Brains working towards machine consciousness

In a rejoinder to Pløn Verhagen, entitled "Learning theory or pastime of the self-amused" George Siemens makes the observation
"The content-central view of learning loses effectiveness in environments that are rapidly changing and adapting. Text in itself is a codification of knowledge at a point in time—a snapshot. In contrast, conversation is fluid and continual."
Knowledge is also fluid and continual, with each experience going towards our own sum-of-knowledge, but also having the ability to engage the mind in a bout of revisionism. We adjust our world model according to the latest information available (according to my empirical epistemology) - and the strength of this is such that we can suffer from source confusion (for a simple description, see Brewer and Williams, 2007).

I have just been reading Wellman's Little boxes, Glocalization and Networked Individualism. I particularly like the discussion of specialized roles. In this section, Wellman uses scholarly academics as an example of how some people like to maintain contact through the written word (specifically email in this case) in order to be able to live their lives according to their own rhythm whilst still being able to communicate within a network of individuals.

We had several very useful conversations yesterday, ranging from issues of Digital Identity - who are you, what image do you portray on the web - through Learner Agents and trying to produce systems which are adaptive in their support of learners, to games based learning of various different types.

This is an edited extract from a forthcoming book chapter about the use of Folksonomological Reification to examine and bridge the onto-folksonomical divide. That all makes more sense in the context of the full chapter, though, and I won't go into it further here. The chapter is co-authored with Shirley Williams, Karsten Lundqvist and Edwin Porter-Daniels.