Virtual Learning

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by socrates
Can I ask. Is it normal to be so suspicious of a post?

It's quite common to be suspicious of an identity; one can never be sure when one is dealing with a sockpuppet or a pseudo

The topic of online identity was a hot one in 1995-6, when Sherry Turkle published her <i>Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet</i> , also at that time Judith Donath wrote <i>Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community</i>

But you haven't answered my question: A coincidence you selected "socrates" as a pseudonym? Or was it by design?

[Nic Name]

Originally posted by socrates

Can I ask. Is it normal to be so suspicious of a post?

Only abnormal posts.

This post was your first post in the Cellar. You haven't made many since. Your member details are not many, and you specify that you don't want to receive email through this community even though it would protect your privacy.

You haven't contributed much to the community, yet, but have so many questions. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it does raise suspicions in certain other circumstances.

Your first post mentions a book, which you praise in a follow-up post in this thread.

Your member name corresponds to the psuedomyn of the author of that book. The author of that book is very Internet savvy, having recently become a columnist in the adult learning section of about.com, which is the same subject as this thread.

Your first post is in a new thread started with the title Virtual Learning and your first post uses the terms "lifelong learning" which is the buzzword of the author.

You enquire about virtual learning, relating it to your personal situation being rural etc., implying that you might be considering such, but don't actually respond to any of the replies in this thread that deal with the subject of virtual learning ... only responding to those that mention the book.

You enquire about virtual learning, and ask about the experiences of the common folk in the Cellar, yet describe yourself as a sociology scholar in another thread.

You have only participated in three threads ... two started by yourself.

Is it common to be so suspicious of a post? No. Is it common for a post to be so suspicious? No.

While the identity of this member may not be "Mr." Gross (such deference!) it may well be someone from about.com shilling for their new alliance with Mr. Gross and the chats they've been running over there with "Socrates" this month.

You are quite right to suggest that Mr. Gross would be unlikely to shill his book on the Cellar. It probably has more to do with the marketing folks at About.com.

And, if that's the case, they must be delighted with this thread.

[elSicomoro]

Originally posted by Nic Name
This post was your first post in the Cellar. You haven't made many since. Your member details are not many, and you specify that you don't want to receive email through this community even though it would protect your privacy.

Though you present other good arguments Nic, the member details one is not a good one IMO. I don't have my e-mail option on (b/c people can use the PM), not to mention you yourself don't have many details and use a fake URL (or rather, one that doesn't appear to be yours). And many of your initial posts (and still to a degree today) are links or pics.

[Nic Name]

Originally posted by socrates

I know that many Uni's and college's must be offering degree programme's completely online now, but where on earth do you start?

This statement by a "sociology scholar" must certainly have been laying some pipe for a subsequent reference to About.com.

What sociology scholar calls a University a Uni?

As might be obvious, my reference to www.nicname.com a Korean website, was not intended to mislead any dwellar but the most clueless. It's a joke, for those who discover it. I've made it clear that I'm a Canadian, living in Toronto, and have made many contributions to the discussion in the Cellar ... not many rants, though. I have accepted email from members and replied to some providing my return email.

I don't take issue with socrates anonymity ... what's being questioned is motive. Socrates doesn't have to deal with these suspicions. But we don't have to be played for morons by the likes of Mr. Market, Dream Weaver and others who enter the Cellar with ulterior motives, however cleverly disguised.

I could be wrong. And socrates could answer our questions. Or maybe, he'd prefer hemlock.

[socrates]

What sociology scholar calls a University a Uni?


Eh, Me?

I really have chuckled at how these posts go off in tangents. I mean really, are some of you having acid flash backs or is there an air of paranioa gently rolling on the cellar virtual network.

I mean, really, come on,.....

pimping a book, pretending to be someone else..

lol

[socrates]

You are quite right to suggest that Mr. Gross would be unlikely to shill his book on the Cellar. It probably has more to do with the marketing folks at About.com.


Oh jees, stop please lol

My sides are splitting

lol lol LOL

[That Guy]

Seems to be quite a bit of lolling around in here.

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by socrates

I really have chuckled at how these posts go off in tangents.

It's called "topic drift" and it's really quite common. You still haven't answered the question re your choice of moniker: "deliberate or coincidence?" Pushing a little topic drift of your own, maybe? That text laughter is starting to sound a little nervous.

[socrates]

It's called "topic drift" and it's really quite common. You still haven't answered the question re your choice of moniker: "deliberate or coincidence?" Pushing a little topic drift of your own, maybe? That text laughter is starting to sound a little nervous.

Sorry for laughing, but really.

Anyone care to look at the start of the thread and notice that I was asked for the name of the book. All I wanted was tips on virtual learning, but the secret police in their own self importance wished otherwise.

Next.

Why socrates. Why not. A very popular name. Inspired many people. Ever wondered why you get companies called Amazon ,get software called copernic[us] or get helicopters called cobra's


Maybe it's because someone used a popular name, place or thing from the past or present to label their baby.

[Griff]

The jury is hereby sequestered until resolution. May justice be swift.

[Nic Name]

Originally posted by socrates

All I wanted was tips on virtual learning ...

What did you think of the Open University?

[MaggieL]

So, you're saying "It's just a coincidence".

You'll find that folks online will tend to discuss whatever they want to discuss...and while Socrates (the original one) preferred to <b>pose</b> questions rather than answering them, we tend to be a little more bidirectional around here. Don't confuse "starting a thread" with "being in the driver's seat".

My best tip on "Virtual/lifelong/peak learning" is: "learn how to surf the Web". People have dreamed of such a resource for ages ; now it's here on your doorstep at very low cost. Intelligent use of a search engine will teach you more about most subjects than almost anything else you can do in a classroom/office setting.

[juju]

Originally posted by MaggieL
My best tip on "Virtual/lifelong/peak learning" is: "learn how to surf the Web". People have dreamed of such a resource for ages ; now it's here on your doorstep at very low cost. Intelligent use of a search engine will teach you more about most subjects than almost anything else you can do in a classroom/office setting.

I agree. Learning how search engines really work was one of the best things i've ever learned. Once you know how they work, it's much easier to use them to find what you need.

Once you learn that, you should learn how to sort the "wheat from the chaff", so to speak. Like, if you're searching for one thing in particular, you should be able to click a link, and size up whether or not a particular page might be what you're looking for within 2-3 seconds. If you just sit there reading every web page that google gives you, you will never find what you want. Newbies in real life are always telling met to slow down when i'm trying to find something for them, 'cause when I start looking, I skim pages extremely fast. It's not that i'm not looking very hard, it's just that with 1 million pages in results, you've got to make snap judgements.

After that, no bit of information is out of your reach. So then you've got to decide what it is you want to learn, and then go do it. I learned HTML and Linux completely through online resources.

[Nic Name]

The subject of Virtual Degrees is covered in a current article in Wired.

As juju and MaggieL point out, the Internet is the key to universal access to knowledge.

Accreditation is another issue.

What is your objective for online learning, Socrates?

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by juju

Once you learn that, you should learn how to sort the "wheat from the chaff", so to speak. Like, if you're searching for one thing in particular, you should be able to click a link, and size up whether or not a particular page might be what you're looking for within 2-3 seconds.

And tabbed browsing with background loading is the best thing that ever happened to this technique. You can scream though the hit list triggering the load of pages that look like candidates based on the hit context, page title and URL...then investigate the candidate hits as they finish loading. If you're lucky and you're on Mozilla, chances are good you can read important content in the page *before* it finishes loading. Tabbed browsing is already available in Moz, as well as in Opera and recent versions of Konqueror. I'm sure people who insist on using IE will have it eventually; it's simply a feature that's too good not to have. I hear Opera is getting a new rewrite of their HTML renderer too, which might make it more Gecko-like.

The other kick-butt feature for surfing with high productivity is an entry on the browser context menu that lets you highlight text on a page and kick off a search window based on the text. I can think of a couple of enhancements I'd like to see for this: one would be placing quotes around the search text so you only match the entire phrase contiguously ather than pages that simply have each of the search words somewhere. Another nice-to-have would be running the search in a new tab rather than a new window. If I ever take the time to get jiggy with XUL maybe I'll hack out one or both of those features.

A black-belt searching skill is carefully selecting search terms...many English words are "overloaded" with more than one meaning; you're toast if you are searching a secondary meaning of a commomly-used term. Either you have to come up with a synonym that's free of collisions, or identify a synonym for the colliding term, and filter that *out* of the search. Alternatively you can intersect with another term from the target domain and hope it filters out the false hits.

Ferinstance...suppose you're interested in the aerobatic maneuver that involves autorotation of a stalled airplane. That's commonly called a "spin", but you need to block out the noise created by folks talking about the process that creates thread from fibers, the art of controlling public attention and interpretation, and several other topics.

Since there's really no other word for the aerobatic manuver, you're gonna have to intersect with other words from aviation, like "stall", "autorotation" or "aresti"(the name of the inventor of a notation for aerobatic maneuvers) if you're interested in deliberate spins. Obviously (and unfortunately, for novices) the more you know about a topic the more efficiently you can search and navigate it, since the semantic web of related concepts is better known to you as you learn more.

Tools like Kartoo and The PlumbDesign Visual Thesaurus can be helpful searching unfamiliar territory, or revealing unsupected connections.