Group items tagged

49% of all Americans said the internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to impact local communities.

41% of these internet-using active group members say the internet has had a major impact on their ability to organize activities for their groups

24% of these internet-using active group members say the internet has had a major impact on their ability to volunteer their time to groups

New media conducive to fostering participation can indeed increase the freedoms Clinton outlined, just as the printing press, the postal service, the telegraph, and the telephone did before.

Despite this basic truth -- that communicative freedom is good for political freedom -- the instrumental mode of Internet statecraft is still problematic.

THE THEATER OF COLLAPSE

Opinions are first transmitted by the media, and then they get echoed by friends, family members, and colleagues. It is in this second, social step that political opinions are formed. This is the step in which the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can make a difference. As with the printing press, the Internet spreads not just media consumption but media production as well -- it allows people to privately and publicly articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views.

This condition of shared awareness -- which is increasingly evident in all modern states -- creates what is commonly called "the dictator's dilemma" but that might more accurately be described by the phrase coined by the media theorist Briggs: "the conservative dilemma," so named because it applies not only to autocrats but also to democratic governments and to religious and business leaders. The dilemma is created by new media that increase public access to speech or assembly; with the spread of such media, whether photocopiers or Web browsers, a state accustomed to having a monopoly on public speech finds itself called to account for anomalies between its view of events and the public's. The two responses to the conservative dilemma are censorship and propaganda. But neither of these is as effective a source of control as the enforced silence of the citizens. The state will censor critics or produce propaganda as it needs to, but both of those actions have higher costs than simply not having any critics to silence or reply to in the first place. But if a government were to shut down Internet access or ban cell phones, it would risk radicalizing otherwise pro-regime citizens or harming the economy.

In some circles, the term digital divide is itself defunct. Instead, using digital inclusion is not only a way to reframe the discourse in a more positive light but also reflective of what access, adoption, and literacy in the digital world really mean today

Today, physical access to computers and the Internet is only the first of three significant layers to digital equality, according to both Deloney and Blake-Plock. Here's how they break it down (and how we can change the game):

National initiatives like the National Broadband Plan, as well as grants for hardware and software in schools and libraries, can help address the essential-tools gap that persists in some rural and low-income areas.

This refers to literacy, not only with hardware and software but also with the vast global conversation that the Internet enables. He notes that there is a gap between those who are "getting connected into broader networks, building their capacity and their social capital, creating the new wave of learning" and those who are, for a slew of complex reasons, not doing so.

What’s more devices that have some form of optic, such as a camera, will enable us to see and interact with 3D multimedia visualizations of information which can be overlaid on what the camera shows us of the ‘real’ world. here’s an interesting video of an augmented reality web browser being used on a mobile phone; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b64_16K2e08

4.2 Ensure that every student and educator has at least one Internet access device and appropriate software and resources for research, communication, multimedia content creation, and collaboration for use in and out of school

5.2 Rethink basic assumptions in our education system that inhibit leveraging technology to improve learning, starting with our current practice of organizing student and educator learning around seat time instead of the demonstration of competencies

Convening education stakeholders, in person and online, to share content, insights, and expertise and to collaborate on key elements of this plan. Ideas and best practices that emerge from these convenings will be shared throughout our education system

mobile blogging is becoming more and more popular. 

If those kinds of trends continue—or start to find their way into the edusphere—that can only mean two things: Blog content will continue to play an important role in driving conversations in all fields. My own content could be drowned out, lost in the sea of posts being published by writers who are investing more time than I am in their blogs.

The lines are blurring between the blogosphere and social media spaces like Facebook and Twitter:

Bloggers spend more time interacting in social media spaces than the average American.

The codex, in turn, was transformed by the invention of printing with movable type in the 1450s.

The fourth great change, electronic communication, took place yesterday, or the day before, depending on how you measure it.

When strung out in this manner, the pace of change seems breathtaking: from writing to the codex, 4,300 years; from the codex to movable type, 1,150 years; from movable type to the Internet, 524 years; from the Internet to search engines, nineteen years; from search engines to Google’s algorithmic relevance ranking, seven years; and who knows what is just around the corner or coming out the pipeline?