Online Learning Can Be Engaging and Effective Online learning, done right, can be a delight — and achieve learning objectives. It appears that teaching online by necessity rather than aspiration has led to a many online attempts at learning that have fallen short of the mark, leaving those who were…

Howard Rheingold (originally published on my Patreon) At the time of this writing, the entire world’s population is in a state of crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. In the absence of rapid and coherent action from the highest levels of official governance, and in coordination with official responders, citizens…

Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. …

I thought I’d paste this in here because it will disappear from Facebook soon: I‘m just getting more and more anxious to get out of here, so I’m not going to wait until after the election. Sometime in the next couple weeks I’m going to delete. You will be able…

This was originally posted on Patreon. Please support me there for access to exclusive content, early access to content like this, and tangible art rewards. One of Facebook’s most grievous sins is the way Facebook groups have killed or severely dampened the art of the online forum among most of the online population. Many special interest groups, from fan communities to political organizers, use forums. …

Technologies of Cooperation Humans are the dominant species on this planet because we learned to use verbal communication to organize and coordinate collective action: Collective defense by diminutive primates who lacked muscles, speed, claws, fangs and collective food-gathering. Speech, writing, print, Internet, mobile media each multiplied the ability of humans to do things…

Social Dilemmas (Link to clickable concept map of social dilemmas) It’s more convenient for you to hop in your car to drive somewhere, rather than waiting for public transportation, walking, or riding a bike. When hundreds of millions of people hop in their cars every day in a rush hour that rolls around the time zones, tons of pollutants and…

Institutions for Collective Action Co-learners in my online course join it because they want to DO something about cooperation. The course takes its time getting there in order to lay an interdisciplinary foundation in the biology of complex interdependencies, the biological and cultural evolution of cooperation, the cultural exaptations that make increasingly elaborate and…

By the end of part four in this series, I had introduced the role of symbiosis and other cooperative arrangements in the living world, theories about how competitive Darwinian evolution could have led to this pervasive cooperation, and talked about the notion that our species exapted our biologically evolved capabilities…