Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter?
HOWARD RHEINGOLD
TOPICS
Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter?
It is a complaint we have all heard about the internet: all the cat videos and incessant celebrity gossip sites are making us, as a culture, stupider.
However, digital community expert Howard Rheingold doesn’t think that’s the case. In fact, he believes that both designing and using digital media can actually improve our intelligence. As Rheingold sees it, human beings have the unique ability to build tools — like alphabets, speech, writing, and printing — that leverage our ability to think and cooperate. When it comes to computers and the Internet, Rheingold says there’s potential for us to systematically direct the evolution of intelligence.
This speech topic, Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter?, is the subject of his talk and a TED ebook which examines the origins of digital mind-extending tools, and lays out the foundations for their future. In it, Rheingold proposes an applied, interdisciplinary science of mind amplification. He also unveils a new protocol for developing techno-cognitive-social technologies that embrace empathy, mindfulness, and compassion — elements lacking from existing digital mind-tools. And he introduces the tools he uses in his Introduction to Mind Amplifiers and Think-Know Tools online courses—mindmapping and concept mapping, social bookmarking, and Personal Brain.
Net Smart: How to Thrive Online
Like it or not, knowing how to make use of online tools without being overloaded with too much information is an essential ingredient to personal and organizational success in the twenty-first century. But how can we use digital media so that they make us empowered participants rather than passive receivers, grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking basket cases? In this presentation, cyberculture expert Howard Rheingold shows us how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully.
Howard outlines five fundamental digital literacies that will help consumers of information thrive:
• Attention: how does attention work, and how can we use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information?
• Participation: what is the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, tweeters, and other online community participants, and how can we emulate?
• Collaboration: how do successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways?
• Critical Consumption of Information: How do you sort through the good from the bad?
• Network Smarts: How do you build and manage successful networks.
Way-New Collaboration
Howard's latest exploration is into what he calls the "technologies of cooperation"--a new wave of tools that are enabling ever more complex forms of collective human action. There has been a long co-evolution of the technologies we create and the communication media we use these technologies to build, Howard says. Human populations create media from technologies that were often not designed with those media in mind, but we've been using those media to organize collective action on scales and with people and in places and at speeds that we were not able to before. In this presentation, Howard explores why this is true, and where we might be going next. What are the dynamics and the structure of humans organizing collective actions in the years ahead? His TED talk about this topic has been viewed nearly half a million times.
And his four subsequent four years of research into cooperation theory with the Institute for the Future has been documented.
Social Media in Teaching and Learning
With the advent of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) by Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and many commercial enterprises such as Coursera, the use of social media in teaching and learning is making headlines. Rheingold has been pioneering the use of forums, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, online video and other media in his courses at UC Berkeley and Stanford University, where he currently teaches courses on Social Media Issues and Social Media Literacies. He teaches his own totally online courses through Rheingold University and recently led a yearlong effort by volunteers in a dozen countries to create a free online handbook for independent learners. Howard takes us on a tour through his teaching methods and shows us how the future of a new culture of learning is emerging within and outside universities today.
Think Tanks: Brainstorming Beyond the Keynote
- Immediate interaction and extended dialogue with your entire group following keynote presentation, 15-30 minutes following 40-50 minute keynote.
- In-depth brainstorming with your thought-leaders in a 60-90 minute session.
- A structured report on the spot reflects the immediate outcome of the collaborative think-tank session. Ongoing discussions can extend into online think-tanks.
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Howard Rheingold