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A newsletter: The Augmentationist Weekly

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A group of co-learners, inspired by Howard Rheingold, studies how information technology can augment human intellect. Our discussions are dispersed through various social media and closed online venues. I’ll publish a weekly newsletter (as from next week on Friday) to give an overview of the discussions in our network. I also include brief comments on related stuff elsewhere.

Here’s the content of the first newsletter – subscription details at the end or in the column at the right-handside of this site:

What this newsletter is about

A group of co-learners, inspired by Howard Rheingold, studies how information technology canaugment human intellect. Our discussions are dispersed through various social media and closed online venues. In this newsletter I try to give an overview of the discussions in our network. I also include brief comments on related stuff elsewhere.

Collective Intelligence 2014

“This interdisciplinary conference seeks to bring together researchers from a variety of fields relevant to understanding and designing collective intelligence of many types.” This conference seems to be very interesting: from digital sweatshops to social computing and crowdsourcing….

(via Howard Rheingold on Scoop.It!)

Thinking the Unthinkable

Speaking about augmentation: a friend of mine sent me this video about Media for Thinking the Unthinkable, a presentation by Bret Victor. who tries to invent the medium and representations in which scientists, engineers, and artists will understand and create systems. The content of his illustrations is very geeky, but try to see beyond that and try to grasp what he’s trying to invent.

The Next Big Opportunity: Tools that cure our short attention spans

A venture investor looks at the opportunities and obstacles in trying to create new tools to help people deal with information distraction online.

(via Howard Rheingold on Scoop.It!)

#Unplug

Mentioned on our Twitter feed #thinkknow: Baratunde Thurston left the internet for 25 days. You should try this too, but read the article at FastCompany for some useful tips.

Working with TheBrain

During the latest Think-Know course facilitated by Howard Rheingold we’ve been using TheBrain, a kind of database/mindmap for your thoughts and thought-clusters. Some students tried out TeamBrain, which allows for collaboration. Imagine a group of bloggers developing ideas in TeamBrain, discovering unexpected relationships between ideas and thoughts, which eventually lead to more inspiring blogposts.

Of course one could try to do this also with other collaborative mindmaps, but TheBrain is one of the most sophisticated tools out there.

One of our TheBrain and mindmap-specialists mentioned some interesting research about the use of mindmap-like structures in dialogue mapping. Read McGee’s Musings about the book Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems by Jeff Conklin.

Cooking as Augmentation

In our Alumni-social bookmarks I found this gem on Brainpickings, a link to a review of Michael Pollan’s book Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation. The book looks at cooking as a significant tool (thinking augmentation) that changed our ways of thinking and had a significant impact on culture.

Peeragogy in Spanish

Peeragogy.org is a handbook for those who want to launch a peer2peer-learning project. A very international group of contributors create the handbook (the book is never ‘really’ finished), and now it seems the project gains quite some traction in the Spanish-speaking world.  A teacher in Uruguay launched a Google+ community for the Spanish speaking community.

The Spanish short version of the handbook will be published by the UOC Press in October in a book called EDUCACIÓN, MEDIOS DIGITALES Y CULTURA DE LA PARTICIPACIÓN (Education, Digital Media and Participatory Culture). A Spanish group runs a very interesting cooperative project called ‘hybrid learning’  that we can include in the handbook.

The Peeragogy-folks also have a thriving Google+-community, it’s not too late to join!

gmooc

Digital Game Based Learning MOOCs: Join in September!

So nice. We already had the connectivist Massive Open Online Courses – based on learner-centric, distributed activities using a syndication engine to connect the various events. Then came the xMOOCs – more top-down like massive courses, experimenting with auto-grading systems. Now I learned about gMOOCs – game-based MOOCs.

 

 

Read online.

MOOC.ca updated

Connectivist Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) specialist Stephen Downes updated the MOOC.casite a bit and made it easier to submit MOOC and to find them. Of most importance is the new Submit MOOC page, an easy way to enter information about your MOOC and have it listed on the MOOC.CA website and also mentioned in the MOOC.ca newsletter (which has more than 5,000 subscribers).

Newspapers and MOOCs

Kevin Werbach is a Wharton-professor who gave a very interesting MOOC about gamification (and author of a book about this art, For the Win, How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business). He sent out an interesting tweet about Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post: “Bezos should convert the Washington Post into a MOOC.”

Exactly: could we consider the newspaper as a potential Massive Online Open Course? With distributed discussions – the people formerly known as ‘the audience’ discussing and co-publishing with journalists on various platforms?

The HRU Knowmads

I finished the latest Think-know Tools course organized by Howard Rheingold about the theoretical-historical background of intellect augmentation and the practical skills of personal knowledge management. I’m becoming quite a veteran of his courses, and I continue meeting co-learners via the HRU Alumni network.

These meetings are very webby – completely dispersed over various platforms and tools.

Read online.

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