Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush was never directly involved with the creation or development of the Internet. He died before the creation of the World Wide Web. Yet many consider Bush to be the Godfather of our wired age often making reference to his 1945 essay, "As We May Think." In his article, Bush described a theoretical machine he called a "memex," which was to enhance human memory by allowing the user to store and retrieve documents linked by associations. This associative linking was very similar to what is known today as hypertext. In 1937, Bush became the president of the Carnegie Institution. "The owner of the memex let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. This system is remarkably similar to modern hypertext.
Personal Memex The Vision Over the last few years, I’ve been interested in the fields of Personal Knowledge Management (or PKM) and Personal Learning Environments (or PLE). I’ve been a knowledge worker as long as I can remember, and have subsequently searched long and hard for numerous software applications and systems to help me better process, organize, and retrieve information. I’ve tried many different free and commercial solutions (outliners, PIMs, personal knowledge bases, mind mapping software, notebooks/pad, etc.), but none of then were 100% complete in my mind. Then, In 2006 I came across Vannevar Bush, and learned about his amazing vision for the Memex (or “memory extender”). The memex is the name given by Vannevar Bush to the theoretical proto-hypertext computer system he proposed in his 1945 The Atlantic Monthly article As We May Think. “Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. What is It, and What Can It Do? Core Components in Use
Entropy and Information Theory 3 March 2013 This site provides the current version of the first edition of the book Entropy and Information Theory by R.M. Gray in the Adobe portable document format (PDF). This format can be read from a Web browser by using the Acrobat Reader helper application, which is available for free downloading from Adobe. The current version is a corrected and slightly revised version of the second printing (1991) of the Springer-Verlag book of the same name, which is now out of print. Permission is hereby given to freely print and circulate copies of this book so long as it is left intact and not reproduced for commercial purposes.
To Know, but Not Understand: David Weinberger on Science and Big Data - David Weinberger In an edited excerpt from his new book, Too Big to Know, David Weinberger explains how the massive amounts of data necessary to deal with complex phenomena exceed any single brain's ability to grasp, yet networked science rolls on. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington recorded daily weather observations, but they didn't record them hourly or by the minute. Not only did they have other things to do, such data didn't seem useful. Even after the invention of the telegraph enabled the centralization of weather data, the 150 volunteers who received weather instruments from the Smithsonian Institution in 1849 still reported only once a day. Now there is a literally immeasurable, continuous stream of climate data from satellites circling the earth, buoys bobbing in the ocean, and Wi-Fi-enabled sensors in the rain forest. We are measuring temperatures, rainfall, wind speeds, C02 levels, and pressure pulses of solar wind. This would not be the first time. In 1963, Bernard K. Dr. Images: 1-3.
Jan05_01 Editor’s Note: This is a milestone article that deserves careful study. Connectivism should not be con fused with constructivism. George Siemens advances a theory of learning that is consistent with the needs of the twenty first century. His theory takes into account trends in learning, the use of technology and networks, and the diminishing half-life of knowledge. George Siemens Introduction Behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism are the three broad learning theories most often utilized in the creation of instructional environments. Learners as little as forty years ago would complete the required schooling and enter a career that would often last a lifetime. “One of the most persuasive factors is the shrinking half-life of knowledge. Some significant trends in learning: Many learners will move into a variety of different, possibly unrelated fields over the course of their lifetime. Background Driscoll (2000, p14-17) explores some of the complexities of defining learning. References
Transliterature, A Humanist Design Journal of Knowledge Management Practice: Library Journal of Knowledge Management Practice Editorial TLA welcomes you to its unique experiment in journal publishing - the open library concept - pioneered by TLA in 1998. In this approach you the reader have open access to all articles that have been, and are currently being, published in JKMP by TLA. Please note that the articles have been optimised for viewing using Internet Explorer. Note that articles originating prior to August 1999 were published in the Journal of Systemic Knowledge Management. If you are pleased with what you see in JKMP, please visit us on FaceBook and Comment &/or Like. Peter A.C. In The Knowledge Garden: Volume 1: 1998 - 1999 Volume 2: 2000 - 2001 Volume 3: 2002 Volume 4: 2003 Volume 5: 2004 Volume 6: 2005 Vol. 7, No. 1, March 2006 Vol. 7, No. 2, June 2006 Vol. 7, No. 3, September 2006 Vol. 7, No. 4, December 2006 Vol. 8, No. 1, March 2007 Vol. 8, SI-1, May 2007 Vol. 8, No. 2, June 2007 Vol. 8, No. 3, September 2007 Vol. 8, No. 4, December 2007 Vol. 9, No. 1, March 2008
Information theory Overview[edit] The main concepts of information theory can be grasped by considering the most widespread means of human communication: language. Two important aspects of a concise language are as follows: First, the most common words (e.g., "a", "the", "I") should be shorter than less common words (e.g., "roundabout", "generation", "mediocre"), so that sentences will not be too long. Such a tradeoff in word length is analogous to data compression and is the essential aspect of source coding. Note that these concerns have nothing to do with the importance of messages. Information theory is generally considered to have been founded in 1948 by Claude Shannon in his seminal work, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". Historical background[edit] The landmark event that established the discipline of information theory, and brought it to immediate worldwide attention, was the publication of Claude E. With it came the ideas of Quantities of information[edit] This is justified because . that , of
Science publishing: The paper is not sacred Two months after we started a blog that tracks scientific retractions — Retraction Watch — in 2010, one of us (A.M.) told The New York Times that we weren't sure we would have enough material to post with any regularity. That concern turned out to be unfounded — in just 16 months, we have written about some 250 retractions. Little did we know that, in scientific publishing, 2011 would become the Year of the Retraction. Here's what grabbed everyone's attention: retractions have increased 15-fold over the past decade, while the number of papers has risen by less than 50% (see Nature 478, 26–28; 2011). It is not clear why, and it is always dangerous to draw too many conclusions from what is a relatively rare occurrence — some 300 retractions among 1.4 million papers published annually. Still, it is clear that software that detects plagiarism has played a part in the retraction spike, as has the larger number of eyeballs on papers, thanks to the Internet. Too laissez-faire?
U Rheingold U. is a totally online learning community, offering courses that usually run for five weeks, with five live sessions and ongoing asynchronous discussions through forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, and social bookmarks. In my thirty years of experience online and my eight years teaching students face to face and online at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, I've learned that magic can happen when a skilled facilitator works collaboratively with a group of motivated students. Live sessions include streaming audio and video from me and from students, shared text chat and whiteboard, and my ability to push slides and lead tours of websites. Future classes will cover advanced use of personal knowledge tools, social media for educators, participatory media/collective action, social media issues, introduction to cooperation studies, network and social network literacy, social media literacies, attention skills in an always-on world.