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J Black

Designing for Civil Society: Not getting it may be a worldview thing - 0 views

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    When people are unenthusiastic about social media and other Web 2.0 stuff it is tempting to be a bit sneery and say they don't "get it". Who can fail to see the benefits of publishing without publishers, and organising without organisations? The tools may take a little getting used to, but surely they are worth trying in pursuit of a better world? Maybe for you, but not necessarily for them. It could be people do get it and don't like what they see, because your world view isn't theirs. If they say We can't do that - and they mustn't do it either, it may be a reflection of organisational culture - or something deeper about the way thing work.
J Black

Clay Shirky: 'Paywall will underperform - the numbers don't add up' | Technology | The ... - 0 views

  • His predictions for the fate of print media organisations have proved unnervingly accurate; 2009 would be a bloodbath for newspapers, he warned – and so it came to pass. Dozens of American newspapers closed last year, while several others, such as the Christian Science Monitor, moved their entire operation online. The business model of the traditional print newspaper, according to Shirky, is doomed; the monopoly on news it has enjoyed ever since the invention of the printing press has become an industrial dodo. Rupert Murdoch has just begun charging for online access to the Times – and Shirky is confident the experiment will fail."Everyone's waiting to see what will happen with the paywall – it's the big question. But I think it will underperform. On a purely financial calculation, I don't think the numbers add up." But then, interestingly, he goes on, "Here's what worries me about the paywall. When we talk about newspapers, we talk about them being critical for informing the public; we never say they're critical for informing their customers. We assume that the value of the news ramifies outwards from the readership to society as a whole. OK, I buy that. But what Murdoch is signing up to do is to prevent that value from escaping. He wants to only inform his customers, he doesn't want his stories to be shared and circulated widely. In fact, his ability to charge for the paywall is going to come down to his ability to lock the public out of the conversation convened by the Times."
  • Cognitive Surplus; Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.
  • It proves, Shirky argues, that people are more creative and generous than we had ever imagined, and would rather use their free time participating in amateur online activities such as Wikipedia – for no financial reward – because they satisfy the primal human urge for creativity and connectedness.
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  • Just as the invention of the printing press transformed society, the internet's capacity for "an unlimited amount of zero-cost reproduction of any digital item by anyone who owns a computer" has removed the barrier to universal participation, and revealed that human beings would rather be creating and sharing than passively consuming what a privileged elite think they should watch. Instead of lamenting the silliness of a lot of social online media, we should be thrilled by the spontaneous collective campaigns and social activism also emerging. The potential civic value of all this hitherto untapped energy is nothing less, Shirky concludes, than revolutionary.
  • Which is to say that, if in 1994 you'd wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you'd still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since."
  • The one point of agreement between internet utopians and sceptics has been their techno-deterministic assumption that the web has fundamentally changed human behaviour.
  • But I'm saying if the new technology creates a new behaviour, it's because it was allowing motivations that were previously locked out. These tools we now have allow for new behaviours – but they don't cause them."
  • But even if he's right, and the internet has merely unveiled ancient truths about human behaviour, isn't it still legitimate to feel a little bit dismayed by Facebook's revelation of almost infinite narcissism?
  • Look, we got erotic novels, first crack out of the box, once we had printing presses. It took a century and a half for the Royal Society to start publishing the first scientific journal in English. So even with the sacred printing press, the first things you get serve the basest human urges. But the presence of the erotic novels did not prevent us from pressing the printing presses into the service of the scientific revolution. And so I think every bit of time spent fretting about the fact that people have base desires which they will use this medium to satisfy is a waste of time – because that's been true of every medium ever launched."
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    "If you are reading this article on a printed copy of the Guardian, what you have in your hand will, just 15 years from now, look as archaic as a Western Union telegram does today. In less than 50 years, according to Clay Shirky, it won't exist at all. The reason, he says, is very simple, and very obvious: if you are 25 or younger, you're probably already reading this on your computer screen. "And to put it in one bleak sentence, no medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.""
J Black

ed4wb » Blog Archive » The New Bottom-up Authority - 0 views

  • It appears that most teachers today underestimate the amount of learning that is happening among youth outside of schools.  Since this informal learning sometimes dubbed “hanging out”, “messing around” or “geeking out”  happens outside of the classroom and doesn’t look like traditional learning, it’s easy for educators to miss. The quality and quantity of learning, the process by which it occurs, and the way authority is established in these informal environments, should be something that teachers become familiar with. Will Richardson, who writes extensively on these matters, believes that, “One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely.” (see article)
  • It appears that most teachers today underestimate the amount of learning that is happening among youth outside of schools.  Since this informal learning sometimes dubbed “hanging out”, “messing around” or “geeking out”  happens outside of the classroom and doesn’t look like traditional learning, it’s easy for educators to miss. The quality and quantity of learning, the process by which it occurs, and the way authority is established in these informal environments, should be something that teachers become familiar with. Will Richardson, who writes extensively on these matters, believes that, “One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely.” (see article)
  • It appears that most teachers today underestimate the amount of learning that is happening among youth outside of schools.  Since this informal learning sometimes dubbed “hanging out”, “messing around” or “geeking out”  happens outside of the classroom and doesn’t look like traditional learning, it’s easy for educators to miss. The quality and quantity of learning, the process by which it occurs, and the way authority is established in these informal environments, should be something that teachers become familiar with. Will Richardson, who writes extensively on these matters, believes that, “One of the biggest challenges educators face right now is figuring out how to help students create, navigate, and grow the powerful, individualized networks of learning that bloom on the Web and helping them do this effectively, ethically, and safely.” (see article)
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  • Schools, in general, are not taking advantage of the power of peer-based learning or the benefits of a more decentralized type of expertise which lies outside of its ivory walls.
  • The same study later describes a writer’s heightened sense of authenticity that comes from peer feedback as opposed to school evaluations: “It’s something I can do in my spare time, be creative and write and not have to be graded,” because, “you know how in school you’re creative, but you’re doing it for a grade so it doesn’t really count?”
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    The top-down, authoritarian model found in most classrooms today looks very different from the model many students experience when they learn online. The classroom's hierarchical approach, with the sage on the stage, requires, (and, ultimately demands) passivity and deference on the part of the learner. Informal, interest-driven networked learning, with its access to large stores of information and variety of opinion, on the other hand, takes a much different view of authority. It's usually peer based, largely democratic, meritocratic, often creates dissonance due to variety and demands evaluation. Knowing what we do about active learning, one would seem clearly superior to the other.
J Black

Zoho upgrades Web word processor with good UI (two of them!) | Webware - CNET - 0 views

  • Zoho is improving its online word processor, Writer, with a revised user interface and a few new useful features. The interface change is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too experiment. The new "MenuTab" UI gives you drop-down choices from the top level of the menu, but you can also press on a top-level menu choice to display an icon bar with identical options. The icon bar is nothing like Micrsoft Office 2007's tab bar, which supports many more options and has more complicated different ways to use it.
  • I find Zoho Writer 2.0 to be a strong word processor that's incredibly easy to learn and use, even more so than Google Docs. The dangerous collaboration function means I can't recommend this product, yet, as a workgroup app. But I wrote this review solo in Zoho, and it didn't give me a minute of confusion or trouble.
  • Zoho Writer users Google Gears to give users offline access
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  • You post directly to a few different blogging services from Zoho Writer, which is a very nice feature for bloggers.
  • Zoho is said to offer simultaneous collaborative editing, as Google Docs does, but when I tested the app I found it far too easy to over-write another user's edits. I do hope this gets fixed very soon.
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    Zoho is improving its online word processor, Writer, with a revised user interface and a few new useful features. The interface change is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too experiment. The new "MenuTab" UI gives you drop-down choices from the top level of the menu, but you can also press on a top-level menu choice to display an icon bar with identical options. The icon bar is nothing like Micrsoft Office 2007's tab bar, which supports many more options and has more complicated different ways to use it.
J Black

A 'Second Life' For Educators : January 2009 : THE Journal - 0 views

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    ELIZABETH KNITTLE, technology integration specialist for the Barnstable Public School District in Massachusetts, took her first tentative steps in the 3D online virtual world known as Second Life about two years ago. She wasn't impressed. "I looked around and I thought, this is crazy," Knittle recalls. "I just couldn't see the value of it, so I left. But then people starting blogging about it-- a lot of people-- so I had to reconsider. I decided that if I was going to understand this thing and be able to answer questions about it intelligently, I really just had to suck it up and get in there and participate. Once I connected with people inworld, it made all the difference." That early buzz among K-12 educators centered on Second Life's potential as a learning platform. And in the last few years, many colleges, universities, and libraries have established resources in what has become the preeminent multiuser virtual environment (MUVE). Today, more than 100 Second Life "regions" are used for educational purposes.
J Black

Welcome | Wordnik - 0 views

shared by J Black on 08 Jun 09 - Cached
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    Fantastic web app to use for ESL classes because it is so much more than a traditional dictionary... "What is Wordnik? Wordnik wants to be a place for all the words, and everything known about them. Traditional dictionaries make you wait until they've found what they consider to be "enough" information about a word before they will show it to you. Wordnik knows you don't want to wait-if you're interested in a word, we're interested too! Our goal is to show you as much information as possible, just as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make your own opinions about words known. By "information," we don't just mean traditional definitions (although we have plenty of those)! This information could be: * An example sentence-even if we've only found one sentence for a word, we'll show it to you. (And we'll show you where the sentence came from, too! * Related words: not just synonyms and antonyms, but words that are used in the same contexts. (For instance, cheeseburger, milkshake, and doughnut are not synonyms, but they show up in the same kinds of sentences.) * Images tagged by our friends at Flickr: want to know what a "pout" looks like? We'll show you. * Statistics: how rare is "tintinnabulation"? Well, we think you'll see it only about once a year. "Smile"? You might see that word many times, every day. * An audio pronunciation-and you can record your own! * Something YOU tell us! Use the "Contribute" links to tell us something-anything-about a word.
J Black

YouTube - Information R/evolution - 0 views

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    Below Information copied from Youtube (written by MWesch) This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming w... This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively. High Quality WMV download: http://www.mediafire.com/?atyamxuyn2p Quicktime: http://www.mediafire.com/?6hqygitsy0v If you are interested in this topic, check out Clay Shirky's work, especially: http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontolo... Also check out David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous: http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.... This video is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. So you are welcome to download it, share it, even change it, just as long as you give me some credit and you don't sell it or use it to sell anything.
buyglobalsmm45

Buy Etsy Accounts- 100% Fully Verified account & cheap.... - 0 views

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    Buy Etsy Accounts Introduction Etsy is an online marketplace that allows people to sell unique handmade or vintage items. It is a popular platform for people who make and sell arts and crafts, and many people use it to supplement their income. The Pros of Buying an Etsy Account Etsy is a great platform for people who are looking to sell handmade or vintage items, and there are a number of reasons why buying an Etsy account can be a great idea. Then are just a many of the advantages of doing so ➤ It can save you time: If you're starting from scratch, creating an Etsy account can take a fair amount of time. Between setting up your shop and listing your first few items, it can take several hours. And if you're not familiar with the platform, it can take even longer to get everything set up correctly. By purchasing an Etsy account that's already been created, you can avoid all of that work and get started selling right away. ➤ You'll benefit from previous work: When you buy an Etsy account, you're not just buying the account itself. You're also getting all the work that the previous owner put into setting it up and building it up. This can be a great advantage, especially if the account already has a good reputation and a decent amount of traffic. "Buy Etsy Accounts ➤ It can be a cost-effective way to start selling: Starting an Etsy shop from scratch can be a bit pricey. Between the listing fees and the costs of setting up your shop, you can easily end up spending a few hundred dollars before you even make your first sale. If you're on a tight budget, buying an Etsy account can be a much more cost-effective way to get started selling. ➤ You can get started selling right away: One of the biggest advantages of buying an Etsy account is that you can start selling immediately. With a new account, you'll need to spend time creating listings and shipping items. With an existing account, all of that work has already been done for you. This can
J Black

Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches - Times Online - 0 views

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    Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world's airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions. "Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable," said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.
J Black

Driving Change: Selling SharePoint and Social Media Inside the Enterprise - ReadWriteWeb - 0 views

  • balk at the technology because they have no desire to share their knowledge for the benefit of the organization. These individuals tend to equate their knowledge with job security; therefore, they feel nervous about sharing out of fear that they wouldn't be needed any more.
  • "Look for agnostics, ignore atheists."
  • busy workers will not respond to buzzwords like "wiki," "blog," and "community."
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  • The point here is to take collaborative technology and apply it to processes that are routine and can be easily completed.
  • My personal experience has been that most people don't care what tool they are using, just as long as its easy, or easier then the way they had to do it before if that makes sense. And that most people don't want to change the way that they're doing things currently, even if its obviously easier, because currently = comfortable and change = scary.
  • knowledge management is about the people and their attitudes; it is about cooperation.
  • Writing a lot and reading a lot feels natural to us, but to many people it is a chore - so we end up being our wiki's sole active user.
  • You are not selling a tool. You are trying to help people work in a smarter and more efficient way.
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    Though this article is written for the business sector, there are many great parallels with how we experience social media's acceptance in the educational realm. The suggestions that are given are readily applied to our setting, as well. In the enterprise, many employees think blogs are merely websites on which people talk about their cat or their latest meal. Many don't know the differences between and advantages of such tools as message boards, blogs, and wikis. They have heard of these terms in passing, but the demands of their day-to-day jobs have prevented them from recognizing the distinct benefits of each tool. Solution: It is useless to advocate for social media tools in a vacuum. Unless you're describing a solution to a practical problem, busy workers will not respond to buzzwords like "wiki," "blog," and "community." Your client usually has about a 30-second attention span in which you can sell a social media tool. An aide in my arsenal has been the excellent videos by Lee Lefever at Common Craft. Lee visually explains social media concepts "In Plain English." Common Craft videos quickly explain complex and sometimes unfamiliar technologies in a few minutes, sans the buzzwords, hype, and sensationalism. Problem: Cynical Clients Who Don't Want to Share Information Unfortunately, some potential SharePoint users balk at the technology because they have no desire to share their knowledge for the benefit of the organization. These individuals tend to equate their knowledge with job security; therefore, they feel nervous about sharing out of fear that they wouldn't be needed any more.
J Black

Share RSS Feeds via AIR with ShareFire - ReadWriteWeb - 0 views

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    When reading your RSS feeds, do you prefer a local application versus one that is online-only? If so, look no further than ShareFire. Besides being platform-independent (courtesy of Adobe Air), it is also completely free and open-source. It was created with article sharing in mind, as its name implies. According to its creators, Christian Cantrell and Dan Koestler, this was a priority. ShareFire supports sharing stories to AIM, Twitter and email, and posting articles to many services including Delicious, Digg, MySpace and Windows Live Bookmarks (now called favorites).
Gia DeSelm

What is LiC? | Learning is Change. - 0 views

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    Learning is Change. It is upheaval. It is revolution. Every time that we learn something new, it challenges our assumptions, it provokes us to act. Our
Annie Evans

Hands-On Math Movie & Activity - Skateboard Flex - 0 views

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    One important quality of a skateboard is its flex, how far the deck will bend when weight is put on it, and how well it snaps back to its original shape.
hanch91

Development and Changes in Gambling Strategies with Experience Growth - 2 views

In the world of gambling, where every move can determine your success or failure, the development and adaptation of gaming strategies are key aspects of achieving maximum winnings. With experience ...

started by hanch91 on 08 Mar 24 no follow-up yet
J Black

Webinar Recap: Brian Solis Presents Social Media and Education | Tech Academy - 0 views

  • Educators and students must both learn to participate in the social media realm, but participate in a way that is smart, educational and valuable. Since we are educating them on effective communication, we must be prepared to use social media tools inside of the classroom to get this point across. From personal conversations with other educators using social media, and chats with #SMCEDU, its clear that social media integration is not widely accepted or practiced across the USA. Its something Social Media Club- EDU aims to help facilitate through guidelines, training workshops, best practices and policy.
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    "Educators and students must both learn to participate in the social media realm, but participate in a way that is smart, educational and valuable. Since we are educating them on effective communication, we must be prepared to use social media tools inside of the classroom to get this point across. From personal conversations with other educators using social media, and chats with #SMCEDU, its clear that social media integration is not widely accepted or practiced across the USA. Its something Social Media Club- EDU aims to help facilitate through guidelines, training workshops, best practices and policy."
J Black

7 Things You Should Know About Google Jockeying | EDUCAUSE CONNECT - 0 views

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    A Google jockey is a participant in a presentation or class who surfs the Internet for terms, ideas, Web sites, or resources mentioned by the presenter or related to the topic. The jockey's searches are displayed simultaneously with the presentation, helping to clarify the main topic and extend learning opportunities. The "7 Things You Should Know About..." series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning practices and technologies. Each brief focuses on a single practice or technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use "7 Things You Should Know About..." briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues. In addition to the "7 Things You Should Know About…" briefs, you may find other ELI resources useful in addressing teaching, learning, and technology issues at your institution. To learn more, please visit the ELI Resources page.
J Black

Ways to use Wordle | SoulCradler - 0 views

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    So, educators, I am interested to know how you have used Wordle in your classrooms or as part of your work. I must favour visual learning, as I find visualisation tools such as Wordle, as well as SearchMe, Search Cube, Tag Galaxy and Many Eyes very useful. If they suit me as a learner, they must suit some of my students as well. I'll acknowledge the flipside of my argument and point you to Dy/Dan's post on Wordle as nothing more than eye-candy and time-filler. Maybe it is no more than engagement-on-the-cheap, but if it works, why discount it? You can decide for yourself. Here are some ways that I have utilised Wordle:
J Black

10 Best Practices for using wikis in education « Technology Teacher - 0 views

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    Just because you build a wiki, doesn't mean they will come. This has been my and other faculty members' experiences in using wikis in the classroom. We all know the feeling . . . the excitement of seeing and then using a type of software that should be just perfect to engage students and to enable community-building. We work during our break time to incorporate this learning technology in our course only to find out that students aren't that excited about it. I think one of the reasons for the lackluster student enthusiasm toward any type of new technology tool is that they need to learn it. I'm not saying that students are lazy . . . it's just that the internal question, "what's in it for me?" probably needs to be answered.
Michael Wacker

educon22 - home - 0 views

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    What is EduCon 2.2? EduCon 2.2 is both a conversation and a conference. And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is, hopefully, an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas -- from the very practical to the big dreams.
Archer Breaker

AHEB Investment Group in Joint Venture Partnership for UK Green Energy Park - 0 views

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    During this ongoing successful partnership, designed to complement the strengths of the two companies, QuickSilver has now also introduced a new business partner, who will join AHEB Investment Group in a new Joint Venture partnership, taking full advantage of AHEB's in-depth and sophisticated knowledge of the complex financing and funding requirements of major global projects. Under the agreement, AHEB will be a shareholder as well providing financial consulting and guidance for the duration of the project and will have sole responsibility for securing its funding, a projected cost of GBP 750 million. It will also provide funding opportunities in part through its network of investor partners.
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