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“it creates an environment where people need to talk to each other to get the whole story.”

Space is the place for re-search. A distraction-free oasis capable of creating the conditions for systematic intellectual inquiry about important questions.

How to focus and operationalize the wisdom of crowds? Crowds that are now equipped with smartphones?

> polls
> unannounced quizlets
> participatory problem solving tasks (scavenger hunts, etc.)
> use time constraints and competition to keep kids on task

Atomize! Reify. explode > recombine | divergent > convergent

An experiment in collaborative knowledge-making, Dig! is about conducting research in bite-size doses of insight through an iterative process of aggregating, analyzing, and curating fragments of accumulated information.

An oasis in a torrent of information overload and meaningless repetition, Dig! is a knowledge repository that aims to be the antidote for two world weary academics prone to intellectual pursuits rather than clerical whack-a-mole.

And taxonomies are useful. Circumscribing intellectual spaces, defining terms, and so on.

The value of tasking students with the seemingly mechanical and relatively unintimidating challenge of assembling collections of terms related to a content area has succumbed to disruption through edupunked supportive networks delivering high quality content that meets many curricular objectives. Time to (re)design and glean those punked out immersive best practices.

Etymologies are often revealing, but WTF?

Twitter’s  decision to double its character count from 140 to 280 characters last year hasn’t dramatically changed the length of Twitter posts. According to new data released by the company this morning, Twitter is still a place for briefer thoughts, with only 1% of tweets hitting the 280-character limit, and only 12% of tweets longer than 140 characters.

Critical making implies self-awareness during the process of creating, but what about the how of arriving at appropriate responses to communications challenges (message, voice, aesthetic, etc.)? Modeling may represent a way out of the quagmire, but how to manage the process?

Reflectivity vs. reflexivity.

Situational awareness & muscle memory. Tactical forces are trained to rely on series of rote procedures in life threatening situations.

Twitter’s  decision to double its character count from 140 to 280 characters last year hasn’t dramatically changed the length of Twitter posts. According to new data released by the company this morning, Twitter is still a place for briefer thoughts, with only 1% of tweets hitting the 280-character limit, and only 12% of tweets longer than 140 characters.

One of the chief benefits of play is behavior modeling (provided the model is on their best behavior).

Why contrive to re-create labyrinths and instead simply acknowledge that the information torrent within which we find ourselves is one already? All that need be done is to foreground the reality of this familiar context. 

Rather, how about acknowledging and leveraging the labyrinth within which we already find ourselves? Course shells and other human interaction are labyrinthine enough. The task is to ascribe meaning to their myriad manifestations.

In Letter to a Future Lover, Ander Monson creates a labyrinth in miniature, composed from the human amendments (errata, underlines, tears, hairs) and any bundle of pages he encounters. This includes library books from shelves as far-flung as Biosphere 2, to the tossed manuscripts of a well-loved professor, to a card catalogue repurposed as scrap. These are biblio-rejects—books that smell of loneliness, books that flop open like happy pups at the touch of Monson’s hand.

via http://brooklynquarterly.org/review-letter-to-a-future-lover/