knowledge and Learning In The News - 7/27/2006

July 27, 2006

Multi-tasking Adversely Affects Brain's Learning - Science Daily
Even if you learn while multi-tasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily.

Teacher development key to tech success: Polling, scientific research, and sources of error - Christopher D. Sessums
The poll (read: not a formal scientific investigation) attempts to shed light on educators' opinions regarding the use of computers in their classrooms and "attempts to gauge the effectiveness of computers in preparing students for the 21st-century workplace."

The emerging 1% rule - Anecdote
In Yahoo Groups, the discussion lists, 1% of the user population might start a group; 10% of the user population might participate actively, and actually author content, whether starting a thread or responding to a thread-in-progress; 100% of the user population benefits from the activities of the above groups.

Building Better Virtual Teams - eLearn Magazine
PowerPoint is not an effective teaching tool for an online class. Good PowerPoint presentations need a real-time presenter. Yes, I could record an audio track along with PowerPoint. I know professors who report great success doing just that. I have even heard students praise such lectures. But, prerecorded lectures are not interactive.

The Flynn effect is reversing - Mind Hacks
American Scientist discusses the trend for changes in how well people score on intelligence tests and notes that the Flynn effect, whereby the population has been scoring increasingly well on intelligence tests over time, seems to be slowing down or reversing in some places.

knowledge and Learning In The News - 7/25/2006

Study: Distractions Impede Learning - ABC News
"What's new is that even if you can learn while distracted, it changes how you learn to make it less efficient and useful," said Russell A. Poldrack, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Expert Mind - Scientific American
Much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well.

The Wrong Tail: How to turn a powerful idea into a dubious theory of everything - Slate
This insight goes only so far, but like many business books, The Long Tail commits the sin of overreaching.

The philosophy of business knowledge - KM World
Businesspeople and philosophers actually are both interested in the same two facets of knowledge: certainty and the relation of mind and world. Businesspeople, of course, are not interested in knowledge for its own sake. They want to put it to use. Philosophers, on the other hand, would rather give us a good, pounding headache.

Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos meet "Ginger" - Harvard Business School
The story behind Dean Kamen's Segway scooter, and his combustive meeting with the kingpins of Apple and Amazon. Excerpt from Code Name Ginger.

knowledge and Learning In The News - 7/23/2006

E-mail losing ground to IM, text messaging - MSNBC
E-mail is so last millennium. Young people see it as a good way to reach an elder - a parent, teacher or a boss - or to receive an attached file.

Building Information Neighbourhoods - Green Chameleon
I've seen it lots of times before, sometimes dashed out on whiteboards by IT managers in a state of near religious ecstasy, sometimes on the powerpoint slides of ECM/DMS system vendor salepersons. It's called ECM Heaven.

Departure, Abandonment, and Dropout of E-learning: Dilemma and Solutions - James Madison University
Investigation the widespread phenomena of e-learning dropout and abandonment.

Tourist Remover - Snap Mania
Remove moving objects such as tourists or passing cars from your photos. Take multiple photos from the same scene -- FREE.

Microsoft's media player dubbed Zune
Read about it on engadget. See Microsoft's the Coming of Zune. Like the tune on Coming to Zune? Go to Regina Spektor's site, click on the video tab to see the video "Us."

knowledge and Learning In The News - 7/20/2006

50 ways to become a better designer - Computer Arts
What is design? Design is both the process and the final product of an endeavour to fulfil a personal or professional brief. Whether you are creating a piece of graphic work, a website, or a design for a new product, the underlying principal is the same - the creative process is everything.

Folksonomies: A User-Driven Approach to Organizing Content - UI
Folksonomies, a new user-driven approach to organizing information, may help alleviate some of the challenges of taxonomies. Sites with folksonomies include two basic capabilities: they let users add "tags" to information and they create navigational links out of those tags to help users find and organize that information later.

Way Back Machine
Enter the URL in the search field and then click the "Take Me Back" button. The Way Back Machine can be pretty interesting at times as it allows you to see the growth of a website by clicking on the various archived links; and of course allows you to view dead links. However, note that when you click on one of the archived page links, that it takes you to another archived page. To get the original page, cut away the first part of the link.

The Internet is old news and boring.. Deal with it - Blog Maverick
The Internet is Boring. Its old news. (via Will Thalheimer)

Hellodeo Record video, get code, then play it on the web. (via Stephen Downes)

knowledge and Learning In The News - 7/18/2006

IBM's KM strategy - KM World
With a knowledge management history that dates to 1994, IBM certainly qualifies as an early adopter. Although its focus has shifted through the years, IBM's success with knowledge management continues to thrive through its enterprisewide knowledge exchange and collaboration.

Gadgets get the feel of the tactile world - New Scientist
When it comes to interacting with computers, our sense of touch has been all but ignored. It's the first sense we develop in the womb, yet for most of us rumbling games controllers or vibrating cellphones are just about the only devices that make use of it. That is set to change.

An author with a 'long tail' - c/net
When Wired Magazine published an article called "The Long Tail," it immediately became a phenomenon on the order of Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point."

Problems with Bloom's Taxonomy - ISPI (via Will Thalheimer)
Bloom's taxonomy is almost 50 years old. It was developed before we understood the cognitive processes involved in learning and performance.

Changing Models - elearnspace
George Siemens writes on Changing Models. Tony Karrer responds, and Stephen Downes comments. And another post by Tony Karrer.

knowledge and Learning In The News - 7/15/2006

New Perspectives - New Media
It's not a question of, "will this new media world succeed?" It will, and in many ways it already has. The appropriate question is, "will I be a part of this new media world?"

Your Attention Please - Business Week
It's not just that media is splintering, as it has been for decades. The difference now is that the Internet is thrusting that trend into overdrive.

Increasing Consumer Preferences By Manipulating Memory - Science Daily
The first experiment found that when participants had to solve an anagram before seeing a target brand, they were more likely to claim to have seen the brand before. Participants also had higher preference ratings for the brand relative to competing brands in the same product category

Citations as knowledge flow - Knowledge Jack
The basic idea is that, people learn from and build upon the ideas presented by others. When these people then publish and reference their sources-of-inspiration, one can visualize the flow of knowledge (or ideas) over time.

Wi-Fi More Popular than iPod? - EarthWebNews.com
The survey also indicated that Wi-Fi is changing the nature of the home office. Rather than the traditional fixed office space in the den, respondents said mobile wireless computing lets them work in the kitchen, living room or their local coffee shop.

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).