Civic innovation can be mightly enhanced by the civic engagement goals of higher education - too bad there's not anything here about the role of local universities or community colleges in a life-long learning effort to support innovative experimentation and public discussions
Internet redefining citizenship in 21st century
- Civic Information API, e.g., Kenya Elections Hub
- Sunlight Foundation programs for open govt data
- MySociety collaboration among developers esp open source code
This paper explores the impact of communication media and the Internet on connectivity
between people. Results from a series of social network studies of media
use are used as background for exploration of these impacts. These studies
explored the use of all available media among members of an academic research
group and among distance learners. Asking about media use as well as about the
strength of the tie between communicating pairs revealed that those more strongly
tied used more media to communicate than weak ties, and that media use within
groups conformed to a unidimensional scale, showing a configuration of different
tiers of media use supporting social networks of different ties strengths. These
results lead to a number of implications regarding media and Internet connectivity,
including: how media use can be added to characteristics of social
network ties; how introducing a medium can create latent tie connectivity
among group members that provides the technical means for activating weak
ties, and also how a change in a medium can disrupt existing weak tie networks;
how the tiers of media use also suggest that certain media support different kinds
of information flow; and the importance of organization-level decisions about
what media to provide and promote. The paper concludes with a discussion of
implications for Internet effects.
recommended by Maryellen Weimer in her blog http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/teaching-metacognition-to-improve-student-learning/ where she includes some great questions to get students going (e.g., one minute papers or dyads in class):
- How have I prepared for class today?/What's the best way for me to prepare for a class like this one?
- What questions do I have
- Why did I miss those exam questions/ What do I need to do to avoid missing questions like these on the next exam?