DR Expose 2
Plugins
Processing HDR images to get just the right effect can be as much art as science. The new HDR Expose 2 from Unified Color Technologies (UCT) aims to help you find the right balance between the two, so you get just the finished image you want without headaches and frustration.
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Using Scripted Patterns in Photoshop CS6
CS6
One of the problems with pattern fills in Photoshop is the complete lack of randomness you get in shape, color, and position. Just think about it: a real brick wall isn’t made from perfectly identical bricks; each brick varies in color, texture, and even size. That’s why Adobe added the ability to apply scripts to pattern fills in Photoshop CS6.
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2D to 3D in Photoshop CS6 Extended
CS6
Stephen Burns shows viewers how to take an image of a 2D object and transform it into a 3D object using depth maps in the new Photoshop CS6 Extended.
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Corel AfterShot Pro
Product Reviews
Corel’s first professional photo catalog and RAW editing software, AfterShot Pro, is based on a number of technologies—Bibble Pro, Noise Ninja, and Perfectly Clear—that are widely known and respected in the photography world. It’s available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
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Photoshop CS6 Type Styles
CS6
http://layersmagazine.com/photoshop-cs6-typ
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The Transformational Potential of Flipped Classrooms : Education Next - 3 views
educationnext.org/otential-of-flipped-classrooms
flipclass learning blog education edtech selfdiscipline motivation
shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 26 Aug 13
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"the flipped classroom is a form of blended learning in which students learn online at least part of the time while attending a brick-and-mortar school. Either at home or during a homework period at school, students view lessons and lectures online. Time in the classroom, previously reserved for teacher instruction, is spent on what we used to call homework, with teacher assistance as needed. How can this improve student learning? "
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Is Brick & Mortar Education Going to be Left in the Dust by Online Learning &... - 52 views
blogs.adobe.com/...arning-flipped-classrooms.html
education 21stcenturyskills learning online learning pli ilp personalized personalized learning
shared by Jon Tanner on 04 Nov 13
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"Cognitive theories of education that anchor approaches like Constructivism have been suggested as preferable approaches for many decades. Unfortunately traditional educational institutions, as well as certification bodies and most notably political administrations have long favored didactic instruction (basically drill and kill, lecture-centric approaches to education) because the results of these methods are far simpler to track and report. "
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15 Excel Formulas, Keyboard Shortcuts & Tricks That'll Save You Lots of Time - 35 views
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For most marketers, trying to organize and analyze spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel can feel like walking into a brick wall over and over again. You're manually replicating columns and scribbling down long-form math on a scrap of paper, all while thinking to yourself, "There has to be a better way to do this." Truth be told, there is -- you just don't know it yet. Excel can be tricky that way. On the one hand, it's an exceptionally powerful tool for reporting and analyzing marketing data. On the other, without the proper training, it's easy to feel like it's working against you. For starters, there are more than a dozen critical formulas Excel can automatically run for you so you're not combing through hundreds of cells with a calculator on your desk.
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The Black Plague: A LEGO® creation by Dane Brick : MOCpages.com - 6 views
The Brick Testament - 4 views
LEGO.com Bricks & more : Games : Creative Builder - 73 views
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Filth Wizardry: DIY spinny spellers and repurposing Duplo bricks - 55 views
www.filthwizardry.com/...-spellers-and-repurposing.html
child reading InformationLiteracyInstruction
shared by Galadriel Chilton on 07 Oct 10
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Education Week: Research Shows Evolving Picture of E-Education - 0 views
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Research shows that virtual schooling can be as good as, or better than, classes taught in person in brick-and-mortar schools
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But that broad conclusion, which comes mainly from a couple of research syntheses published in 2001 and 2004, masks a lot of variation in the designs of online classes and in who takes them
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to figure out under what conditions, what scenarios, in what content areas, and with what students.”
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“Whether that’s 24-hour technical support, tutorial support, parental vigilance, or face-to-face site coordinators or mentors,”
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“You pay attention to what’s going on,” she says, “and you respond to them as individuals.”
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LEGO Digital Designer : Virtual Building Software - 5 views
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This is LEGO Digital Designer. The program that lets you build with LEGO bricks on your computer.
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A downloadable 3D model maker from Lego. Designed for children and simple to use. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+&+Web+Tools
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Benefits of Online Learning | Education Guidance | WorldWideLearn.com - 45 views
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dotEPUB - download any webpage as an e-book - 125 views
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Really Like This >> dotEPUB -Download any Webpage as an e-book http://bit.ly/lOXUvZ #bookmarklet #ebook #edtech #elearning #tlchat #edchat
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The suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud of sunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground plan was wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called its architecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impression that the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be an intellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddly shaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was he disappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard it not as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not "artists," the whole was nevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face-that young man was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat-that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discovered anything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular than himself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy.
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dotEPUB is software in the cloud that allows you to convert any webpage into an e-book
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What We've Been Up To In 5th Grade & Give Away @ The Resource(ful) Room! - Teaching Tal... - 6 views
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The STEAM-Powered Elementary School: Montour Opens World's First Lego-Themed Brick Make... - 7 views
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Gun Culture Is My Culture. And I Fear for What It Has Become. - The New York Times - 15 views
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What I was doing was perfectly legal. In North Carolina, long-gun transfers by private sellers require no background checks.
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We don’t touch the guns or draw them from their holsters. They are unseen and unspoken of, but always there.
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I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew the rules: Always assume a firearm is loaded. Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Know your target and what’s beyond it.
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or my family, guns had always been a means of putting food on the table. My father never owned a handgun. He kept nothing for home defense.
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In the end, what happened was swept under the rug. My parents said the school was probably trying to keep the story off the news.
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I pushed friends behind the brick foundation of a house as a shootout erupted over pills. There were times when someone could have easily been shot and killed.
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I found a community that reminded me of my grandmother, where folks still kept big gardens and canned the vegetables they grew. They still filled the freezer with meat taken by rod and rifle — trout and turkey, dove and rabbit, deer, bear, anything in season.
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A few weeks later, the boy took that .30-30 lever action into the field and killed his first deer with it — the same as his uncle, his grandfather and great-grandfather.
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There is a sadness that only hunters know, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration
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I asked if there was anything I could’ve done differently to make him more comfortable when he first approached the truck.
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versed and that young black state trooper with braces had been behind the wheel, a white trooper cautiously approaching the car.
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I’ve witnessed how quickly a moment can turn to a matter of life and death. I live in a region where 911 calls might not bring blue lights for an hour. Whether it’s preparation or paranoia, I plan for worst-case scenarios and trust no one but myself for my survival.
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they own them because they’re fun at the range and affordable to shoot. They use the rifles for punching paper, a few for shooting coyotes. E
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step as close to Title II of the federal Gun Control Act as legally possible without the red tape and paperwork. They fire bullets into Tannerite targets that blow pumpkins into the sky.
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None of them see a connection between the weapons they own and the shootings at Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland. They see mug shots of James Holmes, Omar Mateen, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz — “crazier than a shithouse rat,” they say. “If it hadn’t been that rifle, he’d have done it with something else.”
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They fear that what starts as an assault-weapons ban will snowball into an attack on everything in the safe.
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I think about that boy picking up that AR in Cabela’s, and I’m torn between the culture I grew up with and how that culture has devolved.
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changes I know must come, changes to what types of firearms line the shelves and to the background checks and ownership requirements needed to carry one out the door.
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a subsistence culture already threatened by the loss of public land, rising costs and a widening rural-urban divide; the right of individuals to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.
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Despite everything we have in common, despite the fact that he’s my best friend and we were going squirrel hunting in a few days, the two of us fundamentally disagree
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there were kids on the television in the background, high school survivors who were willing to say what we are not, and I was ashamed.
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ne of those pretty, late-winter days with bluebird skies when the trees are still naked on the mountains and you can see every shadow and contour of the landscape.
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I know that part of what they’re missing or refusing to acknowledge is how fear ushered in this shift in gun culture over the past two decades.
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Fear is the factor no one wants to address — fear of criminals, fear of terrorists, fear of the government’s turning tyrannical and, perhaps more than anything else, fear of one another.
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I recognize this, because I recognize my own and I recognize that despite all I know and believe I can’t seem to overcome it.
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I have no visions of being a hero. Instead, I find myself looking for where I’d run, asking myself what I would get behind. The gun is the last resort. It’s the final option when all else is exhausted.
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we walked, I could feel the pistol holstered on my side, the weight of my gun tugging at my belt. The fear was lessened by knowing that there was a round chambered, that all it would take is the downward push of a safety and the short pull of a trigger for that bullet to breathe. I felt safer knowing that gun was there.
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Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as "Third Places" - 52 views
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"bowling alone" hypothesis (Putnam, 2000), which suggests that media are displacing crucial civic and social institutions
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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.
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A core problem on both sides of the debate is an underlying assumption that all Internet use is more or less equivalent
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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
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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.
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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.
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They are known for their peculiar combination of designed "escapist fantasy" and emergent "social realism"
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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.
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the assumption that the most fruitful advances are sometimes made when congruent findings are discovered through disparate means
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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
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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)
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brick-and-mortar "third places" in America where individuals can gather to socialize informally beyond the workplace and home
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virtual environments have the potential to function as new (albeit digitally mediated) third places similar to pubs, coffee shops, and other hangouts.
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the default assumption is that no one person is compelled to participate legally, financially, or otherwise.
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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
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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
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the relationships that play-partners have with one another offline are often "leveled" within the online world
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appeal to people in part because they represent meritocracies otherwise unavailable in a world often filled with unfairness
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"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).
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such that "one may go alone at almost any time of the day or evening with assurance that acquaintances will be there"
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accessible directly from one's home, making them even more accommodating to individual schedules and preferences
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"What attracts a regular visitor to a third place is supplied not by management but by the fellow customer,"
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"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"
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As one informant satirically commented in an interview, "You go for the experience [points], you stay for the enlightening conversation.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Oldenburg (1999) argues that seriousness is anathema to a vibrant third place; instead, frivolity, verbal word play, and wit are essential.
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The playful nature of MMOs is perhaps most apparent in what happens when individuals do bring gravity to the game.
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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
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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
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Anderson (1991), who suggests that geographic proximity itself is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for the emergence and preservation of "community."
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Social capital (Coleman, 1988) works analogously to financial capital; it can be acquired and spent, but for social and personal gains rather than financial
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This form of social capital is marked by tentative relationships, yet what they lack in depth, they make up for in breadth.
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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.
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shows that bridging and bonding social capital are tied to different social contexts, given the network of relationships they enable.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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Despite differences in theoretical grounding and methodologies, our conclusions were remarkably similar across complementary macro- and micro-levels.
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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.
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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.
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In such cases, MMOs appear to enable a different kind of sociability, one ostensibly recognizable as a "community" nonetheless.
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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
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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).
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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.
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Moreover, despite the semantics of the term, "weak" ties have been shown to be vital in communities, relationships, and opportunities.
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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
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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.
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it seems ironic that, now of all times, we would ignore one possible solution to our increasingly vexed relationship with diversity.