Good post on attractors, one of the major concepts in chaos theory. “An attractor is a piece of structure of many systems that appears when you view the systems evolution over time. Speaking informally, an attractor is sort of like a black hole in the phase space: it’s a region of the space where if you get sucked into it, you’ll never leave.” Vía Stephen Downes
Refiriéndose a http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2009/06/the_magic_of_attraction_aka_at_1.php
Blogs are author-centric in a world that’s increasingly about relationships. Blogs are slanted toward me, me, me, me, me; the net is inexorably moving to us, us, us, us, us. Dialog trumps monolog.
Skills and competences for the 21st century Many commentators have discussed the difference between learning outcomes suitable for industrial and knowledge-based societies (see for instance, Gilbert, 2005; Conference Board of Canada, 1991). Indeed, in the USA The partnership for 21st century skills is an organization set up to promote the development of such skills. I usually refer to the Conference Board of Canada’s 1991 list, as it seems to have stood the test of time. These include:
* good communications skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening)
* ability to learn independently
* social skills (ethics, positive attitude, responsibility)
* teamwork skills, collaborative learning, networking
* ability to adapt to changing circumstances
* thinking skills (problem-solving; critical, logical, numerical skills)
* knowledge navigation
* entrepreneurship (taking initiative, seeing opportunities)
* digital literacy. These skills can be classified as being ‘process-oriented’ rather than ’subject-oriented’.
However, I believe it is a mistake to see these skills as being independent of the subject or topic domains in which they need to be used. For instance, problem-solving in engineering requires knowledge of physics, maths and structural qualities of materials, for instance, whereas problem-solving in medicine requires knowledge of other content areas, such as anatomy, physiology, etc. (There is substantial research that shows that skills do not automatically transfer from one content domain to another). The important issue here for education is that skills need to be embedded within a subject or knowledge domain. Thus there are implications for setting curricula (what is to be taught), teaching methodology (how it is taught or learned), and assessment (what is examined). If any one of these areas is not adequately addressed in terms of skills and competences, then teaching is likely to fail in terms of meeting 21st century learning goals.
Surowiecki señala que a fin de obtener los mejores resultados posibles, algunos criterios que deben cumplirse. Es necesario que haya diversidad de opiniones. Parece que el Internet es perfecto para ello. Acaba de leer los comentarios en un blog, Digg o vídeo de YouTube. Las opiniones de las personas deben ser independientes. Esto significaría, en el caso de un avión derribado o persona desaparecida, los investigadores sólo se sabe que las coordenadas de adivinar por los participantes. (Una vez que la búsqueda ha terminado, los usuarios predicciones podrían hacerse públicos.) Para lograr resultados de alta calidad, tiene que haber descentralización. Una vez más, queremos ser difícil encontrar un mejor ejemplo de descentralización de la World Wide Web. Y por último, tiene que haber algún mecanismo que permite la agregación de predicciones presentadas. En el caso de latitud y longitud de datos, esto se podría hacer con poco esfuerzo.
