Bryan Alexander Webinar; Learners and their Learning Process
AAEEBL is very lucky to have Bryan Alexander for our first webinar of 2016. He is a consultant to the world on how to understand technology and its effects on learning and education. One of the creators of the MOOC idea — the interactive, social form of MOOC — he is a strong contributor to innovations in education and also a wonderfully engaging speaker.
His topic is “Learners and Their Learning Process.” He will talk for 20 minutes and then will open the webinar to discussion (audience uses chat; Bryan responds in voice) for the last 30 minutes of the Webinar. Trent Batson will serve as moderator.
The webinar is free but you must register to attend.
But Urban argues it’s a good fit for the evolution of the library, while maintaining its purpose: to connect people to knowledge. An evolution, which remains unnoticed by other libraries, including university ones.
Get off the train in Florence Italy and you’re in a city-wide free wi-fi hotspot with better bandwidth access and speed than most home modems in the USA. There’s no reason that wi-fi access shouldn’t be provided as a benefit of being a citizen of the wealthiest (yet still incredibly backwards) nation on Earth.
blogging started to evolve when social media platforms for smaller forms of text-based publishing turned up, like Twitter. Then images and video became easier to publish and share.
what’s changing most drastically is not what we’re doing, but where. He points out that there are cataclysmic changes in how content is published and consumed and offers the example of Facebook Notes, which encourages people to blog on Facebook.
Mark talks about the difference in publishing on Facebook, LinkedIn or other platforms and says the magnet for inbound leads isn’t on your website anymore.
More contemplation on blogging in particular and social media in general in this IMS blog:
It’s a nice idea, but it also appears to be wrong. Over and over, researchers have failed to find any substantive evidence for the notion of learning styles, to the point where it’s been designated a “neuromyth” by some education and psychology experts.
is it possible that the Iranian government realized the evolution of social media and his respective obsolescence and this is why they freed him prematurely?
Blogs were gold and bloggers were rock stars back in 2008 when I was arrested.
The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralisation – all the links, lines and hierarchies – and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realised how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.
Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object – the same as a photo, or a piece of text. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting. But links are not objects, they are relations between objects. This objectivisation has stripped hyperlinks of their immense powers.
At the same time, these social networks tend to treat native text and pictures – things that are directly posted to them – with a lot more respect. One photographer friend explained to me how the images he uploads directly to Facebook receive many more likes than when he uploads them elsewhere and shares the link on Facebook.
Some networks, like Twitter, treat hyperlinks a little better. Others are far more paranoid. Instagram – owned by Facebook – doesn’t allow its audiences to leave whatsoever. You can put up a web address alongside your photos, but it won’t go anywhere. Lots of people start their daily online routine in these cul-de-sacs of social media, and their journeys end there. Many don’t even realise they are using the internet’s infrastructure when they like an Instagram photograph or leave a comment on a friend’s Facebook video. It’s just an app.
A most brilliant paragraph by some ordinary-looking person can be left outside the stream, while the silly ramblings of a celebrity gain instant internet presence. And not only do the algorithms behind the stream equate newness and popularity with importance, they also tend to show us more of what we have already liked. These services carefully scan our behaviour and delicately tailor our news feeds with posts, pictures and videos that they think we would most likely want to see.
Today the stream is digital media’s dominant form of organising information. It’s in every social network and mobile application.
The centralisation of information also worries me because it makes it easier for things to disappear.
But the scariest outcome of the centralisation of information in the age of social networks is something else: it is making us all much less powerful in relation to governments and corporations. Surveillance is increasingly imposed on civilised lives, and it gets worse as time goes by. The only way to stay outside of this vast apparatus of surveillance might be to go into a cave and sleep, even if you can’t make it 300 years.
