Brains working towards machine consciousness

I have received an invitation to take part in a collaborative critical review of Connectivism by Roy Williams who I met through the Connectivism and Connected Learning course run by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. The project is seeking to critically assess Connectivism and examine whether there is a benefit in providing a Web 2 Learning Theory.

Over at her blog, Frances Bell has a useful critique of Connectivism underway (I believe this is also being combined into a wiki somewhere...)

I posted a comment over there:

This Is Me is an Eduserv funded project to design learning materials to help with education about forming, maintaining and securing your personal identity on the web, otherwise known as their Digital Identity (DI). The initial stages involve collecting people's stories about DI, whether cautionary, advisory, entertaining or just plain educational.

In typical Ben style, he argues why you should vote. I feel compelled by the logic. I should find time to read more of Ben's stuff too - though last time I was reading it I did wonder quite why he was using my brain rather than his own. To be fair, I suspect it may be as well as his own as I think he is somewhat more brainy than me.

Just a note to say I have finally got round to finding the settings which allow people to leave their name etc. should they so choose. I would like it if you do let me know who you are, but I have refrained from making it compulsory.

The internet provides many resources and many distractions. Of the resources, some are higher quality than others. A learner, seeking understanding, is in a similar position to a ship's captain - aiming to reach a certain goal, but without necessarily having accurate charts to plot the route, weather forecasts to predict disturbances to their route, and possibly without much idea of how the rudder works, or from where they are starting.

I have to apologise to those who have commented on this blog - until now I had thought that the server was emailing me when I got comments (it used to), but that appears not to be the case at the moment. I will try and address this, so your comments get published with the minimum of delay.

Oh, and if you would like to leave your name in the post, that would be grand :-)

I have held off posting about this, as I wanted to make sure I wasn't being too 'hot headed', but the more I see, the more I am sure there is something wrong.

Been getting:

Request took too long.

Your request took too long to complete. This is typically just a temporary error due to high network traffic or heavy usage of Blogger.

Please hit the back button on your browser and try again. If the problem persists, please contact the Blogger Help Group. We apologise for the inconvenience.

quite a bit when trying to read blogs on Blogspot.com recently. Wonder just how much traffic it takes to cause an error like this on the service?

Some thoughts on the differences between artificial and natural, a debating point, if you will, rather than a firm stand point.

The artificial is, I would argue, the product of the mind. It is that which is created as a result of ingenuity, the clever or artful produce of rational agency. It can also been seen as not genuine, based on the reproduction of something which occurs naturally but without the innocence of that state, fooling the senses into a believing that it is something which it is not, a falsehood, a manipulation of the observer’s senses.