The most important and paradoxical fact shaping the future of online learning is this: A brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard drives waiting to be filled with data. People learn from people they love and remember the things that arouse emotion. If you think about how learning actually happens, you can discern many different processes. There is absorbing information. There is reflecting upon information as you reread it and think about it. There is scrambling information as you test it in discussion or try to mesh it with contradictory information. Finally there is synthesis, as you try to organize what you have learned into an argument or a paper. Online education mostly helps students with Step 1. As Richard A. DeMillo of Georgia Tech has argued, it turns transmitting knowledge into a commodity that is cheap and globally available. But it also compels colleges to focus on the rest of the learning process, which is where the real value lies.

- “The Campus Tsunami/a>” by David Brooks, May 3, 2012.
Originally published by The New York Times.

There are currently two major revolutions occurring: the enlightenment of man and the awakening of computers. What’s incredible is that they are intertwined in their quest for information and knowledge. The more powerful computers become, the easier it is for man to access information. The better information we have, the better computers we make, and so on.

We have no way of knowing precisely what will happen with our brains. We may lose all feelings, or we might gain extra-human senses that allow for beauty to be not only recognized, but lived within.

It’s looking ahead that allows us to create effective constructs for living. In a time where many things are uncertain, we must individually live with an openness to change in order to feel secure in our lives. Learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

- “Zach Puchtel: The Future Is No Place for Fear” by Zach Puchtel, May 7, 2012.
Originally posted by The Huffington Post.

The next wave of digital products won’t just be about archiving the web; they’ll be about destroying the archive.

- “Forget About It: Making the Internet More Like Our Brains” by Megan Garber, May 8 2012.
Originally published by The Atlantic.

The importance of learning to code isn’t so that everyone will write code, and bury the world under billions of lines of badly conceived Python, Java, and Ruby. The importance of code is that it’s a part of the world we live in. I’ve had enough of legislators who think the Internet is about tubes, who haven’t the slightest idea about legitimate uses for file transfer utilities, and no concept at all about what privacy (and the invasion of privacy) might mean in an online space. I’ve had enough of patent inspectors who approve patents for which prior art has existed for decades. And I’ve had enough of judges making rulings after listening to lawyers arguing about technologies they don’t understand. Learning to code won’t solve these problems, but coding does force engagement with technology on a level other than pure ignorance. Coding is a part of cultural competence, even if you never do it professionally. Alsup is a modern hero.

- “A federal judge learned to code” by Mike Loukides, May 16, 2012.
Originally posted to O’Reilly Radar.

The internet is a beast, uncivil by corporal standards, rudely honest in its capacity to include any idea the mind can think of — and any voice, no matter how small, can ring loud in the internet’s ear.

The internet is not a country; it is not a belief system; it is not a government. It belongs to everyone, and no one, and by virtue of its existence, the internet has broken the bond of routine social contracts, conditioning our prejudiced perception of evolution and God. We are now on the path to a new human, our more ethereal counterpart…the Electro Sapien or e-sapien.

How the future supremacy of the Electro Sapien will play out is speculative, at best. Competing themes on how we came to be homo sapien, “modern man,” are still lost in interpretation. What we can infer, by way of all theories on the origin of the homo sapien — from the Aquatic Ape theory to unknown breakaway members of some homo antecessor-group, or a Homo Heidelbergensis / Homo Sapien tryst — is that many possibilities existed, and one survived.
Likewise, with over seven billion human beings living today, it is rational to assume that small, pre-Electro Sapien groups or types, directed by the species’ self-organisation, have begun to break away from the whole.

To establish who these new electro-types are, and why they will survive to establish the next level of species’ expansion, involves the discomfort of disputing or questioning the future validity of traditional interpretations of human purpose.

- “The Internet Messiah Has Arrived” by Thomas Easley, May 11, 2012.
Originally posted to Big Think.

Whilst the pain of finding a parking space will dissipate into the cloud, the cloud will hide other, less apparent costs. The concepts of the “smart” car, “smart” parking and payment systems, and “smart” cities are interesting enough. But all are really just a smoke screen for a much deeper set of political and even philosophical issues that will impact urban dwellers in the near future, especially as more than half’s the world’s population will soon be living in cities. That set of issues centers around the delicate dance between public and private ownership of space, both in the cloud and on the ground.

- “The Networked Urban Environment” by Jan Chipchase, May 3, 2012.

So when digital evangelists prognosticate about the future of publishing, as they love to do, and about what “needs” to go away, serious nonfiction is now one of the first things I think about. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and want to read more of it and notice twentysomethings have little perceived patience for weighty tomes. Maybe it’s because I’d rather have pragmatic conversations about what categories are best suited to digital — genre fiction obviously, certain commercial strains of literary fiction, basically any book that needs to have a completed manuscript done before it’s shopped around, or can be finished very quickly post-proposal — and which ones won’t be. Maybe it’s because the very institutions that support serious nonfiction are themselves in more financial trouble than they used to be.

- “Serious Nonfiction in the Digital Age” by Sarah Weinman, May 10, 2012.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday and lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

There are currently two major revolutions occurring: the enlightenment of man and the awakening of computers.

What’s incredible is that they are intertwined in their quest for information and knowledge. The more powerful computers become, the easier it is for man to access information. The better information we have, the better computers we make, and so on. [...]

1) We have no way of knowing precisely what will happen with our brains. We may lose all feelings, or we might gain extra-human senses that allow for beauty to be not only recognized, but lived within. [...]

It’s looking ahead that allows us to create effective constructs for living. In a time where many things are uncertain, we must individually live with an openness to change in order to feel secure in our lives. Learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.

- “The Future Is No Place for Fear” by Zach Puchtel, May 7, 2012.

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1848.

In many ways, Facebook’s story is the most modern example of the American dream gone right. Some would argue that those who have gotten rich from the company should pay some dues back into the system that enabled that success. As billionaire Mark Cuban has written on his blog, the ‘most patriotic thing you can do’ is ‘bust your ass and get rich. Make a boatload of money. Pay your taxes.

“Just In Time For A Facebook IPO Tax Break, Eduardo Saverin Renounces U.S. Citizenship” by Colleen Taylor, May 11, 2012. Quoting “The Most Patriotic Thing You Can Do” by Mark Cuban, September 19, 2012.

In the future, not getting any imagery or story line or content is going to be the equivalent of silence because people are so filled up now with streaming video. Paying attention to anything will be the missing commodity in future life. You think you’ll miss nothing, but you’ll probably miss everything.

- Ed Schlossberg, as quoted in “Silence Is Golden” by Maureen Dowd, December 6, 2011.
Originally published by The New York Times.

Humans have been co-evolving with their technologies since the dawn of prehistory, when tool making and meat eating co-evolved with brain development and social complexity. What is different now is that we have moved beyond external technological interventions to transform ourselves from the inside out—even as we also remake the Earth system itself. Coping with this new reality means liberating ourselves from such categories as “human,” “technological,” and “natural” to embrace a new transhuman techno-human relationship.

- Brad Allenby in “You Want the Future? You Can’t Handle the Future!,” May 2, 2012.
Originally posted to 33rd Square.

The truth is that everything you do changes your brain. Everything. Every little thought or experience plays a role in the constant wiring and rewiring of your neural networks. So there is no escape. Yes, the internet is rewiring your brain. But so is watching television. And having a cup of tea. Or not having a cup of tea. Or thinking about the washing on Tuesdays. Your life, however you live it, leaves traces in the brain. [...]

In the absence of any substantial evidence, I would hazard a guess that the majority of internet use is either information search or communication, using email and social media. If this is so, using the internet should affect our brains so that we are better at these things. Probably this is already happening, part of a general cultural change which involves us getting better and better at dealing with abstract information.

Internet use would only be a worry if it was getting in the way of us practicing some other life skill. If Facebook stopped people seeing their friends face to face that could have a harmful effect. But the evidence suggests this is not the case. If anything, people with more active internet lives have more active “meat-space” lives. Most of us are using the internet as a compliment to other ways of communicating, not as a substitute.

So there is no magic extra risk from the internet. Like TV before it, and reading before that, it gives us a way of practicing certain things. Practice will change our brains, just like any habit. The important thing is that we are part of this process, it is not just something that happens to us.

- “Does the internet rewire your brain?” by Tom Stafford, April 24, 2012.
Originally posted to the BBC Future Blog.