Wiki: Learning objectives In this brief, intensive, introductory course, the diligent student will: understand the origins of intellectual augmentation and the fundamentals of computer augmentation theory learn to use concept maps, social bookmarking, and annotation tools for personal knowledge management and collective intelligence learn to use Personal Brain knowledge management tool to combine concept-mapping with bookmarking in a personally customizable knowledge repository understand the theories and evidence underlying extended mind theory be exposed to the broad landscape of Cyborg Literacy, encompassing technological, cognitive, epistemological, and literacy/learning aspects The introductory nature of the course is stressed because of its brevity. This course should equip the diligent student to pursue deeper and broader understanding after completion of the course, using the recommended texts as a guide for further study. Through interaction with the instructor, personal reflection, and group discussions, students will understand the broad conceptual frameworks for each of the four topic areas, know where to delve deeper into the literature, and will have some exposure to the cognitive, technological, epistemological and social issues that arise from the use of digital media to amplify intellect. Return to syllabus main page Pasted from Wiki: About this course: Expect participative and collaborative learning Please read this and make a commitment to participate before you decide to take this course! If we do it right, we're going to make magic happen: strangers all over the world will coalesce into a learning community in six weeks. But this result is not guaranteed. I've done this with 15, 30, 50 university students who met with me for three hours a week, face-to-face, over ten and fifteen weeks, in addition to our social media work between class meetings. This is the ninth time that I have facilitated one of these six-week intensives. We have less time, less territory to cover than university students, and we won't have the advantage of blending face-to-face with online discussions. We're all going to have to work together from before the beginning to make this work. I know the subject matter and will introduce, frame it, engage in discussing it. Screencasts and mini-lectures in which I hold forth in some detail about the subject matter are part of the course, but those are online texts. The texts are available to everyone, whether or not they are registered participants in this course. What registered participants get for their $300 and (at least!) a few hours a week is the opportunity to help introduce each other to the main ideas the instructor has structured. I've created the structure within which we will co-learn -- but making sense of it is up to all of us. So don't expect to passively enjoy lectures and read texts. Students and instructor will collaborate through video and chat, asynchronous forums, personal learning blogs, wikis for self-organizing assignments, and mindmaps for trying to get an overview. Instructor will be available for online office hours via Twitter. You can't participate fully without having absorbed the texts -- or at least having run them through your mind once. You need to spend an hour or two with the texts each week -- preferably in advance. Expect to spend another 10-20 minutes a day or more participating the forum discussions, composing blog posts, commenting on each other's posts, bookmarking and tagging, working on your concept map or Personal Brain. Our online engagement will encompass six weeks -- the first few days will be about what we are going to do and the last few days will bed about how well we ended up doing it. Each module will involve a synchronous session (see the schedule -- your real-time participation is preferred, but all sessions are recorded for playback if you miss any) and ongoing discussion in the forums and blogs. The diligent student, the one who will get the most out of this course, will have started each week's readings a week or two before we discuss them. This is not the kind of work that can be done at the last minute. A discussion takes place continuously, every day. It involves more than a few wordy folks -- it requires everyone. You can read in detail what I expect my Cal and Stanford students to commit themselves to, in writing, before they are admitted to my course on virtual community/social media. These are the teaching and learning goals I strive to achieve. This blog post about sensemaking artifacts in massive open online courses can help you make sense of co-learning -- which can seem confusing at first, because it's not the way most of us were schooled. Return to syllabus main page Pasted from Wiki: Schedule Missions Texts Main Syllabus Page Before the course starts: Get started on the texts a week or more in advance and try to stay at least a week ahead. Be sure to read, understand, and commit yourself to the missions and to participatory learning. When every learner has read the texts before we begin to discuss them, our conversations will be richer for all -- and fewer people will feel overwhelmed by the texts and missions we cover each week. We cover a lot of material and many practices quickly -- get a head start. Rhythm of Asynchronous Online Conversations: We begin forum discussions, blog reflections, missions, and lexicon work for each module when the module is introduced during a live session. Each week, after the live session, we will move our primary focus of online discourse to the next subject. However, forum and blog discussions about any topic that maintains co-learners' attention will be held maintained throughout the six weeks of the course. Synchronous (streaming audio/video) orientation meeting: February 3, 10 /AM Pacific; February 4, 5:00 PM Pacific. The first session is presented twice. Schedule for subsequent sessions will be chosen via poll of registered participants, selected from a range of dates/times (see below). All sessions are recorded and viewable later by those who miss a session. The first live meeting will take place at 10 AM and 5 PM Pacific (all times I list are Pacific) on February 3 and 4 . I will mail you invitations the day before each live meeting and around a half hour before the event will send you a URL to log in . BThe first meeting will be longer than usual -- perhaps an hour and a half -- in order to introduce the scope, intentions, and methods of the course, introduce ourselves, and to introduce the first module's subject matter -- Roots and Visions of Augmentation. You should be able to see and hear my streaming video and participate via text chat. We will all participate in different roles -- summarizing the chat, searching for relevant links, contextualizing links, identifying and defining words for the lexicon, mindmapping the session. The text chat, whiteboards, and the entire session will be recorded. This initial live session will be held twice in order to accomodate as many co-learners as possible. If you miss a session, you will be able to access the index of recordings through the forum. Module One: Roots and Visions of Intellectual Augmentation (Introduced in orientation meeting, February 3 and 4) Personal computers and computer networks as we know them were not created because the computer industry or computer scientists thought it would be a good idea for people who had never used computers to do things that computers were never designed to do. The creation of personal computers and computer networks as we know them were financed and organized by the U.S. Defense Department, but the actual envisioning and development grew from the dreams of specific people who thought that computers could extend and amplify human capabilities. Engelbart's "mother of all demos" took place in 1968, Licklider's Man-Computer Symbiosis goes back to 1960, and Bush's "As We May Think" was published in 1945. A lot has happened in the last 60 years, with billions of people using devices and networks that are millions of times more powerful than the first prototypes. Now that we have mind-amplifying personal computers (and smartphones and tablets), digital networks, knowledge finding tools such as Google, knowledge organizing tools such as Personal Brain and concept maps, knowledge sharing tools such as social bookmarking, the challenge is to learn to use these media in an intentional framework and mindset. The first module looks at the history and original intentions of the inventors of intellectual augmentation and the last module looks at the ways in which the ancient human propensity for creating mind amplifiers can be consciously (and mindfully) extended in the future. Between the first and last historical-conceptual modules are three practice-oriented modules. The intention is to balance frameworks and practices, theories and exercises, concepts and missions. For this first week, we'll start with the historical origins of augmentation (and the intention of the originators), analyze the components of augmentation as it was proposed and as it worked out, and discuss elements and components of today's augmentation tools that were not envisioned by Bush, Licklider, or Engelbart. Module Two: Social Bookmarking as Collective Intelligence: February 11, 5 PM Pacific Social bookmarking encompasses both the personal and social aspects of augmentation: individually, we each need to tag and bookmark resources that we may need in the future (and/or want to refer other people to) for our own purposes, and which we don't want to trust to web-search when we need them; at the same time, the "architecture of participation" of social bookmarking services such as Diigo and Delicious enables us to make our individual choices public at no additional cost in time, money or attention. When a sufficiently large and diverse population selects and tags resources, their decisions add up to a valuable collective good. Social curation surfaces and pushes the best resources to the top of the attention pool. Tagging enables emergent "folksonomies" that create knowledge categories out of people's real experiences storing and retrieving information, rather than requiring everyone to categorize resources into an "ontology" created in advance by others. For the individual, curating web resources through social bookmarks can build collections of resources that are easily retrievable for personal use (and hone the bookmarking person's infotentional ability to direct attention toward the most relevant and useful information); at the same time, the bookmarker contributes to an increasingly valuable public good and signals their own expertise about particular topics to others who are interested in those topics. Digging deeper into the social features of these services reveals affordances for collective intelligence as well as (and coordinated with) individual augmentation. A group of people can create a bookmarking group and/or shared tags that enable them to select, share, and discuss resources; group members can highlight passages, attach notes to passages -- and comment on the notes made by other members of the group. With good communication, a well thought-out division of labor, and agreement about a few common tags, a group or team can begin practicing collective intelligence immediately and at low cost in time or money. We are going to start with a Diigo group and will each bookmark and discuss course-related materials over the next six weeks and beyond. Module Three: Concept Mapping: February 18, 5 PM Pacific Mindmapping was invented by Tony Buzan and modified by many others; concept mapping was created by Joseph D. Novak and Alberto J. Cañas. Each of the inventors of these different methods had specific rules (e.g., mindmapping is strictly hierarchical, concept maps must begin with a question). We take a broad, loose, improvisatory approach that allows co-learners to play with and bend the rules. Organizing knowledge in a concept map form can indeed start with a question (when in doubt, you can define your subject in the question: "What is concept mapping?" for example); mappers can use both hierarchical and network forms. Visual thinking is encouraged -- draw images by hand and scan your final maps, copy and paste images into maps. Most important is reflection on the process, which is a way of organizing knowledge about topics for your own use and for others. Understanding the different components of any system and mapping their interactions is a step toward understanding the system and so is finding the best resources to attach to nodes. We use two free but powerful downloadable concept mapping tools -- cMaps and VUE. Each step in the process we follow in this course adds a filtering and organizing tool -- the collection of links we aggregate and categorize with social bookmarking can feed individual concept maps, and the concept maps can serve as starting templates for the next session on Personal Brain. Module Four: Personal Knowledge Management: February 25, 5 PM Pacific Doug Engelbart would recognize Personal Brain as a personal knowledge management tool of great power. Take the concept map and combine it with a powerful structured database with powerful search mechanisms and you begin to take advantage of the significant computation power that is available in affordable devices and the cloud -- Engelbart's original computing engines had less RAM than an icon on today's smartphones. Personal Brain is available for free 30 day trial, after which access to its more advanced features requires an upgrade. By requiring the user to designate parent, child, sibling, and jump thoughts and enabling a large variety of ways to view "thoughts" -- the basic unit of knowledge in Personal Brain -- this personal knowledge manager enables you to not only include, link, categorize, interconnect bits of knowledge, but to zoom up and down levels of complexity and see your growing thought-plex in different ways. Tags, labels, colors and images enable a rich variety of search and visual thinking strategies. We'll build on the knowledge elements collected with social bookmarking and visualized through concept mapping. Learner Lecture: Charlotte Pierce on "What is a book?" Module Five: The Extended Mind: March 3, 5 PM Pacific Our first session introduced the visionaries who initiated the creation of intellect-augmenting technologies and analyzed the elements of the early mind-amplifiers. This session looks at mind-amplification in a broader and future-looking context. Extended mind theorists Chalmers, Clark, and Logan, building on previous work by Innis, Ong, McLuhan, propose a framework for seeing human-tool coevolution. Our minds have been partially outside our brains ever since someone used a stick to draw maps in the sand. Each invented mind-tool as complexified the cultures that adopted it, from writing to alphabets, printing presses to Internets. We're beginning to see the outlines of an interdisciplinary understanding of how to design and use mind-amplifying tools. Drawing on the instructor's TED e-book, we survey extended mind theory and conjecture about where it is going -- and where it ought to go. Module Six: Self-Organized Co-Learning: TBD We put the meta-skill of co-learning into action: co-learners use forums, wikis, and Hangouts to self-organize the last live session and week of forum discussions. Pasted from <<<< Missions Ongoing Missions: Each co-learner will: Read and view the texts in advance of the week in which we will discuss them. Repeated experience has shown that reading texts in advance can prevent overload, overwhelm, and brain-lag in this fast-moving course. Get started a week or two before the course starts and keep a week or two ahead. You'll be glad you did. Submit at least one reflective blog post each week in an online personal learning journal. Comment substantially on at least one other student's post. Contribute at least two posts each week in the forums. Please read this about how to participate in forums. Here is a quick intro to forums in learning, and a video on why to use forums. Edit the lexicon -- Submit words or phrases for defining; create, correct, edit, or add to a word or phrase definition; format entries; add good links. During the weekly live sessions, one or two co-learners are encouraged to present a 5 minute report to the rest of us about one of the recommended readings. If you have graphics, they can be uploaded when you present and you will be able to share your screen if necessary. If you have PowerPoint or Keynote slides, please convert them to .jpgs and number them in the order you wish to present them. Sign up in advamce for presenting micro-lessons during live sessions. Participate in live sessions. Each session will require teams to self-organize around finding relevant links and putting them in the text chat, contextualizing those links for our knowledge repository, identifying and defining words and phrases for our lexicon, keeping track of top-level, secondary, and tertiary categories for our mindmapping, helping brainstorm an online mindmap on the whiteboard at the end of the live session. We really need majority participation in the forums and a critical mass if not a majority in the blogs. If you find that you can't contribute as much as we'd like in the forums or blogs, there is wiki work for you to do. It's far better to check in two or three times a week for ten-twenty minutes, just to keep pace. Depending on how fast you write (we encourage unedited, off the cuff, conversational posting -- no painstaking essays required), add another twenty minutes to an hour each week. Module One: Roots and Visions of intellectual Augmentation Begin the ongoing weekly required mission throughout the course: Post at least twice in the forum, contribute to the lexicon wiki, start a blog where you can post your missions and reflect upon the texts and your learning. Module Two: Social Bookmarking as Collective Intelligence 1. Create a Diigo account. [DONE] 2. Install a browser bookmarklet, extension or toolbar for Diigo. [DONE] 3. Bookmark and tag 5 resources that relate to your learning about think-know tools and include the tag think_know 4. Join the Diigo group http://groups.diigo.com/group/think_know-tools 5. Find, tag, highlight 3 web pages relevant to think-know tools and share them with the Diigo group. In addition to your other tags, also use "think-know." 6. Leave a sticky note on a page shared with the group, comment on a sticky note left by others 7. Sniff out expertise and start to build a network -- search for tags such as "collective_intelligence" or other tags related to your learning in this course; examine resources that are bookmarked by the most people; look at the first people who bookmark these resources; inspect their networks and their tags, adding people and resources when appropriate. 9. Use hypothes.is to annotate Doug Engelbart's Framework for Augmenting Human Intellect -- add the tag think-know to your annotations. Here is a complete, short, illustrated tutorial on hypothes.is for Think-Know. You can join the hypothes.is think-know group here, and see the stream of all our annotations here. Highlight a passage and/or contribute to a conversation thread about a highlighted passage through the "reply" link in the sidebar passage associated with an annotation. Module Three: Concept Mapping 1. Create a concept map using cMap, VUE, or Google Docs (here is a video about using Google Docs Drawings for concept mapping). Use this entire course, any module, or related subject. Feel free to use resources gathered by the Diigo group. Think about the way nodes are connected, where connections are more hierarchically ordered and where they are more network or mesh-like with lateral connections and multiple interconnections; think about networks nested in hierarchies and vice versa. 2. Add resources to nodes. 3. Post a link to your concept map in your blog if you have a URL, or take a screen shot of your concept map -- under 900 by 900 pixels -- and post it in your blog. Module Four: Personal Knowledge Management 1. Download and install TheBrain software. This gives you access to all features for 30 days. After 30 days, you can continue to use a limited version free; access to advanced features after 30 days requires an upgrade to the Pro version. 2. Acquaint yourself with TheBrain's operations by viewing tutorials. 3. Create a Brain on a general topic relevant to this course. Create Thoughts: Parents, Children, and Jumps. Use your Diigo bookmarks and your concept map to help. 4. Add notes and graphics to the Notes field. 5. Add links to Thoughts. 6. Post a screen capture of a page from your Brain on your blog, reflect on your experiences thus far with this mode of knowledge representation. Module Five: The Extended Mind 1. By TK, post in the forum topic http://socialmediaclassroom.com/host/think/forum/the-extended-mind-mission designated for this purpose one question about extended mind theory or practice that you would like to see all co-learners attempt to answer. 2. By TK (Pacific) on TK, instructor will select one of the submitted questions and will notify co-learners through email and the forum. 3. By noon (Pacific) on TK send your response to the instructor BY EMAIL . 4. By 3 PM (Pacific) on TK, instructor will post all of the received responses in the forum topic designated for this purpose. Module Six: Self-Organized Co-Learning Using the meta-skill of co-learning, it is up to the co-learners to create an agenda and division of labor of the last live synchronous session and last week of asynchronous communication. Use the forums, blogs, and wiki available in the social media classroom to organize, plan, and execute. If you can use social bookmarks, concept maps, or TheBrain, so much the better. Back to Main Page Pasted from Missions for first week [4 Feb HR email] Esteemed co-learners — We have ALREADY gelled into a co-learning community. I’ve never seen it happen this fast. That’s very good news. However, it means that you will need to check the forums, blogs, mindmaps, and wiki work often — at least several times a week, preferably daily — if you don’t want to get overwhelmed. If you signed up for a fast-moving, wide-ranging, and comprehensive co-learning experience, here is your chance. I usually have to prod people to get moving toward critical mass. This time, I have to remind people not to become overwhelmed and get left behind! Links, mindmaps, chat transcript, lexicon from yesterday’s live session can be found here: http://socialmediaclassroom.com/host/think2/wiki/session-one-orientation-amp-intro-roots-and-visions-augmentation Today’s live session starts at 5 PM Pacific. Please feel free to show up at 4:45 to get your audio and video set up. Look at the menu bar at the top of the screen and use the icons on the left. http://howard.bigbluebutton.com use your full real name as your username and the password is join If you have not done so, please enter your preferences in this brief poll before tomorrow (Friday), 9 AM Pacific: http://doodle.com/poll/25ac9g943nkwntm6 so we can schedule live sessions at times that are convenient to the largest number of co-learners. You will find the schedule, which I will update tomorrow morning, at http://socialmediaclassroom.com/host/think2/lockedwiki/schedule You will find missions at http://socialmediaclassroom.com/host/think2/lockedwiki/missions (Links to session wikis, lexicon, missions, schedule can be found on the landing page of the wiki http://bit.ly/think-know3) Wiki work on the lexicon has begun: please add words, phrases, definitions from the readings and discussions (and add URLs, expand definitions, alphabetize entries, format the page, correct spelling and punctuation — even the smallest edit is helpful): http://socialmediaclassroom.com/host/think2/wiki/lexicon Ongoing Missions: Each co-learner will: Read and view the texts in advance of the week in which we will discuss them. Repeated experience has shown that reading texts in advance can prevent overload, overwhelm, and brain-lag in this fast-moving course. Get started a week or two before the course starts and keep a week or two ahead. You'll be glad you did. Submit at least one reflective blog post each week in an online personal learning journal. Comment substantially on at least one other co-learner's post. Contribute at least two posts each week in the forums. Please read this about how and why to participate in forums. Here is a quick intro to forums in learning, and a video on why to use forums. Edit the lexicon -- Submit words or phrases for defining; create, correct, edit, or add to a word or phrase definition; format entries; add good links. During the weekly live sessions, one or two co-learners are encouraged to present a 5 minute report to the rest of us about one of the recommended readings. If you have graphics, they can be uploaded when you present and you will be able to share your screen if necessary. If you have PowerPoint or Keynote slides, please convert them to .jpgs and number them in the order you wish to present them. Sign up in advance for presenting micro-lessons during live sessions. Participate in live sessions. Each session will require teams to self-organize around finding relevant links and putting them in the text chat, contextualizing those links for our knowledge repository, identifying and defining words and phrases for our lexicon, keeping track of top-level, secondary, and tertiary categories for our mindmapping, helping brainstorm an online mindmap on the whiteboard at the end of the live session. We really need majority participation in the forums and a critical mass if not a majority in the blogs. If you find that you can't contribute as much as we'd like in the forums or blogs, there is wiki work for you to do. It's far better to check in two or three times a week for ten-twenty minutes, just to keep pace. Depending on how fast you write (we encourage unedited, off the cuff, conversational posting -- no painstaking essays required), add another twenty minutes to an hour each week. Module One: Roots and Visions of intellectual Augmentation Begin the ongoing weekly required mission throughout the course: Post at least twice in the forum, contribute to the lexicon wiki, start a blog where you can post your missions and reflect upon the texts and your learning. One: Roots & Visions of Augmentation texts: (required) Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think," The Atlantic Monthly, August, 1945 (instructor's highlighted version) As a young sailor in the Philippines, awaiting the expected invasion of Japan, radar operator Doug Engelbart saw a copy of the August, 1945 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. Vannever Bush, who was in charge of the USA's wartime scientific effort (including, among other things, the Manhattan Project and the creation of the first electronic digital computer), was concerned about the need for new information tools for the postwar world. In this visionary essay, written decades before the invention of the transistor, Bush imagined a machine that used telephone connections and specially marked paper cards and microfilm to create an extension of the human mind, which he called "the Memex." A few years later, as an electrical engineer in California, when Engelbart started thinking about using computers for group problem-solving, he knew from his experience as a radar operator that complex patterns could be painted with light on cathode ray screens -- which led to the device you are using to read this text. A case of prophetic futurism that got the big ideas right -- hypertext, in this case -- even if his guesses about technical implementation were way off. I wouldn't say that this text is as necessary as Engelbart or Licklider, but if you want to see where they got their inspiration, it's a good read -- like an old science fiction story that came true. Douglas Engelbart, Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, SRI 1962. pp 1-41 (instructor's highlighted version) If you want to know where it all started, you have to start with a young electrical engineer who started looking for a better way for people to solve the 20th century's problems and hit upon the notion that computers and television screens could be hooked together to make tools for amplifying human thought and communication. It took him ten years until J.C.R. Licklider, another believer in the possibility of designing mind-amplifying machinery, began to fund his work. This paper is fundamental. It's about how humans think together, not just about a new kind of computing. You don't have to read the whole thing. But as you read the first 40 pages, keep in mind that Engelbart was starting from scratch, explaining to a world in which the computer business and computer scientists saw computers as strictly meant for scientific computation and business data processing. In 1968, in San Francisco, Engelbart and his team demonstrated a new method of using computers that introduced most of the components of today's personal computers -- the mouse and point-and-click, word processing, hyperlinks, multimedia communication -- in a demonstration that has come to be known as "the mother of all demos." The film of the original demo is available as a Youtube video. J.C.R. Licklider, Man-Computer Symbiosis, IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, volume HFE-1, pages 4-11, March 1960 (instructor's highlighted version) A vital link between Vannevar Bush's Memex and Douglas Engelbart's thinking machines was J.C.R. Licklider's 1960 vision of a future in which "human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly." Just as Bush saw in his own work as a grand coordinator of applied research the need for better information-navigation techniques in order to make practical use of the knowledge that scientific specialties had started producing at a prodigious rate, Licklider saw in his own work as a scientist the need for better information-navigation techniques "in order to get into position to think." When the US Defense Department started the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA -- now DARPA) in reaction to the Soviet launch of the Sputnik artificial satellite, a small and not very central office looked toward future information processing techniques. Because of his previous work as a psychoacoustician on the design of the SAGE air defense system, MIT scientist Licklider had longstanding ties with Defense Department research funders, and his 1960 paper made him the ideal director of the IPTO. Licklider subsequently funded Doug Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland (who invented computer graphics and graphically-controlled computers), and hired Bob Taylor (who became director of Xerox PARC's Computer Systems Laboratory in the 1970s) and many others who went on to create what was first called interactive computing, then personal computing, and the research network that scaled beyond the inventor's initial visions to become today's Worldwide Web. One: Roots & Visions of Augmentation texts: (recommended) Click through this web-brain concept map of Roots & Visions of Augmentation to access more material. Howard Rheingold, Tools for Thought (yes, the entire book is online) Licklider, J. C. R., & R. W. Taylor. (1968). "The computer as a communication device," (PDF) Science and Technology, April. Republished in SRC Research Report 61, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1990. You hear that the Internet originally started as a U.S. Defense Department project, but that doesn't tell much of the story. In the wake of Sputnik, the 1957 Russian satellite that traumatized U.S. beliefs in its technological superiority, the Advanced Research Projects Agency was created, and an MIT scientist was hired to run the small "Information Processing Techniques Office." At that time, the communications giant (ATT) and computing giant (IBM) weren't interested in futuristic ideas about computer graphics, interactive computers, and digital communication networks. But Licklider believed that computers and humans could think together in new ways. Licklider and Robert Taylor, his young research director, were smart enough to realize that when their programmers were spending their time sending each other mass messages about their favorite science fiction writers, they weren't goofing off -- they were inventing a new medium. And fortunately, those in charge of building the foundations of what was to become the Internet had a far-reaching vision, way beyond the borders of their military-industrial funders. To what degree are we living in the utopia they predicted? In what ways has reality fallen short? Fred Turner, "Where the counterculture met the new economy: the WELL and the origins of virtual community" Technology and Culture, Volume 46, Number 3, July 2005, pp. 485-512 If you think the creators of the tools you use today, from your laptops to the Web, were all crewcut engineers and venture-capitalist-funded entrepreneurs, you need to know what Stewart Brand, the communes of the 1960s, and the Whole Earth Catalog had to do with the origins of the Web. I've read and heard many years of theories about the significance of the Well as a pioneering virtual community, an event that I participated in and documented myself, and Fred Turner's ideas about network forums and network entrepreneurs seem to me to exactly capture the mix of altruistic idealism and pragmatic self-interest that infused the spirit of the early Wellites. If Gemeinschafft and Gesellschaft (next session!) are ways to look backward at the way people reacted to the social changes enabled and forced by industrial technology, network forums and network entrepreneurs are potentially useful lenses for looking forward. Turner's critical eye is good at finding the points at which idealism failed, and figuring out why -- without forgetting that without the failed idealists, the successes that surround us wouldn't have happened. (Also see this link to online version of 1968 Whole Earth Catalog and this link to online version of 1994 Millennium Whole Earth Catalog) (a related article by a different author, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Virtual Community Discourse and the Dilemma of Modernity -- for those who really want to delve into this historical transition). Paul Otlet, visioning a web in 1934 ( 1 1/2 minute video) NY Times article about Otlet's Mundaneum. "Paul Otlet, a Belgian bibliographer, pacifist and entrepreneur imagined a day when users would access the database from great distances by means of an "electric telescope" connected through a telephone line, retrieving a facsimile image to be projected remotely on a flat screen." <<< Two: Social Bookmarking as Collective Intelligence (required): "Social Bookmarking and Annotating" (wiki) This wiki page, which appears to be a collective creation, is the most savvy and detailed guide to social bookmarking I've found. The authors introduce it with a claim the instructor wholeheartedly endorses: "The driving force behind the Web 2.0 revolution is a spirit of intellectual philanthropy and collective intelligence that is made possible by new technologies for communication, callaboration and information management. One of the best examples of collective intelligence in action are the wide range of social bookmarking applications that have been embraced in recent years." Howard Rheingold, Social Bookmarking (web page) I authored this page, based on my previous work with university students, as part of the Peeragogy Handbook Project, an exercise in the kind of "intellectual philanthropy and collective intelligence" (together with co-learning) that the project seeks to support. Janetta Garton, "Using Diigo for Collaborative Curation" (blog post) A great, illustrated, step-by-step guide for the group use of Diigo as a collaboration tool. Lightweight collective intelligence. Two: Social Bookmarking as Collective Intelligence (recommended): Howard Rheingold's Social Bookmarking Links (delicious.com archive) Extensive but unordered collection of social bookmarking resources. Classroom Collaboration Using Social Bookmarking Service Diigo (web text) Excellent guide to the collective intelligence features in Diigo. >>> Three: Concept Mapping (required): Joseph Novak and Alberto Cañas, The Theory Underlying Concept Maps and How to Construct and Use them (web text) This is the founding text of concept-mapping. Read this, then download either cMap Tools or VUE. Each of these concept mapping tools have excellent, well-indexed user guides -- cMap Tools support and VUE User Guides (English, French, German) and FAQs.. The cMap Tools website is itself a clickable concept map. VUE has a good short screencast. The best way to learn is to get started with the user guide at hand. Although each co-learner should at least try either cMap or VUE, those who are interested could follow this video about using Google Docs Drawing to make concept maps). Thomas Lancraft, Concept Mapping: A Learning-Theory Based Instructional Tool ... [Message clipped] View entire message Attachments area Preview YouTube video Concept Mapping with Google docs DrawingsPreview YouTube video Concept Mapping with Google docs Drawings Preview YouTube video Paul Otlet, visioning a web in 1934Preview YouTube video Paul Otlet, visioning a web in 1934