Researchers in the social sciences and humanities consider social ties
to be a social resource. Such a resource is referred to as social capital.
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Social Capital in Virtual Learning Communities and Distributed Communities of Practice - 0 views
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Narayan and Pritchett (1997) suggested that communities with high social capital have frequent interaction, which in turn cultivates norms of reciprocity through which learners become more willing to help one another, and which improve coordination and dissemination of information and knowledge sharing. Social capital has been used as a framework for understanding a wide range of social issues in temporal communities. It has been used for the investigation of issues such as trust, participation, and cooperation.
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In one of the earliest definitions of social capital, Hanifan (1916) stated that social capital included "those intangible substances [that] count for most in the daily lives of people - namely goodwill, fellowship, sympathy and social intercourse among the individuals and families who make up a social unit." Many years later, Coleman (1988) followed a similar line of thinking when he suggested that social capital refers to supportive relationships among adults and children that promote the sharing of norms and values.
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Woolcock (1998) argues that social capital `encompasses the norms and networks facilitating collective action for mutual benefit.'
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Fountain (1998) defines social capital as the institutional effectiveness of inter-organizational relationships and cooperation—horizontally among similar firms in associations, vertically in supply chains, and multidirectional links to sources of technical knowledge, human resources, and public agencies.
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Nahapiet and Ghoshal (1998) defined social capital as the sum of actual and potential resources embedded within, available through and derived from the network of relationships possessed by an individual or social unit.
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And Fukuyama (1999) included informal norms that promote cooperation between two or more individuals. The norms that constitute social capital can range from a norm of reciprocity between two friends, all the way up to complex and elaborately articulated doctrines like Christianity, Islamism or Confucianism. And so by definition, trust, networks, civil society, and the like which have been associated with social capital are all epiphenomenal, arising as a result of social capital but not constituting social capital itself.
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A meta-societal definition of social capital was offered by the World Bank (1999), which referred to the institutions, relationships, and norms that shape the quality and quantity of a society's social interactions. In this view, social capital is seen not merely as the sum of the institutions that underpin a society _ it is the glue that holds them together.
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Cohen and Prusak (2001) extend Putnam's definition to define social capital as a stock of active connections among people, which covers the trust, mutual understanding, and shared values and behaviours that bind people as members of human networks and communities.
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As a working definition, we define social capital in virtual learning communities as . common social resource that facilitates information exchange, knowledge sharing, and knowledge construction through continuous interaction, built on trust and maintained through shared understanding.
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Social capital has recently emerged as an important interdisciplinary research area. It is frequently used as a framework for understanding various social issues in temporal communities, neighbourhoods and groups. In particular, researchers in the social sciences and the humanities have used social capital to understand trust, shared understanding, reciprocal relationships, social network structures, common norms and cooperation, and the roles these entities play in various aspects of temporal communities. Despite proliferation of research in this area, little work has been done to extend this effort to technology-driven learning communities (also known as virtual learning communities). This paper surveys key interdisciplinary research areas in social capital. It also explores how the notions of social capital and trust can be extended to virtual communities, including virtual learning communities and distributed communities of practice. Research issues surrounding social capital and trust as they relate to technology-driven learning communities are identified.
iMedia Connection: 5 Experts on 10 Rockin' Brand Videos - Bradley Werner, The Fifth Net... - 0 views
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shared by David Toews on 10 Apr 09
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Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Critical Information Studies For a Participatory Culture (Pa... - 0 views
henryjenkins.org/...nt_wrong_with_web_20_cr_1.html
participation sociality socialmedia newmedia digitaldivide
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we need to look at both agency and structure and so we need to end the theoretical conflict in favor of identifying shared goals
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we need to develop strategies for decreasing the role of ignorance and fear in public debates about new media
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The participation gap refers to these other social, cultural, and educational concerns which block full participation.
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the model of expressive citizenship suggested by the MacArthur Foundation's emphasis on New Media Literacies
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While schools and libraries may represent the best sites for overcoming the participation gap, they are often the most limited in their ability to access some of the key platforms -- from Flickr and YouTube to Ning and Wikipedia-- where these new cultural practices are emerging.
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We need to continue to push for alternative platforms and practices which embrace and explore the potential of collective intelligence
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As John McMurria has noted, the most visible content of many media-sharing sites tends to come from members of dominant groups
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danah boyd and S. Craig Watkins are arguing that social networks act like gated communities, cementing existing social ties rather than broadening them
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social divisions in the real world are being mapped onto cyberspace, reinforcing cultural segregation along class and race lines
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While corporations are asserting a "crisis of copyright", seeking to police "digital "piracy," citizen groups are seeking to combat a "crisis of fair use" as the mechanisms of corporate copyright protection erode the ability of citizens to meaningfully quote from their culture.
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the debates over "free labor" represent the most visible part of a larger effort of consumers and citizens to reassert some of their rights in the face of web 2.0 companies
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In his recent book, Dream:Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, Stephen Duncombe makes the case for a new model of social change which is playful and utopian, channels what we know as consumers as well as what we know as citizens, and embraces a more widely accessible language for discussing public policy.
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There is also a need for critical utopianism which explores the value of emerging models and proposes alternatives to current practices.
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Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Critical Information Studies For a Participatory Culture (Pa... - 0 views
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Tim O'Reilly's concept of "web 2.0" was first promoted at a 2004 conference of key industry leaders and later spread via his "What is Web 2.0" essay.
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There is an urgent need for serious reflection on the core models of cultural production, distribution, ownership, and participation underlying "web 2.0."
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those of us who have long advocated for a more "participatory culture" need to better define our ideals and identify and confront those forces that threaten the achievement of those ideals
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A participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing one's creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another. Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy from one of individual expression to community involvement.
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I have been seeking to better understand the mechanisms by which consumers curate and circulate media content, rejecting current discussions of "viral media" (which hold onto a top-down model of cultural infection) in favor of an alternative model of "spreadability" (based on the active and self conscious agency of consumers who decide what content they want to "spread" through their social networks.
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This new emphasis on "participatory culture" represents a serious rethinking of the model of cultural resistance which dominated cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s.
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In this new context, participation is not the same thing as resistance nor is it simply an alternative form of co-optation; rather, struggles occur in, around, and through participation which have no predetermined outcomes.
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Man-Computer Symbiosis - 2 views
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In short, it seems worthwhile to avoid argument with (other) enthusiasts for artificial intelligence by conceding dominance in the distant future of cerebration to machines alone.
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There will nevertheless be a fairly long interim during which the main intellectual advances will be made by men and computers working together in intimate association. A multidisciplinary study group, examining future research and development problems of the Air Force, estimated that it would be 1980 before developments in artificial intelligence make it possible for machines alone to do much thinking or problem solving of military significance. That would leave, say, five years to develop man-computer symbiosis and 15 years to use it. The 15 may be 10 or 500, but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.
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It is often said that programming for a computing machine forces one to think clearly, that it disciplines the thought process. If the user can think his problem through in advance, symbiotic association with a computing machine is not necessary.
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They would be easier to solve, and they could be solved faster, through an intuitively guided trial-and-error procedure in which the computer cooperated, turning up flaws in the reasoning or revealing unexpected turns in the solution.
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Poincare anticipated the frustration of an important group of would-be computer users when he said, "The question is not, 'What is the answer?' The question is, 'What is the question?'" One of the main aims of man-computer symbiosis is to bring the computing machine effectively into the formulative parts of technical problems.
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It is to bring computing machines effectively into processes of thinking that must go on in "real time," time that moves too fast to permit using computers in conventional ways.
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To think in interaction with a computer in the same way that you think with a colleague whose competence supplements your own will require much tighter coupling between man and machine than is suggested by the example and than is possible today.
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Throughout the period I examined, in short, my "thinking" time was devoted mainly to activities that were essentially clerical or mechanical: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an insight. Moreover, my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability.
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the operations that fill most of the time allegedly devoted to technical thinking are operations that can be performed more effectively by machines than by men.
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If those problems can be solved in such a way as to create a symbiotic relation between a man and a fast information-retrieval and data-processing machine, however, it seems evident that the cooperative interaction would greatly improve the thinking process.
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Computing machines can do readily, well, and rapidly many things that are difficult or impossible for man, and men can do readily and well, though not rapidly, many things that are difficult or impossible for computers. That suggests that a symbiotic cooperation, if successful in integrating the positive characteristics of men and computers, would be of great value. The differences in speed and in language, of course, pose difficulties that must be overcome.
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Men will fill in the gaps, either in the problem solution or in the computer program, when the computer has no mode or routine that is applicable in a particular circumstance.
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Clearly, for the sake of efficiency and economy, the computer must divide its time among many users. Timesharing systems are currently under active development. There are even arrangements to keep users from "clobbering" anything but their own personal programs.
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It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a "thinking center" that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and the symbiotic functions suggested earlier in this paper. The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.
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The first thing to face is that we shall not store all the technical and scientific papers in computer memory. We may store the parts that can be summarized most succinctly-the quantitative parts and the reference citations-but not the whole. Books are among the most beautifully engineered, and human-engineered, components in existence, and they will continue to be functionally important within the context of man-computer symbiosis. (Hopefully, the computer will expedite the finding, delivering, and returning of books.)
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The second point is that a very important section of memory will be permanent: part indelible memory and part published memory. The computer will be able to write once into indelible memory, and then read back indefinitely, but the computer will not be able to erase indelible memory. (It may also over-write, turning all the 0's into l's, as though marking over what was written earlier.) Published memory will be "read-only" memory. It will be introduced into the computer already structured. The computer will be able to refer to it repeatedly, but not to change it.
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The basic dissimilarity between human languages and computer languages may be the most serious obstacle to true symbiosis.
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In short: instructions directed to computers specify courses; instructions-directed to human beings specify goals.
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We may in due course see a serious effort to develop computer programs that can be connected together like the words and phrases of speech to do whatever computation or control is required at the moment. The consideration that holds back such an effort, apparently, is that the effort would produce nothing that would be of great value in the context of existing computers. It would be unrewarding to develop the language before there are any computing machines capable of responding meaningfully to it.
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By and large, in generally available computers, however, there is almost no provision for any more effective, immediate man-machine communication than can be achieved with an electric typewriter.
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Displays seem to be in a somewhat better state than controls. Many computers plot graphs on oscilloscope screens, and a few take advantage of the remarkable capabilities, graphical and symbolic, of the charactron display tube. Nowhere, to my knowledge, however, is there anything approaching the flexibility and convenience of the pencil and doodle pad or the chalk and blackboard used by men in technical discussion.
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2) Computer-Posted Wall Display: In some technological systems, several men share responsibility for controlling vehicles whose behaviors interact. Some information must be presented simultaneously to all the men, preferably on a common grid, to coordinate their actions. Other information is of relevance only to one or two operators. There would be only a confusion of uninterpretable clutter if all the information were presented on one display to all of them. The information must be posted by a computer, since manual plotting is too slow to keep it up to date.
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Laboratory experiments have indicated repeatedly that informal, parallel arrangements of operators, coordinating their activities through reference to a large situation display, have important advantages over the arrangement, more widely used, that locates the operators at individual consoles and attempts to correlate their actions through the agency of a computer. This is one of several operator-team problems in need of careful study.
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3) Automatic Speech Production and Recognition: How desirable and how feasible is speech communication between human operators and computing machines?
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In large part, the interest stems from realization that one can hardly take a military commander or a corporation president away from his work to teach him to type. If computing machines are ever to be used directly by top-level decision makers, it may be worthwhile to provide communication via the most natural means, even at considerable cost.
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It seems reasonable, therefore, for computer specialists to be the ones who interact directly with computers in business offices.
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Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers. It will involve very close coupling between the human and the electronic members of the partnership. The main aims are 1) to let computers facilitate formulative thinking as they now facilitate the solution of formulated problems, and 2) to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs. In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone can perform them. Prerequisites for the achievement of the effective, cooperative association include developments in computer time sharing, in memory components, in memory organization, in programming languages, and in input and output equipment.
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Heidegger 2 Twitter: Technology, Self & Social Networks. - 11 views
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Both object and subject are converted to a “standing-reserve”, to be disaggregated, redistributed, recontextualized, and reaggregated.
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And human individuals, who were once reduced to resources (Frederick Taylor, and the authoritarianism of Human Resource departments), or “eyeballs” in the terminology of internet marketing executives; are now the creative engines of growth, innovation, and creativity.
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This becomes even more interesting when we wonder about the context and meaning of start-ups intentionally exposing their office space’s ductwork - as if the open office with exposed pipes re-instantiates a manifestation of the hearth, or at least ‘un-hides’ the circulatory system of commerce.
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Postmodern technology uses the hyper-reality of simulations to get rid of the limitations imposed by reality. The limit of postmodern reality is not the total objectification of nature, but the replacement of reality by virtual reality totally under our control.
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Borgmann’s antidote for losing our personality to the shallowness and superficiality of hyper-reality is to return to focal activities.
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It takes commitment on our part to engage in focal activities, but the effort affords us a chance to maintain some sense of self in the technological world.
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Thus technological rationality can claim that technologies are value neutral, and only uses are good or evil, despite the fact that the uses are shaped by the technologies.
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And technology leads to new forms of domination. For the critical theorists history has always had domination, but in our time domination has changed from master over slave or lord over serf to the domination of humanity by economics and the market. We are given the illusion of liberty, but that is simply the freedom to choose between brands of mass-produced products.
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Computer technology further de-contextualizes human experience by emphasizing information over understanding. And computers further domination by providing new means of tracking the productivity of workers to the corporation and depersonalizing supervision; very much a modern panopticon envisioned by Jeremy Bentham.
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Foucault’s view allows for the possibility that information technology could be used to put people in more direct communication with each other and spread the concentration of power over society.
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MS Word and freely available blogging software encourages us to constantly revise, so a work becomes a series of drafts, none of which is final (just like this post).
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Gould’s attitude towards design finds philosophical support in pragmatism. Pragmatism recognizes that everyone is socially situated. Dewey taught that scientific theories or methods of logic are tools used in a certain social practice. Attention to the practices surrounding an object are important to understanding it. Since he viewed knowledge as participatory he argued that learning must come about by doing.
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Metaphors provide us a way of understanding the world, by associating one thing with another. Powerful metaphors are like magic, and inform how we think of the objects described, revealing hidden aspects of the thing described. New metaphors for the forces in our lives will suggest new ways of living.
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Metaphors interact with technology in several ways: technology serves as a source of metaphors, new technologies are understood metaphorically, and our metaphors in life pose problems to be solved technologically
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By developing new metaphors, interface designers can suggest new ways of working with computers. If these metaphors are carefully chosen then they will provide a natural model which makes operation of the machine easy.
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Just as metaphors can help us understand computers, computers can provide new metaphors for life. Postmodern theories of psychology suggest that there is no single unified “ego”, but that each of us is made up of a multiplicity of parts, while Minsky discusses the “agencies of mind” in his book “The Society of Mind.” Philip Bromberg claims that a healthy personality is one in which different aspects of the self can come to know one another and reflect upon each other.
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Social networks allow participants to explore different aspects of their personality, to manufacture and evolve aspects of their personality depending on context and mood.
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While some observers might see this activity as evidence of Heidegger’s disaggregation of the subject by technology, it can also be seen as a model for Bromberg’s self as being one while being many. This is just one way in which computer technology, the internet, and connected social networks can show us a new way of understanding ourselves.