Select the type of brainstorming you want to perform in Second Life by using Brainflowing.

Select the type of brainstorming you want to perform in Second Life by using Brainflowing.


Brainflowing has been updated, by including a menu that permits choosing the type of brainstorming we want to perform depending on the number of prims we have available in the land where we develop the activity and. Now users can decide the prims they will use with the tool, taking in mind the prims that they have available in their land or in the land where they use the tool. Thus, person who will conduct the brainstorming, after selecting in the menu the number of prims he or she is interested on using, must indicate to participants how many words they can use for giving utterance to their ideas in the board.

This menu that was incorporated to Brainflowing helps users to understand easily the relation between the number of words we use during the brainstorming activity and the prims we need to have available in the land where the activity takes place.

Though people have prims enough in their land, they can select an option with few prims in order to make participants to express their ideas in few words. This is highly recommended once time we have shared general ideas about the topic we are discussing and we want to polish them.

Finally, we want to point that, by using the option that will allow us to choose the number of prims that will be used in the tool, we can select the 0 prims option. Selecting this option is very adequate if we want to have our Brainflowing displayed in our land but we want people not to drag notecards on it.

By contrary, if we are interested in that people drag notecards into the board, we must select the number of prims that will permit them doing it.

Apart from this new feature, now Brainflowing display more quickly the notecards that users drag into it. Notecards are displayed on the board just instantaneously. Last but not least, in order to facilitate the management of the tool, in these new version the buttoms of the options that can be used by the owner of the tool are highlighted in yellow. ("email the brainstorming", "save your board in a prim before taking it", "add prims")

Enjoy it and take advantage of the characteristics of Second Life environment for brainstorming. Brainflowing is available here

Bibliography for guessing possible uses of Brainflowing.

Herver, G., El Kamel, L. and Rigaux-Bricmont, B. (2010) Entretien de groupe dans Second Life, Recherches Qualitative , edited by the Association pour la Recherche Qualitative (ARQ), Quebec, Canada.Vol. 29, number, 1, Spring, “Entretiens de Groupe: Concepts, Usages et Ancrages” Coordinated by: François Guillemette, Jason Luckerhoff et Colette Baribeaue.
Videos about the tool.

Draceina Pinion made this video about one of the first versions of Brainflowing.

Wednesday, workshop at Second Life by Yuna Brunn and Draceina Pinion

Wednesday 30th June 2010, 5:30 PDT-

Yuna Bruun will do a workshop about Linden Second Life Language and Draceina Pinion will do demonstration of crossword tools.

Place: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Galleria/29/175/24

Galeria Szepanski

Take advantage of this free event for beginning to understand Second Life as an evironment for creative activities (educational, artistical, etcetera). If you do not have still an avatar, this event can be an excellent reason to create one.

Theories of the Information Society, by Frank Wester, 2002

Theories of the Information Society, by Frank Wester, 2002

Quality and Quantity

"Reviewing these varying gedinitions of the information society, what becomes clear is that they are either or both underveloped or imprecise. Whether its is a technological, ecobomic, occupational, spatial or cultural conception, we are left with highly problematic notions of what constitutes, and how to distinguish, an information society.

It is important that we remain aware of these difficulties thought as a heuristic device, the term information society has some value in exploring features of the contemporary world, it is too inexact to be acceptable as a definitive term. For this reason, throughout this book, though I shall on ocassion use the concept and acknowledge that information plays a critical role in the present age, I shall express suspicion as regards information society scenarios and remain sceptical of the view that information has become the major distinguishing feature of our times.

For the moment, however, I want to raise some further difficulties with the language of the information society. The first problem concerns the quantitative versus qualitative measures to wich I have already alluded. My earlier concern was chiefly that quaantitative approaches failed to distinguish more strategically significant information activity from that which was routine and low-level and that this homogenisation was misleading. Here I want to re-raise the quality/ quantity issue in so far as it bears upon the question of whether the information society marks a break with previous sorts of society" (page 21)

"One ought not to imagine that theoretical knowledge´s primacy is limited to leading-edge innovations. Indeed, it is hard to think of any technological applications in whic theory is not a prequisite of development. For instance, road repair, house construction, sewage disposal or motor car manofracture are each premised on known theoretical principles of material durability, structural laws, toxins, energy consuption and much more" (27)

ThinkBalm Decision Making Guide Jan 19 2010 FINAL

Peter Gabriel (The power of the heart)

From web to workplace. Designing Open Hypermedia Systems, by Kay Gronbaek and Randall H. Trigg, 1999

From web to workplace. Designing Open Hypermedia Systems, by Kay Gronbaek and Randall H. Trigg, 1999

Three fundamental elements of visual rhetoric in hypertext, by Paul Kahn, Ronnie Peters and George P. Landow

Three fundamental elements of visual rhetoric in hypertex, by Paul Kahn, Ronnie Peters, and George P. Landow.

What Is The Internet (And What Makes It Work) - December, 1999 By Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf

What Is The Internet (And What Makes It Work) - December, 1999, By Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf

"The authors feel strongly that efforts should be made at top policy levels to define the Internet. It is tempting to view it merely as a collection of networks and computers. However, as indicated earlier, the authors designed the Internet as an architecture that provided for both communications capabilities and information services. Governments are passing legislation pertaining to the Internet without ever specifying to what the law applies and to what it does not apply. In U.S. telecommunications law, distinctions are made between cable, satellite broadcast and common carrier services. These and many other distinctions all blur in the backdrop of the Internet. Should broadcast stations be viewed as Internet Service Providers when their programming is made available in the Internet environment? Is use of cellular telephones considered part of the Internet and if so under what conditions? This area is badly in need of clarification"

Jack Johnson & Eddie Vedder (Constellations)

The light was leaving
In the west it was blue
The children's laughter sang
And skipping just like the stones they threw
Their voices echoed across the way
Its getting late

It was just another night
With a sunset
And a moonrise not so far behind
To give us just enough light
To lay down underneath the stars
Listen to papas translations
Of the stories across the sky
We drew our own constellations

The west winds often last too long
The wind may calm down
Nothing ever feels the same
Sheltered under the Kamani tree
Waiting for the passing rain
Clouds keep moving to uncover the scene
Stars above us chasing the day away
To find the stories that we sometimes need
Listen close enough
All else fades
Fades away

It was just another night
With a sunset
And a moonrise not so far behind
To give us just enough light
To lay down underneath the stars
Listen to all the translations
Of the stories across the sky
We drew our own constellations

lyrics from here

Don Quijote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes

Don Quijote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes. (Centro Virtual Cervantes)

Learning Agency Network Virtual Office

Creating Engagement in Virtual Meetings and Distance Training

VenueGen Whitepaper Engagement

José Saramago (16 november 1922- 18 june 2010)

José Saramago, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1998 has died. He was wrote one of the books that impressed me most, called Ensaio sobre a Cegueira/ Ensayo sobre la Cegera/ Blindness (1995). I read this book in Portuguese when I was in high school. I began to read it slowly to understand the language and the meanings of the text. Once I could read more quickly, I still remained reading it slowly to prolong the pleasure.Years after, in 1998, I could attend a conference he gave in the XVI Semana Gallega de Filosofía. I remember very well his soft and strong voice, the nice and comfortable atmosphere that he created in that crowed theater, where people of all the ages shared the most small space,on the floor, sharing seats...All we seemed hungry, hungry to listen and to "see" by his words and the meanings we could obtain from them.

Plot of the novel in wikipedia

parragraphs of Ensaio sobre a cegueira in Portuguesse.

“Provavelmente, só num mundo de cegos as coisas serão o que verdadeiramente são”
“O medo cega, disse arapariga dos óculos escuros, São palavras certas, já éramos cegos no momento em que cegámos, o medo nos cegou, o medo nos fará
continuar cegos, Quem está a falar, perguntou o médico, Um
cego, respondeu a voz, sou um cego, é o que temos aqui. Então
perguntou o velho da venda preta, Quantos cegos serão precisos para
fazer uma cegueira. Ninguém lhe soube responder.”


“ (…) o mundo está cheio de cegos vivos, Eu acho que vamos morrer todos, é
uma questão de tempo, Morrer sempre foi uma questão de tempo, disse o médico,
Mas morrer só porque se está cego, não deve haver pior maneira de morrer,
Morremos de doenças, de acidentes, de acasos, E agora morreremos também porque
estamos cegos, quero dizer, morreremos de cegueira e de cancro, de cegueira e de
tuberculose, de cegueira e de sida, de cegueira e de enfarte, as doenças poderão
ser diferentes de pessoa para pessoa, mas o que verdadeiramente agora nos está a
matar é a cegueira, Não somos imortais, não podemos escapar à morte, mas ao
menos devíamos não ser cegos, disse a mulher do médico, Como, se esta cegueira é
concreta e real, disse o médico, Não tenho a certeza, disse a mulher”


“Por que foi que cegámos, Não sei, talvez um dia se chegue a conhecer a
razão, Queres que te diga o que penso, Diz, Penso que não cegámos, penso
que estamos cegos, Cegos que vêem, Cegos que, vendo, não vêem.”

BLINDNESS, By Jose Saramago. Comments of Bob Corbett, October 2001
Also appended remarks from George Snedeker, December 2001


Jose Saramago's reaction when he first saw the movie Blidness (2008), based on his novel, "Ensaio sobre a cegueira" (1995) and directed by Fernando Meirelles

The Marketplace of Ideas, by Louis Menand (2001)

The Marketplace of Ideas, by Louis Menand. American Council of Learned Societies
Occasional Paper No. 49, 2001.

"The humanities occupy only a corner of the higher education marketplace, but it has historically been a very prestigious corner. Although no one is likely to take the trouble to cut the humanities disciplines off, there is some fear that the action, including the funding, is moving into areas of teaching and research that can demonstrate a more obvious market utility. The humanities disciplines don't seem to be dying out, but they do feel dislocated. They are institutionally insecure because they appear to have lost their philosophical roots. The question this paper attempts to address is exactly what those roots were in the first place" (...)

"The other critical Golden Age development, the emergence of a scientific model of research, was a reflection of the anti-ideological temper of postwar American thought—the temper epitomized in Daniel Bell's famous phrase "the end of ideology."21 To some extent the antipathy to ideology was simply a response to global political history between 1914 and 1945, but to some extent, as Thomas Bender has suggested, it was a response to all that federal money that began pouring into universities after the war. Scholars eschewed political commitments because they wished not to offend their granting agencies.22 The idea that academics, particularly in the social sciences, could provide the state with neutral research results on which pragmatic public policies could be based was an animating idea in the 1950s university. In the sciences, it helped establish what Talcott Parsons called the ethos of "cognitive rationality."23 In fields like history, it led to the consensus approach. In sociology, it produced what Robert Merton called theories of the middle range—an emphasis on the formulation of limited hypotheses subject to empirical verification.24 Behaviorism and rational choice theory became dominant paradigms in psychology and political science. In literature, even when the mindset was anti-scientific, as in the case of New Criticism and structuralism, the ethos remained scientistic: theorists aspired to analytic rigor.25 Boundaries were respected and methodologies were codified. Discipline reigned in the disciplines"


"Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty's attempt to put an end to (or to transcend) the analytic tradition in philosophy, constructs its argument entirely from within the tradition of analytic philosophy, just as The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn's revisionist interpretation of the history of science, is a perfectly conventional work in the philosophy and history of science. But there is also no question that the turn in the intellectual dialectic exemplified by these works fed into the collapse of the color- and gender-blind ideal of meritocratic educational theory, and that it gave members of groups previously excluded from or marginalized within the academy theoretical equipment for the business of critiquing the traditional forms of knowledge. Kuhn's book is emphatically not a work of science studies, but science studies is what it gave birth to"


"People refer to the new organizations of knowledge as "interdisciplinary," but this seems mistaken. The collapse of disciplines must mean the collapse of interdisciplinarity as well; for interdisciplinarity is the institutional ratification of the logic of disciplinarity. The very term implies respect for the discrete perspectives of different disciplines. You can't have interdisciplinarity, or multidisciplinarity, unless you have disciplines. There is more interest on the part of administrators in interdisciplinary work, and some college catalogues now feature interdisciplinary majors, but there is nothing terribly new or anti-foundational about it. Interdisciplinary scholarship or teaching simply means the deployment of professional expertise in two or more disciplines".

Moby (Porcelain)

present/actual

types of relation with web content

types of communication

A (re)Slice of Life Online, Part Five: Creating Objects in Second Life, by Howard Rheingold

Yo La Tengo - I'm On My Way @ London Roundhouse 2009

MIGR42

Open publication - Free publishing - More sl

Qualitative Methods for Management and Communication Research by David M. Boje, Ph.D.

Burrell, G., & Morgan, G. Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis, Heinemann, 1979, 1-37

Epilogue to Plato: The Bias of Literacy, by Twyla Gibson

Epilogue to Plato: The Bias of Literacy, by Twyla Gibson
Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, Volume 6, 2005

Duke Special with The Ulster Orchestra (Freewheel)

My Brother’s Keeper: Patterns of Norm Violations in a Virtual World, by Magnus Thor Torfason

My Brother’s Keeper: Patterns of Norm Violations in a Virtual World, by Magnus Thor Torfason

Triads, by James A. Kitts and Jun Huang

Triads, by James A. Kitts and Jun Huang,

Audiovisual Thinking

Audiovisual Thinking. The Journal of Academic Videos

As they state

"Society has changed radically due technological changes in audiovisual mediation and new digital tools/platforms. Video is becoming a central part of our everyday life and communication, as well as a valuable tool for researchers to share their results, insights and engage with the academic and other communities. Academics have many different forms of media for expressing ourselves, for example text, audio and images. These different media have different strengths and weaknesses. Traditionally, academic dissemination and debate have relied very much on the written text. But now, audio and images should be embraced by the academic world, not because it is better than the written word, but because video can say things differently".

learning design

Constructivist Learning Design, by George W. Gagnon, Jr. and Michelle Collay

"Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist,Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching", by Paul A. Kirschner and John Sweller, Educational Psychologist , 41(2), 75–86

nothing to hide (yo la tengo)

The SCImago Journal & Country Rank

As they explain:

"The SCImago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that includes the journals and country scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus® database (Elsevier B.V.). These indicators can be used to assess and analyze scientific domains. This platform takes its name from the SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) indicator, developed by SCImago from the widely known algorithm Google PageRank™. This indicator shows the visibility of the journals contained in the Scopus® database from 1996 (...)

As well as SJR Portal, SCImago has developed The Atlas of Science project, which proposes the creation of an information system whose major aim is to achieve a graphic representation of IberoAmerican Science Research. Such representation is conceived as a collection of interactive maps, allowing navigation functions throughout the semantic spaces formed by the maps".

Magazine M 29, by Däniel Vandermissen

Open publication - Free publishing - More sl

Don´t Panic (Cold Play)

The dictionary of sustainable management

The Dictionary of Sustainable Management, by Corina Beczner, Bob Gower, Ruth Katz
and Nathan Shedroff

Pleymo (ce monde a l'envers)