Mindful Infotention: Dashboards, Radars, Filters : Howard Rheingold : City Brights
Mindful Infotention: Dashboards, Radars, Filters
Infotention is a word I came up with to describe the psycho-social-techno skill/tools we all need to find our way online today, a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills with computer-powered information filters. The inside and outside of infotention work best together:
Honing the mental ability to deploy the form of attention appropriate for each moment is an essential internal skill for people who want to find, direct, and manage streams of relevant information by using online media knowledgeably.
Knowing how to put together intelligence dashboards, news radars, and information filters from online tools like persistent search and RSS is the external technical component of information literacy.
Knowing what to pay attention to is a cognitive skill that steers and focuses the technical knowledge of how to find information worth your attention. More and more, knowing where to direct your attention involves a third element, together with your own attentional discipline and use of online power tools - other people. Increasingly, most of the recommendations that make it possible to find fresh and useful signals amid the overwhelming noise of the Internet are social media - online networks that make possible social exchange and relationship. Tuning and feeding our personal learning networks is where the internal and the technological meet the social.
Mentally trained and technologically augmented infotention is about conjuring intelligent input - developing means for clearly and continuously detecting information that could be valuable for each individual, just in time and just in place. Tuning the input doesn't guarantee that what comes in will all be accurate. That's where crap detection skills come in. Ultimately, it is counterproductive to expend too much energy trying to separate the literacies of attention, participation, collaboration, crap detection, and network awareness. Reductionism does make it possible to abstract the key components of complex structures and make it easier to understand how they interact, so I'll be discussing each of the literacies separately at first. Later, I'll point out the hybrid infotentions that web-dwellers use today, like Twitter literacy.
The overall system I'm seeking to understand is one of mindful infotention. I intend to elaborate in more detail later about the mindful part, especially in regard to the attention management part of infotention. Right now, I'm starting with the easier part - the external know-how about putting information detectors and filters together online. In order to see more clearly how the subsystems work together, I'm working on a concept map. The Mindful Infotention web page displays the map as I continue to update it. Click on a document icon within one of the concept nodes to reveal the names of resources; click on the name of the resource to spawn a new tab in your browser that opens the resource page.
Here is a non-interactive representation of the infotention cmap:
Posted By: Howard Rheingold (Email) | September 01 2009 at 03:21 PM
Listed Under: 21st Century Literacies
