Sunday, June 28, 2026 Strategy, technology, media, and social systems

I Think

Sorin Adam Matei

Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.

Tag: learning

How much should I know?

Once, Socrates was approached at the local gymnasium by a young Athenian man, seeking the tutoring of the great mind of Attica, the wisest man since Solon. “O, Socrates son of Sophronikus, you who know so many things, please take me as…

Promoting competency based education through trade-off thinking

We live in a world of things. Those who make the things define the way we live our lives.  Their decisions impact not only our trivial needs, such as spending a night on Facebook checking the status of our friends.  Technologies that…

What is a theory of mass communication?

What qualifies as a mass communication theory? Typically, the phrase is connected with the idea of “media effects.” Mass communication theories are typically imagined as ways to explain how mass communication affects us. How does mass communication influence our political or shopping choices, how…

The Evolution of Research on Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning – Springer

What is known (and unknown) about computer supported collaborative learning?   This chapter summarizes two decades of research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). We first review the key idea that has emerged, namely the fact that collaboration among peers can be “designed”,…

Ex Yale professor William Deresiewicz rejects bureaucratic education and thinking in American Scholar Essay “Solitude and Leadership”

Current college students are called “digital natives.” They are heralded as a new type of intellectual foragers, who can multitask better, gather information faster,  and spread it with more efficiency than their adult peers. Nothing less true, affirms Deresiewicz in this scathing…

IThink 01/24/2009

2009 Horizon Report » Technologies to Watch In the first adoption horizon we find mobiles and cloud computing, both of which are already well established on many campuses — and still more organizations have plans in place to make use of these…

IThink 01/17/2009

Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference 2009 tags: no_tag Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century According to a recent study from the Pew Internet & American Life project (Lenhardt & Madden, 2005), more than one-half of…

IThink 01/13/2009

The Fedora Project: An Open-source Digital Object Repository Management System tags: fedora, repository, project, lor, library, learning, object, lol old bailey online – Google Search tags: no_tag Cirip.ro / manafu / Foloseste cineva shortText.com… tags: no_tag The Plagiarism Checker tags: plagiarism, writing,…

Educating with new media

Interesting take on Social Media in Education.. From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons My own experiments in this regard led to the creation the World Simulation, now the centerpiece of my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course…

Adrants comments on the Obama infomercial

Adrants, snarky as usual, spins the Obama infomercial, this way and then that way. Hey, dude, now you can tell us, whose side are you on? MATEI.ORG :: Making the invisible, visible! Communication, GIS, spatial, wiki, mapping learning and discovery in real…

ITHINK 09/27/2008

LibriVox » Links tags: no_tag Blog before you Think!: TiddlyWiki Mania tags: tiddlywiki, wiki, productivity, gtd, javascript, software, work List of TiddlyWiki adaptations – post by stumax Howard Rheingold’ Social Media Class This quarter Howard Rheingold teaches the Social Media class at…

Creating Online Community: Critical Issues and Practical Guidelines

Submitted by Colleen E. Brown on November 26 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink) Introduction The need for group membership, social support, and information gathering are part…

Growing online communities

Submitted by Pamela Morris on November 26, 2007 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink).  “An (online) host is like a host at a party. You don’t automatically…

Welcome to I-berspace: Media Gratifications in Successful Virtual Communities

Submitted by Robert N. Yale on October 15, 2007 to the On-line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2007, Purdue University, Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink). Abstract This essay posits that virtual communities are successful to the degree…

Is the game of Go humanity’s last, best hope?

From The Economist RESEARCHERS in the field of artificial intelligence have long been intrigued by games, and not just as a way of avoiding work. Games provide an ideal setting to explore important elements of the design of cleverer machines, such as…

FW: SC06 Kurzweil’s Keynote

I found your blog while tagging my blog with SC06. I noticed that you were interested in finding the slides to Kurzweil’s keynote at SC06. I too was looking for them and found a couple of his slides on wikipedia and I…

Front Porches and Public Spaces: Planned Communities Online

Front Porches and Public Spaces: Planned Communities Online Susan Huelsing Sarapin Comm. 632: Online Interaction Professor: Dr. Sorin Matei November 19, 2006 Introduction Where else today but in the cost-effective frontier of cyberspace can the average person construct a community?1 With widespread…

The seven principles of designing communities of practice

Wegner’s Communities of Practice concept is rooted in seven design principles. All good online communities, which are variants of communities of practice, should keep them in mind: 1. Design for evolution Design elements should be catalysts for a community’s natural evolution. As…

I Link, Therefore, I Am: Connection and Identity in Computer-Mediated Communication

By Susan Huelsing Sarapin Submitted on October 22, 2006 to the On-Line Interaction and Facilitation Seminar, Fall 2006, Purdue University Dr. Sorin A. Matei via the I Think Blog (http://www.matei.org/ithink) Introduction Today, people all over the world are connected, or “tethered” (Turkle,…

A “Learning Landscape” with Tagging

What is Elgg? (It’s being used at MIT.) Described by its founders as a ‘learning landscape’, Elgg provides each user with their own weblog, file repository (with podcasting capabilities), an online profile and an RSS reader. Additionally, all of a user’s content…

Spaceaware: The Visible Past Version

Spaceaware is a research project I started a couple of years ago, which looks at how people make sense of information delivery experiences similar to the “hailing billboard” scene in Minority Report. (Remember the scene in which Tom Cruise is greeted by…

The magic of experiments

John Henry makes the very persuasive point that magic thinking is at the very core of the modern experimental method. Francis Bacon, the inventor of the experimental and inductive methods was seriously committed to a research program inspired by magic. In the…