Monthly Archives: July 2004

The Revolution Will Be…Printed?

By Michael Feldstein | July 25, 2004

With all the hype and hoo-ha about the conventions being blogged, there is a quieter, less sexy revolution going on that nobody seems to notice, probably because it’s old tech. I think it’s amazing that printed copies of the 9/11 Commission report were available to be purchased online within minutes of the report’s release and [...]

Posted in Books I Like, Digital Democracy | Comments closed

Exploring Emergence

By Michael Feldstein | July 23, 2004

This “active essay” put out by MIT’s medialab illustrates how emergence works. You can really see how the patterns form out of simple rules; maybe this is the best way to teach the concept. Note that the Java applets didn’t work properly on my Mac using Safari, though they seemed fine on Windows and Firefox.

Posted in Blogo-eroticism and Other Hype, Emergence, Distributed Cognition, & Aggregation Science | Comments closed

More Emergence Hoo-Ha

By Michael Feldstein |

I got an email this morning calling my attention to the existence of something called the “Emergent Learning Forum.” I don’t know this group and I don’t know what they mean by “emergent learning”; my previous posts on emergence were in response to articles that have appeared in eLearn and the echoes of them that [...]

Posted in Blogo-eroticism and Other Hype, Emergence, Distributed Cognition, & Aggregation Science | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Credit Where Due

By Michael Feldstein |

I should have pointed out in my last post that Stephen Downes has already made the point that the term “emergence” is being misused in the context of “emergent learning.”

Posted in Blogo-eroticism and Other Hype, Emergence, Distributed Cognition, & Aggregation Science | Tagged , | Comments closed

“Emergent Learning” Is an Oxymoron

By Michael Feldstein | July 22, 2004

In the introduction to Steven Johnson’s oft-referenced but seldom understood book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, he describes emergent systems as follows:
In the simplest terms, they solve problems by drawing on masses of relatively stupid elements, rather than a single, intelligent “executive branch.” They are bottom-up systems, not top-down. They [...]

Posted in Blogo-eroticism and Other Hype, Books I Like, Emergence, Distributed Cognition, & Aggregation Science, Notable Posts | Tagged , | 1 Comment
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