Optimism and pessimism are kind of like spectator sports: things are getting better – or – things are getting worse. Passive hope is wishing or believing things will turn out ok. Potent hope, in contrast, is active, intentional, and grounded in the positive potential we can observe in people and the world. When we have potent hope, we don’t claim to know what will happen, but we do claim good reason to take action and find rich meaning in our lives. This post concludes with more than two dozen inspiring quotes about potent hope.
Dear friends,
Given the number of discouraging trends in the world, it is easy to feel hopeless and pessimistic. So I want to take a few moments to look at these very human feelings – optimism and pessimism, hope and hopelessness.
Years ago I did a report for a sci-tech database publisher. I wrote up the results of a number of on site visits at research universities. I reported that there was no mechanism to preserve researchers’ data. The reason was pretty obvious: Research facilities at universities are less important than sports teams, business activities, and fund raising. When the researcher moved on, the data just sat somewhere until there was a housecleaning or a hard drive wiped. If financial support disappeared, none of the facilities I visited had an old school records management system in place. If a researcher took the data with him or her, those data may or may not have been managed in a thoughtful way. On to the next grant, tally ho.
For a peer-to-peer approach to collective intelligence
It’s eight a.m. on a Monday morning in 2007. In the Arcueil examination centre, a thousand heads crane with difficulty over wooden desks that are damaged by pens scratching across thin sheets of paper. Railway lines surround the enclave; trains make the building shudder rhythmically; the heads lookup for a minute, distracted, then return to concentrate on the studious, urgent writing of their paper. Invigilators wander the rows, imperturbable, watching every head that turns, every hand hiding in jean pockets. Only the noise of crumpled paper can be heard and, when this fades away, the room is deathly silent. A thousand pupils have been gathered here for six hours to answer a difficult question. All interaction with their peers is forbidden and, if an unexpected memory lapse should halt their train of thought, they cannot consult their notes. The essays produced by the pupils will sink into oblivion, stored in a dedicated hanger that has housed examination papers for many generations.
A few years later, I’m facilitating an all-day workshop in a large white room with some twenty computers. Around me, groups of pupils talk, laugh and see-saw between a sheet of drawing paper and the computer screen. Some isolate themselves to code, others are hunched over a 3D printer producing an open source design that they’ve just downloaded. The pupils consult their teachers, ask advice from the experts present in the room and share their progress with the others. Some momentarily leave their own group to help their friends in a competing group. The workshop involves “remixing” artistic works that have come into the public domain or are open source. No assessment is planned; the reaction of those present is the only measure of the quality of their production. Watching them, I think that they are extremely lucky to be able to draw freely from all these wells of existing knowledge: their own intelligence, that of their peers and teachers, virtually everything that humanity has produced and, above all, the global knowledge which is within easy reach. At the end of the workshop, we find their work surprising and original and the quality exceeds all our expectations. Our doubts about the pupils’ capacity to open up the raw materials and extract a structured form from them were unfounded. Now they make us smile.
We are connected to an infinite number of individuals, organisations and machines. In my view, the cooperation of all of these entities, regardless of the nature of their intelligence, is what defines collective intelligence
Infopolicy – Henrik Brändén: Today’s technology shift has many parallels with the arrivals of mass-printed books at universities. At the time, teachers at universities were horrified that the availability of books undermined their ability to charge students for reading aloud. There is something to learn from history here.
In the most recent issue of Respons, Peter Josephson writes about the university crisis right after the turn of the century in 1800. Developments in information technology had kept an enormous pace: the printing costs had fallen, and an increasing amount of teaching material was available in books. This had created a crisis for teachers at universities. As far as anybody could remember, they had held lectures where they had read aloud from some book or manuscript of their own, where students had had to pay a small admissions fee to the lectures. But apparently, disrespectful students had started to skip those lectures – they would sit down in libraries to read instead.
Only four percent complete massive open online courses: setback or growing pains?
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have relatively few active users, and user engagement falls off dramatically, especially after the first one to two weeks weeks of a course. Ultimately, only a handful of users persist to the course end.
That's the gist of a recent study from a University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) study. The study's authors, Laura Perna and Alan Ruby, analyzed the movement of a million users through sixteen Coursera courses offered by the University of Pennsylvania from June 2012 to June 2013.
