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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

Being told that a bunch of people are addicted is not all that helpful. Even worse is equating lots of time in and of itself to addiction. Why are they addicted? All for the same reasons? What else is going in their lives and cultures? What skills are they picking up if any? Is their massive time-on-task leading to anything or not? What percentage of players are addicted in any harmful sense?

There is also an important issue missed by the show and that is the question of how people from different social and economic groups use and benefit (or not) from digital media. I guess it is not surprising that American TV does not much deal with class issues, but there is little doubt that digital media are leveraged by some families to great benefit for their children in school as part of a larger learning and literacy ecology that includes digital media and print. Other families use digital media in quite different ways. Indeed, there are many different uses with many different outcomes--my simple dichotomy really will not do, but it raises the issue of equity and outcomes for diverse people in our society (and, indeed, world).

Books can make people smarter or dumber--they can expose them to the world or hide reality from them. So any real understanding of them would have to be nuanced and contextual. For books we have long learned to ignore their power for bad. For digital media we are predisposed--at least if we are Baby Boomers--to look for the dangers.

The film is indeed thought provoking. Its power is in being by and large an "etic" (outside) view of other people's new cultures. It is less good at giving a real feel for what those new cultures and their concomitant practices mean to young people today from the inside.

What works for me about the website is that it is multi-vocal, allowing many points of view to be expressed on more or less equal footing, encouraging reflection as people make their own decisions about what to watch and how to juxtapose the pieces. I doubt any two readers took the same path through this material or any two teachers used the resources the website provides in precisely the same ways.

I frankly found the documentary itself mind-numbing and relentless. It rarely trusts the viewer to draw their own conclusions about what they are seeing and it deploys much of the material in ways which point towards a much less nuanced conclusion than any of the participants in the conversation might have advocated.

If companies like Facebook and Google are actually committed to the safety of its users, they need to take these complaints seriously. Not everyone is safer by giving out their real name. Quite the opposite; many people are far LESS safe when they are identifiable. And those who are least safe are often those who are most vulnerable.

Likewise, the issue of reputation must be turned on its head when thinking about marginalized people. Folks point to the issue of people using pseudonyms to obscure their identity and, in theory, “protect” their reputation.

The assumption baked into this is that the observer is qualified to actually assess someone’s reputation. All too often, and especially with marginalized people, the observer takes someone out of context and judges them inappropriately based on what they get online.

There is no universal context, no matter how many times geeks want to tell you that you can be one person to everyone at every point. But just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster. Rather, people are responsibly and reasonably responding to the structural conditions of these new media. And there’s nothing acceptable about those who are most privileged and powerful telling those who aren’t that it’s OK for their safety to be undermined. And you don’t guarantee safety by stopping people from using pseudonyms, but you do undermine people’s safety by doing so.

At the start of each session, Mr. Campbell gave the 11 students a strange kind of pop quiz. For one thing, it was anonymous, so no grades were given. And rather than ask questions about the content of the homework, he asked students to detail how much time and effort they spent preparing for class. Among the questions: Did you talk to a classmate about the assignment? And how many hours did you spend on the reading?

The scores started low—between 4 and 5, meaning the students did far less than the assigned homework. Something happened as the term progressed, though, as students bought into the concept

"The commenting and linking are crucial," he says, "as those activities are essential parts of being in the real blogosphere."

If the core activity at college shifts away from the classroom and into practical activities, do students even need to come to a campus?

"There is definitely a broader array of options available to students who wish to forgo the commute to class altogether in exchange for online classes that essentially provide the same content that professors regurgitate to students in lecture."

To Orange, I will show an actual example of a map in my next full post and explain more about the parameters that are given and what the students fill in themselves. You raise a much more important question though, about the necessity of simplifying in order for the simulation to work. This aspect of the simulation almost led me to abandon the whole thing as I started to think it through and plan for it. Instead I found two ways to deal with it: 1. I challenge my students to tell me where the simulation is oversimplified and make their own case for how the simulation should change for the next time it is performed. This way they are not simply accepting our imaginary world “as is” and are instead actively thinking about how the real world works and how we may have misrepresented it in our simulation. (Even if the simulation fails miserably, it has succeeded in getting students to think about how the world works!) 2. I encourage the students to use the simplification as a canvas on which they can build and/or interpret complexity. In a lecture format I only have so much time to cover the effects of colonization – perhaps 50 minutes – not enough to really explore all of the different facets. In the World Simulation I can encourage each student to think about how colonization would affect their culture in multiple ways and at multiple levels (e.g. infrastructure, social structure, superstructure). Sometimes this is to complex to be incorporated into the simulation, but they are asked to do a reflection paper immediately following the simulation in which they write their own “cultural history.” This written format allows them to explore some complexities they might not have had the time or means to express in the simulation.

However, as with annotations in paper books, sometimes the value of an annotation goes beyond its content. Marshall (1998) suggests that the very act of evaluating a handwritten annotation's relevance creates a level of critical engagement that would not happen while reading a clean copy of a book. Marshall studied university students' annotations in textbooks, and found that students preferred books that had been marked by previous readers, as long as the marks were intelligible.

Similarly, Sherman (2008) studied marginalia in English Renaissance texts and found that students of the time were routinely taught that simply reading a book was insufficient. In order to have a "fruitful interaction" (p. 4) with a text, marking it up with one's thoughts and reactions was considered essential. Marginalia and other signs of engagement and use – even such apparently content-neutral additions as food stains – Sherman sees as valuable evidence of reader reaction, and the place of the physical information object in people's lives.

In a study of flickr.com, Ames and Naaman (2007) created a taxonomy of motivations for annotation along two dimensions: sociality and function. The latter dimension echoes people's motivation to annotate printed textbooks: the function of making important or interesting passages more easily findable for later review. The sociality dimension is a component of the Web infrastructure – making photographs findable for others, and creating shared tagsets for people with similar interests, so they might collaborate more easily. In this sense, photographs are boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989), around which diverse individuals can interact and communities can build (Gal, Yoo and Boland 2006). Digital collection items can also be boundary objects, even if those conversations take place asynchronously.