Blue Planet

Catchy music with video on our planet

Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

At TED

Book at Amazon

Clay Shirky teaches New Media as an associate teacher[3] at New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications ProgramBlog

Previous TED Talk “Institutions vs. collaboration”.

Liar, liar: Why deception is our way of life

As BP continues to lie about the gulf disaster, let us take time to see why we lie.

“Lying gives us the temporary delusion that our personal and social worlds are intact, that we are loved, that we are safe, and above all, that we are not likely to overwhelmed by the uncertainty inherent in living in a world we can never truly know.”

This article in NewScientist by Dorothy Rowe, describes how each of us interpret of the world and what is going on differently due to our how our brains are formed (neuranatomy) and our past experiences.

The Invisible Gorilla

Ever take this test?

Half of us do not see the gorilla walking around. We miss stuff, our illusions and our beliefs effect our vision.

Six “everyday” illusions:
▪ attention
▪ memory
▪ confidence
▪ knowledge
▪ cause
▪ potential

The six most common errors.
▪ inattentional blindness (failing to see things that are in plain sight);
▪ the belief that our memories are more reliable than they are;
▪ the tendency to think someone is competent if they are confident;
▪ the illusion of knowledge (we know much less than we think);
▪ the assumption that things that occur together must be causally related (think MMR vaccine and autism);
▪ and the increasingly popular notion that cognitive exercises make us smarter (in fact, physical exercise has a much stronger effect).

Book: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us

TEDxOilSpill – We all need to help and do something to stop this!!

BP is not listening to the experts and all the other suggestions to help this oil spill.

TEDxOilSpill will tackle the tough questions raised by the recent and ongoing environmental catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Oil Spill Challenge

livestream: http://www.livestream.com/tedxoilspill/

Listen to this new graduate’s speech

The University of Washington Virtual World Certificate officially had its first graduation. The student’s worked hard and excelled at mastering virtual worlds in theory, design, development and big ideas. This is one of the first virtual world certificate graduation of which I am aware and it means that people are seriously studying the subject and becoming experts in building virtual immersive environment for educational, corporate and government uses. (from Karl Kapps blog.)

Here is a machinima of the graduation:

Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds (FCVW)

The Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds (FCVW)

Microsoft Life Sciences Innovation Award 2010

This award went to a “project that uses a 3-D virtual environment to hold a virtual scientific poster session.” The session, held by the pharmaceutical company Merck was conducted in ProtonMedia’s Photosphere virtual-world platform technology.

As stated in Karl Kapps’ blog. “Corporate monies are about to be thrown behind 3D in a BIG WAY….these efforts will push virtual 3D world technology from the fringes of organizational training and collaboration efforts to the forefront of organizational learning and collaboration efforts. It is only a matter of time.”

Retention rates in higher education

Interesting study done on adjuncts and retention rates, in various levels of education.

But what hit me most was this:

“the typical four-year college loses 26 percent of its students between the first and second years, and that about 60 percent of college students who fail to finish end their program in the first year — suggesting that any push to improve retention and graduation rates must address factors that relate to first-year retention.”

I remember decades ago, when I was in college it was graduate students that taught many courses. And that instruction was not very good, many due to the graduate student could not speak english very well, and that they had no previous teaching experience, nor extensive knowledge on the subject.

Now that online instruction is growing, this is getting worse. Online teaching is not like face-to-face teaching and many courses are just being “thrown” up without much thought.

The future of instructional design – or my heart belongs to ADDIE

Very interesting article by Tony Bates.This was a discussion among a group of Instructional Designers in Canada.

Highlights:
“There was strong agreement that it was important for instructional designers to have both classroom experience and experience of teaching online as well as academic qualifications in instructional design.”

“Several people pointed out that the ADDIE or ISD framework was useful, because it forced one to look at teaching and learning from a systems perspective, and that approach was still important and valuable, although slavish adherence to all the detailed steps was probably futile.”

“There was some agreement that different learning theories can all be useful depending on context, especially the ’state’ of individual learners and the nature of the subject matter. It was considered part of an instructional designer’s skills to be able to identify the most appropriate approaches to learning within different contexts, and not to be dogmatic about any single theoretical approach. ”

It was suggested that to build engaging activities, you needed to know your audience and what ‘fired them up.’…some students were not interested in social learning”

and what is NOT being looked at:
“Although we don’t have good designs or models yet for the use of web 2.0 or hybrid learning, we do have theories of learning. Why are we not applying theory more rigorously to these areas and coming up with new models based on theory that can be tested?”