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Cynthia Sarver

CITE Journal - Language Arts - 94 views

  • Since it is through communication that we exercise our political, economic and social power, we risk contributing to the hegemonic perpetuation of class if we fail to demand equal access to newer technologies and adequately prepared teachers for all students
    • Cynthia Sarver
       
      What is being done??
  • They can benefit their students by developing and then teaching their students to develop expertise in evaluation of search engines and critical analysis of Web site credibility. Well-prepared teachers, with a deep and broad understanding of language, linguistics, literature, rhetoric, writing, speaking, and listening, can complement those talents by studying additional semiotic systems that don’t rely solely on alphabetic texts.
  • Not only will teachers need to understand “fair use” policies, they are likely to need to integrate units on ethics back into the curriculum to complement those units on rhetoric.
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  • Students should be counseled not only on the risks to their physical safety, but also on the ways that the texts they are composing today, and believe they have eliminated, often have lives beyond their computers, and may reappear in the future at a most inopportune time.
  • learn methods of critically analyzing the ways in which others are using multiple semiotic systems to convince them to participate, to buy, to believe, and to resist a wide range of appeals
  • It also implies the process of uncovering one’s own cultural, social, political and personal (e.g. age, gender) backgrounds and understanding how these backgrounds can and often do influence one’s own ways of communicating and interacting with others in virtual and face-to-face encounters.
  • nstances of anti-social behavior in online communication such as using hurtful language and discriminating among certain members of virtual communities have been reported.
  • allows their members to construct and act out identities that may not necessarily be their real selves and thus lose a sense of responsibility toward others
  • Professional development for teachers and teacher educators must be ongoing, stressing purposeful integration for the curriculum and content, rather than merely technical operation. It also needs to provide institutional and instructional support systems to enable teachers to learn and experiment with new technologies. Offering release time, coordinating student laptop initiative programs or providing wireless laptop carts for classroom use, locating computer labs in accessible places to each teacher, scheduling lab sessions acceptable for each teacher, and providing alternative scheduling for professional development sessions so that all teachers can attend, are a few examples of such systems. Finally, teachers and students must be provided with technical support as they work with technology. Such assistance must be reliable, on-demand, and timely for each teacher and student in each classroom.
  • educators must address plagiarism, ownership, and authorship in their classrooms.
  • strategies to assess the quality of information and writing on the Web
  • help students develop netiquette
  • Such netiquette is thus not only about courtesy; more importantly, it is about tolerance and acceptance of people with diverse languages, cultures, and worldviews.
  • Teachers and teacher educators must examine with students the social processes through which humans grow individually and socially, and they must expose the potentially negative consequences of one’s individual actions. In doing so, teachers and educators will be able to reinforce the concept of learning as a social process, involving negotiation, dialogue, and learning from each other, and as a thinking process, requiring self-directed learning as well as critical analysis and synthesis of information in the process of meaning-making and developing informed perceptions of the world.
Matt Renwick

Autism Issues Complicate Anti-Bullying Task - Education Week - 15 views

  • examine the entire school environment
  • Positive Behavioral Supports
  • target students' conversational ability and social skills
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  • increase the empathy and social skills
  • paraprofessionals were taught to initiate games and age-appropriate activities
  • understanding the 'hidden' curriculum
  • Those types of interventions can work if they're embedded in a systematic framework for addressing a school's climate
  • One-shot approaches—such as a school rally or asking students to sign pledges promising not to engage in bullying—"have relatively little impact
  • teach bullies different ways to behave
  • supports schoolwide approaches that spell out clear behavior expectations and schoolwide monitoring, such as the models of positive behavioral supports
Jennie Snyder

Why schools must move beyond 'one-to-one computing' | eSchool News - 114 views

  • Adding a digital device to the classroom without a fundamental change in the culture of teaching and learning will not lead to significant improvement.
  • “one-to-world.”
  • The planning considerations now evolve from questions about technical capacity to a vision of limitless opportunities for learning.
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  • As soon as you shift from “one-to-one” to “one-to-world,” it changes the focus of staff development from technical training to understanding how to design assignments that are more empowering—and engage students in a learning community with 24-hour support.
  • learning how to manage the transition from a learning ecology where paper is the dominant technology for storing and retrieving information, to a world that is all digital, all the time.
  • Leaders must be given the training to: Craft a clear vision of connecting all students to the world’s learning resources. Model the actions and behaviors they wish to see in their schools. Support the design of an ongoing and embedded staff development program that focuses on pedagogy as much as technology. Move in to the role of systems analyst to ensure that digital literacy is aligned with standards. Ensure that technology is seen not as another initiative, but as integral to curriculum.
  • In a one-to-world approach, the critical question is not, “What technology should we buy?” The more important questions revolve around the design of the culture of teaching and learning.
  • t’s essential to craft a vision that giving every student a digital device must lead to achievements beyond what we can accomplish with paper.
  •  
    Thoughtful article by ed-tech consultant, Alan November. 
Katie Nettles

What Are You Going To Do To Inspire Students? - 73 views

  • so we focus more on the stuff we can change: curriculum, assessment, and instruction.
    • Katie Nettles
       
      Focusing on instruction is KEY!  Teachers must change the way they teach… teaching straight from a text book- plowing through each chapter- isn't going to inspire students!
  • It can be marked by creativity, innovation, or curiosity. 
  • (You’re not going to see a teacher-dominated classroom full of inspired students; the teacher’s enthusiasm is only useful as an initial catalyst.)
Gerald Carey

Observations: Welcome to 'Bring Science Home' - 71 views

  • Today we kick off Scientific American's Bring Science Home initiative, which will offer 20 free tabletop science activities during the month of May. We hope they will make for easy—and fun—ways to enjoy science at home
Deborah Baillesderr

Gamestar Mechanic - 46 views

  •  
    Play, design and share games.  Focuses on game design
  •  
    a very popular web-based game design environment. Global Kids http://olpglobalkids.org/ is using it to run social benefits game design contests and badging programs. They are getting 100+ new game design entries per week. From the parents' guide: Gamestar Mechanic is currently supported by a partnership between the Institute of Play and E-Line Media. The game was originally developed by Gamelab in partnership with the Institute of Play and the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab (AADLC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Initial funding for the game and companion learning guides came from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The design of the game is based on research by some of the leading academics in the field including Katie Salen (Executive Director of the Institute of Play and curriculum author for the New York City Public School Quest To Learn) and James Paul Gee (author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy).
  •  
    This site has students creating games from scratch and putting them out into the world for feedback within the Gamestar Mechanic community. Students use math, problem solving, writing skills and more to make their games interesting. I think this could be used in the classroom as a theme-based project or just to get students interested in coding.
Clint Heitz

The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens - Scientific ... - 25 views

  • The matter is by no means settled. Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s, however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common.
  • Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.
  • Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
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  • At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people navigate texts, screens impair comprehension.
  • Because of their easy navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited to absorption in a text. "The ease with which you can find out the beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have more free capacity for comprehension," Mangen says.
  • An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you are reading Proust's magnum opus or one of Hemingway's short stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies create enough "haptic dissonance" to dissuade some people from using e-readers. People expect books to look, feel and even smell a certain way; when they do not, reading sometimes becomes less enjoyable or even unpleasant. For others, the convenience of a slim portable e-reader outweighs any attachment they might have to the feel of paper books.
  • In one of his experiments 72 volunteers completed the Higher Education Entrance Examination READ test—a 30-minute, Swedish-language reading-comprehension exam consisting of multiple-choice questions about five texts averaging 1,000 words each. People who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported higher levels of stress and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.
  • Perhaps, then, any discrepancies in reading comprehension between paper and screens will shrink as people's attitudes continue to change. The star of "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not Work" is three-and-a-half years old today and no longer interacts with paper magazines as though they were touchscreens, her father says. Perhaps she and her peers will grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to lurk in the minds of older generations. In current research for Microsoft, Sellen has learned that many people do not feel much ownership of e-books because of their impermanence and intangibility: "They think of using an e-book, not owning an e-book," she says. Participants in her studies say that when they really like an electronic book, they go out and get the paper version. This reminds Sellen of people's early opinions of digital music, which she has also studied. Despite initial resistance, people love curating, organizing and sharing digital music today. Attitudes toward e-books may transition in a similar way, especially if e-readers and tablets allow more sharing and social interaction than they currently do.
Clint Heitz

Do we read differently on paper than on a screen? - 9 views

  • In total, there are more than 180 researchers from 33 different countries participating in the COST-initiated research network E-READ, reading in an age of digital transformation. This network examines the effects and consequences of digital developments in terms of reading.
  • It is not a case of "one size fits all," but patterns are beginning to emerge from empirical research into the subject. The length of the text seems to be the most critical factor. If the text is long, needs to be read carefully and perhaps involves making notes, then studies show that many people, including young people such as students, still often prefer a printed book, even if it is available as both an e-book and in electronic formats with options for making notes, enabling the user to search for and highlight the text digitally. This is not the case when it comes to shorter texts.
  • When reading long, linear, continuous texts over multiple pages that require a certain amount of concentration, referred to as "Deep Reading," the reader often experiences better concentration and a greater overview when reading from a printed medium compared to a screen. When we are reading from a screen, only one section can be seen at a time and the available reading surface area is limited. If you read a printed medium such as a book, several text areas are available simultaneously and it feels easier to form an overview and make notes in the margins.
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  • However, an interesting finding in some of the empirical studies is that we tend to overestimate our own reading comprehension when we read on screen compared to on paper.
  • it has been found that we tend to read faster on screen and consequently understand less compared to when reading from paper. This is a very new research topic and there are studies that have not found any differences in this area.
  • such findings do highlight something very important, namely that we may have a different mental attitude to what we read on a screen. This has very significant implications, including in the context of education.
  • For example, reading literature has proven to have a stimulating effect on the imagination and encourage the development of empathy. Reading has an effect on our ability to concentrate and for abstract thinking. We want to discover if such processes are influenced by the reading medium.
  • There is a need for more empirical research on reading comprehension in terms of screen reading and also on the subjective reading experience.
mstuehm76

Want to improve literacy in your school? Here's how | eSchool News - 23 views

  • the district adopted the McGraw Hill curriculum for ELA.
    • mstuehm76
       
      We use Language for Learning
  • we teach students how to build an argument and develop critical-thinking skills using five steps: Claims, Evidence, Reasoning, Counterarguments, and Audience.
  • To evaluate the effectiveness of our school-wide initiative, we now administer quarterly writing assessments for each content area. We analyze student writing samples at the end of each quarter and include norming as a department, using the district writing rubric to determine strengths and areas requiring improvement.
    • mstuehm76
       
      Marzano Score 4 rubrics
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  • “I agree with what ___ said about ___, but disagree that ___.”
  • Much of what our students learn is told to them, so it is critical that they develop listening comprehension.
  • We started with a baseline assessment in September and will compare those results to a final writing sample at the end of the year.
meghankelly492

Project MUSE - Learning from Masters of Music Creativity: Shaping Compositional Experie... - 7 views

  • n contrast to others who are not as prone to divulge their feelings about their creative process
  • "Variation in style may have historical explanation but [End Page 94] no philosophical justification, for philosophy cannot discriminate between style and style."3
  • The testimonies of the composers concerned bear on questions about (a) the role of the conscious and the unconscious in music creativity, (b) how the compositional process gets started, and (c) how the compositional process moves forward
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  • It is hoped that the themes that emerge by setting twentieth and twenty-first century professional composers' accounts of certain compositional experiences or phases of their creative processes against one another will provide a philosophical framework for teaching composition.
  • Furthermore, the knowledge of how professional composers compose offers the potential of finding the missing link in music education; that is, the writing of music by students within the school curriculum
  • Such involvement may deepen their understanding of musical relationships and how one articulates feelings through sounds beyond rudimentary improvisational and creative activities currently available
  • raw philosophical implications for music composition in schools from recognized composers' voices about their individual composing realities
  • It is hoped that the direct access to these composers' thoughts about the subjective experience of composing Western art music in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century may also promote the image of a fragmented culture whose ghettoization in music education is a serious impediment to the development of a comprehensive aesthetic education.
  • n other words, there is a striking unanimity among composers that the role of the unconscious is vital in order to start and/or to complete a work to their own satisfaction.
  • I need . . . to become involved, to come into a state where I do something without knowing why I do i
  • This is a complex problem and difficult to explain: all that one can say is that the unconscious plays an incalculable rol
  • Nonetheless, these self-observations about the complementary roles of the unconscious and conscious aspects of musical creativity do not cover the wide range of claims in psychological research on creativity
  • I strongly believe that, if we cannot explain this process, then we must acknowledge it as a mystery.25 Mysteries are not solved by encouraging us not to declare them to be mysteries
  • When Ligeti was commissioned to write a companion piece for Brahms' Horn Trio, he declared, "When the sound of an instrument or a group of instruments or the human voice finds an echo in me, in the musical idea within me, then I can sit down and compose. [O]therwise I canno
  • Extra-musical images may also provide the composer with ideas and material and contribute to musical creativity.
  • ome composers need to have something for it to react against.38 Xenakis, however, asserted that "all truly creative people escape this foolish side of work, the exaltation of sentiments. They are to be discarded like the fat surrounding meat before it is cooked."
  • as, as these examples show, dreams can also solve certain problems of the creative process.
  • In other words, to compose does not mean to merely carry out an initial idea. The composer reserves the right to change his or her mind after the conception of an idea.
  • n sum, self-imposed restrictions or "boundary conditions"55 seem to provide composers with a kind of pretext to choose from an otherwise chaotic multitude of compositional possibilities that, however, gradually disappears and gets absorbed into the process of composition which is characterized by the composers' aesthetic perceptions and choices.
  • Therefore, it is not surprising that influences from the musical world in which the composer lives play an important role in the creative process
  • Thereby the past is seen as being comprised by a static system of rules and techniques that needs to be innovated and emancipated during the composers' search for their own musical identity.
  • I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed; in other words: how the artist made it his own.
  • Nothing I found was based on the "masterpiece," on the closed cycle, on passive contemplation or narrowly aesthetic pleasure.61
  • Furthermore, for some composers the musical influence can emerge from the development of computer technology.
  • In sum, the compositional process proceeds in a kind of personal and social tension. In many cases, composers are faced with the tensive conflict between staying with tradition and breaking new ground at each step in the process. Thus, one might conclude that the creative process springs from a systematic viewpoint determined by a number of choices in which certain beliefs, ideas, and influences—by no means isolated from the rest of the composer's life—play a dominant role in the search for new possibilities of expression.
  • If a general educational approach is to emerge from the alloy of composers' experiences of their music creativity, it rests on the realization that the creative process involves a diversity of idiosyncratic conscious and unconscious traits.
  • After all, the creative process is an elusive cultural activity with no recipes for making it happen.
  • n this light, the common thread of composers' idiosyncratic concerns and practices that captures the overall aura of their music creativity pertains to (a) the intangibility of the unconscious throughout the compositional process,68 (b) the development of musical individuality,69 and (c) the desire to transgress existing rules and codes, due to their personal and social conflict between tradition and innovation.70
  • In turn, by making student composers in different classroom settings grasp the essence of influential professional composers' creative concerns, even if they do not intend to become professional composers, we can help them immerse in learning experiences that respect the mysteries of their intuitions, liberate their own practices of critical thinking in music, and dare to create innovative music that expresses against-the-prevailing-grain musical beliefs and ideas.
  • Therefore, it is critical that the music teacher be seen as the facilitator of students' compositional processes helping students explore and continuously discover their own creative personalities and, thus, empowering their personal involvement with music. Any creative work needs individual attention and encouragement for each vision and personal experience are different.
  • After all, the quality of mystery is a common theme in nearly every composer's accoun
  • Failing this, musical creativity remains a predictable academic exercise
  • Music teachers need to possess the generosity to refuse to deny student composers the freedom to reflect their own insights back to them and, in turn, influence the teachers' musical reality
  • Indeed, it is important that music teachers try to establish students gradually as original, independent personalities who try to internalize sounds and, thus, unite themselves with their environment in a continuous creative process.
  • Music teachers, therefore, wishing student composers to express and exercise all their ideas, should grant them ample time to work on their compositions,
  • n sum, music knowledge or techniques and the activation of the student composers' desire for discovery and innovation should evolve together through balanced stimulation.
  • While music creativity has been a component of music education research for decades, some of the themes arising from professional composers' experiences of their creativity, such as the significance of the unconscious, the apprehension towards discovering ones' own musical language, or the personal and social tension between tradition and innovation, among others, have not been adequately recognized in the literature of music education
  • By doing this, I strongly believe that musical creativity in general and composing in particular run the risk of becoming a predictable academic exercise
  • which merely demands problem-solving skills on the part of the student composers (or alleged "critical thinkers").
  • . On the other hand, only few music educators appear to draw their composer students' attention to the importance of the personal and social conflict between staying within a tradition or code, even if it is the Western popular music tradition, and breaking new ground at each step in the creative process and, possibly, shaping new traditions or codes.
  • Culture is a precious human undertaking, and the host of musics, arts, languages, religions, myths, and rituals that comprise it need to be carefully transmitted to the young and transformed in the process."85
  • Nevertheless, further research is needed in which women's voices can be heard that may offer an emancipatory perspective for the instruction of composition in education which will "challenge the political domination of men."
meghankelly492

Precompetitive appraisal, performance anxiety and confidence in conservatorium musician... - 0 views

  • Primary and secondary appraisals formed theoretically consistent and reliable evaluations of threat and challenge. Secondary appraisals were significantly lower for students who viewed the performance as a threat. Students who viewed the performance as a challenge reported significantly less cognitive anxiety and higher self-confidence. Findings indicate that the PAM is a brief and reliable measure of cognitive appraisals that trigger precompetitive emotions of anxiety and confidence which can be used to identify those performers who could benefit from pre-performance intervention strategies to manage performance stress.
  • Music performance anxiety (MPA) can be controlled when musicians cognitively restructure their own thoughts and feelings about their performance by anticipating symptoms of anxiety and turning them to constructive use
  • The cognitive interpretation, or appraisal, of an initial emotional response, such as fear, exerts a proximal influence on performance
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  • and substantially determines if performers will suffer emotion-related detriments or profit from emotion-related benefits
  • Emotions that are too weak or intense and feel unpleasant lead to lower motivation, distracted attention, and reduced performance.
  • On the other hand, appropriately intense emotions which feel pleasant and are expected to help future performance are more likely to lead to increased effort, better decision making, and hence enhanced performance
  • Mann-Whitney U tests of mean ranks showed that compared to students who viewed performance as a threat (MThreat = 7.00, SDThreat = 0.99), students who viewed performance as a challenge (MChallenge = 5.02, SDChallenge = 1.91); reported significantly less cognitive anxiety at pre-recital (U = 21.00, z = -2.167, p = .028) and significantly higher self-confidence both at the start of semester, (MThreat = 4.79, SDThreat = 0.90; MChallenge = 6.42, SDChallenge = 1.08; U = 29.50, z = -3.555, p < .001) and pre-recital (MThreat = 4.45, SDThreat = 0.72; MChallenge = 6.55, SDChallenge = 0.98; U = 2.50, z = -3.104, p < .001, Figure 2).
Jeff Andersen

Designing for Web Accessibility - Tips for Getting Started | Web Accessibility Initiati... - 1 views

  •  
    This page introduces some basic considerations to help you get started making your user interface design and visual design more accessible to people with disabilities. These tips are good practice to help you meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) requirements. Follow the links to the related WCAG requirements, detailed background in the "Understanding" document, guidance from Tutorials, user stories, and more.
Rafael Morales_Gamboa

Contemplating the consequences of Constructivism - The Learner's Way - 21 views

  • learning is a process which occurs within the mind of the individual as they process stimuli arriving from their sensory buffer from their environment (broadly speaking), into working memory and onward into long-term memory. 
    • Rafael Morales_Gamboa
       
      The emphasis does not have to be on the individual, as is common. The social group learns by means of individual, but joined and synchronized, learning.
  • self-guided learning or self-initiated learning
    • Rafael Morales_Gamboa
       
      Not in the case of social constructivism.
  • what is significant
    • Rafael Morales_Gamboa
       
      To others...
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  • independent practice
    • Rafael Morales_Gamboa
       
      and social practice
  • the research on what produces effective learning supports this
    • Rafael Morales_Gamboa
       
      Of course, that depends on what exactly is evaluated.
  • This desire is evident when we expect our learners to be scientists, historians, geographers, researchers and problem solvers/finders.
    • Rafael Morales_Gamboa
       
      As well as critical citizens.
  • We teach the skills of inquiry, problem solving and experimentation and then provide opportunities for independent practice.
    • Rafael Morales_Gamboa
       
      Can you imagine anything a better explanation of "knowledge transfer"?
  • we have previously instructed them in
  • The gradual release of responsibility model of instruction suggests that cognitive work should shift slowly and intentionally from teacher modeling, to joint responsibility between teachers and students, to independent practice and application by the learner
    • Rafael Morales_Gamboa
       
      Does not sounds like the classroom is empty? Classmates? Who cares about them?
  • It is not always the case that learning is best served when the process begins with direct instruction.
  • Schools provide a rich environment within which such learning may occur
    • Rafael Morales_Gamboa
       
      It is not always the case, and I would rather say that is not often the case, if our cultural legacy that depicts the school in literature and films.
  • best model can be to begin with an independent exploration of new content even when this produces failure
  • schools maximise their impact on the learning that occurs
  • constructivism urges teachers to ensure that the learner is at least as involved in the process as their teachers are
    • Rafael Morales_Gamboa
       
      I would call that "teacher-centred constructivism".
  •  
    Constructivism is one of those ideas we throw around in educational circles without stopping to think about what we mean by it. They are the terms that have multiple meanings, are at once highly technical and common usage and are likely to cause debate and disagreements. Constructivism in particular carries a quantity of baggage with it. It is a term that is appropriated by supporters of educational approaches that are in stark contrast to the opposing view; constructivism vs didactic methods or direct instruction. The question is what are the origins of constructivism and does a belief in this as an approach to understanding learning necessitate an abandonment of direct instruction or is this a false dichotomy?
farrell40

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/technology/pinterest-ipo-stock.html?emc=edit_th_1904... - 17 views

  • The price valued the digital pin board company, which lets people save images and links from around the web, at $12.7 billion. That is a little above its last private fund-raising round, which had pegged the company at $12 billion.By selling at $19 a share, Pinterest raised $1.6 billion from big investors
  • In its I.P.O. prospectus, Pinterest emphasized its differences from some of those services. Pinterest is not a social media app for hanging out with celebrities or broadcasting one’s life, the company said. It is meant to be personal. The company’s 250 million monthly active users, called “pinners,” come to the site to plan their lives, including home projects, weddings and meals.
  •  
    Pinterest
Thieme Hennis

List of Free Science Books | Physics Database - 17 views

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    Really awesome - nearly 150 free science books!
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    "Here's an alphabetical list of all available free books. Note that many of the links will bring you to an external page, usually with more info about the book and the download links. Also, the links are updated as frequently as possible, however some of them might be broken. Broken links are constantly being fixed. In case you want to report a broken link, or a link that violates copyrights, use the contact form. "
Adrienne Michetti

Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places" - 52 views

    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      This is, I think, why I'm more keen on today's social networks than I am on games -- games do not provide deep emotional support.
  • "bowling alone" hypothesis (Putnam, 2000), which suggests that media are displacing crucial civic and social institutions
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Putnam - need to check this article. Interesting; not sure I agree.
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  • According to Putnam, time spent with relatively passive and disengaging media has come at the expense of time spent on vital community-building activities.
  • The evidence to date is mixed
  • A core problem on both sides of the debate is an underlying assumption that all Internet use is more or less equivalent
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      SO True
  • It would be more plausible and empirically rigorous, then, to consider how specific forms of Internet activity impact civic and social engagement as a result of their particular underlying social architectures
  • combining conclusions from two different lines of MMO research conducted from two different perspectives—one from a media effects approach, the other from a sociocultural perspective on cognition and learning.
  • By providing spaces for social interaction and relationships beyond the workplace and home, MMOs have the capacity to function as one form of a new "third place" for informal sociability much like the pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts of old.
  • loosely structured by open-ended narratives
  • They are known for their peculiar combination of designed "escapist fantasy" and emergent "social realism"
  • from two research projects: one an examination of the media effects of MMOs, the other an ethnographic study of cognition and culture in such contexts.
  • the conclusions of both studies were remarkably aligned.
  • the assumption that the most fruitful advances are sometimes made when congruent findings are discovered through disparate means
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      Love this quote.
  • demonstrate the "effects" of game play vs. no game play.
  • first project was a traditional effects study
  • second project, a qualitative study of cognition and learning in MMOs (
  • ethnography
  • sociocultural perspective
  • as a way to tease out what happens in the virtual setting of the game and how the people involved consider their own activities, the activities of others, and the contexts in which those activities takes place
  • a reasonable level of generalizability (random assignment to condition in the first study) and contextualization (ethnographic description of existing in-game social networks and practices in the second)
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      but I wonder why he chose these games -- this is not specified. Only their success in US and abroad?
  • brick-and-mortar "third places" in America where individuals can gather to socialize informally beyond the workplace and home
  • the exaggerated self-consciousness of individuals.
  • In what ways might MMOs function as new third places for informal sociability?
  • virtual environments have the potential to function as new (albeit digitally mediated) third places similar to pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts.
  • in this section we analyze the structural form of MMOs that warrants this "third place" assertion.
  • eight defining characteristics of third places
  • there is no default obligation
  • To oblige any one person to play requires that explicit agreements be entered into by parties
  • the default assumption is that no one person is compelled to participate legally, financially, or otherwise.
  • Unless one transforms the virtual world of the game into a workplace (e.g., by taking on gainful employment as a virtual currency "farmer" for example, Dibbell, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2006a) or enters into such agreement, no one person is obligated to log in
    • Adrienne Michetti
       
      and this is why, in my opinion, you will never see games in school. The game cannot be the Third Place because school is a Second Place.
  • Yee's (2006) interviews also reveal that individuals who game with romantic partners or family find that such joint engagement in the "other world" of MMOs allows them to redefine the nature and boundaries of their offline relationships, often in more equitable terms than what may be possible in day-to-day offline life
  • the relationships that play-partners have with one another offline are often "leveled" within the online world
  • an individual's rank and status in the home, workplace, or society are of no importance
  • appeal to people in part because they represent meritocracies otherwise unavailable in a world often filled with unfairness
  • conversation plays an analogous role
  • "In all such systems, linguistic interactions have been primary: users exchange messages that cement the social bonds between them, messages that reflect shared history and understandings (or misunderstandings) about the always evolving local norms for these interactions" (p. 22).
  • third places must also be easy to access
  • such that "one may go alone at almost any time of the day or evening with assurance that acquaintances will be there"
  • accessible directly from one's home, making them even more accommodating to individual schedules and preferences
  • barriers to initial access.
  • "What attracts a regular visitor to a third place is supplied not by management but by the fellow customer,"
  • "It is the regulars who give the place its character and who assure that on any given visit some of the gang will be there"
  • affective sense
  • As one informant satirically commented in an interview, "You go for the experience [points], you stay for the enlightening conversation.
  • engendering a sense of reliable mentorship and community stability.
  • Oldenburg argues that third places are characteristically homely, their d�cor defying tidiness and pretension whenever possible. MMOs do not fit this criterion in any literal sense
  • In neither of our investigations did the degree of formality exhibited by players within the game bear any relation to the degree of visual ornamentation of the players' immediate vicinity.
  • Thus, while the visual form of MMO environments does not fit Oldenburg's (1999) criterion of "low profile," the social function of those environments does.
  • Oldenburg (1999) argues that seriousness is anathema to a vibrant third place; instead, frivolity, verbal word play, and wit are essential.
  • The playful nature of MMOs is perhaps most apparent in what happens when individuals do bring gravity to the game.
  • the home-like quality of third places in rooting people
  • Participation becomes a regular part of daily life for players and, among regular gamemates such as guild members, exceptional absences (i.e., prolonged or unforeseen ones) are queried within the game or outside i
  • create an atmosphere of mutual caring that, while avoiding entangling obligations per se, creates a sense of rootedness to the extent that regularities exist, irregularities are duly noted, and, when concerning the welfare of any one regular, checked into
  • Are virtual communities really communities, or is physical proximity necessary?
  • Anderson (1991), who suggests that geographic proximity itself is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for the emergence and preservation of "community."
  • Social capital (Coleman, 1988) works analogously to financial capital; it can be acquired and spent, but for social and personal gains rather than financial
  • operates cyclically within social networks because of their associated norms of reciprocity
  • bridging social capital is inclusive.
  • This form of social capital is marked by tentative relationships, yet what they lack in depth, they make up for in breadth.
  • On the one hand, bridging social capital provides little in the way of emotional support; on the other hand, such relationships can broaden social horizons or worldviews, providing access to information and new resources.
  • bonding social capital is exclusive.
  • social superglue.
  • it can also result in insularity.
  • shows that bridging and bonding social capital are tied to different social contexts, given the network of relationships they enable.
  • Virtual worlds appear to function best as bridging mechanisms rather than as bonding ones, although they do not entirely preclude social ties of the latter type.
  • One could argue that, if the benchmark for bonding social capital is the ability to acquire emotional, practical, or substantive support, then MMOs are not well set up for the task:
  • While deep affective relationships among players are possible, they are less likely to generate the same range of bonding benefits as real-world relationships because of players' geographic dispersion and the nature of third places themselves.
  • Despite differences in theoretical grounding and methodologies, our conclusions were remarkably similar across complementary macro- and micro-levels.
  • It is worth noting, however, that as gamers become more involved in long-term social networks such as guilds and their activities become more "hardcore" (e.g., marked by participation in large-scale collaborative problem-solving endeavors such as "raids" into difficult territories or castle sieges), the function of MMOs as "third places" begins to wane.
  • It may be, then, that the structure and function of MMOs as third places is one part of the "life cycle" for some gamers in a given title.
  • In such cases, MMOs appear to enable a different kind of sociability, one ostensibly recognizable as a "community" nonetheless.
  • However, our research findings indicate that this conclusion is uninformed. To argue that MMO game play is isolated and passive media consumption in place of informal social engagement is to ignore the nature of what participants actually do behind the computer screen
  • Perhaps it is not that contemporary media use has led to a decline in civic and social engagement, but rather that a decline in civic and social engagement has led to retribalization through contemporary media (McLuhan, 1964).
  • Such a view, however, ignores important nuances of what "community" means by pronouncing a given social group/place as either wholly "good" or "bad" without first specifying which functions the online community ought to fulfill.
  • Moreover, despite the semantics of the term, "weak" ties have been shown to be vital in communities, relationships, and opportunities.
  • is to what extent such environments shift the existing balance between bridging and bonding
  • In light of Putnam's evidence of the decline of crucial civic and social institutions, it may well be that the classification "lacking bridging social capital" best characterizes the everyday American citizen. T
  • Without bridging relationships, individuals remain sheltered from alternative viewpoints and cultures and largely ignorant of opportunities and information beyond their own closely bound social network.
  • it seems ironic that, now of all times, we would ignore one possible solution to our increasingly vexed relationship with diversity.
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