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Stan Golanka

Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context - NYTimes.com - 49 views

  • It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Core discussion topic? From this, I see a few discussion issues: 1. Do we prize "mash-ups" more than original work? Who is "we" in this? 2. If the answer to #1 is "yes," then the next question is: is this good or bad? 3. Finally, if the answer is "bad" to #2, what place do "mash-ups" have, and how do we help our students see the value in original work?
  • Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise;
    • Stan Golanka
       
      How do teachers help students rise above this "digital forest of mediocrity"?
  • Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
    • Stan Golanka
       
      If Johnson's predictions are true, is this necessarily bad? How much of this concern is "nostalgia"? What would be lost from an academic p.o.v, and what migh be gained?
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  • Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Should teachers "fight" this, or embrace it? Can summaries/sound bites ever be appropriate for academic discussions?
  • And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
  • Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Can teachers moderate this attitude? Does our (adults) use/non-use of technology help breed this attitude?
  • authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.
    • Stan Golanka
       
      Does this ring true to educators? Are social concerns and literary conerns opposites? How does web publishing affect "literary" publishing, as opposed to "non-literary" publishing?
  • However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television,
Matt Renwick

Privacy Concerns for ClassDojo and Other Tracking Apps for Schoolchildren - NYTimes.com - 44 views

  • “I have told all my staff, ‘You cannot display this data publicly,’
  • threatening them into compliance
  • ClassDojo does not seek explicit parental consent
Margaret FalerSweany

How Firm Are Our Principles? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • MORAL quandaries often pit concerns about principles against concerns about practical consequences.
  • two ethical frameworks. A utilitarian perspective evaluates an action purely by its consequences. If it does good, it’s good. A deontological approach, meanwhile, also takes into account aspects of the action itself, like whether it adheres to certain rules. Do not kill, even if killing does good. No one adheres strictly to either philosophy, and it turns out we can be nudged one way or the other for illogical reasons.
  • to think either abstractly or concretely
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  • a very simple manipulation of mind-set that did not change the specifics of the case led to very different responses.
  • Class can also play a role. Another paper, in the March issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that upper-income people tend to have less empathy than those from lower-income strata, and so are more willing to sacrifice individuals for the greater good.
  • stressing subjects, rushing them or reminding them of their mortality all reduce utilitarian responses,
  • Even the way a scenario is worded can influence our judgments, as lawyers and politicians well know.
  • our moods can make misdeeds seem more or less sinful.
  • Objective moral truth doesn’t exist, and these studies show that even if it did, our grasp of it would be tenuous.
Ed Webb

Enemy Lurks in Briefings on Afghan War - PowerPoint - NYTimes.com - 51 views

  • “PowerPoint makes us stupid,”
  • behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making
  • deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world
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  • Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point.
  • Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters. The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”
Margaret FalerSweany

With Tech Taking Over in Schools, Worries Rise - NYTimes.com - 43 views

  • Technology companies are collecting a vast amount of data about students, touching every corner of their educational lives — with few controls on how those details are used.
  • growing parental concern that sensitive information about children — like data about learning disabilities, disciplinary problems or family trauma — might be disseminated and disclosed, potentially hampering college or career prospects.
  • implications beyond education.
  •  
    Discusses laws proposed in 16 states "prohibiting educational sites, apps and cloud services used by schools from selling or disclosing personal information about students from kindergarten through high school; from using the children's data to market to them; and from compiling dossiers on them."
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