DRP 2010

Participation, Remediation and Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of Digital Culture

Apparently it's not only the IRS using social media to find its targets, but burglars as well.

Sony released a 7-inch, $399, touchscreen, 3G and Wi-Fi e-book reader this morning, and it's never more obvious that Amazon is up against a wall in the market segment it helped create.

Vowing to fight unauthorized reproduction of news reports online, The Associated Press said Thursday that it will add software to each article showing who created it and what limits apply to the rights to use it. The software will also notify the A.P. about how the article is used across the Web.

Education that includes at least some online work is more effective than classroom-only teaching, according to a major research review done for the Department of Education.

In the latest example of finding media innovation where you'd least expect it, CBS is embedding a video player in a print ad in Entertainment Weekly that

Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library.

Interesting case, though I don't know if something has been done about that licence problem by now (it happened in 2007)

The Amazon Kindle is a handy device, but owners should shop carefully for e-books and consider no-cost options as well.

While current computing practice abounds with innovations like online auctions, blogs, wikis, twitter, social networks and online social games, few if any genuinely new theories have taken root in the corresponding "top" academic journals. Those creating computing progress increasingly see these journals as unreadable, outdated and irrelevant. Yet as technology practice creates, technology theory is if anything becoming even more conforming and less relevant. We attribute this to the erroneous assumption that research rigor is excellence, a myth contradicted by the scientific method itself. Excess rigor supports the demands of appointment, grant and promotion committees, but is drying up the wells of academic inspiration. Part I of this paper chronicles the inevitable limits of what can only be called a feudal academic knowledge exchange system, with trends like exclusivity, slowness, narrowness, conservatism, self-involvement and inaccessibility. We predict an upcoming social upheaval in academic publishing as it shifts from a feudal to democratic form, from knowledge managed by the few to knowledge managed by the many. The technology trigger is socio-technical advances. The drive will be that only democratic knowledge exchange can scale up to support the breadth, speed and flexibility modern cross-disciplinary research needs. Part II suggests the sort of socio-technical design needed to bring this transformation about.

"We wanted to ask a different question," said Clifford Nass, a Stanford University cognitive scientist. "What happens to people who multitasking all the time?" In a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nass and Stanford psychologists Anthony Wagner and Eyal Ophir surveyed 262 students on their media consumption habits. The 19 students who multitasked the most and 22 who multitasked least then took two computer-based tests, each completed while concentrating only on the task at hand.

Interesting that. And scary. Hail the era of scatterbrains. I'm definetely one of them.

Rebecca Blood and John Quiggin readings

Articles by Jean Burgess at QUT. Interesting researcher who has just co-authored a book with @joshgreen

Collaborative Encyplopedia Wikipedia is test-driving a new editing scheme to enahnce its credibility, making it subject to screeing and altering before it is published online. Doesn't this not defeat the purpose of it in the first place?

YOUTUBE has offered a way for creators of videos which become a big hit to cash in on their success.

European publishers join the rush to blame Google for the publishing industry's problems, but Google Europe Chief Philipp Schindler suggests that the industry needs to look at themselves.