The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
I will not replicate all that is at www.oss.net and to a much lesser extent, www.earth-intelligence.net, but do want to recognize a handful of extraordinary individuals by isolating their especially meritorious contributiions to the long-running debate about national intelligence reform and re-invention.
Reference: Tactical Conflict Planning and Assessment Framework (US AID in Afghanistan)
Reference: Money as Wishful Weapons System (2)
Reference: Do Working Men Rebel? Insurgency and Unemployment in Iraq and the Philippines
Reference: Commander’s Emergency Response Program in Counterinsurgency Warfare
Reference: Five-Day Counterinsurgency Program of Instruction
Phi Beta Iota: Paul Strassmann, former CIO Xerox, former Director of Defense Information in the 1990's, a retiree recall to serve as CIO for NASA under Sean O'Keefe, is one of the deeper minds thinking about all this stuff. Visit him at Strassmann, Inc.
In yesterday’s post on Personal Aggregate, Filter & Connect Strategies, I didn’t have room for one key point: one of the key filters to use is your network. When he was in Brisbane last month, George Siemans gave a talk
with an example that illustrated this perfectly.
For the past couple of years, he has run a course on Connectivism with Stephen Downes. Here is the definition of connectivism from Downes:
At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks.
As I understand it, one of the points of the course is to present students with so much data that they can’t possibly process or understand all of it as individuals. This forces them to create networks to build data-gathering and sense-making networks in order to succeed. There are more details about networks, connectivism and the course in this excellent presentation from Downes (the presentation also discusses Downes’ framework for building knowledge within complex networks, which consists of Aggregate – Remix – Repurpose – Feed Forward).
by Jeff Jarvis
A while back my PhD student Sam and I were talking, and he asked me about my RSS feed. His question was something along the lines of ‘what blogs would I have to read if I wanted to be able to make the connections that you do on your blog?’ As we talked, I realised that it didn’t matter if I gave anyone else my exact RSS feed, they wouldn’t be able to replicate my blog – and the reason for this is aggregate, filter and connect.
When I first thought about aggregate, filter and connect as a framework, it was in an attempt to explain why Amazon’s business model worked better than that of other online bookstores. The first time I talked about it in public, it was to explain how open education might work. I’ve been working on making it in to a general model of how we create something unique when we’re primarily dealing with information.
As such, it can be used to explain business models, like Amazon’s, or blogs, like mine. The more I’ve talked about the model, the more other people are picking it up, which is great. Some of these recent discusssions have gotten me thinking about how aggregate, filter and connect works at a personal level. This was really Sam’s question. I’ve talked about how Charles Darwin basically used an aggregate, filter and connect strategy, Phil Long talks about it as part of personal knowledge management, Harold Jarche has discussed it as both a general model for business and for personal knowledge management (an idea that Jack Vinson picked up, and connected to the concept of enhanced serendipity from Ross Dawson), and Glenn Wiebe used the framework to discuss both Joseph Priestly’s inventions and teaching. So we’re starting to get a bit of discussion Today I’d like to illustrate the concept by discussing how I use it.
Phi Beta Iota: Full reading recommended! These folks are redefining both the meaning and the practice of being in harmony with reality, with others, and with relevant information.
emergent by design
2009 December 21
by Venessa Miemis
1. What is Twitter?
Getting started on Twitter is like walking into a crowded room blindfolded: you know there’s somebody out there, but you’re not quite sure who they are, where they are, or why you should care.
My initial Twitter experience was kind of like this: The 46 Stages of Twitter (here’s the educator’s version)
After digging deeper, I started to see patterns in the way information was traveling, and in the connections between the people I was following. Based on those observations, this is my current opinion:
Twitter is a massive Idea & Information Exchange.
Granted, there is a TON of noise. I’m not suggesting that Twitter is a utopia where it’s possible to get 100% pure relevant content to what you want to know all the time. BUT, there is a tremendous wealth of information and human capital out there that is certainly worth exploring. Businesses are finding it’s useful for interacting with customers and gauging public opinion, educators are collaborating with one another and integrating it into their “personal learning networks (PLNs),” and individuals are using it to find out more about specific interest areas.
I read a piece recently by Howard Rheingold titled Twitter Literacy, in which he said:
Twitter is not a community, but its an ecology in which communities can emerge.
Phi Beta Iota: Tip of the hat to Who’s Who in Collective Intelligence: Pierre Levy for the tip-off. As Haiti demonstrated recently, Twitter was the only intelligence-communications system that worked in the first hours and days, followed by texting. The US Embassy and CIA fired blanks. See Journal: Haiti Rolling Directory from 12 January 2010.
