Stories by Googlers

A video of some Googlers talking about the past and future at Google... A great network of smart people that I'd love to join one day...

You...at the center...

Terry Anderson has given a presentation on "Groups, Networks and Collectives" to CCK08. The presentation is available on blip and the related paper can be downloaded here.
According to Terry "each of us participates in groups, networks, and collectives". While I do agree with the difference Terry made between the three social forms, I do not see that we are merely members of groups/communities or nodes in networks/collectives. In my opinion each of us is at the center of her very own personal knowledge network.

YOU are the sun and everything travels around YOU...

Putting Connectivism to Work

Interesting thoughts in this post by Dave Pollard. Dave writes:

My experience suggests that some of the greatest challenges to doing 'good' work are knowledge and learning related:

• Most people are ignorant of how the world really works.
• We live in a world of great imaginative poverty, with a dearth of practical ideas about how to make work, and our world, better.
• Our conversational skills are abysmal.
• While we learn mostly from conversation, from being shown, and thenceforth from practice (all collaborative processes), our learning institutions, programs and systems deprive us of all three, and instead force us to try to learn from reading, listening, and being told (all individual processes), after which we are expected to be 'expert' without any real practice.
• This individualized approach to knowledge leads us to depend on 'experts', 'executives', 'managers' and 'consultants' and build systems that are hierarchical and support a cult of leadership, instead of drawing on collective knowledge, collaboration and community and building systems that are egalitarian and cooperative.
• We are propagandized to be competitive and to lack empathy for others, which deprives us of the will and opportunity to work and learn collaboratively and to share knowledge with others.

Learning Styles Don't Exist

Via Stephen Downes and Brent Schlenker.

A video by Daniel Willingham, Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Virginia, explaining why Learning Styles don't exist.

The new TechMeme killer

Google has just launched a new homepage for Google Blog Search.

Michael Cohen, Product Manager at Google writes:

Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we're now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event. Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you'll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere.

Will the new Google Blog Search be the Techmeme killer?