Just read these articles here and here on mobile phones radiation.
As I am not a frequent mobile phone user, I am feeling safe. Also, I suffer from headaches after mobile conversation. So, I avoid mobile conversation as far as possible.
For those of you who are a male mobile user, are you aware of the radiation here?
In this presentation by James Surowiecki
James poses 3 questions
1. What motivate people to blog?
2. Do blogs have genuine access to collective intelligence?
3. What are the dark sides of blogs?
Whilst his story about tsunami is still fresh with me, as I learnt about the tsunami and earthquake in Japan through various blogs and social media, I think it would be a great lesson to reflect on such catastrophe and its implications, in particular how media such as FB, Twitters, blogs would play a part in collecting and harvesting intelligence, in this complex ecology….
In Blogosphere, what counts as rational? Is value measured by money?
Blogs provide affordance for bloggers where they are:
– Volunteering their cooperative power
– Accessing & collecting intelligence
James coins it as collective distributive intelligence, or participative journalism. Bloggers would then be able to establish their voice in the media.
The dark sides of blogging, according to James include:
– people falling in love with internet
– people thinking that networks are necessarily good things
– when people are more tightly linked to group, the harder for them to remain independent
He concludes that
– groups are only smart if individuals are independent
People just do what the one in front of them does, and so the meme would be “transmitted” from one blogger to another blogger or reader, and so on. Has the blogosphere been able to collect such collective distributive intelligence? This reminds me of the Paradox of Wisdom of Crowd, as highlighted by James.
Similarly, I could transfer such learning to FB, Twitters, Youtube, Ted.com etc. where memes and ideas are shared and transmitted in an endless manner through different means, where some ideas are amplified, whilst others would be dampened and faded into “darkness”.
What does this story tell me? A good lesson, that there are always two sides of the same coin, in blogging, in networks. And overly optimistic or pessimistic in tapping into the collective intelligence would end up with “group-think” or “narcissism with a closed mind”.
This links me back to reflect on Communities and Networks as shared here.
May be this Learning Analytics would shed some light as to how and what it means to blog in the blogosphere.
Here Rita reflects on her learning with Learning Analytics and asks:
If students only use the LMS for such a limited amount of their learning, and data on the other learning is not collected, what will be the relevance and value of carrying out analytics on this LMS environment?
How about carrying out analytics on blogging in the blogosphere?
Here research into who’s talking and who’s listening on Twitter provides some interesting perspectives and patterns –
“Bloggers, unlike those in other categories, are more likely to retweet information outside their own categories, reflecting the “characterization of bloggers as recyclers and filters of information.”
Would bloggers of “our community” exhibit similar behaviors?
I enjoyed reading this Revolutions in higher education: how many dimensions of openness? by Sir John Daniel, which was referred by Stephen Downes (see his post too).
Here Sir John highlights:
Openness and inclusivity on one hand and hierarchy and restrictions on the other.
The three findings by Tony Bates:
– Rapid growth of eLearning
– Institutional goals for eLearning short on ambition
– For profits are better placed to expand online because they do not have to worry about resistance from academic staff, nor about exploiting their earlier investment in campus facilities.
Will higher education split over the coming years into a public sector focused on research and a for-profit sector doing most of the teaching? And if so, does it matter?
Some governments would like to see higher education divide itself into research universities and teaching institutions. Extrapolating the trends we have identified suggests that their wish may come true, with the added difference that most research will take place in publicly-supported institutions while most teaching will be done by for-profit enterprises.
These dimensions of openness: open admissions; distance learning at scale, and open curricula remained the principal expressions of openness for the next thirty years.
My reflections: There is already a trend in adopting eLearning at various levels in Higher and Further Education, but that the current rapid and exponential growth in technology has accelerated the needs of developing open education and learning in response to those changes.
Back in more than three decades where I first tried the Bachelor of Science in Mathematics (an External degree) by distance education, the only resource provided was the list of text provided by the University. The only fees involved in the Degree study was the examination. Surely, the standard of the Bachelor degree was equivalent to that awarded internally.
So, what makes the difference from that of the award of the degree today? The main difference lies with the abundant resources available in the internet and OER, many open online courses (such as the MOOCs – PLENK2010, CCK11, Groom’s DS106 to the upcoming MobiMooc), the support from the institutions including mentoring, peer-learning, and accreditation, and the ubiquitous networks (educational, social and informal) available that might be exploited to support the study. Besides, there are often real and virtual communities around us that could add considerable value to individuals whilst studying in formal courses.
Openness could open windows of opportunities for institutions to respond to the demands of study and development of tens of millions of learners around the globe. However, there is also a significant impact on Higher Education due to the disruptive technology.
What could we learn from such disruptive technology?
When disruptive technologies enter a market, they offer a value proposition that is impossible to dismiss. Customers move to the new solutions and change the balance of the industry. Market forces do not operate to maintain the dominance of existing players; rather they move to meet the needs of the maximum number of customers. Disruptive changes are afoot in our industry and will continue. Companies, researchers, system developers, and service providers can choose to ride the wave or fight the wave, but they cannot dissipate the force of the wave of change that is occurring.
So, would we be in the midst of this huge tsunami of change where we would need to ride on, rather than fighting against? That is the complexity arising from the mix and interaction of openness in education and learning, disruptive technology and the internet, and the people and society that are engaged in formal and informal education and learning.
Photo: From Wall Paper
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