I taught the first class of the semester. Fun to be teaching again. It's the highlight of my school week. We spent a fiar amout of time discussing the wiki, which I intend to use as a learning tool for students to interact more and help each other learn the real material for the course-- HTML, XML, and other web stuff. It's gratifying to see less than 12 hours after class ended, there are already a few new pages up.
Also ran into my old advisor and chatted a little about System Dynamics and the spread of misinformation. It's hard to describe what System Dynamics is (especially since my coursework was in the early 1990's), but essentially it creates mathematical models of social systems with complex interrelationships: feedback loops, cause-effect relationships, etc. I couldn't do the field of study justice with further explanation, especially this early in the morning.
You see, the classic models for the "spread of information" is fairly similar to the models for the spread of disease: essntially the factors of numbers of people contacted vs the rate of spread. Some information is more virulent than other kinds of information, I suppose. But what if you needed to model the spread of "misinformation" and its correction? It's a two-stage process...
I still haven't quite figured out the protocol for blogging; is it one thought per "blog post" or is it one blog post per session at the keyboard? For me, I tend towards the latter, even if it means a few unrelated paragraphs in one posting.
