Monday, January 31, 2011

sleep


_______________

steven johnson

especially the 4th video - on space..
the co-working space.
groups of people sharing face to face work environments, but composition is people working for diff firms, for selves, etc
very mesh.

diverse interests and fields of expertise in that space, crucially not all working for the same person.
slightly more professionalized version of the coffee house.

Sunday, January 30, 2011

kirsten olson

i;m currently reading here: wounded by school

student: actually when i'm stupidist, thinking most simply & conventional that i do best on std tests. - @OlsonKirsten 's wounded by school

student: ...in a confusing land of contradictory rules.
my heart is heavy. oh what we miss.. in the name of school. reading - @OlsonKirsten 's Wounded by School  ... let's notice people.

ave child by M Buscemi: part of that majority, hump part of the bell, spends his life unnoticed in an average kind of hell. -wounded by schl
feeling unseen, unknown, undersold in school - wounds of the average   - @OlsonKirsten 's Wounded by School  ... notice people.

we are terribly attached to an institution that does not, in the face of a great deal of evidence, serve us well. @OlsonKirsten 's Wounded

we need to stop chasing exponentially expanding content. vincent hawkins, director of curric & instruct, vermont

new employees are of limited value to our company if they can't grow out of the role for which they were intially hired, bill engler , being versatiel is the surest way to get yourself noticed
we'll take a risk hiring someone w/o technical expertise, but you can't teach someone to be confident or flexible.  bill gallagher, pres of computer bases financial systems, ADS

Gatto: lockstep schooling, drvein by standardization/obedience, drives out imagination and courage

@OlsonKirsten p. 86 is huge, we don't yet have language to frame our problems in affective terms - wounded by school
none have hrs/stamina to ? anything about the ed system -we're so preoccupied w/our own kids immediate problems - wounded @OlsonKirsten 
after 6th grade i found myself abandoning the one thing i had found comfort in for so many years, my imagination. -wounded @OlsonKirsten

Saturday, January 29, 2011

umair haque


.......Real change doesn't begin with governments, presidents, or prime ministers. It begins with each of us. In the 20th century, never-ending mass-marketing, monopoly, and mega-politics came together to convince us, each and every one, that we're not really free: just free enough to choose between different flavors of the same old toxic junk. It was a trick, a ploy, a television hallucination. We're the freest people in history. It's time to use it like we meant it.
Every revolution begins from the bottom up. Fed up with the status quo? Tired of the 20th century? Then don't just talk about it. Reject it and refuse it. Build a better 21st century instead.
One of history's greatest builders once said: "be the change you want to see in the world". Let me update Gandhi's wisdom for the next decade. Want a revolution? Be the revolution you want to see in the world.

___________________________
Craig Cortello
"The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn." Alvin Toffler
 
_________________________________________
 via @DrGarcia  

"Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music." 
- Angela Monet 

_____________________________________

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

lucy

1) notice - i love dogs


2) dream - i'm a dog trainer



3) connect - to Maddie, who showed me how to train her dog



4) do - i went home and trained my dog and made a how to slideshare



mosh pits of creativity


Innovation labs are a key part of a movement to overhaul old-style R&D. They are designed to complement, and sometimes even replace, the intensive traditional system -- which required that scientists or engineers toil away privately for years in the pursuit of patents, then hand their work over to product developers, who in turn dropped it onto designers' and marketers' laps for eventual shipment out to the public.

These organizations have discovered that innovation labs can be a powerful tool for big corporations to cut through their own bureaucratic bloat.


Mingling with people....has been key - 
create spaces that foster conversation across projects/disciplines/etc

thanks @techfacil

_________________

jk rowling

via @globalearner


J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

the benefits of failure
and the crucial importance of imagination


there is an expirey date for blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction
poverty entails fear and stress, depression, - romanticized only by fools

ultimately we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure. the world will try to convince what it believes it is

failure means a stripping away of the inessential
doing only the work that mattered to me

set free - greatest fear had been realized - and i was still alive
rock bottom became the solid foundation

come failure in life is inevitable
unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case, you fail by default

you will never truly know yourself or the strength of your relationships until both have been tested by adversity, such knowledge is a true gift, worth more than any honor or achievement.

importance of imagination
not only the unique human capacity to envision that which is not
the power that enables us to empathize with humans whose experiences we have never shared

they can refuse to know, might be tempted to envy them except i do not think they have fewer nightmares than i
choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental aprophobia and that brings its own terrors
the willfully unimaginative see more monsters, they are often more afraid

those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters

we do not need magic to transform the world, we already have it in us


as is a tail - so is live, not how long it is, how good it is , is what matters

_______________________________

langwitches

@langwitches and @snbeach and @globalearner coming together here.
bravo silvia for this and this and more i'm sure.

great model of how to share.

_______________

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

gary stagger

listening to him on future of ed w/ @stevehargadon
gary's site

does not like conflict - but is thought of as outspoken - it's because this matters to him

hard to be successful if you're really trying to help kids
in ed good ideas are incredibly fragile
papert - knowledge is a consequence of experience

edtech has become boat shows...
but it's about finding things that have never before been able in traditional curriculum (paraphrase, could be off)

90% of schooling is language arts vs experiences
computers can help you focus on so much more,, and allow kids to be scientists, and mathematicians and artists, ets.
we're only using a very small % of the computer's capacity

building simulations, making sense of large amts of data, exploring # theory, writing,

there have been a lot of examples, but tend to be shortlived because they are fragile, and things are short lived

hard to recommend schools for people to visit.

young people have a remarkable capacity for intensity
we all should be looking for opportunities for kids to build on that intensity

key elements of good 1 to 1:
john holt, john dewey, seymour papert
through 20th cent knew how to dewey in lang arts class, but that's it
personal computer - space for kids, they get to mess around - ownership of machine and ideas and processes

the teachers who get it - are ones who get the theory of learning
and progressive ed
best teachers that worked with in computers are ok with straying from the script.

not so much a window to the future but a magnifying glass
good teaching magnified by computers

starting a site - called dailypapert.com
papert -= the sweet spot for educators

consortium

BronStuckey: Wasn't it Alan Kay who said you can put a  piano in every classroom and not make a school "musical" Why do we care so much about how many computer rather than how effectively used?

newby's welcome to the community as long as they are willing to imitate the actions and ? of the experts
your clout is based on the # of people that want to learn from you, be like you

online handouts

what's edtech:
3 priorities - all are for lobbying for money
gary says - aren't their some policy considerations
filtering and blocking
what should be the experience when a student and teacher sit by the computer, why are these experiences always just sitting around an expensive piece of paper
pd is ongoing


funny - suspect because of the potential
horn is a lobbyist that wants to raise money to put content on a computer??

dgende: Khan's Academy is good BUT perpetuates the lecture/sage on the stage/teacher-centered pedagogy
school of one: drill and practice software.. with playlists

230000 from gates, hornes thinktank - telling folks to defund public schools and replace it with computer programs that can increase class sizes. the carpe diem school, 100-200 kids in hs age, taught by machine

computers are being used to reinforce the idea of status quo, but by using buzz words like personalized we're masking that we are becoming less humane

innovation is not a synonym for cheaper
those who know true edtech - need to scream it out

how can we move tech to better problem solving than content pushing

competition is based on the idea that ed is a scarce resource.. completely wrong
for one kid to succeed - others have to fail

how to increase # of eds that get it...
shameless sharing

climeguy: Nicholas Carr's book Shallows is an important book that talks about the future of AI along with the downside of the Internet.

______________________________________________

tony robbins

decision is the ultimate power, thanks @garystager





reason failed to achieve..
didn't have knowledge, money, time, manager, ..
these are a claim to you missing resources..
but that is not the defining factor
the defining factor is never resources, it's resourcefulness
if you have emotion, human emotion

emotion is it.. if we can get the right emotion -
we can get ourselves to do anything
if we don't have enough money, but are creative..
emotion is the ultimate resource


what's your target - not your desire - your needs
1) certainty
2) uncertainty - like surprises? you like the surprises you want - variety
3) significance - the fastest way if you don't believe in resourcefulness is violence, that's why violence will always be around, until we get a consciousness change
4) connection and love
these 1st four - needs of personality - everyone finds a way to meet
last 2 - needs of the spirit
5) grow - if you don't grow, it doesn't matter how much money you have or friends you have
6) give - contribute beyond yourself, secret to living is giving
giving shows others that strangers care

17 - fed 2 families... then started growing
18 years later - feeding 2 mill people in 35 countries
not trying to brag but i'm proud of human beings because they get excited to contribute once they get a chance to experience rather than talk about it.

are you driven by significance or love

we have the same needs, but are we a certainty freak or an uncertainty freak

if your dominate emotions..listed
- all the world
less than 12 - and more than half make them feel bad

some people, no matter what happens, find a way to be ticked off
some people, no matter what happens, find a way to be happy

explore your web, the one inside you
the needs, the beliefs, the emotions that are controlling you
1) so there's more for you to give
2) so you can appreciate what's driving other people

____________________________________

dave eggers

revisiting eggers brilliance


now have 1400 volunteers
street level open to public
community gathering,
ended up making enough for rent and full time employee
locally funded, locally built

the domino street team

cool jets @heyamberrae
on the domino street team project
How do you know if you’re a good fit? You are: a digital native who blogs, tweets and instagrams like nobody’s business. You take risks, challenge conventions, and care about reinventing outdated systems. You’re inspired by great thinkers like Seth Godin and organizations like TED, and you love spreading ideas that matter. When you read a great book, you immediately want to share it with others. It changed your life and you want it to change other people’s lives too. If that sounds like you, this is your opportunity.

Monday, January 24, 2011

seth godin

the way people get things done

No, most people can't manage themselves well enough to excel in the way you need them to, certainly not immediately. But those that can (or those that can learn to) are able to produce amazing results, far better than we ever could have bullied them into. They turn into linchpins, solving problems you didn't even realize you had. A new generation of leaders is created...
And it lasts a lifetime.



________________________

chris guillebeau

With that in mind, here’s  
how you get what you really want:

1. First, decide what you really want. Studies have shown it’s hard to get something if you’re not sure what it is. If time and money were no object, who would you be? What would you do?

2. Never make decisions based on the perceived limitations in front of you.
There is almost always a way around perceived limitations; watch this video for a great example. Instead, make decisions based on what you identified in Step 1.

[whoa - check out the foot ball video above - in the link in #2]

3. Take small, immediate steps toward getting what you want.
Don’t wait long; take the first step right now. Possible small steps toward traveling where you want include reading a guidebook at the library or bookstore, saving $2 a day, scheduling a date in your calendar even if you’re not sure it will work, etc.

4. Review the steps on a regular basis.
If it’s your life dream to go to Destination x, write it on a post-it note and put it where you’ll see it everyday. Then always think, “What’s next? How can I make this happen?”


Whatever your dreams are, start taking them very, very seriously.


_______________________________

nic askew

soulbiorgraphies

would the boy you once were be inspired by the man you've become?
introduce me to your friends and i'll tell you who you are.

people help us determine what is illusion and what is real.

acceptance frees us up from neediness of love



THE POSSIBILITY OF MEN from Nic Askew on Vimeo.

we run from responsibility, but what if responsibility is a gift
what if what we can responsibility is an opportunity to have the impact that we want, that speaks to us at a profound level

_________________________________

Sunday, January 23, 2011

adora svitak



not - what do you want to do when you grow up.. what are you doing right now

bravo Adora. spot on.
There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats it’s children.
      -Nelson Mandela

_______________________________________

de institutionalizing

macaulay: reclaiming the wider meaning of education

degree vs ability, etc..

 __________________

anti retirement video



thank you uncle John.

debt free and 700 mill in reserves, 31 years in office..


__________________________________

comment

comment on this post:
i'm thinking like @dragonfly.

so much energy and time and money spent on things that perhaps we wouldn't spend so much energy and time and money on if we just stopped for a bit and realized - we currently assume so much.

now that the web is allowing for personalization in public ed, that changes the game completely. now in public ed we can ask to a person, what is success to you. we're missing that.

we find it hard to discuss edreform (or whatever you want to call it) without ending our sentences in, ... as compared to the national/global tests/standards/readiness. that right there seems to be the limiting factor. we're failing to ask the very questions that can make change happen. what is success to you, and how can we facilitate that.

even if currently we don't believe that extreme type of differentiation can occur in public ed, we need to get away from readiness for a particular destination and focus more on ones ability to think, characterized in particular in Carol Dweck's Mindset.


check out comment #19 by Andrea in this post.. thank you Kima

are we changing or simply changing words

Saturday, January 22, 2011

john hagel

the neurobiology of passion


_______________________

Friday, January 21, 2011

i have much

i have so much to learn.
esp about people.

Thursday, January 20, 2011

sugata mitra

the granny cloud via @ewanmcintosh 
(ewan rocks big time) (ok - so does sugata) (ok - everyone rocks)


it's simple.
you can learn/be/do whatever you want.
we have all the resources we need for mentors.

not that many people will need to change what they are doing now.. as long as they love what they are doing now.
we just need to reassemble gatherings.. who's together in a room (space) and why. and free up the people who aren't doing what the love to start that journey.

we do need, however, to focus more on access. 3/4 of the world won't have it as easy. 3/4 of the world aren't connected.
please look into what kosta is doing in regard to that. this is a game we all want to play.
let's be green about people

___________________________________

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

ewan mcintosh

ah Ewan, you woke me up in the middle of the night, to tell me this...
learn by doing.


self - organized learning:
Robin Hood School - negotiated learning 
1) passion projects, hour everyday, but regurgitation of content, ie: that looks cool so all the boys would do that
2) scaffolded projects, planning, doing, sharing/reflecting,  but spent a lot of time in organizational talk, we haven't done what we said we would do
3) provocation projects, give them something that will challenge them, lot of people thought this was mad, basically play, this showed if play is appropriately challenging and engaging, problem in supplying the challenge

let kids do what they wanted to do, listen to them, let them go off in tangents
not:
1) telling them, what would you like to do as a topic, and then planning the whole thing
2) asking what questions they have and then planning lessons with the answers
but
let children self-organize,
personally, that's what works best for us.... own the learning
[this was all in his great post here, with embedded video above and great post here]

i responded to his request in original post:

over the course of the last two years, especially this year in the lab, we've gone through several girations similar to your passion, planning, and provocation projects.

what we've been experimenting with,
in regard to focusing on resources that matter, namely people,
and in regard to a basis for self-organization.
kid voices








ok. good enough.










_______________________________________

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

d'arcy norman

What if we table the discussions about sustainability and management. What if everyone was running their own stuff. Designing their own environments. Sharing and collaborating on their own terms (and, assuming that these are their terms and not ones just handed down from Teacher).

via bags of gold
thanks Jabiz.
________________

will richardson

for it to scale and for change to happen it's going to a lot more people in the conversation
[humanity 4.0, etc - all about convo, info is in the people]
really interesting now..
looking and seeing how different people outside ed are trying to make in roads into ed

ie; ignition tutoring  - plotting slope, for halo

rethinking tech, halvorsen and ?

get people from top - archdiocese
shared culture allows for rapid change

teachers as learners first
1) takes off pressure of using tons of tech in classroom - do for yourself first, enjoy that
2) very few models of learners in the classroom

steve - since i've been doing the interview series, less interested in tech and more interested in community

the more mobile things get the more interesting things get

tools aren't interesting until they facilitate some connectedness

one thing will loves - evernote
it's my outboard brain, so easy to dump ideas in there (not video yet)
evernote has made me less transparent
mbteach (Mary Beth): Dropbox is for files. Evernote allows web clippings and note-taking

writing - only way you get better at writing is to write.. and to have good feedback

how do we amp the convo?

[by getting local schools out into their communities - let community problems, dreams, etc, become what we do/solve/work on during the day, needing less resources if we start maximizing use of one resource - people, people have the knowledge in them... getting out and convo]

______________________________________

gary jules

mad world - kid pick for lab song



___________________________________

Sunday, January 16, 2011

mash-up

edit mode...


a process - via martin - to (disciplinarity) cross discipline boundaries
+
a standard - via hagel - to be the glue of the knowledge overload
finding stability at the core of change:
sources of stability that will provide us with the firm grounding that we all, even the most jaded adrenaline junkies, need to thrive: tacit knowledge, trust relationship, talent development
accelerating change breeds exactly the kinds of needs that will give rise to new sources of stability. 
an opportunity that none of the current leaders of the commercial Internet understand, much less address.  There is a white space here.

 +

back to martin - the marriage of change and stability, validity and reliability,  

+ 

back to hagel - on turkles alone together

Those who come to this book looking for rich statistical data will be disappointed.  This is a powerful ethnographic study that makes its points come alive with individual stories and experiences.  I
Many of the usage patterns she describes so compellingly have their source in the business world where globalization and digital technology infrastructures are increasing competitive pressure and leading to sustained erosion in performance. Rather than stepping back to reassess if the current way of doing business is still appropriate, the reaction of most business executives is to squeeze harder, demanding more output with fewer and fewer resources.  In this environment, the basic assumptions of the business world take even deeper root: transactions trump relationships, short-term trumps long-term, multi-tasking trumps focus, predictability and control trump experimentation and initiative.
The new modes of communication enabled by technology fit right in to this mindset. They provide us with the illusion of control and predictability.

To address these mounting pressures and the impact they have on the relationships around us, perhaps we need something more than conversations and small behavior changes. In the face of mounting pressures from our work lives, perhaps we need something more fundamental.  Perhaps we need to re-connect with our passion and find ways to integrate our passion with our profession.
In reflecting on Sherry’s book, I went through the exercise of identifying people that I thought were relatively immune from the technology-enabled behaviors that Sherry so eloquently identifies and criticizes.  The outliers that came to mind all had one thing in common: they were deeply passionate about their work and had what I have described as the “passion of the explorer”.
Driven by a connecting disposition, these people deeply engage with others and rapidly build trust-based relationships, relying heavily on face to face meetings and lengthy phone (or Skype) conversations. They enrich these relationships by drawing people into shared quests where deep engagement is required to come up with the creative new approaches to succeed in the quest.


+

a machine to manage knowledge system - via videos vs documents  - roger schank
next generation of Knowledge Management systems, managing video stories and not documents

 +

Kelly



the glue/standard/, the process of learning? detox?
the documentation giving way to video documentation.. needing help organizing, perhaps the demo of schank's will help?
the marriage, public school system and innovation, helping the system realize that the data they are collecting is no longer reliable. they may find more reliability in mapping systems and video logs that can monitor growth per stories.

_______________________

Saturday, January 15, 2011

keep running into the need for bold

friend on triiibes shared this link. on Michelle Rhee's 1 billion on ed.
now i've been talking with Bonnie about meshing up moneys with what works.

per Rhee's comment, i emailed co senator Mike Johnston.

Diane sent me these:
http://www.nationallabnetwork.org/
http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/educate-innovate

wrote her back:
this is why we're still in a rut. we're basing all our efforts off and spending all our monies on data, like PISA. people wanting to do good or feeling pressure to come up with a solution are just focusing on what we've always focused on. they change a few little things or words so that it feels like reform, but it's so not.

we're not asking people what success is to them. which is the very first question to ask/discuss. without taking time to find that out - most everything that follows becomes invalid.

funny thing is that this voice of reason, to let people decide, is what govern/business claims is invalid. it's scary to give up control like that.






gosh let's work together.
notice unexpected solutions, dream boldly, connect unlikely people/info, do what matters

_____________________________________________

laurie maves



_________________________________

roger martin

nov 2009:


in pieces here.

54:06 - rather than - to think about thinking. be able to think across boundaries
need to teach the basic science of interdisciplinarity.
we draw boundaries between knowledge domains, then we complain about them, then we separate them, then we complain about the boundaries, so we redraw them..

if boundaries are a problem, then what is a fundamental pattern of thinking that enables you to reach across boundaries. wouldn't matter what material
bruce - design and design thinking are what you're describing

why - in perhaps the most important thing, that can make a person successful or not - do we leave this thinking to a person? roger - because it's easier to teach a discipline than disciplinarity thinking


___________________________________

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

jeri ellsworth

stanford talk 2003

self taught electrical engineer

talks a lot about mentors...
they saw that i was excited about where i wanted to go and were willing to share their knowledge with me.

________________________________

kevin buecher

passion, community, be you.



_______________________________________________

mash-up






humanity 4.0   +    what tech wants   +   homeless people   +    philosopher kings   +   un_schooled   +  ?



from humanity 4.0:
converge - the more convergent the whole, ie: the more you remain recognizably you even as your cells are continuously replaced, the more resilient, adaptive and creative the living system will be - hunter gathering era - the universe is made up of individual parts
relate - the more open and free flowing the relationships, the more resilient, adaptive and creative the living system will be - agragrian era - the universe is a web of interconnected relationships
diverge - keeps us stuck thinking of ways to tweak the machine - the more divergent or diverse the parts, the more resilient, adaptive and creative the living system will be - industrial era - the universe is an unbroken whole
integrate - by itself the living system integrates all those divergent parts into a convergent whole in dynamic relationship internally and externally in an ongoing, moment by moment process of self re-creation
- integral era - the universe is an integral living system made up of parts, relationships, and wholes

we find harmony in integration

the most important task of the era is to acknowledge life










life integrates and animates.
it pulls us into thrivability vs sustainability






is the bridge to humanity.
we evolve our consciousness not by reading books and presentations but through conversation.

4.0 or status quo


from Kelly What Tech Wants):
to maximize our own contentment, we see the  
minimum amount of technology in our lives.
yet to maximixe the contentment of others, we must
maximize the amount of technology in the world. 



throw in cold weather  - and there's a sense of urgency. no?

and if there's urgency, or desire for belonging, seems both can be found in community
and in realizing that wisdom can be found in unlikely places.
right in the middle of life, no doubt. no need for pseudo anything. just live.
school is learning. learning is life. that's it.
nothing is for everybody @irasocol
24/7 integration and flexibility

as seen here via @ewanmcintosh
and below - a random snippet of how kids learn:




what's next?
- this is next. now is next.
jump in. live. connect. converse. be.

and key to where-with-all...
if we have trust, if our premise is - we all want good...
we don't waste energy on defense.
i've got your back.
no?

______________________

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

ira david socol

tool belt theory for everyone

http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2008/05/toolbelt-theory-for-everyone.html

wrote the Drool Room
learning in a way not recognized by the people in power

school wasn't originally designed for good - it was designed to label and segregate
school is not really failing what it was designed for. so if you call into question what you're wanting, it's going to take more than tweaking.
school was designed to fail 75% - to weed out people for the workforce

school was designed so that those with  money would be able to keep their success
1800 's - to decapitalize the country.

if we don't like what's going on - it's the system that has to change. not the teachers and students



















Alcott and Barnard

Dewey vs. Cubberly  and Thorndike

 Ira has written a great series called "Designed to Fail" that captures a lot of the history he is discussing http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2010/09/designed-to-fail-education-in-america.html

Link to the series http://tomazlasic.net/why-is-everyone-an-expert-on-education/
we think because we went to school we're experts at education

bill gates - because he's made a lot of money - must know what he's doing
poor people must not know what their doing

strategy for affecting change - empowering people who are in the buildings first

not that parents can't be innovative - most just have had a bad experience in school

we have to change what tech is in school
we have to let kids choice tech for selves

there is nothing for everyone

we don't value family here. the less money you have the less time you have to spend with your family.

the better you do at eradicating poverty -
western michigan k-5 - after kindergarten they have 3 possible tracts, traditional, looping and 120 kids and 6 teachers in one giant 1-5 classroom

colleges of ed are not leading this - so we need to


________________________________________

Monday, January 10, 2011

yukie koda



speed listening with audible.
i need to look into audible.

thank you Bernd and Yukie.

_______________________

Sunday, January 9, 2011

michelle holliday

humanity 4.0


Saturday, January 8, 2011

Thursday, January 6, 2011

cool night on twitter

cristian:  http://tinyurl.com/294vfw2
blogs this:  http://tinyurl.com/32hc9f5
i tweet this:





cameron tweets this:





(yeah - the Cameron Sinclair - architecture for humanity)
later..
seth tweets this:






because we had about an hour face to face yesterday on just this stuff.



how could you want to miss any of this?
all after hours.
all stuff that matters.

oh the connections we can now make.
makes me giddy.


ah George. perfect:






thanks Tom..
________________________

curation tools

4 promising curation tools that help make sense of the web

10 creative uses of new facebook profile

tech & learning

drake and warlick
using tech well not just when the tech is invisible, but when the walls and the clocks and the labels become invisible.



nielsen and webb (mesa state)  - cells


______________________________

dorfman & davis





______________________________________

dan ariely

temptation and self-control

can you take on short term consequences of loss for a long term gain

waiting for choc, doing exercise, etc... we'll do it
because in the future we'll wonderful people
problem is we don't live in the future


his trick for self-control
he loves movies but has no time to watch, so his deal was after injection, he would watch movies

we exagerate the now and ignore the future
he did reward substitution, he acted as if he cared about the liver

we face problems with self-control all the time
can we use reward substitution, maybe

all the elements that create human apathy - rolled into one
perhaps it isn't reward substitution

1) reward substitution
2) self-control contracts - creative ideas, alarm clock connected to your least fav charity, etc
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Wednesday, January 5, 2011

kevin kelly



web (not internet) is 5000 days old - and if we would have suggested it 5000 days ago - we would have said - that's impossible.  (and what has happened is amazing and no one is amazed)
so what will happen in the next 5000 days

100 bill clicks per day
55 trillion links
to a first approx - size of machine is size of brain
however your brain isn't doubling every 2 years
2040 - will exceed human brain in world
consequences
1) we're giving this machine a body -
portals
the cloud - touching the cloud to compute - everything goes through it
our environment becomes the web...embed web into the world
2) restructure it's architecture -
a) link computers - net  [machine to machine]  b) link pages [page to page]  c)  link info [id to id]
so you have to be open to having your data shared vs just your page or computer
after 5000 days - future d) link things
3) we're going to become co-dependent on it - our environment becomes the web...embed web into the world
always on it - total personalization will require total transparency


we think dependency is bad - but now - we're totally dependent on other techs - ie the alphabet, etc

next 5000 - not going to be the web but only better
going to be smarter (anticpate what we're doing in a good sense)
will know us
will be more ubiquitous - us in the middle of it

you have to begin to think of this as a new kind of stage - not just - only better
it's a large organism, it's a whole system, a one, a unity of some sort is starting to emerge.






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steven johnson

ted on emergence


book was on density - and how the coming together of people, intertwined as a web (emergence) was making the world a better place..
just finishing while he is a couple blocks away from 911, when density is embodied in the destruction, density kills

a week after - walking 20 blocks.. streets were alive with people, a beautiful urban day, the city was working, everything that makes a city successful was on display, on the streets.
decentralized in function - 20 blocks north, 2 days later, city was thriving

who builds a neighborhood - personalities, etc
answer - everybody and nobody
who is keeping the streets alive post 911 - whole system

increasingly what we're starting to see on the web

new model of inner-activity
you suddenly have the power to put a link to your dog on your page, and others have the power to click on those links


wow - filmed in 2003



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barry schwartz

we need less rules and more virtue


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homeless

how cool is this:


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Idzie Desmarais

great post (and entire blog) on unschooling. much to learn here..

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kate fridkis

trouble with being exceptional
these notes from listening to her interview with Beatrice of Radio Free School.
the idea of balance
when you learn to love learning - you do things that interest you, whatever things that interest you end up connecting you to a lot of things in a lot of surprising ways..
so you end up being more well-rounded than anyone expects.. but it's not because you set out to do that

you learn something new in every environment - always learning.. because you're living

so glad to make the acquaintance of the lovely @EatTheDamnCake


esp love this: when she said - i wish it wasn't a competition, because no one thing is the answer. we need many choices. (my paraphrase)

and then the interviewer making a comment on questions asked of homeschoolers - that they don't seem to ask of others.. like - can you socialize, can you adapt to the real world
reminded me of Roger Martin's The Design of Business, we live in a reliability-oriented world, which we don't question. validity-oriented thinking, innovation, alternate thinking, is questioned beyond measure and then blown off when the same questions should be asked of everyone. the ones asking the questions are quite often lacking those answers most.
ie: can you adapt to the real world - how far from the real world is public school? life isn't like a traditional school classroom.

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mark harvoth

bravo Mark




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Monday, January 3, 2011

steven johnson

where good ideas come from  - rsa


what spaces do they hatch in:
1) hunch state - slow
ie: tim berners lee - 10 yrs for www
create a space where ideas can mingle and swap


the great driver of scientific and techno  innovation
has been the historic increase of connectivity - over the last 600-700 yrs
so yes - we're distracted.. but we have so many new ways to connect.
chance favors the connected mind.

fitting with Kelley's below - the more drippings we leave, the more potential for others to connect them, whether we do it or not..

min our selection of tech
but max the global choices of tech

Steve's april 2010 Ted


1650 english coffee house was crucial to the birth of the enlightenment
1) before that - people drank alcohol all day long
2) architecture of the space -

what are the environments that lead to unusual levels of creativity
coffee house
web
cities
bio environments - rain forrests

shared patterns?
flash, eureka, lightbulb - all share that an idea is a single thing
when really - it's a network that has never formed before
how do you get your brain into these environments where these networks will form

a design that matters
spend money getting aid and advanced electronics, but then when it breaks down, can't fix, so waste
these places can keep cars working.. so built a neonatal incubator from toyota parts

if we are trying to spaces for innovation.. we need messy looking spaces.
most people aren't good at telling/remembering where great ideas happened
kevin dunbar - went around and videoed and asked
almost all the important break through ideas happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting, often when they shared their mistakes (not individually by the microsope)
the liquid network, lots of different ideas playing off each other
aslo - a lot of great ideas linger for decades, not a lightbulb flash on moment
darwin tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection, says it's a light bulb moment in his auto bio
howard groover looked back at darwin's notebooks - he found that darwin had the full theory months and months before he had the lightbulb moment
he had the concept, but unable to fully think it yet

how do you create environments for ideas to have this long half-life?

google has hunch cultivating environments
and if you share that space, grows faster

used to be we locked them up - to make them more valuable
we should spend even more time valuing the sharing and connecting of ideas.

oct 1957 - sputnik - johns hopkins - nerd heaven
2 having an informal convo, "has anyone tried to listen to this thing?" so they try - and they pick up the signal
before long - they think they might be the first to do it, so they record it.
then they start thinking, we're noticing small frequency rates, we could probably calculate the speed using the doplar effect
we could look at the slope of the doplar effect to figure out how close it is to us
after 3-4 weeks, they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite going around the earth - from this little sounds
figured out an unknown location of satellite from known location on the ground
could you figure out the other way?
and they say yes
so they work on submarines with satellites
that's how gps was born,
30 yrs later - anyone could do it, and

great case study in the unplanned power of open innovative systems and spaces

listening, plotting, cold war, cup of coffee

chance favors the connected mind

how do i miss all this. this is from sept by steven - tinkering - and  
adjacent possibilities
really what headed to steven in the first place yesterday when i read this by stephen hurley at the coop

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speaking of the connected mind.. check this out - via smart mobs - mappings/networks that will make the world smart  thanks to tweet from @ricetopher

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kevin kelly

what tech wants

















p. 236 - what tech brings is expanding choices... which allow us to be us.
writing in 1950, sociologist David Riesman: " the more advance the technology, on the whole, the more possible it is for a considerable number of human beings to imagine being somebody else."
we expand technology to findout who we are and who we can be.

upon studying amish, hippies, wendell berry and eric brende - who believe they don't need exploding tech to expand themselves. they are all minimalists. but - have they traded contentment for revelation. have they discovered, can they even, who they can become.
this is fine for them, but what if everyone does it, the optimization of choice collapses.
by constraining the wuite of acceptable occupations and narrowing education, the amish are holding back possiblilites not just for their children but indeirctly for all.

unlike the amish and minimites, the tens of millions of migrants headed into cities each year may invent a tool that will unleash choices for someone else. if they don't, then their children will.

our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possiblilites fo rothers

the amish and minimites have important lessons to teach us about selecting what we embrace.

i do want to be choosy about what i spend time mastering. i want to be able to back out of things that don't work out. i do want the minimum because i've learned that i have limited time and attentions

ownership of choices
we owe the amish hackers a large debt... through their lives we can see the technium's dilemma very clearly:
to maximize our own contentment, we see the  
minimum amount of technology in our lives.
yet to maximixe the contentment of others, we must
maximize the amount of technology in the world. 

we can only find out own minimal tools if others have created a sufficient maximum pool of options we can choose from. the dilemma remains in how we can personally minimize stuff close to us while trying to expand it globally.


p. 244 - we can learn much from disruptive technologies
switching occupations is the norm for tech.. and invention requires many encounters with early adopters and collisions with other inventions to refine its role in the technium.

we make prediction more difficult because our immediate tendency is to imagine the new thing doing and old job better. (school, no?0
we are stuck in the same blindness.
ie: the advertisers pitched the telephone as if it were a more convenient telegraph. none of them suggested having a conversation.
technologies shift as they thrives. they are remade as they are used...
they bring completely unpredicted effects as they near ubiquity.

if we examine technologies honestly, each one has its faults as well as its virtues.. in fact, an invention or idea is not really tremendous unless it can be tremendously abused.

p. 246

first law of technological expectations:
the greater the promise of a new tech, the greater the potential for harm as well
so comes precautionary principle (first crafted in 1992) most recent version states: activities that present an uncertain potential for significant harm should be prohibited unless the proponent of the activity shows that it presents no appreciable risk of harm.    [aup's, cipa, etc]

so - a tech must be shown to do no harm before it is embraced.
so - precautionary principle is very very good for one thing - stopping technological progress,
via cass r sunstein, we must challenge the precautionary principle not because it leads in bad directions, but because read for all it is worht, it leads in no direction at all.

every good produces harm soemwhere.
ie: malaria infects 300-500 mill, casing 2 mill deaths per year, it's debilitating to those who don't die and leads to cyclic poverty. but in the 1950's the level of malaria was reduced by 70% via ddt. it was so successful however, farmers eagerly sprayed it by the tons on cotton fields, so got into water cycles and into fa cells in animals, drop in reproduction rates for some predatory birds and die-offs in some fish and aquatic life species. so banned in 1972. and malaria cases in asia and africa rose again to deadly pre-50's levels.
plans to reintroduce ddt for households were blockded by the world bank, etc 1991 treaty by 91 countries - phase out ddt altogheter. ddt was probably bad, better safe than sorry. in fact ddt had never been shown to hurt humans, and the environmental farm from the miniscule amoutns of ddt applied in homes had not been measured. but nobody could prove it did not cause harm,despite its proven ability to do good.

risk aversion

we now know that people will accept a thousand times as much risk for tech or situations that are voluntary rather than madatory.
ie: you don't have a choice where you get your tap water, so you are less tolerant in regard to its safety than you might be from using a cell phone of your choice.

also - the acceptability of risk is directly influence by how easy it is to imagine both the worst case and the best benefits, and that these are determiend by ed, advertising, rumor and imagination.

generally - safety trumps innovation

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