Group items tagged

The Oxford Internet Institute is a research department of the University of Oxford, focusing on the social implications of the Internet and other advanced ICTs. Our multidisciplinary research faculty include political scientists, sociologists, lawyers, and economists who are engaged in a variety of research projects covering the themes of: Everyday Life, Governance and Democracy, Network Economy, Science and Learning and Shaping the Internet. One of our key missions is to stimulate and inform debate about the Internet, and to shape policy and practice around its (re)invention and use.

Our interactive people's history of the internet brings together your stories, alongside our own research and video interviews with key figures

The evolving world of the Internet - blogs, podcasts, wikis, social networks - offers instructors and students radically new ways to research, communicate, and learn. Integrating these Internet tools into the college classroom, however, is not an easy task. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine the role of social networking in education and demonstrate how social network sites (SNS) can be used in a college classroom setting. To do this, existing research relating to SNS and education is discussed, and the primary advantages and disadvantages of using SNS in the classroom are explored. Most importantly, specific instructions and guidelines to follow when implementing SNS (i.e., Facebook) within the college classroom are provided. Specifically, we show that multiple types of Facebook course integration options are available to instructors. It is concluded that SNS, such as Facebook, can be appropriately and effectively used in an academic setting if proper guidelines are established and implemented.

"A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers. MARK D. PAGEL is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology; Head of the Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading; Author Oxford Encyclopaedia of Evolution; co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology. His forthcoming book is Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind."

"Massive Open Online Courses might seem like best way to use the Internet to open up education, but you're thinking too small. Technology can turn our entire lives into learning experiences. 5 Comments "

"In 1991 a Yale professor David Gelernter envisioned a lot of what we now do on the Internet. Future computing, he thinks, may be organized around a concept called 'lifestreams.'"

A conversation with David Weinberger about facts, fiction and forecasts

Oliver Burkeman went to Texas to the South by Southwest festival of film, music and technology, in search of the next big idea. After three days he found it: the boundary between 'real life' and 'online' has disappeared

Over the past decade or so, the Internet has become a huge source of information and education, especially for those who might be short on time, money or other resources. And it's not just crowdsourced data collections like Wikipedia or single-topic blogs that encourage individual learning; huge corporations and nonprofits are making online education and virtual classrooms a very formal affair these days.

Wikipedia stands as an undeniable success in online participation and collaboration. However, previous attempts at studying collaboration within Wikipedia have focused on simple metrics like rigor (i.e., the number of revisions in an article's revision history) and diversity (i.e., the number of authors that have contributed to a given article) or have made generalizations about collaboration within Wikipedia based upon the content validity of a few select articles. By looking more closely at metrics associated with each extant Wikipedia article (N=3,427,236) along with all revisions (N=225,226,370), this study attempts to understand what collaboration within Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface. Findings suggest that typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a collaborative sense, and do not reflect much diversity in the construction of content and macro-structural writing, leading to the conclusion that most articles in Wikipedia are not reflective of the collaborative efforts of the community but, rather, represent the work of relatively few contributors.

"Since the mid-1960s John Brockman has been at the cutting edge of ideas. He is a passionate advocate of both science and the arts, and his website Edge is a salon for the world's finest minds"

This autumn more than a million students are going to take part in an experiment that could re-invent the landscape of higher education.

The way we represent, organize and share our knowledge propels us forward. It can either constrain or extend our abilities to think and create. In 1964, in his groundbreaking new media studies, Marshall McLuhan proposed that it is the medium, not just the content it carries, that impacts our lives. This is captured most eloquently in his most famous line: "The medium is the message."

The iJIM journal aims to focus on the exchange of relevant trends and research results as well as the presentation of practical experiences gained while developing and testing elements of interactive mobile technologies. The objective of the journal is to publish and discuss fundamentals, applications and experiences in the field of interactive mobile technologies in learning and teaching as well as in industrial and other applications. iJIM is an Open Access Journal. Readers don't have to pay any fee. Only registration is necessary.

Images are an important form of knowledge that allow us to develop understandings about our world. Flickr is the world's most used and most popular public repository of photographs and currently hosts over five billion images. This map reveals the global geographic distribution of geotagged images on the platform, and thus reveals the density of visual representations and locally depicted knowledge of all places on our planet.