Multilitteratus Incognitus

I came across the following graphic in this week's Change 11 topic, titled "Power Law of Participation" Now...don't get me wrong, I love visualizations as much as the next learner, but visualizations need to mean  something.  Even context-less they need to be somewhat decipherable and viewers need to be able to infer some meaning.  This isn't the case with this image.  What is this "Power Law"?  What do the axes mean?  What is measured? How is it measured? Why is it measured? Who determines the periphery and the core?  What are the criteria for inclusion or exclusion? What tool  is being talked about? Perhaps there is some more in the readings, but given that this was provided as a link (and not embedded in the reading text), I am not sure if it is :-) Ross Mayfield (CC) Image URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ross/541707092/sizes/z/in/photostream

The other day I was reading a CCK11 blog on a way to visualize the connections on your LinkedIn network .  Since this week's topic is "the network" on CCK11, I thought it would be cool to see how my network looks. You always get a notification on your social networks indicating who a particular contact has in common with you, but you don't generally get the full picture. With a few hundred contacts on my LinkedIn network my diagram does look a bit chaotic (I don't even want to know what an Open Networker's diagrams looks like!), but zooming in makes things a bit more clear. The main thing that struck me is that LinkedIn didn't ascribe any specific values to the color-labels.  When I connected with people I usually indicated that I knew them from class, from work, that we did business together or there was some sort of consultation going on. To be honest I'm not really sure how this mapping tool color-coded my contacts.  The low-hanging fruit seemed t...

I came across this Prezi course introduction to an "Intro to Learning on The Cloud" course. I have to say that from a teaching and learning perspective the course looks pretty compelling! This introduction was interesting as well, however there is a big caveat. I don't know if this was a self-paced presentation, or if it was used in an in-class presentation. As an in-class presentation I can see this Prezi working, however as a voiceless self-paced presentation it's a major fail. About 40 seconds in, having clicked next-next-next the animations in this prezi made me nauseated - the the point that I needed to stop viewing it! I wonder if this was a case of flashy-prezi use, or just a good presentation for the wrong medium teaching & learning in the "Cloud" on Prezi

One of the "in" things today is to try to use social networks for everything including marketing, advertising, social mobilization and yes even teaching. I came across this graphic a while back showing which social networks are prevalent in which countries. This is quite interesting, but it only gives you which networks are most popular based on goodle trends and alexa at one point in time. Don't get me wrong, it's a nice visualization, but I think that some people might use this as sure proof that they should use one network over another when the better approach, in my opinion, is diversification :-)