Blogging about my IMI Master

Today I attended a Colloquium with the topic “live and learn within the digital climate change” (I translated it to english, hope the translation is not too bad). The session was live streamed via ustream. At the moment I am not sure if there will be a recording available of this colloquium online, but will add a link if I find it.

Martin Lindner went through the history of web and learning, from about the 60ties I would say, up to today. He told a few stories of his life which are bound together with some of the historical events. His descriptions showed already that there is a change and will be more changes to come in the future.
I would wrap up the essence of his presentation the way that information were once large and tought in even larger buildings but this will change. Information is now a quite small piece and you will consume it everywhere.
Through this change in information size a different strukture for teaching information has to be found.

Personally, if I take a look at the technical environments today I agree that teaching will change, but I have no idea how it will change.
I hope handling of information sources will change as well. This was one though I got on my way home. …If I am surfing on the web I read many short texts, remember the information I need and go to the next page. Now I get to the problem here, which I encountered during my bachelor thesis. What happens if I use some way text pieces I only remembered kind of unintentionally in my thesis? I did not copy paste that but remembered this tiny piece of information I once read somewhere and use this now. That gave me some nightmares, as you may know, usually in a thesis you have to write down the sources you use information from. I think it makes no sense to write down each webpage which you ever read, otherwise I would not get finished with writing Seeing my surfing behaviour and information flow and on the other hand this prerequisite I hope that handling of information sources and intellectual property rights will change.

There was another question I found really interesting and which I thought through on my way home which was about the depth of learning. If learning will get to the same depth if there are so many small information pieces flying around on the web. Part of Martin Lindners answer was “Das Web ist tief – und entsteht durch eine Übereinanderlagerung von Schichten”, copied from evideo twitter (Translation: The web is deep – and it emerges through overlapping layers. ) I think thats nicely put and I personally want to add, that depth might be the same or even better as when getting large chunks of information. With large information chunks you will perhaps so much bored, that you drop the topic. With small information pieces it is easier for you to process them and move around in the information pieces. You will be more interested in topics as it is the direction you want to follow and you will be more eager to commit yourself to a topic whereas when you are forced through information you do not like your motivation curve will drop.

OK,these are my two cents and enough for today. Please feel free to comment or discuss with me

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 at 11:20 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.