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From a special section of the International Journal of Communication -- Howard
"Aristotle could write that we ascribe “universal education to one who in his own individual person is thus critical in all or nearly all branches of knowledge, and not to one who has a like ability merely in some special subject.” Today nobody can know about everything. The flow of information so far exceeds what anyone can observe, learn, or appreciate that we must look at methods of compression, summarization, and filtering. These methods must achieve reductions of a million to one to cope with what is now routine. Fortunately, technology is making this possible." 
I'm glad to see Google providing more material about how to use search effectively -- Howard "Web search can be a remarkable tool for students, and a bit of instruction in how to search for academic sources will help your students become critical thinkers and independent learners. With the materials on this site, you can help your students become skilled searchers- whether they're just starting out with search, or ready for more advanced training." 
You can use this feeds directory to determine the RSS feeds of any of your favorite online service be it Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or something else. 
The history professor and author of Too Much to Know tells us what researchers have been discovering about how earlier human societies collected, organised and used information...
Amazing read and historical perspective about transmission. Knowledge and information are actually very different concept :
"This book doesn’t actually focus on the term information but it talks about the institutions that made knowledge possible. Its first volume runs “From Gutenberg to Diderot" – in other words, mid-15th to mid-18th century. A second volume stretches “From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia”, from the mid-18th century to the 21st century. Peter Burke is a great cultural historian who has worked on many different aspects of the transmission of knowledge – including, for example, how historians worked, or how ideas about good behaviour at court were transmitted. In this synthetic pair of books he explores the question: What were the institutions that were collecting, classifying, sorting and disseminating information?"
In our world now where information is everywhere, how you make sure that knowledge is still accessible ? Curation is now not only a great means to express yourself but also an obvious path to become a gatekeeper and a qualitative filter.
This article gives an awesome perspective on an universal and eternal inspiring mission : transmission.
Via axelletess 
Looks like a more sociable version of Personal Brain -- mindmapping plus communication. "DeepaMehta is a software platform for knowledge workers. The special feature of DeepaMehta is the situation-centered user interface: information belonging to one working context is -- together with its content associations -- displayed and edited in a single window. Whether it is text, images, documents, emails, websites, events or for example contacts." 
"SweetSearch is a Search Engine for Students. It searches only the 35,000 Web sites that our staff of research experts and librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved when creating the content on findingDulcinea. We constantly evaluate our search results and "fine-tune" them, by increasing the ranking of Web sites from organizations such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS and university Web sites. SweetSearch helps students find outstanding information, faster. It enables them to determine the most relevant results from a list of credible resources, and makes it much easier for them to find primary sources. We exclude not only obvious spam sites, but also marginal sites that read well, but lack academic or journalistic rigor. As importantly, the very best Web sites that are often buried on other search engines appear on the first page of SweetSearch results." 
A little technically complicated to install, but this filter is an example of the kind of crap-detection/information-evaluation filters that the infotentive will be able to use as filter-tech becomes more user-friendly -- Howard
"With the help of del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, we used a recommendation algorithm to score every blog on Memeorandum based on their linking activity in the last three months. Then I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull that information out of Google Spreadsheets, and colorize Memeorandum on-the-fly. Left-leaning blogs are blue and right-leaning blogs are red, with darker colors representing strong biases. Check out the screenshot below, and install the Greasemonkey script or standalone Firefox extension to try it yourself." 
"In his marvelously insightful and useful new book Net Smart: How to Thrive on Line, Howard Rheingold tells the story of what may the be world's first email interruption. David Levy, formerly a researcher at the legendary PARC think tank in Palo Alto, was demonstrating how the very first email interface worked when a new email happened to come in. He switch from demonstrating to answering the email, thus ushering in (if you believe some pundits) The End of Civilization As We Know It. This delightful story goes on. Now a professor at the University of Washington, Levy teaches a class called "Information and Contemplation." Like so many digital innovators I work with, Levy is concerned with deep breathing, mindfulness, and introspection. Rather than that being in contradiction to email interruption or compensation for what Rheingold calls "our always-on lives," mindfulness, according to Levy, is a response to attention overload not just for a digital age but for a modern age in which just about everything we do, for the last two hundred or so years, has come time-stamped." 
"The Twitter strip search tool. We strip out the noise by delivering realtime and historical search results only from the people you follow." "We believe it's more like serving your delicious and fresh cup of morning coffee just the way you like it. That's why we built Scoopinion, a news service that aggregates honestly. We only serve stories that are actually read, and read well. We call it crowdcuration. It's fresh, tasty and the best way to start your morning. It's also slightly magical. Scoopinion curates stories based on how well they are received by our editor community — that is, you and our users. For a story to enter Scoopinion, an editor just has to find it online, and read it. Our browser app takes care of the rest." 
"In November 2009, boyd traveled to New York City to deliver what she expected to be a major address at the Web 2.0 Expo, one of the year’s most important gatherings of Internet professionals. Her topic was what she terms “living in the stream,” or how not to drown in the flood of information that comes at us all the time. Teens, she believes, are especially good at this. The most web-savvy of them manage to stay open to all the digital stuff without having to process everything. They take what they can handle and remain untroubled that much may elude their grasp. It’s a kind of cyber-Zen. “The goal is . . . to be peripherally aware of information as it flows by, grabbing it at the right moment, when it is most relevant and valuable, entertaining or insightful,” she said at the Expo. “It is about a sense of alignment, of being aligned with information.” She talked about the high some Twitter users get “feeling as though they are living and breathing with the world around them, peripherally aware and in tune, adding content to the stream and grabbing it when appropriate.”" 
"Groofer works by filtering, matching, and presenting what’s relevant in your in your news and blog stream, based on the collective smarts of your work groups." 
Robin Good: "Prismatic is a news discovery tool allowing you to select and specify the "interests" and topics on which you want to be kept up-to-date.
Once configured Prismatic offers a well laid out web-based magazine format in which you can pick and look at any of your preferred news topics.
Prismatic automatically provides detailed information about each news story it will present you, including the number of times it has already been shared and the relevant tags associated to it.
Initially Prismatic connects to your main social networks (FB and Twitter) to learn about your interests and then gradually learns with your help what kind of content you are most interested in.
Prismatic has two ways to discover new interests: search and links to related feeds. Search can find topic and publisher feeds or you can create a new feed from a query. Each story has links to related feeds, which you can follow to explore new interests.
Check out more News Discovery Tools here: https://www.mindmeister.com/134760952 ;
Free to use.
Try it out now: http://getprismatic.com " Via Robin Good |
Linda Stone was one of the primary sources for my book, http://www.rheingold.com/netsmart -- Howard
"Eighty percent of us seem to have it. I broke the story about it in early 2008 on the Huffington Post, and called the phenomenon, "email apnea." Later in 2008, in talks and interviews, I referred to it interchangeably as "email apnea" and also, as "screen apnea." Definition: Shallow breathing or breath holding while doing email, or while working or playing in front of a screen. While we have a greater tendency toward email apnea or screen apnea, while doing email and texting on laptops and smartphones, we are at risk for breath holding or shallow breathing in front of any screen, any time. Not only does this increase stress levels, it impacts our attitude, our sense of emotional well-being, and our ability to work effectively." 
If sleep is essential to processing information we receive during the day, we probably need to make sure we have sufficient media-free downtime during our waking hours in order to effectively assimilate today's massive incoming infostreams. -- Howard
"In the midst of this multimedia blitzkrieg, the importance of mindfulness and focused attention is rising. If we can't cultivate mindfulness and focused attention while sitting quietly in a room, then how can we expect to bring these qualities of mind into turbulent circumstances -- both on and offline? FRACTURED ATTENTION, FRACTURED MIND At a company known for a hard-driving culture, a seven-week course in mindfulness techniques is giving employees a better way to cope. Hootsuite, the social media dashboard, has added five new apps specifically aimed at the enterprise: Mailchimp email campaign management tool, Chime.in for brands to build communities, an RSS reader, and more -- Howard "Newsle finds articles about you, your friends and colleagues, and anyone else you care about and notifies you minutes or hours after they're published." 
Panes is an iPad app that lets you easily multitask between Twitter, Facebook, RSS, the web, and more. All of your widgets can be found at the bottom of the screen, like a dock, so that the one you want to switch too is literally just a tap away. 
I use mindmaps with my students so they can literally see the information they read in the texts in a visual, connected, lateral form. "In a lab in Sussex a group of people have had their brainwaves scanned while completing a series of tasks, individually and in groups, to see if data visualisation - presenting information visually, in this case a series of mind maps - can help. The results showed that when tasks were presented visually rather than using traditional text-based software applications, individuals used around 20% less cognitive resources. In other words, their brains were working a lot less hard. As a result, they performed more efficiently, and could remember more of the information when asked later. Working in groups, they used 10% less mental resources." "Email as a system is not broken, but we, through our email behaviors, are broken. Nearly all of the articles written recently about fixing email have concentrated on technology and building a better client or implementing the specs more closely or bringing two systems together. These are all great ideas and have a ton of value, but they will not fix the inherent issue that people are experiencing with email, but which most articles fail to articulate: we think email is broken because we are overwhelmed by it and get less real work done because of it." 
"The problem of how to find relevant content on the web has yet to be solved on a mass scale. You’ve got cyborg news aggregators like Techmeme and Google news and social aggregators like Reddit and Digg competing with Twitter and the Facebook Newsfeed, all of them trying to get you the news that you want to know, as fast as possible. The Seattle-based Wavii, which has been in super stealth mode until now, takes a different approach to the problem. The startup uses natural language processing and machine learning to parse far corners of the web and bring users personalized content based on their Facebook Likes and feedback. Upon entering Wavii via Facebook Connect, you are asked to pick a combination of 12 topics that pertain to you and rinse, repeat. Wavii picks these initial interests by processing your Facebook Likes, and adjusts itself as you give it more data." 
"Tired of being buried in email? Lighten the load and reclaim your time! Just follow these easy steps to organize and automate your inbox!" 
"The public has access to information in unprecedented ways. Unfortunately, it has access to good information and access to shitty information. For me, the challenge is: How do you create media literacy? How do you get people to critically engage the news that’s available? These are issues we need to address, but the availability of information is still amazing. And I think that’s part of what’s so terrifying to people, that there’s so much information out there.
More information does not make a more informed population. We need to think about what it actually means to create a more informed society. We’re a long way away from that. But I don’t have some nostalgic lust for the past, because I don’t think we’ve ever been truly informed." 
The best news and content discovery tools available as selected and listed by Robin Good - updated monthly... |
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