Dave Pollard’s How to Save the World keeps poking me with reminders of the Canadian perspective that I so admire –minimally tainted by infection with the global power trip that most Americans don’t even notice, and with lots of basic good sense, eh? His posting yesterday, on being ahead of the times around oneself, gets it just right. And he concludes:

I am announcing the start of a new Movement. It is the Movement of People Too Far Ahead For Their Own Good. Or, for short, the Too Far Ahead Movement. And since most movements have an icon, or a secret handshake, or some other quiet acknowledgment of mutual membership, like the ‘V’ sign of the 1960s Peace Movement, the Too Far Ahead Movement should have a gesture, too.

What might be a good gesture to acknowledge the presence of another Too Far Ahead person? We could use something exotic like the ‘be seeing you’ gesture from The Prisoner. But I’m leaning towards something subtle — say, a simple nod with eyes closed and closed right hand to right chest…

This crossed my bow at more or less the same time I was reading Peter Sandman’s absolutely essential Flu Pandemic Preparedness Snowball. Besides being a super-fine piece of writing, it has a really important point to make about being a True Believer, under the heading “Be nice to the newbies”:

Anyone who has ever been an activist knows how demoralizing it is to start winning. You had this solid “in” group of fellow fanatics. Everyone knew everyone else; everyone knew the facts and the issues; everyone knew how special you all were to care so deeply, to keep plugging away despite your neighbors’ obliviousness. Then you made some progress, and suddenly there were strangers coming to your meetings, asking stupid questions, offering inappropriate suggestions, making everyone uncomfortable, sometimes even usurping leadership… the last two weeks have seen an explosive increase in newcomers to bird flu sites. These latest newbies are in the early stages of their adjustment reaction. Some are frightened and urgent; some are skeptical; nearly all are ignorant. Some of the oldtimers are feeling crowded and a little contemptuous, and it’s showing… As a fellow fanatic put it to me a few days ago: “The mainstream is finally starting to pay attention, and some of the flu geeks are getting upset. They haven’t quite figured out why. They just know they’re in a bad mood.”

Sandman goes on to suggest practical steps and considerations for flu geeks, or (in the general sense) for anybody who awakes to being a person Too Far Ahead For Their Own Good.

A friend asked

Libraries and librarians are quite taken with this whole Information Literacy jag, particularly since some universities seem to be rewriting mission statements to include some mention of a goal of producing students who are “Information Literate”. I am therefore trying to use this fixation on information literacy training as a springboard to promoting the idea that libraries should be promoting “spatial information literacy” through a mix of direct instruction, online mapping services, and curricula development. I am curious as to where you would see spatial information literacy vis-a-vis information literacy – merely a subset, or perhaps almost a superset, since spatial information literacy seems to involve skills that go beyond the searching/evaluating/assessing that figure prominently in the descriptions of information literacy that I’ve read. Do you have any words of wisdom on this that you’d be willing to share?

So here’s what I came up with (and I’ve opened up comments on this one, in case anybody wants to engage):

Continue reading →

Much as I admire George Siemens’ work, exemplified in passages like

Our changing learning context is axiomatic. We see it in any form of information – from newspapers to radio to TV to the internet. Everything is going digital. The end user is gaining control, elements are decentralizing, connections are being formed between formerly disparate resources and fields of information, knowledge is developing rapidly, and everything seems to be “speeding up”…
http://www.connectivism.ca/blog/35

I can’t help feeling that these essentials of Constructivist learning aren’t as much to the fore as they deserve to be:

• managing the Information one has, and finds –so that it can be retrieved, repurposed, reorganized (the management tools are pretty ad hoc and idiosyncratic, and not very well interlinked)
• constructing and distributing the Outcomes of the searches one does, the learning one experiences, the insights one encounters (this communication activity is arguably what the Web is really for)

Not that I’ve been so very systematic about either myself… but that’s exactly what I mean to work on, now that my time is much more my own. And not that I know just what I’m after building, though lots of the fragments slide in and out of focus as I unpack boxes of books and files and maps and images…

I really do mean to explore and construct and distribute, and I aspire to doing something exemplary with hyperlinked materials, with the primary objective of encouraging others to do likewise.

The last 7 weeks or so has been liminal: a time of disrupted routines, with the house sold, housesitting for vacationing friends, commuting over the Blue Ridge every day, and now finally relocated and unpacking, reconstituting spaces and finding that many of those routines are no longer necessary or relevant. Every bit of unpacking is a skein of contingencies: where to put what, which to banish to the barn as less than essential, how to create spaces for things that are essential… and where did I pack this or that necessary item? My former life is fading rapidly, but the new is just beginning to define itself. I expect to use this space for all sorts of things, but I’m not quite ready to define them yet. Maybe after the rest of the STUFF is dealt with…

I quite like this version of what blogging is about and for:

When a learner sits down and blogs, she/he is engaging in a reflective process. Nebulous thoughts and feelings are put to words. External ideas are scrutinized. The natural capacity of harmonizing our emotions and thoughts with ideas and concepts is evoked. A small cognitive and emotional oasis in the desert of busynes[s]. And, I imagine more learning occurs in only a few minutes here than hours any where else…
(from Siemens’ Connectivism Blog, a real treasure)

…and I’m thinking that this is another facet of Gardner Campbell’s notion of “real school”, and that Rudy Rucker’s wetware fits in too. Obviously.

…What is more important are the skills in being able to re-skill oneself or to move away from “mastery” to knowing where to find fellow practitioners…
CogDogBlog, last night

Oh but I wish I’d said that. And now we have some effective answers, in various facets of social software. The problem I’ve had is getting the attention of those who need to know about RSS etc. but don’t yet.

From blog of proximal development:

Our role as educators, to paraphrase Lessig, is to ensure that the past, the linear, visual mode of thinking give rise to but does not limit the creativity and the energy of emerging technologies. This can happen only if we recognize that we cannot impose the old upon the new just as we cannot create the new in a vacuum. It is our job to ensure that our students acquire the skills necessary to intelligently share their views, whether it’s in a wiki, an every-day conversation, or a traditional five-paragraph essay. We need to ensure, as Prensky suggests, that they learn both the “legacy” and “future” content. To do that, we need to acquire the skills of digital pioneers, we need to “remix and feed forward.”

…We are pioneers. We bring the experience with us and we are constantly discovering new territories and adopting to them with efficiency and speed. We “Filter, repurpose, remix, feed forward” to use Stephen [Downes’] words again. We might be newcomers according to Prensky but we come with the tools we need to filter the old, remix with the new, and give our students the skills they need to participate and not just “surf.”

Extraordinarily well said, in today’s Social tagging in the enterprise:

…the tagging craze is mainly fueled by social effects. It’s true that I tag my own content online in order to help me keep track of it, but I’d be unlikely to do so if I were the only person engaged in that process. Categorizing my stuff to help other people find it is part of the motivation, but it runs deeper than that. Observing who else bookmarks my items, and what terms those folks use to describe my items, helps me measure the effect of my work. Finding other items those folks have bookmarked and tagged leads me to new resources relevant to my work.

To accompany “the Ears of the Hippopotamus” (replacing the tired Tip of the Iceberg), this from Doc Searls’ Weblog:

Blogs are acting like the ibis on the shoulder of the buffalo to mainstream journalism right now.

An interesting NYRB review has this passage in it:

To understand the history of cybernetics, it is important to understand that mathematical communication has two languages, which we call analog and digital. Analog communication describes the world in terms of continuously variable quantities such as electrical voltages and currents that can be directly measured. Digital communication describes the world in terms of zeros and ones, each zero or one representing a logical choice between two discrete alternatives. Analog communication is the language of analysis. Digital communication is the language of logic.

I knew that… but I’d never have said it as elegantly.