Howard Rheingold

The study authors scanned the brains of 14 people -- seven men and seven women -- using functional MRI to measure bursts of activity in the brain. The researchers tracked the brains of the volunteers as they learned how to better use their peripheral vision through a computer game. In the game, participants learned to detect the presence or absence of a tilted letter "T" in the lower left side of a screen while they were distracted by other "T"s. It took about a week for the participants to figure out how to get to the level where their responses were correct 80 percent of the time. This is in contrast to the level of about 10 percent to 20 percent, where some participants began, Corbetta said. The game is similar to day-to-day life in the way that you have to figure out what to pay attention to as you navigate the world. "It's always a balance as to what you see and what you pay attention to," he said. - Howard Rheingold

In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about something much more fundamental: how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world. - Howard Rheingold

This course is designed to teach students how to take skillful possession of their power as citizens by becoming perceptive news consumers. Armed with critical-thinking skills, a firm grasp of relevant history, plus practical knowledge about the news media, students learn how to find the reliable information they need to make decisions, take action or make judgments. At a time when the digital revolution is spawning an unprecedented flood of information and disinformation each day, the course will seek to help students recognize the differences between news and propaganda, news and opinion, bias and fairness, assertion and verification, and evidence and inference. - Howard Rheingold

The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. - Howard Rheingold

How to decide on a short domain name? Bit.ly recommends Domai.nr, a free service for coming up with ideas. If you type in scholarly, for example, Domai.nr returns several suggestions for shortened versions of that word that also happen to work as domain names. How to purchase a domain? I’ve always liked Namecheap, but Domai.nr will suggest a variety of places to buy your domain. - Howard Rheingold

The long wait for the popular Twitter client Tweetbot to arrive on the iPad is over. The robot-themed app has a definite reputation to live up to as it has become one of the de-facto alternatives to Twitter’s increasingly newbie focused official clients. - Howard Rheingold

The point here is that literacy is culturally and politically mediated. Or to be more precise: all literacy is culturally and politically mediated - to such an extent that literacy ends up being divided and sub-divided into differentially controlled and mediated literacies. S - Howard Rheingold

Make interactive ebooks for Windows - Howard Rheingold

PDF ebook for Mindmanager - Howard Rheingold

A central challenge in crowd computing is the workflow design problem: how can we divide a complex job — for instance, editing a paper or writing a computer program — into a sequence of microtasks that can be solved by a pool of crowd workers on the web? Effective workflow design is a difficult process, requiring careful task design, extensive software development, and iterated testing with a live crowd. The complexity of workflow design limits participation in crowdsourcing marketplaces to experts willing to invest substantial time and effort, and limits the kinds of tasks that can be crowdsourced today. What if we could use the crowd to attack the workflow design problem itself? We present Turkomatic, a tool that allows requesters to collaboratively design and execute workflows in conjunction with the crowd. - Howard Rheingold

We all spend time every day looking for information in our  email, yet we know little about this refinding process. Some  users expend considerable  preparatory  effort  creating  complex folder structures to promote effective refinding.  However modern email clients provide alternative  opportunistic  methods  for  access,  such  as  search  and  threading, that promise to reduce the need to manually  prepare. - Howard Rheingold

Rerources on mindfulness - Howard Rheingold

There are regular inquiries on Twitter and in forums about free mind mapping software, so to provide answers, InformationTamers have put together this list. So here is a quick list of current software that is free or has a free option. Apps that are free for a trial-period only are excluded. If you're looking for detailed reviews though, you can pick up at no cost this eBook about free mind mapping and similar software with its very thorough analysis and examples showing the capabilities of each package. Grab your copy now! ("Free" here is as in beer, not in freedom, though some of the software listed is open source, so is free in both senses. Of course a pencil and paper is always free - or almost.) - Howard Rheingold

A mind map starts with a central topic - what the map is going to be about - as a keyword, image or phrase. That's easy. It's what comes next, the first layer of topics or keywords, that most often seems to be a barrier to those beginning mind maps, because a piece of paper or computer screen that is almost empty can sometimes give us a state of mind to match. In answer to the question "Where do I start?" or "How do I decide what topics to put in the first layer of nodes?" here are some tips: Think about how the central topic may be subdivided - these sub-categories will usually be second-level topics, though perhaps not when mind mapping for creative solutions. Don't worry about having to change this first layer later. The process of mind mapping will often change your thinking about a topic, and require changes in the map. Use a parking list for topics that seem related, but don't have a clear place in the hierarchy yet. As the map develops you will generally see where to place... - Howard Rheingold

A concept map is a way of capturing understanding of a topic on a computer screen or on paper, in a way that shows how concepts are related and helps its users visualize knowledge. A concept map lets the person or group making it see whether they have understood all the parts of the topic being mapped, and the nature of the relationship between the parts. One use of concept maps is as a learning tool for individuals acquiring understanding of a subject from outside sources. Concept maps support teachers and tutors in seeing the level of understanding that a student has achieved. They are also used as a method of capturing, realizing or formalizing knowledge. A group may have the knowledge in their heads but may never have defined it formally. Working together, members of the group can build a concept map by consensus, or can at least see clearly where points of disagreement exist that need to be resolved. Concept maps can be a great help in viewing a subject and absorbing it quickl - Howard Rheingold