Skip to main content

Home/ Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University/ Group items tagged reality

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Mike Wesch

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed - 0 views

  • When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism, into an alienated and alienating “blah.”
  • since dialogue is the encounter in which the united reflection and action of the dialoguers are addressed to the world which is to be transformed and humanized, this dialogue cannot be reduced to the act of one person’s “depositing” ideas in another; nor can it become a simple exchange of ideas to be “consumed” by the discussants.
  • Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people.
  • ...32 more annotations...
  • Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others.
  • If I do not love the world — if I do not love life — if I do not love people — I cannot enter into dialogue.
  • dialogue cannot exist without humility.
  • Dialogue further requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human
  • the “dialogical man” believes in others even before he meets them face to face.
  • Founding itself upon love, humility, and faith, dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship of which mutual trust between the dialoguers is the logical consequence.
  • naming of the world
  • Whereas faith in humankind is an a priori requirement for dialogue, trust is established by dialogue.
  • Nor yet can dialogue exist without hope. Hope is rooted in men’s incompletion, from which they move out in constant search
  • critical thinking — thinking which discerns an indivisible solidarity between the world and the people and admits of no dichotomy between them — thinking which perceives reality as process, as transformation, rather than as a static entity — thinking which does not separate itself from action, but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved.
  • We must never merely discourse on the present situation, must never provide the people with programs which have little or nothing to do with their own preoccupations, doubts, hopes, and fears — programs which at times in fact increase the fears of the oppressed consciousness. It is not our role to speak to the people about our own view of the world, nor to attempt to impose that view on them, but rather to dialogue with the people about their view and ours. We must realize that their view of the world, manifested variously in their action, reflects their situation in the world. Educational and political action which is not critically aware of this situation runs the risk either of “banking” or of preaching in the desert.
  • Often, educators and politicians speak and are not understood because their language is not attuned to the concrete situation of the people they address. Accordingly their talk is just alienated and alienating rhetoric.
  • he dialogue of education as the practice of freedom
  • oncept of a generative theme
  • For precisely this reason, the methodology proposed requires that the investigators and the people (who would normally be considered objects of that investigation) should act as co-investigators.
  • Generative themes can be located in concentric circles, moving from the general to the particular.
  • I consider the fundamental theme of our epoch to be that of domination — which implies its opposite, the theme of liberation, as the objective to be achieved.
  • For example, underdevelopment, which cannot be understood apart from the relationship of dependency, represents a limit-situation characteristic of societies of the Third World.
  • I must re-emphasize that the generative theme cannot be found in people, divorced from reality; nor yet in reality, divorced from people; much less in “no man’s land.” It can only be apprehended in the human-world relationship.
  • t is as transforming and creative beings that humans, in their permanent relations with reality, produce not only material goods — tangible objects — but also social institutions, ideas, and concepts
  • Actually, themes exist in people in their relations with the world, with reference to concrete facts.
  • We must realize that the aspirations, the motives, and the objectives implicit in the meaningful thematics are human aspirations, motives, and objectives.
  • a common striving towards awareness of reality and towards self-awareness,
  • As a process of search, of knowledge, and thus of creation, it requires the investigators to discover the interpenetration of problems, in the linking of meaningful themes.
  • the comprehension of total reality
  • Thus, the process of searching for the meaningful thematics should include a concern for the links between themes, a concern to pose these themes as problems, and a concern for their historical-cultural context.
  • Just as the educator may not elaborate a program to present to the people, neither may the investigator elaborate “itineraries” for researching the thematic universe, starting from points which he has predetermined.
  • That is, they must consist of communication and of the common experience of a reality perceived in the complexity of its constant “becoming.”
  • Human beings are because they are in a situation. And they will be more the more they not only critically reflect upon their existence but critically act upon it.
  • One of these basic themes (and one which I consider central and indispensable) is the anthropological concept of culture. Whether men and women are peasants or urban workers, learning to read or enrolled in a post-literacy program, the starting point of their search to know more (in the instrumental meaning of the term) is the debate of the concept. As they discuss the world of culture, they express their level of awareness of reality in which various themes are implicit. Their discussion touches upon other aspects of reality which comes to be perceived in an increasingly critical manner These aspects in turn involve many other themes.
  • I am more and more convinced that true revolutionaries must perceive the revolution, because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love
  • This affirmation contains an entire dialogical theory of how to construct the program content of education, which cannot he elaborated according to what the educator thinks best for the students.
  •  
    For precisely this reason, the methodology proposed requires that the investigators and the people (who would normally be considered objects of that investigation) should act as co-investigators.
Adam Bohannon

Heidegger 2 Twitter: Technology, Self & Social Networks. - 11 views

  • Both object and subject are converted to a “standing-reserve”, to be disaggregated, redistributed, recontextualized, and reaggregated.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • Borgmann’s antidote for losing our personality to the shallowness and superficiality of hyper-reality is to return to focal activities.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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).
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • This fluid multiplicity of personality is what gives us our flexibility and resilience.
  • Social networks allow participants to explore different aspects of their personality, to manufacture and evolve aspects of their personality depending on context and mood.
  • 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.
priyalkale

latest topic Mixed Reality Industry latest Size, Share, Revenue Analysis, latest tren... - 0 views

  •  
    The mixed reality will provide huge help for the students as well as for the teachers as it makes things interactive. This technology offers better and interactive ways of study and also helps in reducing the learning errors. It uses 3-D images that give great user experience than the traditional systems, which only produces 2D images.
  •  
    The mixed reality will provide huge help for the students as well as for the teachers as it makes things interactive. This technology offers better and interactive ways of study and also helps in reducing the learning errors. It uses 3-D images that give great user experience than the traditional systems, which only produces 2D images.
anonymous

My second machinima: YouTube - Epic Journey - Travel forms in WoW - 11 views

  •  
    Have you ever wanted to fly? This is just one more thing you can do in a synthetic world that you can't do in reality. This is a montage of my Night Elf druid taking various travel forms in World of Warcraft. I created it in order to share a glimpse of the world through my eyes for those who haven't spent any time there. I created it over the course of a couple of hours using Wegame and Windows Movie Maker. The music is an open license track from CC Mixter (see credits).
Mike Wesch

Gives Life Meaning: Homeless Mind - Modernity's Discontents - 2 - 0 views

  • The discontents derived from the bureaucratization of major institutions are very similar to the ones just mentioned. However, they are even broader in scope for the simple reason that bureaucratization has affected nearly every sector of social life.
  • A congregation of Tibetan Buddhist monks, let us say, transplanted to the United States, can start using electric razors without thereby altering the character of their social relations. If, however, this monastic community started to bureaucratize its procedures, the very fabric of its social life would change almost immediately.
  • The individual is "surrounded" by bureaucracy far more effectively than he is by the technologized economy,
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Political life has become anonymous, incomprehensible and anomic to broad strata of the population
  • All the major public institutions of modern society have become "abstract."
  • Because of the religious crisis in modern society, social "homelessness" has become metaphysical--that is, it has become "homelessness" in the cosmos.
  • Modernity has accomplished many far-reaching transformations, but it has not fundamentally changed the finitude, fragility and mortality of the human condition. What it has accomplished is to seriously weaken those definitions of reality that previously made that human condition easier to bear. This has produced an anguish all its own, and one that we are inclined to think adds additional urgency and weight to the other discontents we have mentioned.
  • In the private sphere, "repressed" irrational impulses are allowed to come to the fore. A specific private identity provides shelter from the threats of anonymity. The transparency of the private world makes the opacity of the public one tolerable.
  • A limited number of highly significant relationships, most of them chosen voluntarily by the individual, provide the emotional resources for coping with the multi-relational reality "outside."
  • The most fundamental function of institutions is probably to protect the individual from having to make too many choices.
  • Human beings are not capable of tolerating the continuous uncertainty (or, if you will, freedom) of existing without institutional supports.
  • In their private lives individuals keep on constructing and reconstructing refuges that they experience as "home." But, over and over again, the cold winds of "homelessness" threaten these fragile constructions. It would be an overstatement to say that the "solution" of the private sphere is a failure; there are too many individual successes. But it is always very precarious.
Adam Bohannon

The Grid: The Next-Gen Internet? - 0 views

  • The Grid evolved from the early desire to connect supercomputers into "metacomputers" that could be remotely controlled. The word "grid" was borrowed from the electricity grid, to imply that any compatible device could be plugged in anywhere on the Grid and be guaranteed a certain level of resources, regardless of where those resources might come from.
  • As with the Web, the initial impetus for a grid came from the scientific community, specifically high-energy physics, which needed extra resources to manage and analyze the huge amounts of data being collected.
  •  
    The Matrix may be the future of virtual reality, but researchers say the Grid is the future of collaborative problem-solving. More than 400 scientists gathered at the Global Grid Forum this week to discuss what may be the Internet's next evolutionary step.
Mike Wesch

Augmented Reality Devices: See the Online World While Walking the Real One - 1 views

  • Vuzix CEO Paul Travers said, “The Wrap 920AV will not just change the portable video industry, but how consumers view and interact with information. From watching a Civil War video reproduction battle reenactment on the actual battleground to walking through the streets of New York City with an animated virtual tour guide, the possibilities are endless.” Available in Spring 2009, you can check out the device in action at CES, Sands Expo Convention Center Booth #73810.
  • Watch this short video to see how AR is going to transform the way we learn. From AR books with interactive images and characters, to museums and learning centers with additional virtual layers of information, learning will be an experience that we can interact with and enjoy.
  • Wikitude AR Travel Guide
firozcosmolance

Barefoot College -An extraordinary dream brought into reality by Bunker Roy - Gossip Ki... - 0 views

  •  
    Barefoot College! The name evokes some sort of inquisitiveness. Isn't it? If you are looking for admission to this college, check your credentials first! The toppers out there, with some fancy graduation or post-graduation degree with scores more than 80 or 90 percent,are disqualified to attend this college!
Bill Genereux

First Principles - Liberty, Technology, and the Advent of Social Networking - 20 views

  • are you a data set that Facebook counts on to offer to its advertisers—with the opt-outs subsidized by the fools who don't change their privacy settings?
  • The world, emptied of meaning, presents an unbearable situation in which meaning must be imposed
  • Even questioning takes a back seat to Google's anticipation of your query.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • We can hardly do anything without irony, since the Internet haunts us with the vision of every possible alternative.
  • since many events are announced to us only virtually, we might not take reality seriously either.
  • Will babies swaddled in social media still grow up to desire the rational milk without guile? Or will the real world become a bric-a-brac, an inferior knockoff of virtual reality?
  • Where we have the option to practice virtue without the use of technology, we should do so.
Bill Genereux

Views: Over It Yet? Privacy, That Is - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • social media were invented not to promote your own reality show or to engage student learners in the digital age but to make money via programming and targeted advertising at your and your institution’s personal expense
  • give marketers and advertisers the most direct window into our psyche and buying habits they've ever had
  • imagine the level of awareness by other majors not required to understand privacy invasion, liability and social responsibility
Mike Wesch

The Boxxy Story - 0 views

  • Accusations began to fire. Just who would want to try and throw people off the trail and confuse them, and who would have a new, large photo of her? Boxxy herself, or a close accomplice was the consensus. They must have caught wind of her full name being found, and merely be attempting to mitigate the damage by stirring the pot with false leads. 
  • It sounded semi-plausible, but, unbeknownst to the vast majority of /b/ at that moment, the CBRC had long since uncovered a photobucket account which was later seen to contain the same photos, so the implication is obvious, members of the CBRC were trolling /b/ with the photos in a attempt to throw them off, as they themselves were close to breaking into her accounts and did not want Anonymous to do it first.
  • We have no way of verifying if they were telling the truth, or if any of the claimed locations were in any way accurate but the mere possibility of this is shocking indeed. Thankfully, these were almost certainly fake - one of the addresses was a mall, one of the phone numbers was for a chiropractor.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • Within a couple of hours, CBRC had breached her Youtube account, via successfully guessing the secret answer for her email account, deduced from the stack of information they uncovered.
  • Or phishing her with a fake email, depending on who you listen to.
  • They then made her videos private, uploading a video warning her to never post another video again. This attracted 1000 comments within an hour and became the most commented video of the day on Youtube. So that brought it to an end, in theory. They had removed the ‘cancer’.
  • So after all that, was the ‘chemo’ even effective? No, not really. A look at /b/ will reveal Boxxy threads are still being posted. By essentially martyring the Boxxy meme, CBRC have simply created a new groundswell of people willing to troll with her image, as well as genuine resentment at their actions. 
  • Now she has her name, age, dozens of photos, school, internet accounts, alleged phone numbers, and alleged location available online, along with the details of several uninvolved friends. Nobody could have predicted she would create so much chaos, not least Boxxy herself. She had no idea what she was getting herself into by posting a response video.
  • This entire debacle ultimately stems from those who spammed /b/ with her image and pissed off so many people.
  • The lesson for all of us here, obvious as it is, is to think about what you divulge online. Is your Myspace secure? Is your Facebook account private? What forum accounts contain your details, and can they be traced and linked to each other? Everything you write online can potentially be linked, as if it were a jigsaw, and a profile of your life built up. I know plenty of people who have publicly viewable Facebook accounts containing their D.O.B, phone numbers, emails, addresses, places they work, go to college and so on. This is lunacy. This is asking for trouble. Boxxy didn’t do this, yet was still tracked down. 
  • “First, we, CBCR, pretty much made all the breakthroughs in the investigation. I don't care if it sounds arrogant, but if you look through our now-leaked dox, you can see that everything that was found on 4chan was found by us beforehand.”
  • Give people anonymity, and they become de-individuated, whether it be on an image board or in a rioting mob.
  • he same internet machine that could propel you to the top of the Youtube charts and hand you online fame will happily chew you up and spit you back out just as quickly, with zero remorse or consideration for the consequences. This is the reality of the internet today, this case is not the first, and surely not the last.
  • A few examples of fakes:www.youtube.com/user/boxxiebabee  www.youtube.com/user/therealboxxybabee www.youtube.com/user/boxxxxybabeee www.youtube.com/user/boxxyfriendsonly www.youtube.com/user/B0xxxybabee www.youtube.com/user/boxxybaabee www.youtube.com/user/boxxybabee2 www.youtube.com/user/thenewboxxybabee
  • And of course:www.youtube.com/user/Boxxyakamoldybread 
  • P.P.S Some distasteful and blatantly fake photoshopped news items are being posted on /b/ claiming Boxxy is dead. The fakes are very poorly written and contain numerous flaws. Again, don’t be fooled.
  • It's Friday January 16th. On Youtube, the user 'boxxybabee', has 21,800 subscribers, 1.4 million video views and over 38,000 comments on her videos and channel, yet she only signed up 8 days ago, and has only 3 videos. Many people were, and are confused. How did this happen? By documenting what I personally saw, I will show you.
  • The story essentially begins back in April 2006 when 'Boxxy' joined the anime forum/game based site Gaia Online under the username 'M o l d yLunchboxx'. It appears Boxxy returned from a Gaia hiatus at the very end of 2007, and embarked on a posting spree which lasted a week. It was during this first week of January 2008 that she made two Youtube videos for two fellow Gaia users, '4DM1RALAWESOME' and another referred to simply as 'Ant'.
  • Boxxy's last login to Youtube was February 2008, and for Gaia Online, April 2008.
  • The story now takes a leap forward to December 27th, 2008, when, according to Encyclopedia Dramatica, the video 'FOAR 4DD1 FRUM BOXXY' was posted on i-am-bored.com. This was spotted by someone at 7chan, who embedded the video at the top of the random '/b/' board. 
  • This writer first saw FOAR 4DD1 on January 3rd, 2009, when the video was posted as a 'you rage you lose thread' on the /b/ board at 4chan, with the 'Expert' level afforded to those who would withstand the entire video without wanting to tear out their hair or hurt small animals. /b/tards saw what has been labelled 'the most insane display we've ever seen on youtube' and 'the cutest girl you've ever seen'. This was the true start of the Boxxy phenomenon.
  • Over the next couple of days, interest grew, and Boxxy threads began to populate /b/. Why have her videos lain virtually unviewed and untouched for 51 weeks only to be brought up now. Who was this girl? What was the cause of her unique behaviour - her vivacious mannerisms, head bobbing, jaw grinding, random accents and rambling? Was she really 21 as her profile stated? Speculation began. Some pulled out their wikiPHD and speculated, tourettes? ADHD? Drug abuse - cocaine, ecstacy, meth? No, just too much coffee, according to others, or simple acting up to the camera. Comparisons to Zed from Police Academy and Heath Ledger's Joker were immediate.
  • Regardless, a split already began to emerge at /b/. Half of /b/ appeared smitten, captivated by this pretty, wacky girl drenched in eyeliner, but the rest were having their patience tested. Whilst a group of /b/tards declared 'Operation Valkyrie' on Boxxy - intending to find, raid and destroy as much as possible - youtube, myspace, facebook, photobuckets, etc in search of an identity and the 'upper boob' sign mentioned in 41DD, others simply sat and dismayed at the whole effort. Why try and raid the accounts of someone who hasn't logged into any known accounts for almost a year? Many /b/tards resented the obsession with someone who was not only inactive, but a Gaiafag, emo and a camwhore to boot. As one naysayer put it, it was: 'proof that /b/ is full of 13 y.o boys'.
  • The known accounts, Youtube and Gaia, were quickly spammed with the Operation Valkyrie tag. Via analysis of so called 'Gaiafaggotry' forum posts, /b/tards extracted two pictures of Boxxy from her Gaia friends photobucket accounts, and threw out possible names.
  • On January 6th, someone claiming to be Boxxy posted two previously unseen photos on /b/. A troll, surely? The same day, her Youtube account disappeared and her Gaia account became inaccessible to the public. Was this the real Boxxy intervening, or simply trolls posting photos from photobucket under her guise, and hacking into her accounts and shutting them down? It was also on the 6th that a clearly fake Youtube account was created - 'Boxxyakamoldybread'. Even though the videos are clearly of lower resolution than the originals, some were fooled by this, and some probably still are.
  • The 'boxxy lovers' of 4chan were by now declaring her the 'Queen of /b/' and a instant new meme. The haters labelled this as a perfect example of a forced meme. To them, she was the epitome of the 'cancer killing /b/'. Battle lines were being drawn.
  • On the 9th, Boxxy delivered. She addressed 'recent events', said she was in fact free of drugs and personality disorders, and proved it actually was her posting her photos on /b/. Whilst /b/tards were scrambling to find her identity and spamming her accounts, she was there, watching.
  • his interest generated over 70,000 views within 12 hours, pushing the video onto the first page for most viewed of the day on Youtube.
  • Identical chaos was occurring at 7chan, with the /b/ first page 100% filled with Boxxy at some points. On the 10th, with Boxxy now approaching 400,000 views and 10,000 subscribers, Operation Clampdown was declared. If Moot did not ban the users spamming boxxy threads on the 4chan /b/, the site would be brought down via a DDOS. 
  • On the 12th, Youtube 'celeb' Sxephil included Boxxy in the intro for his new video, and used her face as the thumbnail. Personally, I found it extremely cynical of Phil, a Youtube partner who makes money from views, to advertise his extremely boring video about Joe the Plumber with Boxxy's face. What a dick. Worse still, the exposure to his 310,000 subscribers sent several thousand more people to the Boxxy videos.
  • There are many patently absurd theories about Boxxy. If you listen to the drooling idiocy leaking through the interweb, you'll be told she is in fact an actress hired by Gaia Online to promote their product (that's why she says she moved on to bigger and better things, huh, morons?), the whole thing is a giant trolling exercise meticulously planned by her and accomplices, the entire thing was perpertrated by 7chan users attempting to cripple 4chan, she's a paid actress akin to lonelygirl15, or most bizarrely of all, a claim has been put forward that she is a fraud mocking the mannerisms of a 15 year old girl who lives in Chicago, orchestrated by said girl's obsessed crush who is angry at his unrequited love. Some people actually believe this.Well, there you have it. That's pretty much what happened.
Mike Wesch

Phantom's Trees, part two « zunguzungu - 0 views

  • The crux of Carpenter’s insight, I think, is that he isn’t just interested in a privileging of sight over other senses, but a particular way of thinking of sight as touch, of imagining that the things we see are real. On a certain level, of course, we do know that if we look at a row of trees, the “trees” are real while the “row” is imaginary, but — at the same time — Carpenter is not wrong to note that we do tend to act as if these mental bridges are real. Jonathan Edwards’ notion that what God “sees” produces reality gets secularized into practices we do without thinking about it: seeing is believing, we say, and despite all the evidence that seeing a thing is practically synonymous with seeing it wrong, we can still use phrases like “photographic evidence” as if it’s not an oxymoron.
Mike Wesch

Being Real - by Judith Donath - 0 views

  • This chapter will address the problem of teleidentity: how do we - or do we - "know" another person whom we have encountered in a mediated environment?
  • Knowing something about a person's social identity is fundamental for knowing how to act toward them, for the complex rules of social conduct that govern our behavior toward each other cannot function in the absence of information about the other
  • When we first meet someone, we perceive only a few details about them: perhaps their appearance, a few words they utter, the context in which we meet them. Yet our impression of them is much deeper. As George Simmel wrote in his influential 1908 article How is Society Possible? we do not see merely the few details we have actually observed, but "just as we compensate for a blind spot in our field of vision so that we are no longer aware of it, so a fragmentary structure is transformed... into the completeness of an individuality."
Mike Wesch

The New Atlantis » Is Stupid Making Us Google? - 0 views

  • “as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”
  • what we are witnessing is not just an educational breakdown but a deformation of the very idea of intelligence.
  • Even those who have come to the Web late in life are not so very different, then, from the fifth-graders who, as an elementary school principal told Bauerlein, proceed as follows when they are assigned a research project: “go to Google, type keywords, download three relevant sites, cut and paste passages into a new document, add transitions of their own, print it up, and turn it in.”
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • even those who are most gung-ho about new ways of learning probably tend to cling to a belief that education has, or ought to have, at least something to do with making things lodge in the minds of students—this even though the disparagement of the role of memory in education by professional educators now goes back at least three generations, long before computers were ever thought of as educational tools.
  • adapting its understanding of what education is to the new realities of how the new generation of “netizens” actually learn (and don’t learn) rather than trying to adapt the kids to unchanging standards of scholarship and learning.
  • “lower-order skills” in comparison with the spatial, information-gathering, and pattern-recognition skills fostered by hours at the computer screen
  • can’t imagine a mathematician saying the same thing about math, or a biologist about biology, yet, sad to say, scholars, journalists, and other guardians of culture accept the deterioration of their province without much regret.
  • humanities stopped being, or even wanting to be, “guardians of culture” a long time ago.
  • In other words, the “mentors” have not only betrayed their pupils, they have denounced the very idea of mentorship in anything but the tools of deconstruction which allow them to set themselves up as superior to—rather than the humble acolytes of—the culture they study.
  • redefining education as the acquisition of information-retrieval skills
  • No one has ever taught them that books can be read for pleasure or enlightenment—or for any other purpose than to be exposed as the coded rationalization for the illegitimate powers of the ruling classes that they really are
  • But while Bauerlein takes Johnson to task on several points, he seems to suggest that all our educators have to do is expose their charges to some superior alternative to “the ordinary stuff of youth culture”
  • “Young people,” he rightly notes, “need mentors not to go with the youth flow, but to stand staunchly against it, to represent something smarter and finer than the cacophony of social life.” He’s also right that they need more time away from the computer in order to acquire the skills of “deep reading” recommended by Nicholas Carr.
  • But they are not likely to get either one so long as so many educators cling as they do now to the axiomatic belief not just that “learning can be fun” but that it must be fun, and the equally axiomatic rejection of that which may cause pain and humiliation, even if these are productive of real learning
    • Kevin Champion
       
      Well, learning certainly is fun! The process of learning can often times be difficult, terrifying, exciting, depressing, saddening etc. What's interesting is that there is no mention of relevance here. Learning is not always fun, but I think it is always fun when it is relevant. It also seems that the subjective experience of learning only occurs when it is fun. It doesn't feel like learning to me unless it is relevant to me; if it is relevant to me, it is fun! By extension, perhaps we benefit from thinking about learning from both subjective and objective perspectives, including both singular and collective objects (learning of an individual subjectively and objectively + learning of a group subjectively and objectively).
1 - 20 of 28 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page