Pour ces lobbyistes des OBNL que sont les OC, cette nouvelle devrait être suivie...

Le gouvernement du Québec a fixé au 28 novembre 2002 la date d'entrée en vigueur des dispositions de la Loi sur la transparence et l'éthique en matière de lobbyisme relatives au Registre des lobbyistes. Communiqué de presse Site Internet [Gouv Qc]

11:43:24 PM    

What will happen if students blog during class? Would they? Would it be better if they talked aloud? Real plenary discussion isn't possible in a huge conference but should be in a group of twenty students. Perhaps real blog discussions aren't possible with as small a group as twenty? Though fewer bloggers usually participate in a blog thread, there is an awareness of a larger space and the many who choose not to participate? How about chatting textually while discussingly orally? Would that always suck all the jokes out of the room and into the chat ? [Jill Walker]

11:43:17 PM    

pMachine's interface offers the ability to see the total number of posts and comments. I noticed today that we have over 600 posts and 700 comments - more comments than posts for the first time. I'm dedicating a bit of class time to writing comments and students are responding to comments from other students. In class, we talked about strategies for commenting - agreeing, disagreeing, asking clarifying questions, offering additional information. When it works, commenting really fuels conversations since the audience becomes visible to students. I was told today of a student who excitedly told her teacher that her post had generated 13 comments from other students.

A few students who rarely express an opinion in class are posting ideas online that they wouldn't in class. A colleague new to using weblogs made a similar observation. I'm not talking about profound observations here but snippets of thought that often don't translate to spoken words in class. It's encouraging to see particularly for a group of immigrant students who are constantly wrestling with English. I'd like to think they're will be some effect on what happens in class away from the computer screen. [Joe Luft]

7:43:33 PM    

Un fil de discussion à lire...

5:42:58 PM    

Has Europe taken the lead in open debating connections between the knowledge economy, social capital and culturally preferred futures in the networking age?

Telle était la question posée par le «European Commisioner of Employment and Social Affairs» lors de la conférence Knowledge Society and Social Capital des 28 et 29 octobre à Bruxelles.

5:42:58 PM    

Improved Weblogging: Seeds and Notes. [Spike Hall]

Spike is dissecting the thinking-communication process as it is reflected by a thinker's notes. He pictures a continuum from interiority (preliminary, quasi-averbal thoughts) to sociality. Quite interesting. [Sebastien Paquet]

4:42:26 PM    

Self- Organization. A nice introduction to self-organization by a physicist, Cosma Rohilla Shalizi.

"Something is self-organizing if, left to itself, it tends to become more organized. This is an unusual, indeed quite counter-intuitive property: we expect that, left to themselves, things get messy, and that when we encounter a very high degree of order, or an increase in order, something, someone, or at least some peculiar thing, is responsible. .. But we now know of many instances where this expectation is simply wrong, of things which can start in a highly random state and, without being shaped from the outside, become more and more organized. Thus self-organization, which I find to be one of the most interesting concepts in modern science --- if also one of the most nebulous, because the ideas of organization, pattern, order and so forth are, as used normally, quite vague."

His Ph.D. thesis was about quantifying self-organization. The complexity of a process can apparently be meansured by how much information is needed to predict its future behavior. So, a process is self-organizing if its complexity is found to increase, while the input is either constant or random. He also gives some history of the concept of self-organization:

"The idea that the dynamics of a system can tend, of themselves, to make it more orderly, is very old. The first statement of it (naturally, a clear and distinct one) that I can find is by Descartes, in the fifth part of his Discourse on Method, where he presents it hypothetically, as something God could have arranged to have happen, if He hadn't wanted to create everything Himself. Descartes elaborated on the idea at great length in a book called Le Monde, which he never published during his life, for obvious reasons."

[Sebastien Paquet]

Very nice post from Sebastien. Let me add some words by Ernst von Glasersfeld here:

From the constructivist perspective, "learning" is the product of self-organization. Piaget's dictum "intelligence organizes the world by organizing itself" (1937, p.311) was a challenge to direct the attention of psychologists to the question of how the rational mind organizes experience and to design a model of this process. His scheme theory, as I outlined it above, is an attempt to answer part of that question. It can be summarized in the statement: Knowledge is never acquired passively, because novelty cannot be handled except through assimilation to a cognitive structure the experiencing subject already has. Indeed, the subject does not perceive an experience as novel until it generates a perturbation relative to some expected result. Only at that point the experience may lead to an accommodation and thus to a novel conceptual structure that re-establishes a relative equilibrium. In this context, it is necessary to emphasize that the most frequent source of perturbations for the developing cognitive subject is the interaction with others... [Ernst von Glasersfeld]

3:43:45 PM    

Exciting news today. A while back, when Will began his The Secret Life of Bees Weblog I thought that something similar could be done within the context of a history class. Two of my classes are beginning a unit on imperialism and the Spanish-American War and I've invited a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina who specializes in Cuban and Puerto Rican history to be our online expert. She has graciously accepted and will be participating in our discussions via a soon-to-be-posted project weblog. We will examine primary source documents (including music from the time period) as well as discuss class readings through the blog.

My students are excited about this. I'm hoping this will provide an incentive to attack some interesting but difficult reading. Now, if I could only connect with an historian who specializes in Filipino history I'd really have all the angles covered.

Last year, we used a page of links that played a minor role in my students ability to create meaning out of distant historical events. This has the potential to be much more engaging and interactive. Now, I just have to get the site finished... [Joe Luft]

Another educational Weblog project that tries to bring in external domain experts. Very nice.

3:43:45 PM    

Le prochain colloque de la Community Development Society , organisé en collaboration avec l'International Association for Community Development se tiendra à l'Université Cornell du 19 au 23 juillet 2003.

Le programme est disponible sur le site du colloque, ainsi que l'appel de communication

3:43:08 PM    

Montréal est une ville globalement en santé. Néanmoins, plusieurs indicateurs suggèrent qu’il demeure une large place à l’amélioration. Nous sommes en mesure d’apporter ces améliorations, d’autres villes y sont parvenues. C’est dans cet esprit que nous soumettons nos observations et nos réflexions en vue d’orienter l’action de ceux qui ont un impact sur la santé publique.

On peut télécharger le rapport en tout ou en partie.

«Le développement maximal du capital-santé permet à la ville d’atteindre son plein potentiel social, culturel et économique.» Et la santé qui s'y met aussi : valoriser un secteur ou une dimension de la vie passe maintenant par sa transformation en "capital" : après le capital social, voici maintenant venir le capital santé !!

3:43:08 PM    

We have over 130 people (teachers and students) posting on our various pMachine weblogs, I've been struggling to find a useful way to get individual RSS feeds from my class weblogs. The one xml file our blogs spit out is daunting to filter through since it shows posts from all our sites. I tried the Radio Tools RSS Distiller Pat mentioned. I managed to create separate feeds from my project site and my class sites. I don't have to skim through a mile long list of posts. [Joe Luft]

Joe is obviously getting some promising results. I haven't played much with RSS Distiller but since a couple of months I receive my daily Dilbert dosis via RSS Distiller right in my NewsAggregator...

2:42:12 PM    

The itown global network of weblogs is up and open for business.  Very nice implementation. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

This implementation of Radio addresses a lot of wishes/wants on my list.  If we are to get folks in the University community engaged with blogs, then the implementation, which includes community building (and the road signs posted by an entity such as itown are certainly needed), back office support and some old fashioned cheer leading.

And, the Mayor of iTown leaves in Athens.  Go Dawgs! [Jim Flowers]

2:42:12 PM    

Here's a little something I wrote in reply to High Context.editor David Gammel's introduction to the group-forming community.

I'd like to mention one of David's initiatives that he hasn't mentioned in his intro but is in my opinion highly relevant as a practical illustration of blog-based group-forming. David has set up the KMPings service.

What KMPings does is enable webloggers with an interest in knowledge management to combine teasers for selected blog posts from their personal blog. The result is another, collective blog that points to various posts by participants. (If this sounds abstract, just click the link and you'll understand right away.) KMPings has enabled the formation of a loosely coupled community of KM bloggers. I'm subscribed to this blog and it has helped me discover a few new webloggers who share my interest in knowledge management.

One way to describe what KMPings does is to say that it provides a shared channel for a particular area of interest. It was a direct inspiration for my proposal of ridiculously easy (blog-enabled) group forming. My idea is to automate what David has done and extend it to any topic anyone can dream up.

Given such a system, if I felt like it, I could almost instantly set up a "MontrealPings" blog channel, or a "OrigamicArchitecturePings" blog channel, or what have you, and start putting relevant posts at those channels. Other interested webloggers could subscribe (via RSS) to such channels and could ping them whenever they write something that relates to the topic at hand that they wish to share with the community of subscribers.

Perhaps a better name for that idea would be just that, BlogChannels - what do you think?

[Sebastien Paquet]

Sebastien reports on a very cool project. BlogChannels could be a powerful tool... and it might save me a lot of manual work that I need to do for Seblogging. If people simply "pinged" a common channel I would not need to sift through all the stuff that is getting published on the individual Weblogs. This is especially the case with less focused Weblogs where only now and then a posts refers to educational applications of personal Webpublishing and Weblogging...

2:42:08 PM    

We have over 130 people (teachers and students) posting on our various pMachine weblogs, I've been struggling to find a useful way to get individual RSS feeds from my class weblogs. The one xml file our blogs spit out is daunting to filter through since it shows posts from all our sites. I tried the Radio Tools RSS Distiller Pat mentioned. I managed to create separate feeds from my project site and my class sites. I don't have to skim through a mile long list of posts. [Joe Luft]

Joe is obviously getting some promising results. I haven't played much with RSS Distiller but since a couple of months I receive my daily Dilbert dosis via RSS Distiller right in my NewsAggregator...

4:42:56 AM    

Self- Organization. A nice introduction to self-organization by a physicist, Cosma Rohilla Shalizi.

"Something is self-organizing if, left to itself, it tends to become more organized. This is an unusual, indeed quite counter-intuitive property: we expect that, left to themselves, things get messy, and that when we encounter a very high degree of order, or an increase in order, something, someone, or at least some peculiar thing, is responsible. .. But we now know of many instances where this expectation is simply wrong, of things which can start in a highly random state and, without being shaped from the outside, become more and more organized. Thus self-organization, which I find to be one of the most interesting concepts in modern science --- if also one of the most nebulous, because the ideas of organization, pattern, order and so forth are, as used normally, quite vague."

His Ph.D. thesis was about quantifying self-organization. The complexity of a process can apparently be meansured by how much information is needed to predict its future behavior. So, a process is self-organizing if its complexity is found to increase, while the input is either constant or random. He also gives some history of the concept of self-organization:

"The idea that the dynamics of a system can tend, of themselves, to make it more orderly, is very old. The first statement of it (naturally, a clear and distinct one) that I can find is by Descartes, in the fifth part of his Discourse on Method, where he presents it hypothetically, as something God could have arranged to have happen, if He hadn't wanted to create everything Himself. Descartes elaborated on the idea at great length in a book called Le Monde, which he never published during his life, for obvious reasons."

more > [Ming's Meta Mechanics]

Lots of good links and book references in there.

Related theoretical topics: biological order; complexity theory; complexity measures; computational mechanics; cybernetics< /a>; non-linear dynamics; statistical mechanics

Probably connected somehow: adaptation [But self-organization does not imply any kind of adaptation]; design principles (cf. Christopher Alexander, Herbert Simon); the Russell-Whitehead notion of "structure"; simulation and modelling

 Cosma will definitely make it to my sidebar. [Sebastien Paquet]

Very nice post from Sebastien. Let me add some words by Ernst von Glasersfeld here:

From the constructivist perspective, "learning" is the product of self-organization. Piaget's dictum "intelligence organizes the world by organizing itself" (1937, p.311) was a challenge to direct the attention of psychologists to the question of how the rational mind organizes experience and to design a model of this process. His scheme theory, as I outlined it above, is an attempt to answer part of that question. It can be summarized in the statement: Knowledge is never acquired passively, because novelty cannot be handled except through assimilation to a cognitive structure the experiencing subject already has. Indeed, the subject does not perceive an experience as novel until it generates a perturbation relative to some expected result. Only at that point the experience may lead to an accommodation and thus to a novel conceptual structure that re-establishes a relative equilibrium. In this context, it is necessary to emphasize that the most frequent source of perturbations for the developing cognitive subject is the interaction with others... [Ernst von Glasersfeld]

2:42:08 AM    

..., this is the traditional teacher-student relationship: a teacher has knowledge of a certain subject, and has the responsibility to bring their students along to realize their own understanding of that knowledge. Although not unique to the Information Age, the situation must be exacerbated by the famous over-abundance of information available to us on the Web. How do teachers deal with this? In the workshop example, I try to use a just-in-time model: identify the target audience, consider what is important to them, and frame the workshop that way, leaving out information that is not immediately relevant (unless it is raised in questions or discussion).

Maybe it shouldn't be knowledge vs. information at all. Maybe it's a question of what constitutes knowledge in the Information Age, or what happens to our idea of knowledge in the Information Age.

I'm trying on something new here, so I'm sure this is kind of muddled. Does this make sense at all? Is "knowledge vs. information" just an empty buzzword? Or is this just an old question asked in a different way? [Sarah Lohnes]

Hmmm... knowlege requires a knower...and has an adaptive function... information essentially is contextualized data... not sure if I really understand Sarah's statement...

2:42:07 AM