Clay Shirky on 'Cognitive Surplus' (TED talk)

IMHO, well worth the 15 minutes to listen to this - even with the annoying failed sound synchronisation.

Some quotes/ideas:

"The gap is between doing something and doing nothing" (I'm reminded of the former Bishop of Oxford saying "If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing badly"!)

The daycare experiment - where introducing a fine for parents who were late increased the numbers who were late because it changed from operating on a social contract to a payment for services. It doesn't come at all as a surprise, but it is great to see such a neat demonstration of the effect. (Can anyone give me the reference for the paper he talks about. Update, someone did give it to me, in response to my request in a comment on the TED website. It is: Gneezy, U. & Rustichini, A. (2000), 'A Fine is a Price', Journal of Legal Studies 29(1), 1-17. Thank you Chris Ke-Sihai.)

"A trillion hours a year of participatory value up for grabs" {Added later - see this visualisation of time available)

The Ushahidi story is great, but is in danger of becoming over-used. The references to it can become trite. For a bit more depth, I'd recommend SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa Fahamu Books 2009.



PS, on LOLcats. Am I alone in not loving cats? One day I might post a rant about the cats that defecate in my garden, kill birds, rip open the bin bags in the street. But that'd be petty, wouldn't it?

A couple of snippets from Martin Bean's presentation at the OU Teaching Awards

A few things I wanted to keep from the presentation of Martin Bean, OU Vice Chancellor, at the OU Teaching Awards yesterday.

"Transforming information into meaningful knowledge"

In … a world (in which information is everywhere), sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information are paramount.

Mentoring and preparing students for the world in which they live, the central role of the university when it achieved its modern form in the 14th Century, is again at the forefront

Horizon Report 2010 [http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/chapters/trends/]

As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes”

Denis Diderot, "Encyclopédie" (1755) [Online, I could only find this in wikipedia]

Conclusion: Teaching Matters

“..it is the role of us teachers, to make sense of the information that’s out there. To think differently, to act differently, to solve problems, to confront society in different ways”

Debts, money and information

Money is information. That's more obvious today than ever before, now that you can sit at your computer and move bits around to manage your bank accounts, and just by typing in your credit card number buy something (which might be a nice physical thingy that's posted to you, like a packet of seeds , or might be some more bits of information, like a music download).

So this huge debt that the UK has got is 'just' numbers on a computer somewhere. Yet, it seems that in order to change those numbers, there's going to have to be real, physical suffering http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/politics/10250603.stm. We don't yet know where the biggest cuts are going, but people are going to lose their jobs and sooner or later that's going to translate to ill health, into people losing their houses, not being able to afford clothes etc.

So, if it's just numbers on a computer, why do we need to do that? Why not just change the numbers? Instead of "-£771,000,000,000" why can't we write "£0"? Well, that would mean the people (or pension funds, banks, other countries etc, I presume) that the money is owed to would no longer be getting their interest payments, so they'd be poorer.

But then again, it was all going along OK until about a year ago, when someone spotted the problem with the sub-prime mortgages (in my simplistic understanding), and that was information.

It seems to me that these numbers carry with them - or are embedded in - all sorts of things, like 'trust', 'power relationships', 'history', '(in)justice'. I need an economist to explain this to me - explain how these numbers work, as information.