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TAKE A RIDE ON THE CLUE TRAIN

Happily “liberated” from Dave ” Papadavo” Davison at Thoughts Illustrated.

SCOBLE’S NAKED CONVERSATION

Relaying information from my friends in the tech world:

Both Critt Jarvis and Dave Davison are very high on Robert Scoble’s new “networked book” Naked Conversations. As I am out of my element here, I’ll refer you to their substantial investments in things Scoble:

“Lunching with Scoble ” – Davison.

“Skinny Dippin’ in Naked Conversations” – Jarvis.

As blogger will not let me put Critt’s summative Scoble grazr in a post for whatever reason, I may put it in the margin tonight to temporarily replace the old one where the feeds were axed the other day.

Also have to check out this Twitter thing and add it to LinkedIn, which I am already using as a contact and social networking tool.

Addendum:

“WIKINOMICS-another “Networked” book example “

IMPENDING REVOLUTIONS

While I had heard of the Negroponte project for $ 100 laptops previously, it was not until today that a post at Dave Davison’s Thoughts Illustrated made me appreciate the true scale of the endeavor. Dave’s post led me to this article about Alan Kay, one of the fathers of the PC and of the very internet itself. Some key points from the Kay article:

“The Viewpoints Research Institute is actually involved in three new projects. One is the $100 laptop project that Nicholas Negroponte is doing. That is coming along very well. The first 1,000 factory-built machines were built in the last few weeks. The plan is to build 5 million to 8 million laptops this summer, and perhaps as many as 50 million in 2008. We’re very involved in that. The other thing is a recently funded NSF project that will take a couple of giant steps, we hope, toward reinventing programming. The plan is to take the entire personal-computing experience from the end user down to the silicon and make a system from scratch that recapitulates everything people are used to—desktop publishing, Internet experiences, etc.—in less than 20,000 lines of code. It would be kind of like a Moore’s Law step in software. It’s going to be quite difficult to do this work in five years, but it will be exciting.

The third project we’re just getting started on and don’t have completely funded yet, is to make a new kind of user interface that can actually help people learn things, from very mundane things about how their computer system works to more interesting things like math, science, reading and writing. This project came about because of the $100 laptop. In order for the $100 laptop to be successful in the educational realm, it has to take on some mentoring processes itself. This is an old idea that goes all the way back to the sixties. Many people have worked on it. It just has never gotten above threshold.”

Kay makes very clear that the $100 laptop effort is aimed at the Gap where children are relatively uncorrupted by the pop culture techno expectations of America. A tabula rasa to re-start the information revolution. However the economic spillover effects of such an accomplishment cannot be contained. The entire computer market will be affected to broaden societal and global access to information.

At a stroke, in American public schools, the rationale for spending billions on textbooks ( which run about $ 70 per copy on average and are exceedingly mediocre in quality) would be eliminated, as would their use as a crutch by gen-ed majors and basketball coaches posing as teachers of core academic subjects. The poorest American school districts can afford $ 100 laptops even when new textbooks are beyond their budgetary reach. Kids in East St. Louis and Watts and the moonscape of inner city Detroit can enter the information age along with Bangladeshis and Burundians.

Factor in the pirates who will produce copycat versions in places like China and we are talking about an increase in the online population of the world by several orders of magnitude with all that such connectivity entails.

Cross-posted at Chicago Boyz

INFORMATION VELOCITY: KNOWLEDGE OPPORTUNITIES OR WHITE NOISE?

Dave Davison at Thoughts Illustrated posted on Linda Stone, who was featured in the HBR List:Breakthrough Ideas 2007 ( which I picked up from Steve at ERMB) Dave wrote:

“Idea #7 a description by Linda Stone of her extremely apt phrase for our chaotic times: “Continuous Partial Attention (CPA)” .

“This constant checking of handheld electronic devices has become epidemic, and it illustrates what I call ‘continuous partial attention.’ Although continuous partial attention appears to mimic that much discussed behavior, multitasking, it springs from a different impulse. When we multitask, we are trying to be more productive and more efficient, giving equal priority to all the things we do—simultaneously filing or copying papers, talking on the phone, eating lunch, and so forth. Multitasking rarely requires much cognitive processing, because the tasks involved are fairly automatic. Continuous partial attention, by contrast, involves constantly scanning for opportunities and staying on top of contacts, events, and activities in an effort to miss nothing. It’s an adaptive behavior that has emerged over the past two decades, in stride with Web-based and mobile computing, and it connects us to a galaxy of possibilities all day every day. The assumption behind the behavior is that personal bandwidth can match the endless bandwidth technology offers.”

Stone argues that personal bandwidth is not up to the task and, as a result, a backlash to continuous partial attention has already started. She also worries that information overload will burn people out much more quickly as they strain to keep up with an increasing number of information sources all screaming for attention. “

It occured to me from Stone’s use of the term “scanning” that “continuous partial attention” is a behavior that probably has a strong evolutionary base as it would offer obvious survival advantages to early humans who manifested that kind of alert and reactive perception to minor changes in the immediate environment. A behavior that can be relaxed when we are in locales where our need for safety and security are relatively assured norms.

Scanning for information in Continuous Partial attention increases the velocity of information flow to the brain and we would be constantly assessing the value of the given information in terms of “spending” our attention by increasing our focused concentration and going “deeper”. Judiciously practiced, continuous partial attention would yield certain efficiencies in terms of time saved and increased probablity for generating bursts of insight. These would be moments where real learning could potentially take place, opportunities to acquire or, add to, useful knowledge.

The ability to assess information while it is in a dynamic state of flow would appear to be critical. Without that cognitive function establishing the moment for increased attention (and screening out the less valuable flows, the partial attention would come to resemble “white noise” where jumbles of data would represent a stressful, chaotic, environment in which thinking would be more difficult.

Dave is pointing to the development of visualization tools to help bring analytic order to a CPA state. It may be that some day, instead of scrolling through readers or meta-aggregators, we might have montages that we can view and then decide to click an image to read a particular post out of hundreds in just a a second or two; or symbolic ordering systems to classify new posts and articles according to our own criteria. A “visualization before reading” format.

Possibilities abound.

RELATED LINKS:

The Attention Economy And The Net

The Value of Openess in an Attention Economy

Attention Economy

John Hagel

A desktop reference for all visualizers : the Periodic Table of Visualization Methods –Dave Davison

Visual Literacy.org

INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGENCES – Zenpundit

Attention vs. Meaning – Dave Davison

VISUALIZING INFORMATION

First, I’d like to give a big tip o’ the Zenpundit hat to Dave Davison of Thoughts Illustrated for bringing the following links to my attention. Ever since Critt Jarvis connected the two of us last Spring, Dave has steadily enriched my thinking by introducing me to new ideas and thought leaders, something I much appreciate.

Visualizing information is becoming an increasingly important tool in business, government and education for allowing people to understand, comprehend and manipulate large amounts of data quickly and effectively. Both the Intelligence Community concerned with analyzing threats to our national security and private sector tech companies interested in building Web2.0 applications are diving deepinto visualization techniques. If you use power point presentations for business on an extensive basis may be familiar with the work of Edward Tufte, a leading expert in the field of visualizing information.

In teaching children or adults, I frequently make use of diagrams or have students create their own visual formats in order to get them to integrate concepts and make connections that previously might have gone unnoticed. Some very important aspects of history and some areas of the sciences ( say, modern physics) are counterintuitive – they run against our natural logic of how the situation “should” play out. Practicing visualization of information can bring these non-obvious elements to light, make them more concrete and stimulate students to ask questions.

Combining symbolic visual formats and text also engages multiple regions of the viewer’s brain when they “read” it, possibly making the information more meaningful to a larger group of students with different learning styles.

Below is a table “ A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods” created by Visual Literacy.org that gives a comprehensive range of techniques for displaying information that students may find useful for projects in the coming years. While I have loaded the table into slideshare, I encourage you to go to their page because the table there (unlike my version) is fully interactive with examples and descriptions, as well as more easily read ( and can be downloaded as a PDF file).