Archive for the 'Emergence, Distributed Cognition, & Aggregation Science' Category

Reminder: Abstracts Are Due Soon

For any of you who were thinking about submitting an article for the On the Horizon issue I’m editing on breaking up the monolithic LMS, please remember that abstracts are due by April 1st. (Details are in the original post linked to above.) Articles need not be heavily researched with tons of footnotes (although those […]

Teaching Faculty About Wikipedia (and Social Software in General)

I just discovered Jon Udell’s wonderfully archeological screencast about the evolution of a wikipedia page. In eight and a half minutes, he beautifully demonstrates how a community negotiates knowledge construction when nobody is the boss, anybody can edit, and there are no formal processes. As we know, this is a particularly vexing question to many […]

The Intractable Problem of Informational Cascades

Stephen Downes’ new column on e-Learn does a great job of showing that solving the informational cascade problem is more challenging than I had presented it to be in my own article on the topic. In fact, his own analysis reveals that the problem may be harder to solve than even he himself suggests. […]

Homeland Security, Networks, and Accountability

Social networks guru Valdis Krebs has written an analysis which purports to show that creating a single intelligence czar is less efficient in terms of getting intelligence to the President than leaving the stove pipes but adding connections among them.
Maybe.
But Krebs leaves out at least two critical externalities. First, his proposed solution requires that no […]

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 […]





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