Super Hard

Every time I see this picture. I think super hard. I dream that my sleepless nights and my smile and my passion for wanting to do something good in this world is going to pay off. I hope that all the countless opportunities I don’t have because of my circumstance aren’t going to matter. That maybe one day I can have a happy home with a special someone and live my life creating and shaping this world. I want to give it hope. Give a future little one hope.

He gives me so much hope. More hope and joy than I ever express to him, to anyone. And all I think is “ Hey old chap, maybe I’m not good enough. Maybe I’m not trying enough.” but for fucking sake’s it’s so hard to try so hard all the time and see so little of it become anything but I still think. I don’t give up that easy.

Frenchtheory

Journal de l'Hypertexte

Hypertextopia

Models of learning according to Kolb

Four learning styles

The experimenter, like the concrete experiencer, takes a hands-on route to see if their ideas will work, whilst the reflective observers prefer to watch and think to work things out.

Divergers (Concrete experiencer/Reflective observer)

Divergers take experiences and think deeply about them, thus diverging from a single experience to multiple possibilities in terms of what this might mean. They like to ask 'why', and will start from detail to constructively work up to the big picture.
They enjoy participating and working with others but they like a calm ship and fret over conflicts. They are generally influenced by other people and like to receive constructive feedback.
They like to learn via logical instruction or hands-one exploration with conversations that lead to discovery.

Convergers (Abstract conceptualization/Active experimenter)

Convergers think about things and then try out their ideas to see if they work in practice. They like to ask 'how' about a situation, understanding how things work in practice. They like facts and will seek to make things efficient by making small and careful changes.
They prefer to work by themselves, thinking carefully and acting independently. They learn through interaction and computer-based learning is more effective with them than other methods.

Accomodators (Concrete experiencer/Active experimenter)

Accommodators have the most hands-on approach, with a strong preference for doing rather than thinking. They like to ask 'what if?' and 'why not?' to support their action-first approach. They do not like routine and will take creative risks to see what happens.
They like to explore complexity by direct interaction and learn better by themselves than with other people. As might be expected, they like hands-on and practical learning rather than lectures.

Assimilators (Abstract conceptualizer/Reflective observer)

Assimilators have the most cognitive approach, preferring to think than to act. The ask 'What is there I can know?' and like organized and structured understanding.
They prefer lectures for learning, with demonstrations where possible, and will respect the knowledge of experts. They will also learn through conversation that takes a logical and thoughtful approach.
They often have a strong control need and prefer the clean and simple predictability of internal models to external messiness.
The best way to teach an assimilator is with lectures that start from high-level concepts and work down to the detail. Give them reading material, especially academic stuff and they'll gobble it down. Do not teach through play with them as they like to stay serious.

So what?

So design learning for the people you are working with. If you cannot customize the design for specific people, use varied styles of delivery to help everyone learn. It can also be useful to describe this model to people, both to help them understand how they learn and also so they can appreciate that some of your delivery will for others more than them (and vice versa).

See also
Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential Learning. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
Beliefs about people

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Linear modes of thinking

Europe is divided between the pragmatic, empirical, inductive thinking of Anglo-Saxon and North Sea cultures and the rationalist, deductive thinking of the rest of the continent.

Anglo-Saxons are uncomfortable with theories and generalisations and concepts. They prefer to deal with data. Other Europeans are uncomfortable with dealing with data unless it is on the context of an idea or a system. The difference is reflected in the history of European philosophy and in the way our children are taught in schools, in the way football teams are managed and how we structure memos, reports and presentations.

What they have in common is that they are linear modes of thinking. They are based on logical reasoning, categorisation and a belief in cause and effect. Other ways of thinking - intuition, emotional intelligence, lateral thinking, free association and flashes of insight from nowhere – are mistrusted unless they can be logically substantiated.

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-Enter Hypertextopia
-PHONEREADER Library -
- Jean-Philippe Pastor

Not only associative thinking with hypertext

While hypertext is often claimed to be a tool that especially aids associative thinking, intellectual work involves more than association.

So, questions arise about the usefulness of hypertext tools in the more disciplined aspects of scholarly and argumentative writing. Examining the phases of scholarly writing reveals that different hypertext tools can aid different phases of intellectual work in ways other than associative thinking. Spatial hypertext is relevant at all phases, while page-and-link hypertext is more appropriate to some phases than others.

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-Enter Hypertextopia

-PHONEREADER Library -

- Jean-Philippe Pastor

Hypertextual imagery

Gregory Ulmer suggests that image category systems will provide the new logic under electracy and that each person must redefine Aristotle's commonplaces in light of their own experiences and the internet's support for images. Then we will be able to forge imagery that can support collective thinking.

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Slow writing time

Those who know my work with digital media may be surprised to read that I largely support this remark by Mark Bauerlein in his article Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind: Slow reading counterbalances Web skimming in the Chronicle of Higher Education (19 Sept 08):

---given the tidal wave of technology in young people's lives, let's frame a number of classrooms and courses as slow-reading (and slow-writing) spaces. Digital technology has become an imperial force, and it should meet more antagonists. Educators must keep a portion of the undergraduate experience disconnected, unplugged, and logged off. Pencils, blackboards, and books are no longer the primary instruments of learning, true, but they still play a critical role in the formation of intelligence, as countermeasures to information-age mores. That is a new mission for educators parallel to the mad rush to digitize learning, one that may seem reactionary and retrograde, but in fact strives to keep students' minds open and literacy broad. Students need to decelerate, and they can't do it by themselves, especially if every inch of the campus is on the grid.

I don't agree with restraining the digitizing of classrooms, which Bauerlein also calls for, but I do agree with ensuring there's a mix of learning spaces available. I also think that teachers should have the imagination to sometimes teach outside of the classroom altogether. In my own case, I teach mostly online and am constantly struggling with ways to bring that slower and more physical engagement into the learning experience.

Most of Bauerlain's approach is the same-old same-old but I do think we must pay attention to the need for slow spaces both in teaching and in life. Slowness is certainly a vital element of transliteracy.

Thanks to Mez at Facebook for the link to Bauerlain's article.
x-post from http://travelsinvirtuality.typepad.com/suethomas/2008/09/slow-teaching.html
Posted by Sue Thomas

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PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor

Pond-skater minds with Google

Andrew Sullivan

Here’s something : Friedrich Nietzsche used a typewriter. Many of those terse aphorisms and impenetrable reveries were banged out on an 1882 Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. And a friend of his at the time noticed a change in the German philosopher’s style as soon as he moved from longhand to type.

“Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote. Nietzsche replied: “You are right. Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

Gulp. The technology writer Nicholas Carr, who pointed out this item of Nietzsche trivia in the new issue of The Atlantic, proceeded to make a more disturbing point. If a typewriter could do this to a mind as profound and powerful as Nietzsche’s, what on earth is Google now doing to us?
Are we fast losing the capacity to think deeply, calmly and seriously? Have we all succumbed to internet attention-deficit disorder? Or, to put it more directly: if you’re looking at a monitor right now, are you still reading this, or are you about to click on another link?

The astonishing benefits of Google are barely worth repeating. When I started to contribute this column, I used to keep a month’s worth of The New York Times stacked in my study. If I recalled an article or a report that I wanted to refer to, I’d spend a happy few minutes wrestling with frayed and yellowing paper, smudging myself with ink, and usually ended up reading an article that had nothing to do with my search.

I needed a good memory – even visually – to track my vague recollection down. I needed time. I needed to think a little before I began my research. Now all I do is right-click and type a few words. And all is instantly revealed.

I spend most of my day blogging – at a current rate of about 300 posts a week. I’m certainly not more stupid than I used to be; and I’m much, much better and more instantly informed.
However, the way in which I now think and write has subtly – or not so subtly – altered. I process information far more rapidly and seem able to absorb multiple sources of information simultaneously in ways that would have shocked my teenage self.

In researching a topic, or just browsing through the blogosphere, the mind leaps and jumps and vaults from one source to another. The mental multitasking – a factoid here, a YouTube there, a link over there, an e-mail, an instant message, a new PDF – is both mind-boggling when you look at it from a distance and yet perfectly natural when you’re in mid-blog.

When it comes to sitting down and actually reading a multiple-page print-out, or even, God help us, a book, however, my mind seizes for a moment. After a paragraph, I’m ready for a new link. But the prose in front of my nose stretches on.
I get antsy. I skim the footnotes for the quick info high that I’m used to. No good. I scan the acknowledgments, hoping for a name I recognise. I start again.
A few paragraphs later, I reach for the laptop. It’s not that I cannot find the time for real reading, for a leisurely absorption of argument or narrative. It’s more that my mind has been conditioned to resist it.

Is this a new way of thinking? And will it affect the way we read and write? If blogging is corrosive, the same could be said for Grand Theft Auto, texting and Facebook messaging, on which a younger generation is currently being reared. But the answer is surely yes – and in ways we do not yet fully understand. What we may be losing is quietness and depth in our literary and intellectual and spiritual lives.
The playwright Richard Foreman, cited by Carr, eulogised a culture he once felt at home in thus: “I come from a tradition of western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality – a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.
“[Now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’.”
The experience of reading only one good book for a while, and allowing its themes to resonate in the mind, is what we risk losing. When I was younger I would carry a single book around with me for days, letting its ideas splash around in my head, not forming an instant judgment (for or against) but allowing the book to sit for a while, as the rest of the world had its say – the countryside or pavement, the crowd or train carriage, the armchair or lunch counter. Sometimes, human beings need time to think things through, to allow themselves to entertain a thought before committing to it.

The white noise of the ever-faster information highway may, one fears, be preventing this. The still, small voice of calm that refreshes a civilisation may be in the process of being snuffed out by myriad distractions.
I don’t want to be fatalistic here. As Carr points out, previous innovations – writing itself, printing, radio, televi-sion – have all shifted the tone of our civilisation without destroying it. And the capacity of the web to retrieve the old and ancient and make them new and accessible again is a small miracle.

Right now, we may be maximally overwhelmed by all this accessible information – but the time may come when our mastery of the new world allows us to gain more perspective on it.
Here’s hoping. Shallowness, after all, does not necessarily preclude depth. We just have to find a new equilibrium between the two. We need to be both pond-skaters and scuba divers. We need to master the ability to access facts while reserving time and space to do something meaningful with them.

It is inevitable this will take our always-evolving species and ever-malleable brains a little time – and the Google era in a mass form is not even a decade old.
Some have suggested a web sabbath – a day or two in the week when we force ourselves not to read e-mails or post blogs or text messages; a break in order to think in the old way again: to look at human faces in the flesh rather than on a Facebook profile, to read a book rather than a blog, to pray rather than browse.

I think I’ll start with Nietzsche at some point. But right now I have a blog to fill.

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Is Google making us stupid?

Idea Watch: Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Posted by Tom Weber

Ever worry that all that time you spend on the Web might be rewiring your brain? In the July/August issue of the Atlantic magazine, writer Nicholas Carr confesses to that fear–and explores this question: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

In a nutshell, Mr. Carr’s argument is this: Spending so much time reading on the Web is training us to accept information in small bites, and that’s worrisome. He writes:
“Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy … That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
Of course, the notion that the surf-happy world of the Web is affecting our attention span isn’t new. Even before the rise of the Web, other types of media–such as music videos–were being blamed for the same thing. But Buzzwatch suspects many readers will see something of themselves in the article’s description of people cramming ever-more bits of information into every last moment online.

Writes Mr. Carr:
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.
Readers, do you feel that spending time on the Web is rewiring your brain? And if yes, do you care?

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Yahoo! Buzz Share on Facebook Del.icio.us Ever worry that all that time you spend on the Web might be rewiring your brain? In the July/August issue of the Atlantic magazine, writer Nicholas Carr confesses to that fear–and explores this question: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
In a nutshell, Mr. Carr’s argument is this: Spending so much time reading on the Web is […]
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Comments
I don’t know — what was the question again? My attention drifted off before the end of the post . . .
Comment by Independent Girl - June 10, 2008 at 2:17 pm
I did have a comment on this article but I’ve moved on in the past couple of minutes.
Comment by Common Sense - June 10, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Susan Jacoby, former Washington Post reporter and author of The Age Of American Unreason, talked about this back in February.

“A Nation Of Idiots?”http://www.boom2bust.com/2008/02/19/a-nation-of-idiots/
Comment by Boom2Bust.com - June 10, 2008 at 2:20 pm
I’ve found I’m just as able to immerse myself in some books and articles, but less so for other books and articles. Generally, the ones I’m able to immerse myself in are those that are good, and those I’m not able to immerse myself in are those that are mediocre or bad. If there is a crowding-out effect, it’ll be on bad books, and I don’t really have a problem with that.
Comment by Bob's My Uncle - June 10, 2008 at 2:21 pm

Why is this blog so slow?
Comment by Nevermore - June 10, 2008 at 2:21 pm
The same effect has been proven with television and kids, so it makes sense. Too many changes (commercials), too much content.
Comment by Sorry...wasn't paying attention... - June 10, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Its easy to see Mr. Carr has been Googling way too much
Comment by 823077 - June 10, 2008 at 3:37 pm
i definitely agree with this and have felt it much more difficult to read an “e-book” than a real book… If I print the book out then I’m fine…
Comment by boner to boner - June 10, 2008 at 8:45 pm
I’m an old guy. I am so much better informed now then in pre-google. And, because of these vast information tools I now am able to accomplish life’s tasks better and quicker. I now have time to appreciate a good read, nature, art and travel. I am in my best of times. And, not dumber but smarter I should think. Appreciate the gains you can expect from these tools in the future. Lucky you.
Comment by mark - June 11, 2008 at 8:34 pm
stupid google
Comment by s - June 11, 2008 at 8:58 pm
i shall perform a google search to find the answer to this question
Comment by e$ - June 12, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Trackbacks
[…] our look earlier today at concerns that the Web may be rewiring our brains for short attention spans, Buzzwatch thought it appropriate to highlight this video making the […]
Trackback by Buzzwatch : Daily Diversion: The Democratic Primary--For Short Attention Spans - June 10, 2008 at 4:51 pm
[…] The best answer to the question on copy length came to me at a seminar I attended: “People don’t read long copy or short copy. They read what interests them.” That’s why relevancy is even more important today then it was in 1988. People have information overload and, because of Google, perhaps, people have shorter attention spans. That was the theory I came across at a recent Wall Street Journal Blog entitled: “Is Google making us stupid?” […]
Trackback by Google=Stupid? « Marketing That’s Measurable - June 12, 2008 at 1:38 am

Google's effect on our mind

In the debate over Google’s effect on humanity, everyone is missing one big issue
Posted on June 19, 2008 by Douglas Bell

Yes, again: The cover story that launched a thousand blog posts.
For the second time this week, I’m taking my lead from The Atlantic (it’s the best magazine in the world right now, making even The New Yorker appear precious and overwrought). Unsurprisingly, the two articles that stirred me to blog were both (a) about the Web and (b) rife with fundamental, flummoxing misperception. I’ve already written about Mark Bowden’s piece on the Web-induced demise of The Wall Street Journal. Now for the big kahuna: Nicholas Carr’s take on Google. Titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” this cover story has been sticking in bloggers’ craws all week, inspiring them to pee on hydrants to mark their view on the current state of media, the Web and the human condition. Carr’s view is clear: the hypertext world of Google is slowly eroding our capacity for sustained contemplation, thereby flattening our collective intelligence. One thing is also clear: the piece has an enormous blind spot.

Some agree with Carr, of course:
Is this a new way of thinking? And will it affect the way we read and write? If blogging is corrosive, the same could be said for Grand Theft Auto, texting and Facebook messaging, on which a younger generation is currently being reared. But the answer is surely yes—and in ways we do not yet fully understand. What we may be losing is quietness and depth in our literary and intellectual and spiritual lives. —Andrew Sullivan in The Times of London

Some disagree:
Maybe the reason why Nick and so many other literati are losing their patience with long form information is that it is so fundamentally inefficient and inferior to connected bits of information.
You look at a book, read a book, and you easily perceive a coherent whole. You look at all the information on that book’s topic on the Web, all connected, and you can’t see the sum of the parts—but we are starting to get our minds around it. We can’t yet recognize the superiority of this networked thinking process because we’re measuring it against our old linear thought process.
Nick romanticizes the “contemplation” that comes with reading a book. But it’s possible that the output of our old contemplation can now be had in larger measure through a new entirely non-linear process.—Scott Karp at seekingalpha.com

But here’s what both sides in the debate missed: Google’s motivation in all this is money. For all their drivel about corporate responsibility (Google’s motto is the impossibly pretentious “Don’t be evil”), Google “monetizes” (lovely word that) what Karp calls “networked thinking” by charging fractions of whatever currency to place links nearer to the front page of a given search.
And guess what? Google couldn’t care less whether this new form of thought is our salvation or our damnation. In business speak, they’re “content agnostic.” The debate about which is the better mode of rumination for optimal human development—algorithmic/hypertext or monastic/contemplative—is nothing but a sideshow.

So long as the dollar calls the tune at Google, it seems to me that how we read—Carr’s po-faced lament notwithstanding—is somewhat less problematic than whether what we read is the straight goods or just another ad campaign done up in digital drag.

• Is Google Making Us Stupid? [The Atlantic]• Idea Watch: Is Google Making Us Stupid? [Wall Street Journal]• Google is giving us pond-skater minds [The Times]• Connecting the Dots of the Internet Revolution [Seeking Alpha]• How Google ate my brain [Globe and Mail]
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Categories: General, Internet, Over the Border, Magazines
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Linearity

Roy Christopher: What have you found when comparing levels of metacognition in linear texts versus hypertext situations?

JDBolter: On the question of linearity vs. hypertextuality as modes of thinking and learning, I’m an agnostic. I don’t know how we could decide whether associative (hypertextual) or linear thinking is more “natural.” Both hypertexts and linear texts are highly artificial forms of writing. Both have to be learned. The idea that hypertext is natural can be refuted simply by browsing through a random sample of Web sites. We see that people do not find it easy or natural to create good sites — either of the hierarchical or associative kind.RC: Who do you admire writing about media and/or hypertext these days?JDB: I always admire the work of my collaborator, Michael Joyce, and in particular the second volume of his collected essays, Othermindedness. I admire George Landow’s Hypertext 2.0, which remains the standard work on the subject. Meanwhile, there is a great deal of exciting work being done in new media studies. I’ll just mention two: Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck and a new book by Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media.
Among electronic works, I admire M. D. Coverly’s Califia. I’m also impressed by work that does not follow the now traditional hypertextual paradigm. I mean, for example, the kinetic poetry of John Calley and the digital installations and creations of Mark Amerika. My colleague Diane Gromala, a digital artist and theorist, is doing fascinating work in with biosensing equipment to create a kind of animated writing that she calls ‘biomorphic typography.

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Science of thought

Logic might have been defined as the science of the pure Idea.

Pure, that is, because the Idea is in the abstract medium of Thought. But logic might have been also defined as the science of thought, and of its laws and characteristic forms. But thought, as thought, constitutes only the general medium, or qualifying circumstance, which renders Ideas and Lexias distinctively logical. If we identify the Idea with thought, thought must not be taken in the sense of a method or form, but in the sense of the self-developing totality of its laws and peculiar terms. Hypertext and lexias.These laws are the work of thought itself, and not a fact which it finds and must submit to.

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See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts

Abstract thinking

Hypertextual is a kind of logic.

The problem lies partly in a difficulty — which in itself is nothing but want of habit — for abstract thinking; i.e. in an inability to get hold of pure thoughts and move about in them.In our ordinary state of mind, the thoughts are clothed upon and made one with the sensuous or spiritual material of the hour; and in reflection, meditation, and general reasoning, we introduce a blend of thoughts into feelings, percepts, and mental images. Thus, in propositions where the subject-matter is due to the senses — e.g. ‘This leaf is green’ — we have such categories introduced, as being and individuality.

But it is a very different thing to make the thoughts pure and simple our object.

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See the journal French Metablog with today different posts