background preloader

City Brights: Howard Rheingold

City Brights: Howard Rheingold
“Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him.” Ernest Hemingway, 1954 The answer to almost any question is available within seconds, courtesy of the invention that has altered how we discover knowledge – the search engine. Materializing answers from the air turns out to be the easy part – the part a machine can do. The real difficulty kicks in when you click down into your search results. Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, medical advice, financial information, educational resources, scholarly and scientific research. The first thing we all need to know about information online is how to detect crap, a technical term I use for information tainted by ignorance, inept communication, or deliberate deception. Today, just as it was back then, “Who is the author?” Resources:

Evaluating Web Pages: Techniques to Apply & Questions to Ask 1. What can the URL tell you? Techniques for Web Evaluation : 1. Before you leave the list of search results -- before you click and get interested in anything written on the page -- glean all you can from the URLs of each page. 2. 2. 1. INSTRUCTIONS for Truncating back a URL: In the top Location Box, delete the end characters of the URL stopping just before each / (leave the slash). Continue this process, one slash (/) at a time, until you reach the first single / which is preceded by the domain name portion. 3. Check the date on all the pages on the site. 3. 1. What kinds of publications or sites are they? Are they real? 3. Expect a journal article, newspaper article, and some other publications that are recent to come from the original publisher IF the publication is available on the web. Look at the bottom of such articles for copyright information or permissions to reproduce. 4. 1. a. Type or paste the URL into alexa.com's search box. b. 1. 2. 5. 1. 2. WHY?

Mindful Infotention: Dashboards, Radars, Filters | City Brights: Howard Rheingold Infotention is a word I came up with to describe the psycho-social-techno skill/tools we all need to find our way online today, a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills with computer-powered information filters. The inside and outside of infotention work best together: Honing the mental ability to deploy the form of attention appropriate for each moment is an essential internal skill for people who want to find, direct, and manage streams of relevant information by using online media knowledgeably.Knowing how to put together intelligence dashboards, news radars, and information filters from online tools like persistent search and RSS is the external technical component of information literacy. Knowing what to pay attention to is a cognitive skill that steers and focuses the technical knowledge of how to find information worth your attention. The overall system I’m seeking to understand is one of mindful infotention. Infotention Filters

How to Test For One Hundred Percent Truth - the 3 Emergence Truth Tests This article was written only months before I discovered the map of the mind. And while these ideas are still true, our standards for accessing truth have since been raised a thousand fold. More important, in 2010, I began work on a new scientific method, one with which discoveries are guaranteed. On What Do We Base Our Three Emergence Based Theories? The First Truth Test - the Two Geometries (the meta truth test) Socrates had four main areas of study. Despite the immense value of these latter three things, none could exist without the first; the nature of Truth. Logically, one cannot fault Socrates here. Interestingly enough, the essence of modernity's underpinnings; the scientific method, begins with this very same idea. Unfortunately, there is a logical flaw in their practice, one which exists primarily in their test for knowing they've arrived at a sine qua non. Truth for Socrates was a much purer goal. The scientific method ignores this problem. Why this order? Can we do better?

No One Knows What the F*** They're Doing (or "The 3 Types of Knowledge") Be sure to check out my follow-up to this post, clarifying and addressing a few misinterpretations that have been making their way around the internet. Feeling Like a Fraud Have you ever received praise, or even an award, for being great at something despite having no clue what you’re doing? I recently had a conversation with my girlfriend (going to school for her nursing degree) when she expressed her confusion with some praise she had received from her professor. I could see she was distressed. How could I win such an award, being in a room with so many great entrepreneurs and so many exciting companies and business ideas? The answer to that question is the title of this post. The 3 Types of Knowledge To really understand how it is that no one knows what they’re doing, we need to understand the three fundamental categories of information. There’s the shit you know, the shit you know you don’t know, and the shit you don’t know you don’t know. Imagine being lost in the woods.

18 Google Chrome Extensions That Make the Internet a Better Place Evaluating Internet Research Sources Robert Harris Version Date: January 21, 2015 Previous: December 27, 2013; November 6, 2013; Nov. 22, 2010 and June 15, 2007 "The central work of life is interpretation." --Proverb Introduction: The Diversity of Information Adopting a Skeptical Attitude You might have heard of the term information warfare, the use of information as a weapon. Getting Started: Screening Information Source Selection Tip: Try to select sources that offer as much of the following information as possible: Author's Name Author's Title or Position Author's Organizational Affiliation Date of Page Creation or Version Author's Contact Information Some of the Indicators of Information Quality (listed below) Evaluating Information: The Tests of Information Quality The CARS Checklist for Information Quality Summary of The CARS Checklist for Research Source Evaluation Living with Information: The CAFÉ Advice Books you need:

The Infotention Network | Life Skills for Digital Citizenship Evaluating Internet Research Sources Introduction: The Diversity of Information Information is a Commodity Available in Many Flavors Think about the magazine section in your local grocery store. If you reach out with your eyes closed and grab the first magazine you touch, you are about as likely to get a supermarket tabloid as you are a respected journal (actually more likely, since many respected journals don't fare well in grocery stores). Now imagine that your grocer is so accommodating that he lets anyone in town print up a magazine and put it in the magazine section. Welcome to the Internet. Information Exists on a Continuum of Reliability and Quality Information is everywhere on the Internet, existing in large quantities and continuously being created and revised. Getting Started: Screening Information Pre-evaluation The first stage of evaluating your sources takes place before you do any searching. Select Sources Likely to be Reliable Evaluating Information: The Tests of Information Quality Reliable Information is Power

How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months The Okano Isao judo textbook I used to learn Japanese grammar. Post reading time: 15 minutes. Language learning need not be complicated. Principles of cognitive neuroscience and time management can be applied to attain conversational fluency (here defined as 95%+ comprehension and 100% expressive abilities) in 1-3 months. Some background on my language obsession, from an earlier post on learning outside of classes: From the academic environments of Princeton University (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian) and the Middlebury Language Schools (Japanese), to the disappointing results observed as a curriculum designer at Berlitz International (Japanese, English), I have sought for more than 10 years to answer a simple question: why do most language classes simply not work? The ideal system — and progression — is based on three elements in this order… 1. Effectiveness, adherence, and efficiency refer to the “what”, “why”, and “how” of learning a target language, respectively. Ganbare!

Project Information Literacy: Smart Talks Howard Rheingold: "Crap Detection 101: Required Coursework" Project Information Literacy, "Smart Talks," no. 5, January 3, 2011 Subscribe our Smart Talk RSS feed Printer-friendly version Photo Credit: Judith Maas Rheingold If one word captures Howard Rheingold's writing about the political, cultural, and social impact of new technologies, that word is prescient. In 1987, Howard was one of the first to write about the peer-to-peer power of virtual communities building collective intelligence. Not only does he detect change before everyone else does, but Howard also writes about the complex interplay of technology, society, and culture with clarity, depth, candor, and profound insight. We caught up with Howard in late December and shared some of Project Information Literacy's (PIL) latest findings with him. PIL: Since 2003, you have been teaching college students at Berkeley and Stanford. Dealing with the rate of change is also an issue. Your last question is a big one. Howard: Meet Buffy J.

Main Page (Mouse over the webbrain below, click on nodes) June 19 - July 26 A six week course using asynchronous forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, social bookmarks, concept maps, Personal Brain, and synchronous audio, video, chat, and Twitter Cost for individuals is 300 dollars US or 500 dollars if employer reimburses -- via Paypal. 250 for graduates of Rheingold U courses ($200 if you've taken two courses, etc.) Class cohort limited to 30 learners. About this Course Think-know Tools dives into both the theoretical-historical background of intellect augmentation and the practical skills of personal knowledge management. As with other Rheingold U. courses, Think-Know Tools involves 6 weeks of Graduates of Introduction to Mind-Amplifiers can treat Think-Know Tools as an extension of what we covered before. Learning objectives About this course: Expect participative and collaborative learning Schedule Missions Lexicon Texts Session Wiki Pages A Set of Short Videos Related to this Course

Related: