news sites and wondered what it was for. RSS is a format and a process for syndicating web content.

Research Shows Handheld Computers in Classrooms Enhance Student Achievement - GoKnow Learning
According to both Soloway and Norris, the research shows that in the first year of the study, handheld computer groups did 2 percent better than non-handheld groups. In the second year, handheld groups performed 13 percent better in science than non-handheld groups.

knowledge and Learning In The News - 7/10/2006

Brain May Be Hard-Wired to Track Team Sports - CBC News
Without the help of color, the human brain can't pay attention to more than three moving objects at once, concluded a team of neurological researchers reporting in the July issue of Psychological Science.

Completing the Zen in Performance Management - Donald Clark
A focus on four aspects on managing the human side of performance management: learning, reframing, flowing, and viscosity.

How To Manage 125,000 Employees - Forbes
Last year, someone gave Ballard a copy of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and she hasn't stopped talking about it. The book opened her eyes to the power of blogging to reshape business.

People Power - Wired (via The Open Learner)
First, steam power replaced muscle power and launched the Industrial Revolution. Then Henry Ford's assembly line, along with advances in steel and plastic, ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Next came silicon and the Information Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper, and more widely available method of production that kicked efficiency to the next level and transformed the world.

How Much Difference Does a Generation Make? - How to Save the World
We can reach the stars, we can live forever. We can create technologies, extensions of our brains, that transcend all 'real'-world limits. We just need to want to do it, and it will be done.

Video Comments, a WordPress Plugin - ITP Research
Audio and video blogs are forming communities and to encourage conversation the viewers must be able to respond, so we developed a plug-in for WordPress called Video Comments.

knowledge and Learning In The News - 7/07/2006

Knowledge and its price - Sign and Sight
We live in a knowledge society, but it knows very little about itself. Information technologies allow us to organise knowledge faster than ever, yet we are regularly warned that we are losing touch of knowledge.

Building blocks of knowledge - Knowledge at Work
At the heart of knowledge creation lies conversation, shared language, agreement on key distinctions, naming of prime concepts, sharing of experiences or beliefs, the explication and testing of patterns.

50 Popular Science Blogs - Nature
While the top 5 science blogs are listed here.

The imagination economy - CNN & FORTUNE Magazine
The problem is that Americans' pay isn't going up. That's remarkable because the economy is booming - growth is strong, unemployment low, productivity rising smartly. Yet the latest figures show that the broadest index of pay (inflation-adjusted wages, salaries, benefits) is no higher than it was at the end of 2003. (via Gautam Ghosh)

Blue Dot is not just another social bookmarking system - TechCrunch
Blue Dot -- social network or social discovery?

knowledge and Learning In The News - 7/04/2006

Why Managing by Facts Works - Stratey+Business
Real knowledge in the form of empirical analysis of results is the shortest path to the best business decisions. That may seem obvious, yet few companies follow that precept.

Digital Divide - Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth
Podcast and PowerPoint of the Digital Divide.

Knowing before doing? - Connectivism Blog n recent discussions with museums and education providers, the desire for centralization is strong. These organizations want learners to access their sites for content/interaction/knowledge. Learners, on the other hand, already have their personal spaces (myspace, facebook, aggregators). They don’t want to go to someone else’s program to experience content. They want YOUR content in THEIR space.

Signs of the emerging knowledge economy - Eclectic Bill
Part One, Part Two, Part 2.5, Part Three, Part Four (final).

knowledge and Learning In The News - 7/01/2006

Lack of Necessary Workforce Skills Hinders Corporate Ability to Succeed - Accenture
Respondents also reported that even functions they consider critical - sales, customer service, finance and strategic planning (cited as critical by 62 percent, 43 percent, 23 percent and 23 percent, respectively) - were not performing as strongly as they should. In fact, among those who rated these functions among the top three, just one-quarter (25 percent) assigned the highest rating to the performance of their sales function, and under a third provided the same rating to their customer service, finance and strategic planning functions (25 percent, 19 percent and 33 percent, respectively).

Impact Of Consumer Technology Hits Business World - Information Week (via e-Clippings)
Here's some advice for IT departments: Get over it. Sure, consumer technology's momentum has reached a dizzying speed, but fighting it is futile and ignoring it means being left behind. A wiser approach is to focus on the opportunity consumer tech presents, both inside the company and out among customers. The first step is accepting that there's a power shift under way, with consumer tech setting the agenda.

Gladwell: The New Freud? - The Frontal Cortex
Gladwell ended up lumping together all sorts of research, from Damasio's Iowa Gambling Task to Ekman's cartography of facial muscles to brain scans of autistic people, that, at least from a neurological perspective, were totally unrelated.

Borders Are Now Harder to Define - Micro Persuasion
It has occurred to me these past few months that it's far harder to define borders today than ever before. In other words, it's not as easy as it used to be to say this is species A, this belongs to species B. There's so much gray.

Study: Internet partly to blame for your lack of close friends
The number of people who say they have no one to talk to about important matters has more than doubled, according to a new study by sociologists at Duke University and the University of Arizona.

knowledge and Learning In The News - 6/24/2006

June 24, 2006

The Three Worlds of Knowledge - Learning Circuits
One of the most popular epistemology models (except in the behavioral sciences) is Sir Karl Popper's writtings on the Three Worlds of Knowledge. The knowledge/learning/management professions seem to prefer and stay within the realm of Michael Polanyi's concept of personal and tacit knowledge. However, Polanyi's epistemology is narrower and has a limited basis for understanding knowledge as compared to Popper’s work, which provides a broader epistemological foundation.

Why Minimal Guidance during Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching - Educational Psychologist
We are skilful in an area because our long-term memory contains huge amounts of information concerning the area. That information permits us to quickly recognize the characteristics of a situation and indicates to us, often unconsciously, what to do and when to do it.

What are knowledge behaviors - Knowledge Jolt with Jack
Behaviors associated with the idea of knowledge appearing in the interaction between people: sharing, helping, discussing, seeking, .... There are also knowledge behaviors aligned with the individual.

Knowledge-Based Economy Already Here? Academics wondering how much is too much theory - Ohmy News
The so-called "knowledge-based economy" would be a world of smart people, in smart jobs, doing smart things, in smart ways, for smart money, increasingly open to all rather than a few, according to researchers at the United Kingdom's Lancaster Institute of Advanced Studies.

Neuroscience Resources - elearnspace
A useful collection of neuroscience resources.

knowledge and Learning In The News - 6/20/2006

Eye movement, visual memory, and peanut butter sandwiches - Cognitive Daily
Experiments on change blindness have revealed striking limitations in visual memory. Yet new research shows that perhaps visual memory isn't as limited as once was thought.

The Weblog Project
The first open-source movie documentary about blogs and bloggers.

Colleges fail to tap training dollars - Columbus Dispatch
U.S. public and private em- ployers spend about $80 billion a year providing their employees with job-related training, Eduventures said. Private companies account for more than $50 billion of that, and spend about $13.3 billion on outside providers, it said. Colleges could meet the demand by customizing courses and marketing them more aggressively, Eduventures said.

Cubicle Culture: How brainstorming works best - Post Gazette
Some brainstorming sessions get off to a shaky start because the participants subscribe to a tenet that is provably false: "There's no such thing as a bad idea."

knowledge and Learning In The News - 6/13/2006

Gates: 'Information overload' is overblown - ZD Net
"I'd say in all of these cases, we are really dealing with information underload," Gates said in his talk, which kicked off Microsoft's annual CEO Summit. "We still want a lot of information."

On "Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism" By Jaron Lanier - Edge
When Jaron Lanier's piece on "Digital Maoism" first went out on Edge, I knew he'd be generating hundreds of responses all over the net. After talking to John Brockman, we decided to try to capture some of the best responses here.

Some Educators Fear Pull Results in 'a La Carte' Learning - Red Orbit
John Seely Brown, national consultant, co-founder of the Institute for Research on Learning and former chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, comments that, "Maybe the time has come to take a bold move and ask, could we radically rethink what schooling, formal learning and informal learning, could be all about."

Intranet 2.0: Collaboration, Self-Publishing And Tools Mash-up New Driving Forces - Robin Good
The internet is evolving from a channel for content distribution to a platform for collaboration, sharing and innovation – the so-called Web 2.0.

Intentions - The Sift Everything Expiriment
Creating art and creating dreams can be a long, tedious, intentional process. But both art and dreams require a set of intentions instead of a series of responses.

knowledge and Learning In The News - 6/11/2006

Connectivism and the nature of learning - Albert Ip
With the advent of communication and digital technology, we interact with more people beyond the immediate physical reach. We simultaneously participate in many communities.

The Art Of Motivation - Business Week
At Nucor the art of motivation is about an unblinking focus on the people on the front line of the business. It's about talking to them, listening to them, taking a risk on their ideas, and accepting the occasional failure.

Communities of practice: legitimate peripheral participation and lurking - Joitske Hulsebosch
Legitimate peripheral participation is an analytical perspective (LPP) that has to do with opening the practice to someone who is not a core member and who has something if not a lot to learn about the practice.

Wiki's -- Failure or Boon of Online Collectivism? - Will at Work Learning
My main concern with wiki's is that information from real experts can be stupified to the mediocre averaging of above-average minds.

The Next Big Thing: Spreadsheets? - Business Week
It's kind of funny that the original killer app for the PC is returning as a key service for the Web--by one of the guys who originated it, no less. Also, see Jay Cross' post on spreadsheets. And don't forget Dan Bricklin.

knowledge and Learning In The News - 6/04/2006

A Dialog with Thomas Gilbert - Learning Circuits
In the great cult of behavior, the appeal is to control or affect behavior in some way.

Reshaping Reality - Forbes
Reality is changing. Cheap, widely distributed bandwidth and advanced networking technologies are divorcing an ever-growing segment of the population from traditionally "real" constraints like geography and socio-economic status.

iWriter - Talking Panda
Incorporate text and audio files to create innovative learning programs.

Biased Myers-Briggs (MBTI) Research Wanted
CPP, Inc., known formerly as Consulting Psychologists Press, announces that it is offering research grants for research on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism
The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. A core belief of the wiki world is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds.