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Ed Webb

Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • My father would have been unable to “teach to the test.” He once complained about errors in a sixth-grade math textbook, so he had the class learn math by designing a spaceship. My father would have been spat out by today’s test-driven educational regime.
  • A career in computer science makes you see the world in its terms. You start to see money as a form of information display instead of as a store of value. Money flows are the computational output of a lot of people planning, promising, evaluating, hedging and scheming, and those behaviors start to look like a set of algorithms. You start to see the weather as a computer processing bits tweaked by the sun, and gravity as a cosmic calculation that keeps events in time and space consistent. This way of seeing is becoming ever more common as people have experiences with computers. While it has its glorious moments, the computational perspective can at times be uniquely unromantic. Nothing kills music for me as much as having some algorithm calculate what music I will want to hear. That seems to miss the whole point. Inventing your musical taste is the point, isn’t it? Bringing computers into the middle of that is like paying someone to program a robot to have sex on your behalf so you don’t have to. And yet it seems we benefit from shining an objectifying digital light to disinfect our funky, lying selves once in a while. It’s heartless to have music chosen by digital algorithms. But at least there are fewer people held hostage to the tastes of bad radio D.J.’s than there once were. The trick is being ambidextrous, holding one hand to the heart while counting on the digits of the other.
  • The future of education in the digital age will be determined by our judgment of which aspects of the information we pass between generations can be represented in computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd. If we romanticize information that shouldn’t be shielded from harsh calculations, we’ll suffer bad teachers and D.J.’s and their wares.
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  • Some of the top digital designs of the moment, both in school and in the rest of life, embed the underlying message that we understand the brain and its workings. That is false. We don’t know how information is represented in the brain. We don’t know how reason is accomplished by neurons. There are some vaguely cool ideas floating around, and we might know a lot more about these things any moment now, but at this moment, we don’t. You could spend all day reading literature about educational technology without being reminded that this frontier of ignorance lies before us. We are tempted by the demons of commercial and professional ambition to pretend we know more than we do.
  • Outside school, something similar happens. Students spend a lot of time acting as trivialized relays in giant schemes designed for the purposes of advertising and other revenue-minded manipulations. They are prompted to create databases about themselves and then trust algorithms to assemble streams of songs and movies and stories for their consumption. We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen. What is wrong with this is not that students are any lazier now or learning less. (It is probably even true, I admit reluctantly, that in the presence of the ambient Internet, maybe it is not so important anymore to hold an archive of certain kinds of academic trivia in your head.) The problem is that students could come to conceive of themselves as relays in a transpersonal digital structure. Their job is then to copy and transfer data around, to be a source of statistics, whether to be processed by tests at school or by advertising schemes elsewhere.
  • If students don’t learn to think, then no amount of access to information will do them any good.
  • To the degree that education is about the transfer of the known between generations, it can be digitized, analyzed, optimized and bottled or posted on Twitter. To the degree that education is about the self-invention of the human race, the gargantuan process of steering billions of brains into unforeseeable states and configurations in the future, it can continue only if each brain learns to invent itself. And that is beyond computation because it is beyond our comprehension.
  • Roughly speaking, there are two ways to use computers in the classroom. You can have them measure and represent the students and the teachers, or you can have the class build a virtual spaceship. Right now the first way is ubiquitous, but the virtual spaceships are being built only by tenacious oddballs in unusual circumstances. More spaceships, please.
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    How do we get this right - use the tech for what it can do well, develop our brains for what the tech can't do? Who's up for building a spaceship?
Ed Webb

Schools Urged To Teach Youth Digital Citizenship : NPR - 0 views

  • not being trained in digital citizenship never caused a problem for me. I knew what was right and wrong, and I did the right thing. Why is this being treated so differently???‎"Nobody has come out and said, 'This is how it's supposed to be.'" This is part of my issue with "education". Students are learning that they only need to do what they are told. If there's isn't a rule, it must be OK. There's no thought, no critical evaluation, no drawing of parallels that if something is wrong in this circumstance, then it must also be in this other situation. People need to be allowed (forced? certainly encouraged) to think for themselves -- and to be responsible for their own actions!
    • Ed Webb
       
      Do you agree with this comment? Are issues such as ethics, courtesy etc different in the digital domain, or can/should values cross over? Is there a need for training or education specific to the online rather than common to the offline and online?
  • "For the most part, kids who are in college today never received any form of digital citizenship or media training when they were in high school or middle school."
Ed Webb

Duke coed's scandalous sex ratings go viral - TODAY People - TODAYshow.com - 0 views

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    Lessons to learn here include that the quickest way to a publishing contract is notoriety. The media are hungry, but they feed on themselves, ultimately. Lives are catalysts for an otherwise self-sustaining hype cycle.
Ed Webb

AFP: Beijing officials trained in social media: report - 2 views

  • Chinese web users frequently refer to the "50 cent army", rumoured to be a group of freelance propagandists who post pro-Communist Party entries on blogs and websites, posing as ordinary members of the public.
Ed Webb

Chez Pazienza: The Death of Privacy and the Death of Tyler Clementi - 0 views

  • digital age technology, which now allows for the psychological torment that used to be confined only to school to be relentless and omnipresent
  • They felt like they could do it because everybody does it. A good portion of our media culture is now based on prurient voyeurism and a constant invasion of privacy. The public disclosure of a person's most intimate secrets and moments is no longer considered shameful or condemnable -- it's just called entertainment. Why wouldn't a couple of college kids turn their classmate into an unwitting reality TV star? It's basically the same toxic horseshit they grew up watching on MTV, VH1 and E! For all they knew, maybe Tyler Clementi would've loved the mainline of notoriety. If the dipshits on Jersey Shore don't have a problem mining their most repugnant traits in the name of 15 minutes of fame -- if anyone can go to YouTube and post video of a guy complaining about how there are rapists in his neighborhood and suddenly turn that guy into a viral sensation and his complaints into a catch phrase -- why the hell can't two Rutgers freshmen live-stream a roommate in bed with a man? This is the age of the unauthorized sex tape. This is Bentham's Panopticon come to fruition on a global scale. You're always being watched. You're always on camera. You have no expectation of privacy. Clementi should have known that, right?!
  • anyone he personally feels deserves it and he and his website are at the forefront of America's culture of shameless voyeurism and a constant, irrepressible invasion of privacy. It's because someone like Perez Hilton has spent the past few years making himself rich by indiscriminately circulating images of Miley Cyrus's crotch to the world that the two teenagers who tortured Tyler Clementi likely didn't think that what they were doing was a big deal.
Ed Webb

CCTV vigilantes: Snoopers paid to catch shoplifters from home | Mail Online - 0 views

  • This is the privatisation of the surveillance society – a private company asking private individuals to spy on each other using private cameras connected to the internet.
  • The cameras are already there – we just link to them so people can watch them. It is not entertainment, it’s a tool for crime-fighting
Ed Webb

The Stupidest Thing an Editor With Three Decades of Experience Has Said About... - 2 views

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    Remember, sharing is good, but stealing is bad. It pays to know the difference...
Ed Webb

Drones Get Ready to Fly, Unseen, Into Everyday Life - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • An unmanned aircraft that can fly a predetermined route costs a few hundred bucks to build and can be operated by iPhone.
  • the Federal Aviation Administration limits domestic use of drones to the government, and even those are under tight restrictions. FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said the agency is working with private industry on standards that might allow broader use once drone technology evolves. When it comes to paparazzi use of drones, she said, "our primary concern with that would be safety issues."
  • The ability to share software and hardware designs on the Internet has sped drone development, said Christopher Anderson, founder of the website DIY Drones, a clearinghouse for the nearly 12,000 drone hobbyistsaround the world.
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  • The goal is to make a drone that can stabilize itself and track its target. Given the rapid evolution of technology, Mr. Anderson said, "that's now a technically trivial task."
  • As a parent of a 3-year-old, she said, she could use the same technology to track her daughter on her way to school (she would need to plant an electronic bug in her lunch box or backpack). That would "bring a whole new meaning to a hover parent," she said. Schools could even use drones for perimeter control.
  • human nature being what it is, it won't take long for the technology to be embraced for less noble ends. Could nosey neighbors use a drone to monitor who isn't picking up after their dogs? "That's possible," said Henry Crumpton, a former top CIA counterterrorism official who is now chairman of a company that develops drones—including one that can take off vertically, fly through a window and hover silently over your breakfast table. "The only thing you're bounded by is your imagination—and the FAA in the United States," he said.
  • it's just a matter of time before drone technology and safety improvements make the gadgets a common part of the urban landscape.
  • we could all be wandering around with little networks of vehicles flying over our heads spying on us,
Ed Webb

Gay Dallas couple legally weds in Texas, aims to bring e-marriage to the masses - Dalla... - 2 views

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    Could one get married in SecondLife? Via chat or txt?
Ed Webb

School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home Boing Boing - 2 views

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    I can't imagine our school using us as students to sign up for their gateway programs and internet connections to be spying on us through our computer thats crazy, I'm sorry but I wont stand for that and neaither would my parents if that was the case.
Ed Webb

Web Coupons Tell Stores More Than You Realize - NYTimes.com - 2 views

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    I don't personally have a problem with this, but I do think this may just be the beginning of the death of privacy. It starts with coupons and ends with.... brainwashing. Naturally I'm a fan.
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