למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

In one lesson I observed, Donnelly began class with a review of yesterday’s material on photosynthesis. Afterwards she had students open their laptops to watch animations of photosynthesis that she had loaded on their machines earlier. A pop-up quiz appeared after the animations. Donnelly walked around and checked student scores on the quiz. She then summarized the concept of photosynthesis by questioning students. Finally, she collected homework assigned the previous day.

Donnelly’s classes remind me that thoughtful teaching and smooth weekly integration of laptops into biology lessons –within a five period workload and three preparations across different levels of students–can be done with finesse, humor, excitement, and-yes- within a blend of teacher- and student-centered pedagogy. Like many teachers, she hugs the middle of the spectrum.

דיגיטלי כבר פסה. פדגוגיה סוציאלית היא רדיקליזציה של הרבה מגמות שהתחילו מאז ג'ון דיואי עם הקונסטרוקטיביזם שלו ופדגוגיה חברתית.

ההמון תמיד יותר חכם מהגאון

Educational technology use, it turns out, is no Trojan horse, despite the wishes and hopes of many of its advocates.

תוויות: 1:1, חוכמת ההמון, מורים, שינוי

DESPITE the enduring myth of the lone genius, innovation does not take place in isolation. Truly productive invention requires the meeting of minds from myriad perspectives, even if the innovators themselves don’t always realize it.

Brainstorming, Mr. Boyd says, is the most overused and underperforming tool in business today. Traditionally, brainstorming revolves around the false premise that to get good ideas, a group must generate a large list from which to cherry-pick. But researchers have shown repeatedly that individuals working alone generate more ideas than groups acting in concert.

Collaboration involves individuals contributing their unique perspectives, not a type of faceless mob with an identity all its own. The individual view of collaboration has always been an issue for me in using wikis. Wikis overwrite individual contributions....

The best innovations occur when you have networks of people with diverse backgrounds gathering around a problem.

תוויות: בלוגים, ויקי, חוכמת ההמון

Encyclopaedia Britannica is about to launch a new initiative that we’re very enthusiastic about. The main thrust of this initiative is to promote greater participation by both our expert contributors and readers. Both groups will be invited to play a larger role in expanding, improving, and maintaining the information we publish on the Web under the Encyclopaedia Britannica name as well as in sharing content they create with other Britannica visitors.

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Excellent! We need lots of variations on the theme of collaboration. Editing and expertise add value. They slow things down and reduce the ability to scale, but Wikipedia’s process makes it possible to read an article that’s been altered, if only for a minute, by some devilish hand. It all depends on what you’re trying to do, and collectively we’re trying to do everything. So, this is good news from Britannica. It’ll be fascinating to watch.

תוויות: ויקי, חוכמת ההמון

The premise of this blog and generally of my writing is that the Net is a swamp filled with the gold which will cause global enlightenment as the 21st century rolls on. Both Gilder’s and Zimmer’s Microcosms describe the sort of swamp where tiny pieces interact to cause it all. In the golden swamp, gold too is micro.

How does the massive heap of information we call Wikipedia emit supple knowledge. With millions of of possible paths to webpages to choose among why does Google choose to place the best few at the top? Why does the chaos of content connections online make sense emerge instead of just crashing?

תוויות: הרהורים, חוכמת ההמון

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.

For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV. ....

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

תוויות: הרהורים, חוכמת ההמון

אני מקווה כי השמועות על מותו מוקדמות מדי.
וחשוב לטעמי, להעצים את המקום שלו בחינוך.

תוויות: חוכמת ההמון, כלי ווב 2.0, שימוש בבתי ספר

An article today in the New York Times Science section explains how a network of factors - not just a few simple ones - gives rise to diabetes.

This network understanding is new, and being discovered in fields as diverse as biology, electrical engineering, cognitive and information sciences, and many more. It is one of the grand discoveries of our time. A golden age of learning awaits us once we apply this understanding to education.

The most direct and practical way to begin applying networks to education is to open up knowledge resources and interconnect nodes to form clusters, thus emerging ideas

תוויות: חוכמת ההמון, רשתיות

Wired has created a fairly simple resource: How To Wikis covering subjects such as making youtube videos, using flickr, explaining DRM, etc. I'm starting to question the usefulness of resources like this. Five minutes with a good search engine will provide the same information, but with better context specific information for the searcher. Part of the same reason I'm questioning wikipedia as a concept - it is quite simple for anyone with marginal competence with online search/databases/Google Scholar to find what is needed. What is the value of aggregation completed on behalf of many people, rather than based on needs of one person? Not much value anymore.

For instance, most of the technical or scientific information that is in the Wikipedia was already on the Web before the Wikipedia was started. You could always use Google or other search services to find information about items that are now wikified. In some cases I have noticed specific texts get cloned from original sites at universities or labs onto wiki pages. And when that happens, each text loses part of its value.

When you see the context in which something was written and you know who the author was beyond just a name, you learn so much more than when you find the same text placed in the anonymous, faux-authoritative, anti-contextual brew of the Wikipedia. The question isn't just one of authentication and accountability, though those are important, but something more subtle. A voice should be sensed as a whole. You have to have a chance to sense personality in order for language to have its full meaning. Personal Web pages do that, as do journals and books.

תוויות: הרהורים, חוכמת ההמון

Schools should pay attention to Keen's claims and discuss whether policies should be adjusted to meet some of his concerns. In recent discussions with several schools about Wikipedia and its suitability as a source for student research, I learned that these schools had created no policy governing this issue and each teacher was acting independently, with some taking quite a strong stance against Wikipedia while others were more permissive, suggesting that students might use it as a starting place for a project. The more we looked at some of the controversy swirling around Wikipedia, the more the staffs of these schools seemed intent on creating a policy.

תוויות: הרהורים, חוכמת ההמון, רשתות חברתיות

רמתו של התוכן המיוצר במהפכה החברתית המכונה "Web 2.0" נמוכה מאוד, ולמעשה ייתכן שהאינטרנט בגירסתו הקודמת, זו המכונה היום רטרואקטיבית "Web 1.0" היה יותר מעניין, יותר תוסס, יותר אמין, פשוט יותר טוב.

תופעות אשר יצרו היפר-אינפלציה בתכנים ירודים, העתקה סיטונאית של יצירות וטקסטים וניצול האנונימיות של הרשת לביצוע עבירות שונות, לרבות מעשים פליליים.

משתלבת בוויכוח המתנהל באינטרנט דובר האנגלית, בשאלה אם התופעה המכונה תכנים מבוססי גולשים מדרדרת את התרבות ביגון שאולה.