Multilitteratus Incognitus

Well, we've made it to Week 4 of #rhizo14, a full two-thirds done with this rhizomatic thing. But wait, if rhizomes are all middle with no beginning and end, what does two-thirds actually mean? I guess the topic of the week is the printed medium, and the overall question of "is Books making us stupid?"  The question brought up immediately the mental image of Homer Simpson, from the show The Simpsons , pondering one such question. Dave, in his opening salvo this week tells us that there is something in Books that he distrusts, in that books encourages objectivity, distance, a feeling of being removed from the audience. Something less participatory.  This is quite an interesting thought, considering that many (of a certain generation) would claim that Google (and the Internet) is making us stupid and we are losing out literacy skills because we aren't reading as much.  Just like those concerns over Google are unfounded, so is this concern about Books (in general)....

Last week I was reminded of the Canvas Network . Despite the fact that I have a friend and colleague that works for the company there are so many things happening at work that made me forget. In any case, I am glad I stumbled upon the Canvas Network again because it gave me an opportunity to see how another EdTech company, one whose bread-and-butter is the LMS, is approaching MOOCs. Last week I was writing about the innovations that I think are worthwhile exploring further in the Canvas Network, namely letting students know what they are in for if they choose a specific course to take. This got me thinking about campuses today, and admittedly this goes beyond the LMS. Most students have only a small blurb, that is often outdated, to go by when choosing courses for their next semester. Even if you know what a course is about, you don't necessarily know much about the format of the course, the assessment types, whether there are synchronous, asynchronous, or blended components ...

This week's topic, as I mentioned in my initial post, is learning in times of abundance. Eric Duval, in his definition of abundance, goes for the digital element, but I wanted to focus on something  a little more mundane - the "disconnected" world of the library.  The fact of the matter is that our abundance of information is no new thing. Some may go back as far back as the invention of the printing press, but I won't since buying books still costs money to the individual and thus, while there is an abundance in materials, it's not abundant to you because you've got limited money.  Instead I want to focus on something quaint - the library. The library has provided us with a lot of abundant information, for both learning and pleasure.  Through various consortia, if your own town library (or libraries) don't carry the item you want, they can get it for you, usually for no extra charge, so you can have access to whatever material you need. I...

Je sais que cette semaine n'est pas fini, mais je ne sais pas si j'ai autres choses à dire pour ce sujet. Alors, maintenant je pense à le sujet de change MOOC de la semaine prochaine. Le thème de la semaine prochaine est l'apprentissage dans le temps d'abondance. Vraiment je ne sais pas que veut dire Éric Duval (notre facilitateur pour cette semaine) mais je me demande: ce qui est en abondance? L'information? Non, ça ne pourrait être correct parce que nos bibliothèques ont eu beaucoup des livres et information pour beaucoup de temps! Vrai, une bibliothèque n'as pas toutes les livres du monde, mais quelqu'un que veut quelque chose que son bibliothèque n'as pas, cette personne peux demander une livre d'une autre bibliothèque utilisant le "ILL" (interlibrary loan). Je pense que nous avons eu l'abondance en information depuis Gutenberg et l'invention de l'imprimerie; et bien sûr l'existence de la système des bibliothèques. ...

I came across this article a while back on Open Source Exile about the deficiencies of the MARC format. For those of you not in the library world, MARC is essentially a digital version of the information you found in the card catalog. The article echoes a lot of my thoughts on the subject from when I was reading about information organization and cataloging a few years back when I first started working for a library. It's nice to see that I am not the only one who's thought of the issue lol :-)

I was reading this article on Scienceblogs with an associated graphic on where info comes from (click to enlarge): further on in the article there is a more parody-like version of the same chart (click to enlarge): For what it's worth, the original article is short and easy to read - so you should read it. Here's my favorite quote from it: So look at that graph. The X axis is years, which is OK, even if the inconsistency of the intervals is extremely annoying. But what are the units of the Y axis? What's being measured? I have no idea. I presume it's a stacked percentage of something, but that's unclear. Information produced? Absorbed? Thrown at a wall and forgotten? What kind of information? It's all lumped together and unspecified. Could we have some units, please? And can you really categorize a single unit of information that applies appropriately to what comes from a newspaper and what comes from a social networking site? The other data we're missing i...