Information Foraging

Information foraging and social networks
George Siemens
September 5, 2011
Pretoria, South Africa

Information growth: exceeds capacity of human mind and human social systems for sensemaking

“what information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Simon, 1971

More is different, but not new
1550-1750
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_the_history_of_ideas/toc/jhi64.1.html

Hours per day
Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds, 2010

The Structure of Information

http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/2009/05/04/encarta-the-price-curve-of-death/

The Landing

What are networks?

Political blogosphere, 2004
BlueBrain
3D File Manager
Hierarchy Edge Bundles
http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/

Why are social networks so prominent?

Argument: we socialize to make sense of information… i.e. it is our ability to work with information that defines humanity

Informavores
Miller, 1983

‘‘. . . information foraging refers to activities associated with assessing, seeking, and handling information sources”
Piroli and Card, 1995

Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card. 2005
The Sensemaking Process and Leverage Points for Analyst Technology
as Identified Through Cognitive Task Analysis

Information exchange occurs in networks

Tie strength and network positioning

How we are connected influences the information we encounter

Information fragmentation…loss of narratives of coherence

Networked information doesnthave a centre

But…

We need centering (coherence) to understand

We need centering to makesense

We need centering to see patterns

We need centering to share

We create temporary centreswith with foraging strategies such as…

Tags#unisa11

Alerts

social bookmarking

entity relatedness

clustered aggregation

Creating a central message through distributed means

Need time
Incubation
Idea collision
Randomness

Learners as information foragers and navigators

change.mooc.ca
Twitter: gsiemens
www.elearnspace.org/blog
Learning Analytics & Knowledge 2012:
Vancouver
http://lak12.sites.olt.ubc.ca/

http://www.elearnspace.org	2515
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Information Foraging

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