Unfollow a social media whore today
Keith Casey: Last week I noticed the current flood of traffic on my Twitter stream… to the point where I was missing the Tweets of people whom I like and enjoy conversing with. I spent 30 minutes or so and went through the 700+ people I was following on Twitter and removed almost everyone that described themselves as a “social media marketer” or an “online marketer”
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But the result was amazing. The clutter on my feed disappeared. I suddenly saw the useful Tweets and was able to engage with friends and contacts all over the place. Suddenly, I wasn’t so overwhelmed.
I’m tempted to write a piece of software that you can use to automatically unfollow anyone that has the words “social media”, “marketer” or “SEO” in their biography. Just like there are Bayesian spam filters and even now the excellent Stupidfilter, I think that similar filters needs to be built to remove all the social media marketing noise from blogs and Twitter.
Apple are banning stupid emoticon apps from the iPhone App Store. Bad for the kawaii-loving teenagers. Good for everybody else’s sanity.
Learning objects: gotta catch ‘em all!
I’ve been following a lot more of the discussions around universities, education and Web technology recently. One of the buzzwords that’s been going around for a while is this idea of the learning object. A learning object is supposed to be a small instructional component that can be reused widely and often, and delivered electronically, possibly also specifically designed to promote learning through hands-on interaction
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The idea is that one can take a variety of “content items” - text and media - and collect them together into an information object - which are assembled concepts, facts, principles, processes, procedures - and then attach to them one learning objective, and then one transfers a collection of these learning objects together as a lesson. A course, like, say, “Introduction to eighteenth century art” consists of the set of all the reusable learning objects that have been transferred to the student. One can collect all of these learning objects together into some kind of Learning Management System.
To become an expert on eighteenth-century art, one simply needs to locate and collect all the eighteenth-century art learning objects and load them into one’s personal Knowledge Management System! I have this strange vision of Socrates discussing governance with Thrasymachus and Glaucon. Socrates first asks his interlocutors to collect the individual content items in support of their position and assemble them into learning objectives with clearly defined learning outcomes drawn from the learning outcomes guidelines (hidden up in the Formal heaven that Plato willed into being, or in the mind of Zeus or transcribed from the Oracle), and then ensure those learning objects are carefully ordered before transferring them to the interlocuters. I’m trying to figure out exactly what the Sermon on the Mount or “I Have a Dream” would be like after being transposed into a learning object.
Learning objects seem to be little more than the Pokemon cards of learning. Just as raising a pet is a little bit more complex than collecting some Pokemon cards, learning seems to be something slightly more complex than simply the collection of learning objects. Of course, I do collect learning objects: I have a shelf full of books, a hard drive filled with PDFs and a few hundred DVDs filled with video. But the learning object theory seems to make the process of learning nothing more than loading in this object and clicking on through.
Imagine a university built strictly around Learning Objects. Imagine if people actually took it seriously, and it became the way that things were taught. Can you honestly imagine anyone with a critical intellect appearing from such a place? I can’t. Learning Objects seems to be predicated on a siplistic idea of education - education is a set of boxes you just open, rather than being a rather complicated process where one goes back and forth over the fundamentals, rethinking and re-reading, getting lost in more and more levels of the hermeneutic circle, trying to avoid being tripped up by complexity, having one’s mental models shaken up on a daily basis, being led off down the garden path, flailing around in confusion and finally needing to take a damn aspirin to regain control.
Call me conservative or reactionary or whatever you will, but my favourite learning objects are books. The opening scenes of the first episode of Read or Die OVA seem fairly appropriate here.
