Greewich Connect connects with us on a number of levels
Terry Anderson, Virtual Canuck, April 27, 2014

Terry Anderson links to a recent conference paper from the University of Greenwich about an initiative, similar to Athabasca Landing, "designed to induce a variety of open and social programs to the university teaching and learning communities." He reports obstacles similar to those encountered at Athabasca which sometimes "seem intractable." They are:

• Resistance manifested itself as both an active form of change blocking and in more passive forms of intransigence
• Governance itself became an activity rather than a means to implement activity
• Sharing of resources and artifacts happened only on Moodle, which is a closed system
• Academic staff felt they had no time to effectively learn about and embed open content

Yeah. So much easier to just assign a $200 textbook and be done with it.

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Techniques and Tools: How To Visualize Your Network
Beth Kanter, Beth's Blog, April 27, 2014

I had some fun Sunday afternoon watching the Blue Jays win and playing with some network graphs opf my contacts. Here's my LinkedIn network showing a lot of connections in Latin America, the UK and India (guess I'll have to return there, hm,?), Australia and the U.S. Then, following the Carvin example, I used Netviz to analyze my Facebook connections, and and used software called Gephi to produce my Facebook network map.

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Biology’s Shameful Refusal to Disown the Machine-Organism
Stephen L. Talbott, The Nature Institute, April 27, 2014

The metaphors we live by shape the expectations we have. But if the metaphor is inappropriate, so are our expectations. Such is the case with the 'body as machine' metaphor, writes Steven Talbott in this excellent essay. Take even something so simple as the 'heart as pump' metaphor. It conjures a single engine pushing blood through a system of pipes. But most circulatory fluid is outside the popes and the whole body contributes to circulation, a process that resembles tidal ebb and flow more than movement through a pipe. In the same way, I would argue, the 'mind as computer' metaphor is equally misleading, representing cognition as a set of individual data stores, when in fact even a simple concept like 'Paris' is more like a wave of interconnected neural activations, an activation that takes place in the very same body of water as the next wave (which may be 'plaster' or 'France' or 'Hilton' or whatever).

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