Category Archives: Books I Like

It’s a Small Campus After All

Gilad Ravid and Sheizaf Rafaeli’s new piece in FirstMonday, “Asynchronous Discussion Groups as Small World and Scale Free Networks“, analyzes a voluntary learning community that develops on a university’s LMS. These are all students who are (apparently) registered for on-campus web-enhanced courses with strictly voluntary web-enhanced components. Interestingly, the study analyzed networking for the entire [...]

Also posted in Build This, Please, Emergence, Distributed Cognition, & Aggregation Science, Notable Posts | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Book Recommendation: e-Moderating

Gilly Salmon’s e-Moderating is a classic must-read for anyone who is involved with facilitated distance learning. It’s also of value to anyone interested in how pedagogy is a KM skill, as I discuss in some detail in my dual review in eLearn of this book and Cohen and Prusak’s In Good Company.
To begin with, [...]

Also posted in Higher Education, Instructional Design | 1 Comment

Correction on the Origins of Informational Cascade Research

I was mistaken in an earlier post when I claimed that informational cascades research comes from the “heuristics and biases approach” in psychology. It definitely comes from behavioral economics.
Both behavioral economics and the heuristics and biases approach share common ancestry from the work of Herbert Simon. A genuine polymath, Simon won a Nobel Prize in [...]

Also posted in Emergence, Distributed Cognition, & Aggregation Science | Tagged | Leave a comment

Informational Cascades, Network Theory, and Behavioral Economics

Stephen Downes’ mention of my article on informational cascades (thanks for the plug, Stephen) led me to his post in the trdev discussion group. He writes:
In network theory, ‘groupthink’ is an instance of what is known as a cascade phenomenon. A cascade occurs (all other things being equal) when the propogation of a property (an [...]

Also posted in Emergence, Distributed Cognition, & Aggregation Science | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Book Recommendation: Why Societies Need Dissent

If you liked my article on informational cascades then you will probably want to read Cass Sunstein’s Why Societies Need Dissent. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago, writes in detail about the impact of informational cascades on democratic dialogue, the rulings of panels of judges, and other critical areas related to civil [...]

Also posted in Digital Democracy, Emergence, Distributed Cognition, & Aggregation Science | Tagged , | Leave a comment
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.