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Soft things, hard things and invisible elephants
Owner: Jon Dron
Group members: 7
Description:
This is a space to support Jon Dron's contribution to the #change11 MOOC (Massive Open Online Course).
Brief description: Jon Dron's contribution to #change11. <h1><a href="http://tinyurl.com/7xr4y8h"> Main page</a></h1>
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Website: http://change.mooc.ca/week11.htm
Elephants in the room
How should we go about researching the things that have nothing to do with technology - the passion, artistry, imagination and caring of a teacher, for example?
The Goldilocks effect
The easiest and most efficient way of making technologies softer or harder is to assemble hard pieces, adding to make things softer or replacing to make them harder. But what's the best way to do that? What kind of glue is needed? Is an aggregator like grssHopper the answer? Or mashup technologies? Or manual assembly like rhizomes? Or many pieces, loosely joined? And how do we know the right amount of softness of hardness needed in technologies for a given learning trajectory? What is 'just right', not too hard and not too soft, and how do we go about getting there?
An Interview with W. Brian Arthur
By Jon Dron 14 November 2011 @ 12:29pmwww.americanscientist.org - Brian Arthur talks about his great book, 'The Nature of Technology', and summarises some of the main points. Some great stuff about the evolution of technology, particularly how it evolves through assembly, a process of combination and recombination.Any color you like, as long as it is Blackboard
By Jon Dron 23 November 2011 @ 12:38pmjondron.athabascau.ca - I mentioned this during my talk for #Change11 today. It includes a survey I did of courses at the University of Brighton in 2005/6 where virtually all followed the default of providing announcements as the point of entry to the course, despite the...Audio recording of the live session, Wednesday 23 Nov
By Jon Dron 23 November 2011 @ 12:41pmchange.mooc.ca - A recording of the live session for soft things, hard things and invisible elephantsChange MOOC home page
By Jon Dron 8 November 2011 @ 2:05amchange.mooc.ca - The home site for the change11 MOOCDomesticated Cyborgs – Kevin Kelly
By Jon Dron 7 December 2011 @ 12:02pmquietbabylon.com - A great little article by Kevin Kelly about our cyborg nature - that we create our technologies and they create us. Only a slight variant on an old theme that can be found in Dewey, Churchill and McLuhan amongst many others but, as is often the...Kevin Kelly on Immortal Technologies
By Jon Dron 8 November 2011 @ 6:01amwww.kk.org - Wonderful post on how technologies never really die. This means that, in the grand scheme of things, the adjacent possible keeps expanding at an accelerating rate.Kevin Kelly on why the impossible happens more often
By Jon Dron 8 November 2011 @ 6:04amwww.kk.org - This is a great post on how the expansion of the adjacent possible is leading us to a richer and more connected world of ever more marvellous invention and the emergence of structures at a collective level that open up still further...Learning analytics, soft and hard
By Jon Dron 8 November 2011 @ 5:58amwww.slideshare.net - A presentation for LAK11, another MOOC, talking about potential issues relating to soft and hard learning analyticsOrchestrating soft and hard technologies
By Jon Dron 8 November 2011 @ 5:57amwww.slideshare.net - A SlideShare presentation about ways to build technologies for learningThe Adjacent Possible
By Jon Dron 8 November 2011 @ 6:24amwww.edge.org - A talk by Stuart Kauffman in which he explains some of his thinking on the adjacent possible. His book 'Investigations' covers a great deal more of this territory at a mind-bending depth that leaves me floundering from time to time but the basic...
Structure, behaviour and wood
By Jon Dron November 21, 2011 - 10:35am Comments (2)Churchill said 'we shape our dwellings and afterwards our dwellings shape our lives', a sentiment echoed by McLuhan whose take on it was 'we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us'. That's the starting point for the theme for my bit of...More woody stuff - how a focus on a tool can blind us to the technology it is a part of
By Jon Dron November 22, 2011 - 11:38amThe blog post for day 2 of my week at the Change11 MOOC... Yesterday I made a quick and dirty four-minute video in which I explore the ways that a stick can become a technology because of how it can be combined with soft processes and used...So, we had this meeting and talked about soft and hard things...
By Jon Dron November 23, 2011 - 1:05pm Comments (3)I finished the first synchronous sesssion for my bit of the #change MOOC a little while ago. Self referentially, I was a victim of a hard technology of my own devising, a set of slides that formed the background to my talk that, as I talked through...Getting to the Goldilocks spot on the soft-hard continuum
By Jon Dron November 24, 2011 - 4:14pmThere are very few technologies that are wholly hard or wholly soft, at least when viewed as an assembly. It is the proportion of soft/hard parts that make a particular assembly softer or harder. That's how come replacement can make things harder...And so it ends...
By Jon Dron November 25, 2011 - 10:05pm Comments (8)Well, actually, I'm very happy to continue the conversation and develop this group space if anyone is interested. However, we are reaching the end of my week at the Change11 MOOC so this is probably the last post in this space for a while, back to...
Soft things, hard things and invisible elephants
Jon Dron's contribution to #change11.
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