The soft skills you need to lead and succeed in a networked world. This includes: professional learning network, content curation for self-directed learning and professional development, professional learning networks, personal branding, training your attention, self-care and management, managing up and down.
The ability to take data - to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value form it, to visualize it, to communicate is giong to be a hugely important skill in the next decade - Hal Varian, Google
Why oversharing leads to information overload and makes social connections meaningless. Frictionless sharing is automated sharing.
When you take the friction out of sharing, you also remove the value.
To many people, Facebook's "frictionless" sharing doesn't enhance sharing; it makes sharing meaningless.
Frictionless sharing isn't better sharing; it's the absence of sharing. There's something about the friction, the need to work, the one-on-one contact, that makes the sharing real, not just some cyber phenomenon. If you want to tell me what you listen to, I care. But if it's just a feed in some social application that's constantly updated without your volition, why do I care? It's just another form of spam, particularly if I'm also receiving thousands of updates every day from hundreds of other friends.
So, what we're seeing isn't the expansion of our social network; it's the shrinking of what and who we care about.
Automated sharing is giving Facebook a treasure-trove of data, regardless of whether anyone cares. And Facebook will certainly find ways to monetize that data. But the bigger question is whether, by making sharing the default, we are looking at the end of social networks altogether. If a song is shared on Facebook and nobody listens to it, does it make a sound?
Why visual meetings, facilitation, note taking, and other techniques are important in an age of information overload.
Research about the problem of data-overload and how it kills productivity. This means it is important for find new ways of working in an age of big data - visualization helps because it improves our ability to retain informatino and collaborative.
Harman continues: "The way we have to work today involves assimilating information from many sources and the fact we're struggling to do this is a very real business issue - one that will only increase as we enter the big data era. We can't afford to be held back by the volume of information when the climate is so tough. Something as simple as searching for information can have a big effect at a time when businesses are looking to free up employees time to be more innovative and productive in order to stimulate the growth most are looking for in 2012."
Constant interruptions can kill your concentration and put a crimp in your productivity. And according to recent research, you are probably suffering the tyranny of interruptions much more often than you realize.
Finding focus is rapidly becoming the biggest workplace challenge. We highlight a handful of apps to help cure internet addictions and better manage your time.
A presentation at the recent Society for News Design conference imagined a future in which real-time updates about a news event would be shown in heads-up displays on picture frames, windshields and even eyeglasses.
This post answers the question: Is information overload a problem our new digital society must solve or are we changing how we learn?
It makes the case for information curation. Talks about some of the skills: skiming, "Cut-up" learning, and Mind-Hacking.
Content curation = cut up learning - goal isn't aggregation but to cut up the information to unlock trends and insights. The sense-making part. Technique made popular by William Burroughs.
Mind Hacking: Social media us to peer over the shoulders of many -- some provide no value, some do. Become adept at recognizing the difference. Dunbar is for relationships, not information discovery
Summary: Information overload may not be problem we have to solve but instead could lead to a new way of learning. skimming things does not make us shallow, it may help us be rich.
Note to Self: Need to track down the perspective from education and learning theory - related to information overload.
“The ability to understand consumers’ subconscious responses to premium web sites brings new understanding on how people engage with online and social media sites.”
In the first part of the study, NeuroFocus tested three popular website homepages: the New York Times homepage (representing a hard news and commentary experience), Yahoo’s non-personalized homepage (representing a light news and entertainment experience), and the Facebook News Feed (representing a social experience). The company then analyzed consumers’ subconscious responses to each of these sites by looking at their attention, emotional engagement, and memory retention.
The findings weren’t too shocking: The New York Times, Yahoo, and Facebook deliver substantially more engaging experiences than the average web site. Facebook was first in emotional engagement, tied for first in memory retention, and tied for second in attention. It scored highest overall. Color me unsurprised.
This makes me want to read the book and know more.
Clay Johnson seems to make an interesting parallel between the way we consume information today and the way we sometimes overconsume food. Leading to obesity and other health consequences.
Are curators the chefs of the "nouvelle cuisine" of information?
(Thanks to @Charles_Liebert for sharing it with me!)
Hi Beth & Robin,
Beth, I'm going to read the piece on "information coping skills" immediately as well. Robin, I can't wait to see what you come up with, it sounds great, would love to hear more about this......
Closing the loop here. I purchased this book and finally read it the last week. It is excellent and brilliant. Here's my review: http://www.bethkanter.org/info-diet/ The framing is great. And, there is a chapter that talks about content curation, only he calls information literacy.
We live in the Information Age. But I've never heard — nor would any sane person suggest — that we live in the Useful Information Age. The modern downpour of data is largely worthless distraction, and the sheer amount is drowning us.
"Like it or not, knowing how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is an essential ingredient to personal success in the twenty-first century. But how can we use digital media so that they make us empowered participants rather than passive receivers, grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking basket cases? In Net Smart, cyberculture expert Howard Rheingold shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully.
Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or "crap detection"), and network smarts. He explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; he examines how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; and he teaches us a lesson on networks and network building."
LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists have found a direct link between the number of friends a person has on Facebook and the size of certain brain regions, raising the possibility that using online social networks...
Infographics, animated data visualization and collaborative gathering and presentation of data represent the new frontier of information consumption cycle.
Without understanding, all this info we are producing becomes irrelevant.
Design and data visualization practices are therefore strategically critical to the emerging curation trend, as they are pivotal activities to help make sense of large amounts of data.
I really like the expression 'content-fried' in this article- it is exactly what can happen with too mush exposure to varying media sources! It also goes into the theory of infotention, as discussed in module two, as well as techniques to combat becoming overwhelmed. A very useful article!!!
For more than thirty years, Haruki Murakami has dazzled the world with his beautifully crafted words, most often in the form of novels and short stories.
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