Techy Learning, Mindfulness, and Philosophy

Techy Learning, Mindfulness, and Philosophy February 24, 2009

One of my major projects at The Center for Ethics these days has been coordinating and overseeing wiki learning environments. For those who have never worked in wiki, it’s a bit daunting. But after the steep learning curve faces light up as users begin to see a world of possibilities opening up.

Slowly but surely we are dumping expensive proprietary software (the most common is Blackboard) in favor of this free and virtually limitless learning environment. It has tremendous potential to bring cutting-edge research and knowledge to anyone, anywhere, so long as they have the internet.

With the rise of new technologies, however, it pays to take time to weigh the benefits against risks (in this case to time and effort put in). This is not a good application for the casual user, in my opinion, as it requires specialization in coding and understanding of how the internet works. For those with the time to put into it, it’s fantastic. For those who would only use it from time to time – the frustrations of learning and relearning the basics probably aren’t worth it.

This week, those interested in the nitty-gritty philosophy of such learning environments can get free access to the journal EPISTEME, devoted entirely to wiki.

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I’m on ‘Twitter’ now, as you’ll see on the upper right. So far so good. I’m hoping to keep my ‘tweets’ informative and thoughtful. We’ll see how that goes…
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As for other good software/hardware, I’m not using bubble.us much any more (see below), though I may in the future. It’s a bit clunky. Lots of great features, but just not as smooth flowing as one would need for a brainstorming tool (like a really pretty running shoe that weighs eight pounds).

My foxit reader continues to get much use and is wonderful. For anyone who has to work with lots of .pdf articles it is well worth the registration price.

A bit of shareware that I love is Natural Voice Reader, which I use to read texts to me. Often I skim along on the .pdf or .doc as it reads, other times I have it save to a .wav and put it on my .mp3 player for my next run to the gym.

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Maintaining mindfulness through this mental minefeild is an ongoing practice. The urge to multi-task, to jump from here to there to there and back and… Well, you know how it goes. There’s a great article on this from Bodhipaksa at wildmind. I love the quote:

To do two things at once is to do neither (Publilius Syrus)

Well. On that sentiment, I’m off to the gym – but first something to listen to….


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