Kevin Ryan in Tokyo

Category: Learning

  • Boycott Thomson Reuters

    I use an excellent program for research, called Zotero. It helps me catalog everything I find about my research subjects into one easily accessed place. One of the best features is that it can pull the bibliographic information off a web page such as Amazon, and put it into a traditional format, such as APA or MLA. This has long been the most time-consuming part of research for me, getting all those niggly little commas, underlines, and dates, names and titles in the correct order and format. It helps tremendously. Highly recommended.

    Now, Thomson Reuters, publishers of a similar software, endnote, are suing Zotero because Zotero can read endnote’s formatted files and put them into an open standard. (Reported by Liberal Education and EdTechPost). Trying to close down research by suing a company that can read files your customers make is unconscionable.

    If you order Thomson Reuters textbooks, I urge you to switch to another brand.

  • Cognizing and offloading Cognitive Load

    In linguistincs and psychology we talk about the cognitive load of any task. A task that requires calculation or analysis has a larger cognitive load. A task in a foreign language, or using an unfamiliar tool, like a computer, also increases cognitive load.

    David Peskovitz over at BoingBoing has a friend at the Institute of the Future Mathias Crawford found this article about Cognizing entitled Offloading Cognition onto Cognitive Technology by Itiel Dror, and  Stevan Harnad talks about

    “Cognizing” (e.g., thinking, understanding, and knowing) is a mental state.

    And how to offload some of the cognitive load onto technology. In our discussions over at cck08, the Connectivist class  by Siemens and Downes, echoed across the web (search your RSS for cck08), where we are talking about the nature of knowledge, and the connectivist idea that it’s most basic element is connections. Connections between neurons, between people, and between organizations and concepts. Check it out.

  • The Ellsberg Paradox

    Close-up of two bottles of marbles

    Mark Frauenfelder over at BoingBoing is reading Gregory Bern’s Iconoclast. He talks about the Ellsberg Paradox. Read his description of aversion to ambiguity.  Which one would you choose?

  • Edge: John Brockman: Clay Shirky: Voting Republican

    I love summer vacation. I get to sit and read stuff I would never “have time for” during regular work. Case in point, the Edge, an online magazine by author John Brockman, my favorite non-fiction author (since The Third Culture). The last two articles have been great. The most recent is What makes people vote Republican?

    In it we get an author describing how elections are about perceptions of morality, and part of our belief systems may even be genetic. And how the Democrats and especially the academics and intellectuals, don’t get it.

    Even better is the commentary, by a linguist/missionary to the Amazon, a Harvard psychologist and inventor of Multiple Intelligences, a Skeptic, a neurologist (my favorite) another anthropologist, and an Artificial Intelligence (AI)/education specialist (one of my favorite thinkers). This is the kind of thing you sit around the table after dinner talking about.

    And there’s more. One of my favorite books this year is Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. It is about how reduced transactional costs (you do this for me and I’ll do that for you) on the Internet have changed culture as we understand it, starting with business but extending into every part of our lives.

    In Edge, he speaks (see the video, scroll down about 3 articles) about Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus. The main idea is that while gin allowed us to make the transfer from an agrarian to urban society by acting as a buffer while appropriate intuitions were established (libraries, streets), it is TV that takes that role in our switch from industrial to informational society. And like gin, if we can get “off” the Gilligan’s Island, there is a huge potential of cultural resource available in the form of people’s time. See the video (again, scroll down) and then read the comments, you will find out that there is never any reason for saying, “I don’t have enough time,” and how our next generation will never be satisfied with sitcoms.

    I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

    Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken.

    I’ll be teaching kids like that in a few years.

  • NY Times: Ambient Awareness, Digital Intimacy

    Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing pointed me to this NY Times article Ambient Awareness, the effects of the Facebook and Twitter on culture and psychology. A great read. Combined with my reading for cck08, more than 200 pages, I’m glad today is Sunday.