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by Stephen Downes
March 16, 2009

Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science

You don't want to miss this - at the very least, view the image of the map of the sciences. And I'm really chuckling to myself over this. Because I was reading recently a post that characterized the whole 'Unity of Science' project from Logical Positivism as being so over - and it is. The reductive program based on underlying general principles (Gardner Campbell, are you reading?) was a complete failure - but now here is the unity of the sciences, in a full colour diagram, as a network of connected data, observations and concepts. Of course, this study only analyzes journal publications, resulting in a small and naive under-representation of science. But it still tells the story. Johan Bollen, et.al., PLOS One, March 16, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Networks, Project Based Learning] [Comment]

Welcome to Liberal Education Today'S New Home
Liberal Education today has moved to http://let.blog.nitle.org. Bryan Alexander, Liberal Education Today, March 16, 2009 [Link] [Tags: none] [Comment]

Flexbooks in Beta
Jane Park announces the launch of several Flexbooks, "aka as the cK12 Foundation's version of open source textbooks." From CK-12: "CK-12 allows one to customize and produce content by re-purposing to suit what needs to be taught, using different modules that may suit a learner's learning style, region, language, or level of skill, while adhering to the local education standards." Competition for David Wiley's Flat World Knowledge? Jane Park, Creative Commons, March 16, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Customization, Learning Styles, Open Source] [Comment]

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Clay Skirky's widely cited column on the death of newspapers isn't saying anything that hasn't been said before - readers of this website have patiently put up with a steady diet of such articles for almost ten years - but the timing of his article is good and his ultra-conservative conclusion ("Society doesn't need newspapers. What we need is journalism") guarantees placement in, um, newspapers. The conference I'm at, SXSW, is about the popular, the mass - and so are newspapers, and so is journalism - and that is exactly the opposite to network thinking, exactly the opposite to what we need. Society doesn't need journalism, it needs to be freed from journalism. Clay Shirky, Weblog, March 16, 2009 [Link] [Tags: Networks] [Comment]

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