 Do-it-yourself personal photo mosaic made from answering 12 questions, courtesy of MosaicMaker, with questions from Beth T. Royal Bank of Scotland Predicts 30% Drop in Stocks By September: A drop of this size, coupled with a spike in interest rates as oil and food prices soar, could plunge us into the next great depression. The Desert Landscapes Are My Prayers: Some astonishing writing about how we cope with the end of life, from Beth Patterson. Umair Haque's Manifesto for Business Revolution: Jon Husband interviews Umair, who describes the massive change to our economy that P2P is beginning to wreak as it disintermediates the traditional corporation, including the Fortune 500. Peter Senge's Prescription for Business Sustainability: Senge says business has to do much more than just mitigate and adapt to climate change. Lessons From the Tao: The Dao has no agenda. So at the end of the day, everything is done. Thanks to Evelyn Rodriguez for the link. Webcam as Game Controller: A new software program uses your webcam to recognize any selected moving object in its field of vision as a game controller. So then you can play Wii games, play simulated music or sports. Watch the video and use your imagination -- this has terrific possibilities. Thanks to Dale Asberry for the link. Wilderness as Place Apart: "Perhaps we need to start seeing wilderness differently, more holistically, as a part of our urban and suburban worlds. It makes me ask...whether our drive to preserve wilderness areas has had one very detrimental effect: allowing us to despoil those places where we live." Strangers Do Not Create Alliances So Deep and Dark and Sore: Sam points us to a moving poem Words for My Daughter from the Asylum by Hayden Carruth.  Our Future, Cast in Stone: The Oil Drum shows how China's production of cement, which produces 1/2 ton of CO2 for every ton produced, is a massive contributor to climate change. Moving Pictures: Gapminder software lets you animate 3-dimensional graphs over time. Thanks to Peter Craig for the link. And More Moving Pictures: Dan Roam, author of Back of the Napkin, explains how to sketch simple, powerful visualizations to convey and persuade. Thanks to Craig De Ruisseau for the link. North Korea Shows Us the Future of Climate Change: North Korea two decades ago faced a huge spike in price and drop in availability of oil and food, and the consequences of abrupt climate change. We all know how well they adapted. Just for Fun: Business Newspeak: BBC lists the 50 most hackneyed, misused and overused business expressions. Thanks to Paul Sloane for the link. More Evidence IM is More Effective than E-Mail: Another study shows IM saves time, e-mail wastes it. Thanks to Michael Sampson for the link. Books on Entrepreneurship Less Successful Than Their Authors: Those who've succeeded as entrepreneurs are often tempted to write about their success. They usually fail as authors, because their lessons don't provide enough context for what they did to be replicable. Thanks to my publisher Margo Baldwin at Chelsea Green for the link. Creating Intentional Community in Second Life: Cheryl (Mia) has created the physical space for our virtual Intentional Community, and now we're recruiting members. Our blog tells the story of our success so far. If you want to visit, e-mail me with your SL avatar name and I'll teleport you over. And Theresa Purcell points out a new technology that may soon allow Second Life to work on mobile devices. Thoughts of the Week: Excerpts from conversations with homeless people recently interviewed by Liz Seymour: Homelessness
almost by definition makes people hard to track down, and Lowell is
more difficult than some because he refuses to use email. "How do you
communicate with people then?" I asked him once. He answered the
question with patience. "I talk to them." "I’m not really homeless, you know," Lowell said as we settled into the little nest of sofas by the front door, "I’m just houseless. I like the spot where I am." "Is there something you wish you had but didn’t? Something like, I don’t know, like an axe or something?" Lowell shrugged. "A woodsman’s machete would be nice," he l said. "It would make it easier to clean raccoons." "But how do you sneak up on a raccoon?" "You don't need to—they come to you," Lowell said. "Do you do anything with the skin?" "Not if I don't want the fleas." "And in the woods [you can find] strawberries, blackberries, mulberries. All you have to do is watch what the animals eat. If they don't eat it I don't eat it, if they don't drink it I don't drink it. The only difference is I boil the water." "You want to know something?" Danny said "All those people in the middle class, upper middle class, all the people that look down on us, [soon] there are going to be a lot more of them out here with us. And when that happens I think you’re going to start seeing the suicide rate go up. They're not going to be able to take it." Stan shook his head. "It’s too late. It doesn’t matter any more who’s up there. Four years isn't enough, forty years isn't enough, to undo what's been done. Basically the way it is now, we either live together or we're going to die together." |
 Above, artwork from Kate Bush CD A Sky of Honey, via Andrew Campbell and below, Andrew's own representation of Now Time  In January of last year, I wrote an article about how artists tell stories, sometimes about things that words cannot convey. More profoundly than scientists, they hold up for us reflections of the truth about complexity, about nature, and human nature, about all-life-on-Earth, and about our attempts to understand it. I concluded the article as follows: Just
as we must bear the responsibility for making this world as bearable a
place as possible, a little bit better each day, despite knowing that
our civilization is unraveling and that what we have done will be
undone (though hopefully remembered by the few brave survivors of this
century), we must, too, bear the responsibility for telling our stories
despite knowing that few are listening and even fewer understand. This
is nothing new. Perhaps
those who survive civilization’s end, and build a more joyful and
sustainable society, will have the time and energy to appreciate what
we do. And learn from the self-confessed mistakes that cry out in our
portrayal of our terrible world, and its terrible beauty.And so, we brave storytellers, each in our own way, continue to tell our stories as best we can, perhaps much as the cave artists did in the millennia before civilization, as the indigenous peoples did during the millennia of civilization’s hopeful dawn, and as the artists of the renaissances of our civilization did as that civilization churned forwards. We, artists all -- painters, composers of music, sculptors, investigative journalists and many others -- represent to the world the portrait of our civilization’s fourth and final turning. We 'just' tell its story. Whether its meaning will be understood and provoke needed action is not our business. Read the whole article. Category: The Arts |
An interesting and lengthy presentation on how universities/colleges can connect with learners who are active in social technologies - Connecting with the Facebook Generation: Social Media Strategies for Web 2.0
Barack Obama is the first major candidate to decline participation in the public financing system for presidential campaigns. He’s found a more effective way to raise money – by leveraging the power of the American people through online Social Networks. Get the pdf version here.
The 'Rate My Professors' site is huge in the , and got into TIME Magazine's Top 50 websites for 2008. It now features English Universities. My local has 9 staff rated and 54. Each Professor gets a name, subject, overall smiley symbol (good, average, poor), quality rating (1-5), ease (1-5) and whether they’re ‘hot’ or 'not'! At a more detailed level they rate easiness, helpfulness, clarity, interest prior to attending class, textbook use and the opportunity to submit (non-libelous) comments. They also have a Facebook app that lets you to search for, browse and read ratings of professors and schools. Then there's the Top 50 lists.
Professors Strike Back
The Professors Strike Back section is great. They come right back with some witty and sensible replies, “Yes - apparently one of the problems with taking College Classes is that you have to read ‘books’, and alas they’re mostly not thrillers, so I’m terribly sorry that you had to read those boring things.” And check out fantastic All Time Most Popular rant from the great Professor Andrew Tomasello (18+ rating).
Tony Karrer and Michele Martin have been throwing out lots of ideas on their new Work Literacy site ("Work Literacy is a network of individuals, companies and organizations who are interested in learning, defining, mentoring, teaching and consulting on the frameworks, skills, methods and tools of modern knowledge work."). A recent post - (Is scanning important: "Scanning is very important to me and occupies a fair amount of my time. I consider it essential to staying on the forefront. When I begin to work with a new client, I often set up various scanning activities for me to be in a continuous learning mode around their world."
Transforming the way to learn through dialogue and participation: "Overtime, I think universities have become more removed from society and gradually have been involved in a production of knowledge, which tends to objectify reality...I think teachers have to, almost, relearn the pedagogical approaches. Even if we think about dialogue as a conversation, we should not escape from the fact that there are many power relationships that influence the relationship between teachers and students. If teachers engage with students in conversation, unless both sides are aware of the expectations, and of the power relations experienced, it can be very difficult for that conversation to be based really on an equitable basis."
Issues of power and control are central to many changes in society and education. Wikipedia? It's about trust/authority/power. Classrooms? Power/control/authority are the defining elements. And yet, we are now at a point where no one person has the ability to see a field in its entirety. We are all seeing small fragments at best. Theoretically at least, more contributors=more diverse ways of seeing the field. The downside, of course, is that we get completely overwhelmed because we have not yet adjusted our tools and our methods for handling abundance.
In this age of personal production, it is interesting to see how different people manage their information and content. We often talk about how anyone can be a publisher - blogger, podcaster, webcaster, or whatever. But how do people manage their resources? How does a micropublisher find, filter, and share resources? One of the most prolific bloggers in the edtech domain - Stephen Downes - has put together a short presentation on how he manages OLDaily. I would like to see how other micropublishers and bloggers gather and make sense of materials they publish (such as Robin Good, Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman, Alec Couros, Dave Snowden, Jay Cross, Will Richardson, etc.). Bring on the sensemaking screencast series. Hey, can we have that as a meme?
A short study on social network users by age. Depending on the tool in question, significant drops occur at about 18 years for myspace and facebook users and 35ish for linkedin and flickr users. I wonder how those trends will hold up as people age...i.e. do facebook users continue to facebook as they get older? Do they switch to other platforms? Or do they stop all together?
Mark Nichols tackles a broad theme on change within education (and offers a short critique on connectivism...which is revisited in the discussion portion of the post): Solid thinking: A challengable position on learning 2.0 and the incumbent. In particular, Mark suggests we don`t need as broad a change model as some have suggested and that educational reform is best handled by including web 2.0 concepts and tools under the broad umbrella of social constructivism and some degree of centralized control and hierarchy.
 I continue to draw great inspiration from Stewart & Cohen's book Figments of Reality, a book that has clearly also influenced my favourite philosopher John Gray. In the book they state: Living
species, including humans, are emergent properties of (what Daniel
Dennett has labeled) the 'pandemonium' of the body's semi-autonomous
processes -- We are a complicity of the separately-evolved creatures in our bodies organized for their mutual benefit i.e. we are an organism.
And our brains, our intelligence, awareness, consciousness and
free-will, are nothing more than an evolved, shared, feature-detection
system jointly developed to advise these creatures' actions for their
mutual benefit. Our brains, and our minds (the processes that our
neurons, senses and motility organs carry out collectively) are their information-processing system, not 'ours'. Thinking about this in the context of my recent writings on doing versus being and what we're 'meant' to be and do, I began to realize the absurdity of the entire concept of individual (which literally means 'indivisible'), and hence of cultures based on individuality. As a complicity we, each of us, are not 'one', We are not singular. And that is true not only within us but without us -- we are part of the larger organisms of community and Gaia, the community of all-life-on-Earth. Our bodies and the rest of what we call our "selves" are plural parts of larger pluralities. It is not surprising then that we have this problem with deciding who we 'are' and what we're 'meant' to be, and do. It is a question that can only be answered in the context of knowing what we are made up of and what we make up as part of larger organisms. As a generalist, I have always struggled with aspects of my 'self' that seem to be constantly struggling with each other:
The way to understand what we 'are', it seems to me, is a way not of greater self-control but a way, a Tao, of giving up control, of letting go and letting come. Of abandoning this foolish concept that 'we' are something that needs to be managed, directed, restricted, kept from being 'evil', either by outside disciplinarians and 'leaders' or by our 'selves'. Of realizing that we are merely, and totally, the space through which stuff passes. Stuff material and non-materials. Coming and going. Combining and separating. My anal list of things I want to spend more time being and doing is not inconsistent with this 'worldview'. My purpose in practicing these things is not to become a 'better' person, more moral, or wiser, but rather to develop capacities, to become healthier and more resilient and more sustainable and hence ultimately happier and more useful to others and to the world. Happiness and usefulness confer enormous evolutionary advantage, so we shouldn't be surprised that these are the things, ultimately, that we aspire to. (I should mention, by the way, that I have already started making time for some of these practices, even though my days are over-scheduled and ceasing doing the things that I have to stop doing will take some time and effort. That is the power of intention.) So what does this mean, to be the space through which stuff passes? In a way, perhaps, it is being nobody-but-yourself, in the ee cummings sense. Or perhaps it is giving up the whole notion of 'being', and seeing the universe as composed of movement (or movement and stillness) and not matter at all (whatever 'matter' means, as one scientific theory after another about the makeup of the universe is undone by new discoveries). To be not the dancer, but the dance, or at least part of a dance so complex as to be unfathomable to us. That's as far as I've come in my thinking, and perhaps it's absurd to think that I or anyone can go further in this remarkable direction. For further inspiration I'm re-reading phenomenologist David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous, in which he writes: As
we reacquaint ourselves with our breathing bodies, then the perceived
world itself begins to shift and transform. When we begin to
consciously frequent the wordless dimension of our sensory
participations, certain phenomena that have habitually commanded our
focus begin to lose their distinctive fascination and to slip toward
the background, while hitherto unnoticed or overlooked presences begin
to stand forth from the periphery and to engage our awareness. The
countless human artefacts with which we are commonly involved --
buildings, automobiles, television screens -- all begin to exhibit a
common style, and so to lose some of their distinctiveness; meanwhile,
organic entities -- crows, trees, rainfalls -- all these begin to
display a new vitality, each coaxing the breathing body into a unique
dance. Even boulders and rocks seem to speak their own uncanny
languages of gesture and shadow, inviting the body and its bones into
silent communication. In contact with the native forms of the earth,
one's senses are slowly energized and awakened, combining and
recombining in ever-shifting patterns... An alder leaf, loosened by wind, is drifting out with the tide. As it drifts, it bumps into the slender leg of a great blue heron staring intently through the rippled surface, then drifts on. The heron raises one leg out of the water and replaces it, a single step. As I watch, I, too, am drawn into the spread of silence. Slowly a bank of cloud approaches, slipping its bulged and billowing texture over the earth, folding the heron and the alder trees and my gazing body into the depths of a vast breathing being, enfolding us all within a common flesh, a common story now bursting with rain. I still have so much to unlearn. (Thanks to Cheryl, Siona and Patti for sparking this realization.) Painting above by painter and environmentalist Sophie Sheppard, auctioned in 1999 at the Authors Unite in Defense of Mother Earth festival. Category: Being Human |
Overcoming Bias is an interesting blog exploring an mix of philosophy, futurism, and obscure concepts/ideas (or is that an oxymoron when used in the same sentence as "philosophy"?). Recently, they posted on one of lawsuits around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). LHC is a particle accelerator that a few individuals fear will cause the universe to unravel. Which would then in turn make global warming a largely moot concept. Interesting discussion follows in the Overcoming Bias post on probability theory (and when we are willing to gamble with "being wrong") as well as information validity.
I've posted slides from my presentation today to the Canadian Network for Innovation in Education. Topic: Socializing Teaching and Learning. I posted audio on my U of M blog (yes, I know, I can sync the slides on slideshare).
Web 2.5, Web 3.0, Web 4.5, Web n: whatever it is, I'm enjoying the ride. The pieces are coming together. Glue, indeed.
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