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Kevin Champion

Maintained Relationships on Facebook | overstated - 0 views

  • What it shows is that, as a function of the people a Facebook user actively communicate with, you are passively engaging with between 2 and 2.5 times more people in their network. I’m sure many people have had this feeling, but these data make this effect more transparent.
  • The stark contrast between reciprocal and passive networks shows the effect of technologies such as News Feed. If these people were required to talk on the phone to each other, we might see something like the reciprocal network, where everyone is connected to a small number of individuals. Moving to an environment where everyone is passively engaged with each other, some event, such as a new baby or engagement can propagate very quickly through this highly connected network.
  • All Friends: the largest representation of a person’s network is the set of all people they have verified as friends. Reciprocal Communication: as a measure of a sort of core network, we counted the number of people with whom a person had had reciprocal communications, or an active exchange of information between two parties. One-way Communication: the total set of people with whom a person has communicated. Maintained Relationships: to measure engagement, we took the set of people for whom a user had clicked on a News Feed story or visited their profile more than twice.
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  • Peter Marsden found the number of people with whom individuals “can discuss important matters” numbers only 3 for Americans[3]. In a subsequent survey, researchers found that this number has dropped slightly over the past 10 years[4], causing some alarm in the press, but without sufficient explanation[5].
  • Killworth, et al. found using this technique and others that the number of people a person will know in their lifetime ranges somewhere between 300 and 3000[1]. On Facebook, the average number of friends that a person has is currently 120[2]. Given that Facebook has only been around for 5 years, that not everyone uses it, and that the not every acquaintance has found each other, this number seems reasonable for an average user.
  • We were asked a simple question: is Facebook increasing the size of people’s personal networks?
Jessica Rittenhouse

How We Decide: How the Brain Makes ... - Google Book Search - 0 views

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    I heard an interview with this author pertaining to this book on NPR a couple of weeks ago, on a show called, "What Do You Know?" and the wikipedia entry on overchoice reminded me. I thought this might apply, and possibly help someone with their research.
Mike Wesch

Tracking the digital traces of social networks | Eureka! Science News - 0 views

  • So searching through vast amounts of anonymized data, Contractor and his collaborators found that teens had online friendships that were disproportionately with people in their immediate geographic area -- likely with people they already knew. "That finding really went against a lot of the media hype," Contractor said. "People were worried about helpless teenagers talking with strangers, but that is not what we found. This is the first time this has been based on solid evidence." Teenagers also tended to be friends with the friends of their friends, not with people who weren't part of their network already, the researchers found.
Mike Wesch

Arab Media: The Web 2.0 Revolution - 0 views

  • The Cairo News Company, which provided satellite services and equipment for Al Jazeera, the BBC and CNN, was raided by police after it transmitted footage of the food riots.
  • But new media applications were changing the rules. This was demonstrated by the arrest of a journalism student from Berkeley named James Karl Buck, who was detained along with his Egyptian interpreter as he photographed a street protest. Buck used the Twitter application on his cell phone to send a snapshot of himself and the text message “arrested” to a list serve of his contacts. His friends used the message to prompt intervention from Berkeley and the U.S. consulate. Buck was soon able to Twitter the word “free,” and mounted an online campaign to release his interpreter.
  • police finally located him and tortured him for his Facebook password and names of the other group members (the vast majority of which he didn’t know).
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  • But in the United States, many would-be activists have been frustrated by the gap between an online click and concrete participation. Facebook groups and causes often swell, crest and dissipate without leaving a mark on the outside world. 
  • As of August 5, 2008, Facebook listed 484,137 members in the Egypt Network. The 6 April group was alive and well with 72,274 members (six of them new).
  • There are still important differences in the way content is generated as well. The print tradition of knowledge creation tends to require more research, reflection and refinement in the process of transforming an idea from impulse to public distribution. The online environment encourages instant, reflexive responses. So the Internet as we know it has two powerful functions: as conveyor of its own immediate data, and as an extraordinary portal to traditional repositories of knowledge: the published books, reports, journalism, legal briefs and scholarly articles.
  • The Arab world has had a fundamentally different relationship to print culture, and modern published resources are sorely lacking.
Adam Bohannon

Social Media still on rise: Comparative global study - 0 views

  • sian markets (not including Japan) are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region
  • Asian markets (not including Japan) are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region
  • 57% have joined a Social Network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content: 55% of users have uploaded photos, 22% of users have uploaded videos
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  • 23% of social network users have installed an application – 18% of bloggers have installed applications in their blog templates
  • Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and a collective rival to traditional media (184m bloggers world-wide, China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers) – 73% have read a blog, 45% have started a blog
  • Social media has strong impacts over brand’s reputation – 34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog – 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs
  • Interestingly, comments on news websites show almost no increase
  • Estimated 272m users world-wide.
  • Users are posting variety of content – 55% uploaded photos – 21% installed applications – 23% uploaded video • Social Networks becoming social utilities for managing peer to peer relationships: 74% use them to message friends
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."
César E. Concepción-Acevedo

JAMA -- Medical Information on YouTube--Reply, March 26, 2008, Keelan et al. 299 (12): ... - 0 views

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    First, they question the conclusions of our study by suggesting that a more specific keyword search using the term flu shot may give a different picture of the types of messages about immunization being disseminated by YouTube. Second, they doubt whether YouTube should or even could be taken seriously by the medical community.
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.”
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  • 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).
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.
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  • 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
  • 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
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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    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.
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