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Online Learning To Reshape Our World ?

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I’ve been behind the mark in getting some good material out relating to online collaboration tools because I’m actually formulating new potions back in my personal ‘Colab’oratory. I am continuing my search for KISS (keep it stupid simple) online environments that will allow us all to connect online in amazing ways – no matter where we are in the world. And some cool tools are certainly rising to the top. I’ll admit as well that I’m finding the whole online tools explosion to be very daunting! Whoa, we’ve truly got a tiger by the tail, and no one knows what its head looks like! Anyway, I’ll be writing more in this area. A tools offering will be coming online on my DiscoveryFuel.com online tools page soon as well.

For now, I want to plug George Siemens from eLearnSpace.com (see details below), who is writing some great material on the whole online learning thing (otherwise known as eLearning). He found this article in The Atlantic and it’s worth you giving it a scan. For me, it emphasizes our need to learn learn learn about online tools and begin to use them alot. Why? Becaue it will give us the freedom to self-select what we want to learn in an accelerated, expanded, and deepened way without the limits of travel and location that have restricted our education in the past. It talks about how education (learning) and the bad economy are related, describing how education is ramping up, just as it has in the past during periods of bad economy.

Read up from eLearnSpace blog …

Adhering to the motto “a provocative title will surely increase readership”, Atlantic has an interesting article on How the Crash Will Reshape America :  Economic crises tend to reinforce and accelerate the underlying, long-term trends within an economy. Our economy is in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation—similar to that of the late 19th century, when people streamed off farms and into new and rising industrial cities. In this case, the economy is shifting away from manufacturing and toward idea-driven creative industries—and that, too, favors America’s talent-rich, fast-metabolizing places.

I find Richard Florida’s “world is spiky” view to be more accurate than Thomas Friedman’s “world is flat”. But, in this article a tension that I’ve felt with Florida’s work is more clearly revealed than previously. Florida has argued – generally quite effectively – that location matters. Cities and regions of creativity and innovation spur growth. To succeed in your career, it’s a good idea to be in areas that are hotspots for your field. But…I am not sure how to reconcile this view with the growth of technology. Now, more than ever, technology has reduced the challenges of distance. Online education and distributed teams reflect this. Video conferencing and online conferences reduce the need for travel. Is location less, not more, important than in the past?

Questions or Comments? Contact Me <mailto:gsiemens@elearnspace.org> Read ERN online at:http://www.elearnspace.org/blog/. Visit www.elearnspace.org <http://www.elearnspace.org/>  for extensive information and resources on elearning Visit my connectivism <http://www.connectivism.ca>  site for resources on the changing nature of learning. His book, Knowing Knowledge is available.

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The Capital of Meaning: Using News & Social Media to Monitor a Currency’s Effectiveness

An interesting realm to look into that can be used to determine the efficacy of a currency (and/or various forms of capital) is done by monitoring news media conversations.

In this work by Joe Brewer and team, they have accrued media outlet topics tweets and found huge disconnects around common themes. The resulting diagrams show digital clusters of self-truths that create walls between each other, undermining the potential for any deeper understanding emerge and meaning-making to arise. Meaning by the way, is humanity’s primary pathway to spirituality.

One of the primary valuations of the dollar (or any currency) appears in how we connect with each other. Under today’s currency, money creates inherent competition forcing isolation of truth into bubbles of self identification and increases the desire for self-centering power, that is then used to downplay and denigrate other’s truths in the name of their own.

Imagine instead, news outlets shifting from being informational channels, to becoming a common medium (media) for integrating (rather than isolating) shared knowledge. This would allow for measurable correlations between conversational depth, monetary exchange, and world wealth (used here in its broadest meaning) to help humanity monitor its own transformation of rising (or decaying) values, where that value can only be done through second degree assessment of conversational relationships.

This approach would turn organizational ‘valuations’ (which are presently determined almost completely by dollar potential only) inside-out. Allowing for currency to return to its original intent, which was to represent the meaning (rather ‘be’ the meaning) of how we determine value in one another.

Thus, the analysis of news through social media becomes a critical tool in creating capital as a dynamic (no longer static) meaningful world.

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Our Responsibility To ‘AWE’

This short video gives me that spinal shiver we humans get when ‘awe’ is present. When’s the last time you’ve felt it? What moves you? What draws on your desire to be in life? Who are you not to stand up to what is your own momentum into amazing, incredible, awesome!

We have a ‘responsibility to AWE’.

 

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Collaborative Design: Methods for Developing Social Innovation and Social Capital


How does one go about building social innovation and creating social capital?

Creating more grounded transformative work is done by formulating a collective research process that builds shared capacity. If done well, an emerging social system moves itself (self adaptive) into momentous collaborative action. 

CREATING SOCIAL INNOVATION – RESEARCH STAGES

Asking powerful questions within dynamic interactive feedback loops is key to establishing a foundation for the collective to stand on. Some general advice about how to do social research is as follows:

  1. Inquiry: Starting everyone of my questions with ‘open ended’ question words including the 6 ‘W’s: WHY is it this way, WHAT is it exactly, (w)HOW does it work, WHO is involved, WHEN is it enacted, WHERE does it reside or show up. In this way, your research will expand from isolated assumptions into broader understandings and improve data outcomes.
  2. Clustering: The next step is reducing the content you have found by clustering or mapping common synergistic principles or concepts into groupings.This can often be found by creating keyword maps and phrase streams that appear and link across your data.
  3. Synthesizing: The last stage is integrating your results into something meaningful and valued. This happens by testing some of your new gathered insights “with others”. In other words ‘meaningfulness’ is key to a social movement and thereby social action, and this can only occur through interaction and feedback.

These are my 3 stages for developing new insight and interpretation for social innovation. They are based in the understanding of collaborative learning and design.

Next you will need to put your research to the test; not just proving whether it is true or not, but also (and even more important), using your synthesized research to enable social action – a community of practice.

COLLABORATIVE LEARNING – TURNING INFORMATION INTO SOCIAL ACTION

A more challenging but (in my view) more fun part of development, is enabling your research into a ‘social performance’ process for creating social capital and social innovation. This is done through 3 phases as follows (note ‘phases’ are different than ‘stages’):

  1. Enabling a Group Intention
  2. Building a Value Network
  3. Experiencing a Community of Practice

Here is the related article that describes these phases, called Social Innovation: a 3-Phase Transformation Process.

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