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Ronda Wery

FriendFeed, Syphilis And The Perfection Of Online Mobs - 0 views

  • But we note two trends that suggest a bleak future: the increase in non-anonymous mob participation and the evolution of online services towards ever more efficient and real time communication platforms that facilitate mob creation and growth like never before. Things are changing online way too fast for society and culture to adapt. Something will eventually break. I’m going to pick on FriendFeed in this post because I believe it is the nearest thing to Shangri-La for mob justice enthusiasts.
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    But we note two trends that suggest a bleak future: the increase in non-anonymous mob participation and the evolution of online services towards ever more efficient and real time communication platforms that facilitate mob creation and growth like never before. Things are changing online way too fast for society and culture to adapt. Something will eventually break. I'm going to pick on FriendFeed in this post because I believe it is the nearest thing to Shangri-La for mob justice enthusiasts.
Ronda Wery

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: Risks, Rights, and Responsibilities in the Digital Age: An I... - 0 views

  • Like many, I have been inspired and excited by the spectacular case studies. Yet when I interview children, or in my survey, I was far more struck by how many use the internet in a far more mundane manner, underusing its potential hugely, and often unexcited by what it could do. It was this that led me to urge that we see children's literacy in the context of technological affordances and legibilities. But it also shows to me the value of combining and contrasting insights from qualitative and quantitative work. The spectacular cases, of course, point out what could be the future for many children. The mundane realities, however, force the question - whose fault is it that many children don't use the internet in ways that we, or they, consider very exciting or demanding? It also forces the question, what can be done, something I attend to throughout the book, as I'm keen that we don't fall back into a disappointment that blames children themselves.
  • There's been a fair amount of adult dismay at how young people disclose personal, even intimate information online. In the book, I suggest there are several reasons for this. First, adolescence is a time of experimentation with identity and relationships, and not only is the internet admirably well suited to this but the offline environment is increasingly restrictive, with supervising teachers and worried parents constantly looking over their shoulders. Second, some of this disclosure is inadvertent - despite their pleasure in social networking, for instance, I found teenagers to struggle with the intricacies of privacy settings, partly because they are fearful of getting it wrong and partly because they are clumsily designed and ill-explained, with categories (e.g. top friends, everyone) that don't match the subtlety of youthful friendship categories. Third, adults are dismayed because they don't share the same sensibilities as young people. I haven't interviewed anyone who doesn't care who knows what about them, but I've interviewed many who think no-one will be interested and so they worry less about what they post, or who take care over what parents or friends can see but are not interested in the responses of perfect strangers. In other words, young people are operating with some slightly different conceptions of privacy, but certainly they want control over who knows what about them; it's just that they don't wish to hide everything, they can't always figure out how to reveal what to whom, and anyway they wish to experiment and take a few risks.
  • contrary to the popular discourses that blame young people for their apathy, lack of motivation or interest, I suggest that young people learn early that they are not listened to. Hoping that the internet can enable young people to 'have their say' thus misses the point, for they are not themselves listened to. This is a failure both of effective communication between young people and those who aim to engage them, and a failure of civic or political structures - of the social structures that sustain relations between established power and the polity.
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    Like many, I have been inspired and excited by the spectacular case studies. Yet when I interview children, or in my survey, I was far more struck by how many use the internet in a far more mundane manner, underusing its potential hugely, and often unexcited by what it could do. It was this that led me to urge that we see children's literacy in the context of technological affordances and legibilities. But it also shows to me the value of combining and contrasting insights from qualitative and quantitative work. The spectacular cases, of course, point out what could be the future for many children. The mundane realities, however, force the question - whose fault is it that many children don't use the internet in ways that we, or they, consider very exciting or demanding? It also forces the question, what can be done, something I attend to throughout the book, as I'm keen that we don't fall back into a disappointment that blames children themselves.
Ronda Wery

Dangerously Irrelevant - 0 views

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    Ruminations of technology, leadership, and the future of our schools
Ronda Wery

Citizen Journalism: The Key Trend Shaping Online News Media - Introductory Guide With V... - 0 views

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    Citizen Journalism has put democracy back in people's hands. An army of individuals with mobile phones, portable cameras, and blogs is rapidly replacing traditional media as a reliable and wide-ranging source of information. In this milestone report, Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman were among the first to try to explain what citizen journalism really is and why this bottom-up distribution approach could be the future of news.
Ronda Wery

The Dark Side of Twittering a Revolution | Open The Future | Fast Company - 0 views

  • n noting the potential power of social networking tools for organizing mass change, I thought out loud for a moment about what kinds of dangers might emerge. It struck me, as I spoke, that there is a terrible analogy that might be applicable: the use of radio as a way of coordinating bloody attacks on rival ethnic communities during the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990s. I asked, out loud, whether Twitter could ever be used to trigger a genocide.
  • In a 1999 presentation for the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Professor Frank Chalk noted five circumstances that would allow the maximum intensity of a media-driven response to a crisis: the introduction of a new medium of communication, such as radio [or Twitter]; the use of a completely new style of communication; the wide-spread perception that a crisis exists; a public with little knowledge of the situation from other sources of information, and a deep-seated habit of obeying authority among the target audience. All of these circumstances pertain to the promulgation of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and many of them are found in other cases of genocide and genocidal killings, as well. It's easy to see how well this model applies to the Iranian situation, too. This shouldn't be read as an indictment of social networking technologies in general, or of Twitter in particular. As I said at the outset, I'm thrilled at how critical this technology has been to the viability and potential success of the pro-democracy demonstrations. As the cat-and-mouse game around proxy servers further suggests, the only way for a state to entirely cut off the use of these kinds of tools is to kill its own information networks, blinding itself and effectively removing itself from the global economy. What I'm arguing, however, is that we shouldn't see the positive political successes of emerging social tools as being the sole model. We should be aware that, as these tools proliferate, they will inevitably be used for far more deadly goals.
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    In a 1999 presentation for the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Professor Frank Chalk noted five circumstances that would allow the maximum intensity of a media-driven response to a crisis: 1. the introduction of a new medium of communication, such as radio [or Twitter]; 2. the use of a completely new style of communication; 3. the wide-spread perception that a crisis exists; 4. a public with little knowledge of the situation from other sources of information, and 5. a deep-seated habit of obeying authority among the target audience. All of these circumstances pertain to the promulgation of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and many of them are found in other cases of genocide and genocidal killings, as well. It's easy to see how well this model applies to the Iranian situation, too. This shouldn't be read as an indictment of social networking technologies in general, or of Twitter in particular. As I said at the outset, I'm thrilled at how critical this technology has been to the viability and potential success of the pro-democracy demonstrations. As the cat-and-mouse game around proxy servers further suggests, the only way for a state to entirely cut off the use of these kinds of tools is to kill its own information networks, blinding itself and effectively removing itself from the global economy. What I'm arguing, however, is that we shouldn't see the positive political successes of emerging social tools as being the sole model. We should be aware that, as these tools proliferate, they will inevitably be used for far more deadly goals.
Ronda Wery

Studies Explore Whether the Internet Makes Students Better Writers - Chronicle.com - 0 views

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    The rise of online media has helped raise a new generation of college students who write far more, and in more-diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both for the future of students' writing and for the college curriculum.\n\nSome scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands.\n\nA new generation of longitudinal studies, which track large numbers of students over several years, is attempting to settle this argument. The "Stanford Study of Writing," a five-year study of the writing lives of Stanford students - including Mr. Otuteye - is probably the most extensive to date.
Ronda Wery

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship - 0 views

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    Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research.
K Dunks

Creative Web 2.0 Learning - 0 views

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    A presentation that outlines Library 2.0 and what it means for future education.
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