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David McGavock

Final Report: Introduction | DIGITAL YOUTH RESEARCH - 1 views

  • What is generally lacking in the literature overall, and in the United States in particular, is an understanding of how new media practices are embedded in a broader social and cultural ecology. While we have a picture of technology trends on one hand, and spotlights on specific youth populations and practices on the other, we need more work that brings these two pieces of the puzzle together. How are specific new media practices embedded in existing (and evolving) social structures and cultural categories?
  • we describe how our work addresses this gap, outlining our methodological commitments and descriptive focus that have defined the scope of this book. The first goal of this book is to document youth new media practice in rich, qualitative detail in order to provide a picture of how young people are mobilizing these media and technologies in their everyday lives.
  • In this section of this introductory chapter, we outline our methodological approach and how we have defined the objects and focus of our study. The descriptive frame of our study is defined by our ethnographic approach, the study of youth culture and practice, and the study of new media.
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  • How are new media being taken up by youth practices and agendas? Our analytic question follows from this: How do these practices change the dynamics of youth-adult negotiations over literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge?
  • We have developed an interdisciplinary analytic tool kit to investigate this complex set of relations between changing technology, kid-adult relations, and definitions of learning and literacy. Our key terms are “genres of participation,” “networked publics,” “peer-based learning,” and “new media literacy.”
  • The primary distinction we make is between friendship-driven and interest-driven genres of participation, which correspond to different genres of youth culture, social network structure, and modes of learning.
  • We use the term “peer” to refer to the people whom youth see as part of their lateral network of relations, whom they look to for affiliation, competition, as well as disaffiliation and distancing. Peers are the group of people to whom youth look to develop their sense of self, reputation, and status.
  • In contrast to friendship-driven practices, with interest-driven practices, specialized activities, interests, or niche and marginalized identities come first.
  • nterest-driven practices are what youth describe as the domain of the geeks, freaks, musicians, artists, and dorks, the kids who are identified as smart, different, or creative, who generally exist at the margins of teen social worlds.
  • Rather than relying on distinctions based on given categories such as gender, class, or ethnic identity, we have identified genres based on what we saw in our ethnographic material as the distinctions that emerge from youth practice and culture, and that help us interpret how media intersect with learning and participation
  • Genres of participation provide ways of identifying the sources of diversity in how youth engage with new media in a way that does not rely on a simple notion of “divides” or a ranking of more- or less-sophisticated media expertise. Instead, these genres represent different investments that youth make in particular forms of sociability and differing forms of identification with media genres.
  • Our work here, however, is to take more steps in applying situated approaches to learning to an understanding of mediated sociability, though not of the school-centered variety. This requires integrating approaches in public-culture studies with theories of learning and participation.
  • A growing body of ethnographic work documents how learning happens in informal settings, as a side effect of everyday life and social activity, rather than in an explicit instructional agenda.
  • Our interest, more specifically, is in documenting instances of learning that are centered around youth peer-based interaction, in which the agenda is not defined by parents and teachers.
  • What counts as learning and literacy is a question of collective values, values that are constantly being contested and negotiated between different social groups. Periods of cultural and technological flux open up new areas of debate about what should count as part of our common culture and literacy and what are appropriate ways for young people to participate in these new cultural forms.
  • While what is being defined as “new media literacy” is certainly not the exclusive province of youth, unlike in the case of “old” literacies youth are playing a more central role in the redefinition of these newer forms. In fact, the current anxiety over how new media erode literacy and writing standards could be read as an indicator of the marginalization of adult institutions that have traditionally defined literacy norms (whether that is the school or the family).
  • our work does not seek to define the components of new media literacy or to participate directly in the normalization of particular forms of literacy standards or practice. Rather, we see our contribution as describing the forms of competencies, skills, and literacy practices that youth are developing through media production and online communication in order to inform these broader debates.
  • Although the tradition of New Literacy Studies has described literacy in a more multicultural and multimodal frame, it is often silent as to the generational differences in how literacies are valued.
  • The chapters that follow are organized based on what emerged from our material as the core practices that structure youth engagement with new media.
  • Media Ecologies, frames the technological and social context in which young people are consuming, sharing, and producing new media.
  • introduces three genres of participation with new media that are an alternative to common ways of categorizing forms of media access: hanging out, messing around, and geeking out.
  • following two chapters focus on mainstream friendship-driven practices and networks.
  • instant messaging, social network sites, and mobile phones
  • making friendships, gossiping, bullying, and jockeying for status are reproduced online, but they are also reshaped
  • chapter on Intimacy
  • examines practices that are a long-standing and pervasive part of everyday youth sociality.
  • flirting, dating, and breaking up.
  • these norms largely mirror the existing practices of teen romance
  • The next chapter on Families also takes up a key “given” set of local social relationships by looking across the diverse families we have encountered in our research. The
  • use of physical space in the home, routines, rules, and shared production and play. The chapter also examines how the boundaries of home and family are extended through the use of new media.
  • final three chapters of the book focus primarily on interest-driven genres of participation, though they also describe the interface with more friendship-driven genres.
  • Gaming examines different genres of gaming practice: killing time, hanging out, recreational gaming, mobilizing and organizing, and augmented game play
  • Creative Production, looking across a range of different case studies of youth production, including podcasting, video blogging, video remix, hip-hop production, fan fiction, and fansubbing.
  • Work examines how youth are engaged in economic activity and other forms of labor using new media. The chapter suggests that new media are providing avenues to make the productive work of youth more visible and consequential.
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    "What is generally lacking in the literature overall, and in the United States in particular, is an understanding of how new media practices are embedded in a broader social and cultural ecology. While we have a picture of technology trends on one hand, and spotlights on specific youth populations and practices on the other, we need more work that brings these two pieces of the puzzle together. How are specific new media practices embedded in existing (and evolving) social structures and cultural categories?"
Alex Grech

Social Media's Slow Slog Into the Ivory Towers of Academia - Josh Sternberg - Technolog... - 0 views

  • If you took a soldier from a thousand years ago and put them on a battlefield, they'd be dead,"
  • "If you took a doctor from a thousand years ago and put them in a modern surgical theater, they would have no idea what to do. Take a professor from a thousand years ago and put them in a modern classroom, they would know where to stand and what to do."
  • So they went back to school to learn how to create Facebook campaigns, how to incorporate SEO best-practices, how to blog, and how to create social media strategies.
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  • But as social interactions and technologies mature, there has been a swing in the pendulum. Professors are now approaching the teaching of social media from a pedagogical perspective, as much as a practical one.
  • the theories behind social media: why do things go viral, the social theories of how people act and how they communicate to a network, or one person at a time, and why do certain tools work they way they do for us
  • Instead of understanding social media as products, students are encouraged to treat status updates as part of a larger information ecosystem.
  • With social media being a pervasive, if not invasive, aspect of our lives, it makes perfect sense for the Ivory Tower to embrace social media from a theoretical perspective to help students understand the technology and its effect on their daily lives, as well as the epistemological question of "how do we know what we know?"
  • The medium is relatively new enough that there's no canon shaping social media, just conceptual frameworks for looking at the effects of social media on students' lives and communities and on society as a whole. The task of academics is to give students a vocabulary to understand these perspectives, tools to make sense of the theoretical discussions and think critically about social media.
  • "I don't think you have the credibility of doing research, of writing about, unless you get to really know that culture. And the best way of knowing the culture is to actually be immersed in it."
  • "no positive incentives for innovating in pedagogy."
  • Rheingold puts it,
  • Underpinning a disdain for social media in higher education is the assumption that incoming students already have an inherent aptitude for new technologies
  • Terms like "digital native" (those born during or after the introduction of digital technology -- computer, Internet, etc. -- and have an assumed greater understanding of how technology works because they've been using digital technology their entire lives) and "digital immigrant" (those born before this introduction and have had to adapt and adopt the technology at a later point in life) have been bandied around by experts and marketers as ways of classifying and differentiating between generations, and, more importantly, the expectations of those who fall into either category.
  • it has stopped educators from teaching what they need to teach. It has scared educators into thinking students know more than us. God forbid we learn something from our students. And, so, we assumed these kids already know, and we don't teach them. And we expect them to know things and we grade them; we evaluate them; we hire them based on what we think, we assume, they know. And they don't. How would you know this stuff if no one ever bothered to point it out to you that this is something you should be learning, because everyone assumes you already know?"
  • the lack of critical literacy.
  • ce students of the Digital Age have not had to acclimate to this sweeping change from analog to digi
  • al and are assumed to possess some innate technological knowledge based solely on the year they were born, they don't necessarily have to acclimate to the sheer velocity of recent innovations.
  • "We have on our hands the last generation of educators who do remember life before these tools, and so therefore, we have an opportunity to teach some critical literacy that these students may not get otherwise; this generation may not get otherwise
  • Rheingold puts the onus on the students to learn not just from him, but from each other. Instructors can serve as a facilitator, but the student has to want to be there, process that information, and use that information in a productive way.
  • "The issues around social media -- community, identity, presentation of self, social capital, public sphere, collective action; a lot of important topics from other disciplines -- aren't really being raised in academia," said Rheingold. "They ought to be because these topics, not only academically, in terms of the shifts in media and literacy that they're triggering in the world, are where the students live and work."
Charles van der Haegen

New Media Literacies: Greening a Digital Media Class - 0 views

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    Blogpost by Antonio Lopez, co-learner at MindAmp I've been a media literacy educator for a dozen years, although as a consequence of participating in the punk movement during the early '80s, I've been a lifelong proponent of do-it-yourself media. Since entering the field of education I've worked in numerous arts programs with youths, spending considerable time with disadvantaged groups. Working with Native Americans, Latinos and Afro-Caribbean youth has helped me to formulate a multicultural, multi-perspective approach to media literacy that has pushed me to reconceptualize cultural assumptions embedded in traditional media education.* Learners in those communities are under greater stress than mainstream Americans, and their particular needs call for attention to social justice, environmental issues and cultural citizenship, things that many privileged Americans take for granted. At one point when I was working on the rez, a Native American elder opined on the information highway by remarking, "any road can get you somewhere." Unfortunately, many programs that embrace digital media tools are too enamored with the technology to think more critically about the "somewhere" we are moving towards. It was during this period that I realized the importance of appropriate applications of technology and also understood the ethnocentrism embedded in the idea of "progress." More importantly, I was forced to think more carefully about who or what I was ultimately serving in my work as an educator. As a fellow media geek it might surprise you, then, to suggest that my approach since then has been to serve the planet: humans and nonhuman alike. In particular I feel a strong calling to speak to the best of my abilities on behalf of our silent partner: nature. These days in my current role as a professor of media studies at an American University in Rome, I have taken to heart the task of incorporating lessons I learned beyond the walled garden of academia to green the field of m
David McGavock

Digital Skills Can Be Quickly Acquired - NYTimes.com - 0 views

    • David McGavock
       
      Literacy for professionals.
  • In 2007, there were 150 workshops and courses about digital media and technology but none specifically about social media, according to Carmen Scheidel, Mediabistro’s vice president for education and events.
  • “In general, the digital natives are earlier in their careers, and they are not the ones taking these types of classes,” Ms. Scheidel said. “It tends to be people who are very accomplished in their careers but are new to social media. It is an interesting mix.”
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  • To deliver social media training in a more effective way, Ms. Scheidel said that Mediabistro last year introduced a new approach. Instead of offering mostly small workshops with 15 to 20 students, they began offering what she described as an online social media conference.
  • For midcareer executives, particularly in the media and related industries, knowing how to use Twitter, update your timeline on Facebook, pin on Pinterest, check in on Foursquare and upload images on Instagram are among the digital skills that some employers expect people to have to land a job or to flourish in a current role.
  • Pamela Tate, president and chief executive of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, based in Chicago, said digital literacy, including understanding social networking, is now a required skill.
  • To help bridge the gap, major universities, community colleges, online educational businesses from Lynda.com to ed2go.com offer continuing education classes in digital media, including social media skills, Web design, search optimization and Web analytics.
  • The University of San Francisco
  • Harvard’s Extension School
  • Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism
  • It is a place of business. It is a place where your career will be enhanced or degraded, depending on your use of these tools and services.”
  • Professor Sreenivasan and Ernest R. Sotomayor, assistant dean, career services and continuing education, organized a weekend of panels and workshops in late January for 500 people after a similar weekend conference approach drew 300 students last May.
  • For those participants, who wanted one-on-one attention from an experienced social media user, the “social media doctors” were in the house.
  • The idea behind the “doctors” was to give people some individual instruction at a conference setting
  • Educators also say skills classes have to help translate what seems to be a different language — hashtags, mentions, heart.
David McGavock

Multitasking, social media and distraction: Research review Journalist's Resource: Rese... - 0 views

  • researchers have tried to assess how humans are coping in this highly connected environment and how “chronic multitasking” may diminish our capacity to function effectively.
  • Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: “The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking.”
  • Below are more than a dozen representative studies in these areas:
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  • The researchers conclude that the experiments “suggest that heavy media multitaskers are distracted by the multiple streams of media they are consuming, or, alternatively, that those who infrequently multitask are more effective at volitionally allocating their attention in the face of distractions.”
  • Members of the ‘Net Generation’ reported more multitasking than members of ‘Generation X,’ who reported more multitasking than members of the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. The choices of which tasks to combine for multitasking were highly correlated across generations, as were difficulty ratings of specific multitasking combinations.
  • same time, these experts predicted that the impact of networked living on today’s young will drive them to thirst for instant gratification, settle for quick choices, and lack patience
  • similar mental limitations in the types of tasks that can be multitasked.
  • survey about the future of the Internet, technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020.
  • said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the Internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.
  • The educational implications include allowing students short ‘technology breaks’ to reduce distractions and teaching students metacognitive strategies regarding when interruptions negatively impact learning.”
  • The data suggest that “using Facebook and texting while doing schoolwork were negatively predictive of overall GPA.” However, “emailing, talking on the phone, and using IM were not related to overall GPA.”
  • Regression analyses revealed that increased media multitasking was associated with higher depression and social anxiety symptoms, even after controlling for overall media use and the personality traits of neuroticism and extraversion.
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    Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: "The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They're basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking." - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/social-media/multitasking-social-media-distraction-what-does-research-say#sthash.I21dv2wV.dpuf
Charles van der Haegen

SMUPreprint.pdf (Objet application/pdf) - 1 views

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    The first chapter of what is for me a fundamental book that complements our learning here, and hints at how Social Media might contribute to creating a better World. The article elaborates on how new Social Theory brings new perspectives to finding and implementing solutions to the intractable problems of our time. These ideas originally developped by Mary Douglas, an antropologist, and have been further refined and developped into a fully integrated Social Theory, called Theory of Socio-Cultural Viability, anso sometimes called "Cultural Theory". The lead researcher in this field is Michael Thompson, co-author of this book and chapter. Here are some highlights I have jotted down: Why do well-intended attempts to alleviate pressing social ills too often derail? How can effective and efficient and broadly acceptable solutions to social problems be found? By making sure no voices are excluded. Contrary to the ideas on which current social thinking is based, new research has lead to new theory explaining social systems, showing how deliberative quality is key to sustainable policy-making and implementation. It shows that endlessly changing and complex social worlds consist of ceaseless interactions between four mutually opposed organizing, justifying and perceiving social relations. Each time one of these perspectives is excluded from collective decision-making, governance failure inevitably results. Successful solutions are therefore creative combinations of four opposing ways of organizing and thinking. They always seem clumsy compared to any of the 4 voices' elegant solutions. Yet being broadly acceptable to all they are sustainable and implementable A new way to look at pluralism in organizations, institutions, policy-making, democracy, technology, geo-politics and many other social fields is offered to us by multidisciplinary research and practice by leading political scientists, anthropologists, economists, lawyers, sociologists, geographers, engineer
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    Hi guys, this might be stuff that is of interest to you...
Charles van der Haegen

Marco Verweij Trust and social capital in Cutural Theory ( and social media) - 0 views

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    I have already introduced Cultural Theory in the SMC MindAmp. I called it Theory of Sodcio-Culural Viability. Here's an indication of its reach: Why do well-intended attempts to alleviate pressing social ills too often derail? How can effective and efficient and broadly acceptable solutions to social problems be found? By making sure no voices are excluded. Contrary to the ideas on which current social thinking is based, new research has lead to new theory explaining social systems, showing how deliberative quality is key to sustainable policy-making and implementation. It shows that endlessly changing and complex social worlds consist of ceaseless interactions between four mutually opposed organizing, justifying and perceiving social relations. Each time one of these perspectives is excluded from collective decision-making, governance failure inevitably results. Successful solutions are therefore creative combinations of four opposing ways of organizing and thinking. They always seem clumsy compared to any of the 4 voices' elegant solutions. Yet being broadly acceptable to all they are sustainable and implementable A new way to look at pluralism in organizations, institutions, policy-making, democracy, technology, geo-politics and many other social fields is offered to us by multidisciplinary research and practice by leading political scientists, anthropologists, economists, lawyers, sociologists, geographers, engineers, policy-makers, and other leaders in society. Trust and Social capital are key ingredients for learning and for social media to strive. Here's what the author says: In this article, I trace the contributions that the cultural theory developed by Mary Douglas, Michael Thompson, Aaron Wildavsky and others can make to the debate on social capital. First, I sketch the various revisions of Putnam's social capital-thesis that have been proposed since the publication of Making Democracy Work. I note that these revisions are illuminating in and of th
David McGavock

Berkeley Center for New Media - 3 views

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    "Howard Rheingold offers an abstract on what will be addressed in his UC Berkeley Regents Lecture: "My career-long compulsion has been to take new media to their limits. In the field of learning, this means developing a method of teaching and learning that amplifies the affordances of online media to depart from the millennia-old model of professor-lecture-texts-tests. The first stage of this evolution was the application of online media to classroom teaching. The second stage was the transformation of my teaching because of the affordances and biases of social media. The third stage was to move from blended learning that combines face to face classes and online engagement. The fourth stage was to deliver mini-courses that took place entirely online, with an emphasis on cultivating a community of co-learners. The next and most radical stage, which I hope to initiate with the Regent's lecture and accompanying master-class and seminar, is to use the same media for a purely peer-organized pedagogy.""
David McGavock

Pop-Up University | DMLcentral - 0 views

  • Networked social learning is most effective and truly magical when students who don't know one another one day start scouring the world for knowledge to bestow on each other the next day and spend their time contributing to each other's learning. It’s the unpredictable synergy that can happen when a group of strangers assembles online to learn together.
  • But the knowledge-sharing gift economy is a human creation – one that can't be predicted, commanded, or summoned but has to be nurtured, cultivated, and facilitated.
  • Michael Wesch's "A Portal to Media Literacy" made clear to me something I had been feeling my way toward -- a pedagogy that is more about collaboration than technology, in which the technology is central, but is a vehicle for co-discovery.
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  • Cathy Davidson's bold experiments in peer-to-peer learning, including "crowd-sourcing grading," gave me a working model to emulate and appropriate.
  • I learned from Mizuko Ito that young people use digital skills and knowledge exchange as social currency in fan cultures – using social media to learn about things that really matter to them, such as multiplayer games, Pokemon, mashups and fan videos.
  • Henry Jenkins taught me about participatory culture and the importance of teaching skills of credibility (what I call "crap detection") transmedia storytelling, collective intelligence, and network smarts.
  • it only made sense to begin by mobilizing social media skills in parallel with introducing the subject matter. Teaching about social media doesn't make a lot of sense unless students can use social media in their learning
  • The choice to participate in creating and not just consuming the culture in which we live is crucial, and presenting that choice in terms that can engage students is critical.
  • The first acts on the first day of class are crucial – what chaos theorists call "sensitive dependence on initial conditions."
  • As one of my mentors, Lisa Kimball, taught me, a good online facilitator pays heed to the containers, but also thinks in terms of tempo. I knew the importance of engaging as many of the co-learners as possible in the first live session and the first weekend of forum and blog discussion.
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    If Rheingold U, my current experiment in cultivating wholly online, multimedia, unaccredited, for-not-much-pay learning communities, originally germinated out of fun and impulse, the next stage was more scary-serious. As soon as I took people's money and started telling the world about my intentions, I was obligated as well as motivated to make it work - not just to deliver a rich set of learning materials, but to conjure actual social learning magic
Antonio Lopez

Four Questions about Civic Media | DMLcentral - 0 views

  • - Organizing in virtual as well as physical spaces, recognizing that online action alone doesn’t move most politicians - Self documentation using participatory media – in this case, documentation as a form of protest in and of itself - The use of broadcast media to amplify beyond the “some to some” space of social media.
  • Global Voices tries to work on the demand problem using three tools: images, narrative, and human connection.
  • I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the most interesting projects encouraging participation involve maps.
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  • But I’m increasingly convinced that there’s another factor we need to consider: participation.
  • How do we help communities annotate physical spaces? How do we make civic maps?
  • Before we deal with dueling data layers, we’ve got some concrete challenges to take on. Just because data exists to annotate a physical place doesn’t mean it’s accessible
  • How do we encourage productive participation?
  • “How do we help marginal and rarely-heard voices find an audience?”
  • How do we map and understand media ecosystems?
David McGavock

Wiki:Participatory media lesson plans | Social Media CoLab - 1 views

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    "Wiki: Participatory media lesson plans These are a series of small lesson plans (I call them "labs") I've used as assignments for my students. These pages serve as more permanent reminders of what I show them during the face to face class meeting, as assignments, and as resource pages for further learning. Please feel free to add your own. Introduction to Forums Introduction to Blogging Introduction to Wikis Introduction to Social Bookmarking Introduction to RSS Introduction to Twitter/Microblogging Introduction to Mindmapping Introduction to Info Dashboards, Radars, and Filters Introduction to Setting Up a WordPress Blog Introduction to Map Mashups for Journalists"
David McGavock

A New Culture of Learning | Social Media Classroom - 3 views

  • A New Culture of Learning
  • what strikes me is the second part of the title Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.
  • I love seeing a child's imagination being captivated
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  • I am challenged by many who see social-media as the next project rather than a shift in the paradigm of existence.
  • I believe that dissatisfaction with the factory model of school, along with the growing number, ubiquity, and accessiblity, of tools (for connection, collaboration and creation) will tip the balance toward new models and cultures of learning.
  • I love to see teachers and student figuring out how to use technology together; asking questions, trying stuff, "messing around" as Brown would say.
  • The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
  • Can I just say that it is amazingly prescient and still relevant even a decade later? I'm interested in comparing it to his more recent book in discussion here.
  • Howard reponds with an idea on assignments (and the power of assignments). I found the questions (or in other courses the assignements) to really good at directing my brain. 1.Read the question 2. go to sleep 3. stare at the ceiling for hours 4. brush teeth 5. eurekaThese methods are also used in action learning and action research
  • I'm reading the book "the myth of management" (which is not related to learning), and I found out that finding "faults" is actually a dirty consultant trick, as it expands the window through which you can sell your solution. I hacked that idea and replaced solution with learning.
  •  The role of the instructor in balancing freedom and structure -- setting enough structure so that the unlimited freedom doesn't become vertiginous and overwhelming -- resonates with my experiences with Rheingold U. so far. Assignments seem to help, but they can't be too onerous.
  •  Very nice article comparing Thomas/JSB ideas to John Dewey's:
  •  http://charlestkerchner.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/DeweyThomas.pdf
  • Ernst - I am particularly interested in Action Research of the "plan, act, observe,reflect" variety where we never really arrive at conclusions but start again in a new cycle of teaching and learning.
  • that idea of teaching people to fail is very important - I notice that this is acceptable very often in business especially in the contexts of 'start-ups' but unacceptable in most schools. Here in Europe, the work of the Finnish educationalist Pasi Sahlberg gets a lot of attention - one of his motifs is learning to be wrong.
  • Knowing who to listen to in the 'noise' of all the information overload is important - I'm looking forward to our continuing review of how we all re-imagine that new culture of learning.
  • Can You, and if yes, How,  Change a system from within? This is one of the key issues of our time. Learning, PLN, Community support structures, activism, Social media, cooperation.. are all part of that... so it is realIy at the heart of our SMC Alumni topics. 
  • I would suggest, we should be dialoguing in depth about the question, and how to formulate it, before jumping to solutions...
  • The work of social and developmental psychologist, Carol Dweck can inform our discussion about failure,
  • Her book, Mindset, posits that some students have growth mindsets and some have fixed mindsets.
  • Ernst, I adore your description of problem-solving (especially the enumerated part). Downtime is essential for processing information and I agree, even subtle shifts within group dynamics can cause huge internal vistas to open up.
  • The idea of structuring for failure in itself is a whole new take on creative thinking.
  • Schools reward success.  That's our measurement system, our "leaderboard".  Some winners at school go on to run schools. Schools punish failure deeply, systematically.  Remember dunce caps? So taking failure as a good thing is, at the very least, weird and defamiliarizing!
  • Chapter Two of Thomas and Seely-Brown's book  is so short - just five pages - They conclude with the idea ....the point is to embrace what we don't know, come up with better questions about it, and continue asking those questions in order to learn more and more, both incrementally and exponentially. I wonder do the authors want us to reflect repeatedly on the contents of the chapter given its brevity.
  • is it certain type of people who fail, who are subsequently allowed to start again?
  • book's first chapter
  • Two key elements: network ("a massive information network that provides almost unlimited access and resources", sounds like mobile + Web) and environments ("bounded and structural") (19).
  • what do you make of the examples they present?  What do they suggest about the theory they exemplify?
  • ohn Seely Brown is particularly interested in the idea of tinkering. He suggests one of the best 'tinkering' models is the architectural studio -- the place where students work together trying to solve each others' problems, and a mentor or master can also take part in open criticism. Find out why this is a model for us all.  http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bydesign/stories/2011/3147776.htm
  • The first chapter is a pretty rosy, and might I say westernized, view of the power of Internet access + play in learning.* It manages to enlighten and engage using a few choice narratives (I imagine we will get to the power of those at some point in the book, too) and sets us up for the rationale to come.
  • * I'm looking for some reaction with regards to that comment
  • based on WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) concepts. (An aside, here's a truly wonderful post unpacking of the idea of WEIRD in social science research.)
  • I can only talk for myself but there are contradictions between what I think is best to do with the students I teach and what I actually do. This "living contradiction" is something I consider in my own studies - I noticed a Tweet last night from Howard: Online and blended learning is NOT about automating delivery of knowledge, but about encouraging peer learning, inquiry, discourse.
  • The sentence I liked most from Chapter One reads "One of the metaphors we adopt to describe this process is cultivation. A farmer for example takes the nearly unlimited resources of sunlight, wind, water, earth, and biology and consolidates them into the bounded and structured environment of garden or farm. We see a new culture of learning as a similar kind of process - but cultivating minds instead of plants"
  • Everyone - you may have seen the piece below - if not please take 12 minutes to view it - it fits nicely with our current discussion
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    This is the first capture of the conversation from the thread "A New Culture of Learning". We'll see how this goes
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    I read the book almost cover to cover. It led me to think more about pushing what I've been doing closer to pure p2p. One of the co-learners in the latest Mindamp told me about "paragogy." That one is worth bookmarking.
Charles van der Haegen

YouTube - A Portal to Media Literacy Michael Welsch - 0 views

  •  
    "Presented at the University of Manitoba June 17th 2008. (for those of you waiting for the Library of Congress presentation, it will be posted Jul16 videos of the work of Michaerl Welsch in Cultural Antropology classes on media litteracy..; a fantastic and incredibly powerfiull showpiece on how education can become with at the same time hints on what to-morrow could look like..; 19th-ish.) From Stephen's Lighthouse: http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/archives/2008/07/michael_wesch_l.html" "Many of you have probably seen Kansas State University prof Michael Wesch's thought-provoking video, "A Vision of Students Today". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o. Recently Dr. Wesch spoke at the University of Manitoba where he explained the the basis of this video in a talk entitled, "Michael Wesch and the Future of Education." I found it fascinating! He describes how he so naturally incorporates emerging technologies into his courses from the smallest seminar type class to the largest lecture theatre filled class. More importantly he not only talks about the technologies but how he encourages extraordinary participation and collaboration from his students by engaging them in meaningful learning activities. Although the video is 66 minutes long...pour a coffee, iced tea or glass of wine and enjoy this dynamic presentation from a master teacher." http://umanitoba.ca/ist/production/streaming/podcast_wesch.html Dubbed "the explainer" by popular geek publication Wired because of his viral YouTube video that summarizes Web 2.0 in under five minutes, cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch brought his Web 2.0 wisdom to the University of Manitoba on June 17. During his presentation, the Kansas State University professor breaks down his attempts to integrate Facebook, Netvibes, Diigo, Google Apps, Jott, Twitter, and other emerging technologies to create an education portal of the future. "It's basically an ongoing experiment to create a portal for me and my stud
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    This is a most powerful ressource, a showcase of what a single professor has been able to realize in his cultural antropology class
David McGavock

After the Protests - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Protests like this one, fueled by social media and erupting into spectacular mass events, look like powerful statements of opposition against a regime
  • Yet often these huge mobilizations of citizens inexplicably wither away without the impact on policy you might expect from their scale.
  • Now movements can rush past that step, often to their own detriment.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Social media can provide a huge advantage in assembling the strength in numbers that movements depend on. Those “likes” on Facebook, derided as slacktivism or clicktivism, can have long-term consequences by defining which sentiments are “normal” or “obvious” — perhaps among the most important levers of change.
  • But activists, who have made such effective use of technology to rally supporters, still need to figure out how to convert that energy into greater impact. The point isn’t just to challenge power; it’s to change it.
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    Media in the hands of citizens can rattle regimes. It makes it much harder for rulers to maintain legitimacy by controlling the public sphere. But activists, who have made such effective use of technology to rally supporters, still need to figure out how to convert that energy into greater impact. The point isn't just to challenge power; it's to change it.
Charles van der Haegen

About Adbusters | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters - 1 views

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    "The Media Foundation We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century. Adbusters Magazine Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Adbusters is a not-for-profit, reader-supported, 120,000-circulation magazine concerned about the erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces. Our work has been embraced by organizations like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, has been featured in hundreds of alternative and mainstream newspapers, magazines, and television and radio shows around the world. Adbusters offers incisive philosophical articles as well as activist commentary from around the world addressing issues ranging from genetically modified foods to media concentration. In addition, our annual social marketing campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and Digital Detox Week have made us an important activist networking group. Ultimately, though, Adbusters is an ecological magazine, dedicated to examining the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental environment. We want a world in which the economy and ecology resonate in balance. We try to coax people from spectator to participant in this quest. We want folks to get mad about corporate disinformation, injustices in the global economy, and any industry that pollutes our physical or mental commons. Culturejammer's Headquarters"
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    That's the kind of group I wanted to get to know... Thanks marlelo Santos for leading me to them...
Alex Grech

Writing, Reading, and Social Media Literacy - Howard Rheingold - Now, New, Next - Harva... - 5 views

  • When I first faced students in a classroom, I was surprised to discover that the mythology I had believed about "digital natives" was not entirely accurate. Just because they're on Facebook and chat online during class and can send text messages with one hand does not mean that young people are acquainted with the rhetoric of blogging, understand the way wikis can be used collaboratively, or know the techniques necessary for vetting the validity of information discovered online. Just as learning the alphabet requires further education before a literate person can compose a coherent argument, learning the skills of effective social media use requires an education that today's institutions and teachers are ill-prepared to provide.
  • We don't have time for institutions to change, which is why I've worked to provide tools for those educators who are using social media to prepare students for the 21st century.
David McGavock

Doug Rushkoff: Program or be Programmed | WEBLOGSKY: Jon Lebkowsky's Blog - 0 views

  • how quickly things become polarized in this era, the bad-trip bizarre extremes suggested by the Tea Party and the Palinites.
  • “running obsolete code” socially
  • How much of this is the bias of a binary medium, and how much of it is attributable to the biases of the people who program our technologies
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Initially “anyone can program reality” via written text,
  • invention of the printing press assigns more control to those who control the means of production/replication
  • In the era of mass media, there’s a sense of mainstream knowledge that’s vetted carefully by editors and publishers who share similar biases and assumptions.
  • In the era of computers and the Internet, we’ve seen the evolution of a more decentralized, diverse “social” media
  • How free are we from a the centralized set of biases associated with mass publishing?
  • Rushkoff argues that there are biases in the way things are programmed – programmers have biases or they’re directed according to the biases of others.
  • bias followed by commandment
  • 1) Time: “Thou shalt not be always on.”
  • 2) Distance: “Thou shalt not do from a distance what can be done better in person.”
  • you have to be clear whether you’re using the technology where it’s most effective, or simply conceding to its inherent bias.
  • 3) Scale – the net is biased to scale up. “Exalt the particular.” Not everything should scale. This makes me think of E.F. Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful.”
  • 4) Discrete: “You may always choose none of the above.”
  • 5) Complexity. “Thou shalt never be completely right.”
  • Real scholarship acknowledges, embraces, and digs into that complexity.
  • 6) Anonymity. “Thou shalt not be anonymous.”
  • By default, we are incomplete in an environment that is mostly textual and binary communication. In this context, it is liberating to adopt a strong sense of identity.
  • 7) Contact. “Remember the humans.” Content is not king in a communications environment – CONTACT is king.
  • 8) Abstraction. “As above, so below.” Text abstracted words from speech. Invention of text led to an abstract god. Also led to treating economy as if it is nature – but it’s not, it’s a game. Don’t make equivalencies between the abstracted model and the real world.
    • David McGavock
       
      Reminds me of Alan Watts and his description of money in "Does it Matter"
  • 9) Openness. “Thou shalt not steal.”
  • We’re seeing a transitional economy where value and compensation are being redefined, and where especially the value and exchange of social capital is increasingly more relevant.
  • 10) End users. Here the bias is toward making all or most of us end users rather than programmers. “Program or be programmed.”
  • The user and the coder are farther apart. He argues that we should all understand programming, be able to build our own tools or configure tools other have built so that we have more control over the digital environment.
  •  
    10 biases of digital media, and ten commands that go with them.
David McGavock

Power Law of Participation - Ross Mayfield's Weblog - 0 views

  • As we engage with the web, we leave behind breadcrumbs of attention. 
  • But reading alone isn't enough to fulfill our innate desire to remix our media, consumption is active for consumers turned users.
  • Del.icio.us taps both personal and social incentives for participation through the low threshold activity of tagging.
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  • Commenting requires such identity for sake of spam these days and is an under-developed area.
  • Subscribing requires a commitement of sustained attention which greatly surpasses reading alone.
  • Sharing is the principal activity in these communities, but much of it occurs out of band (email still lives). 
  • We Network not only to connect, but leverage the social network as a filter to fend off information overload. 
  • Some of us Write, as in blog, and some of us even have conversations.
  • To Refactor, Collaborate, Moderate and Lead requires a different level of engagement -- which makes up the core of a community.
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    "Social software brings groups together to discover and create value. The problem is, users only have so much time for social software. The vast majority of users with not have a high level of engagement with a given group, and most tend to be free riders upon community value. But patterns have emerged where low threshold participation amounts to collective intelligence and high engagement provides a different form of collaborative intelligence. To illustrate this, lets explore the Power Law of Participation:"
Charles van der Haegen

Google+ Project: It's Social, It's Bold, It's Fun, And It Looks Good - Now For The Hard... - 2 views

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    "You see, the truth is that Google really is trying not to make a huge deal out of Google+. That's not because they don't have high hopes for it. Or because they don't think it's any good. Instead, it's because what they're comfortable showing off right now is just step one of a much bigger picture. When I sat down with Gundotra and Horowitz last week, they made this point very clear. In their minds, Google+ is more than a social product, or even a social strategy, it's an extension of Google itself. Hence, Google+."
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    Great that we are offered the opportunity to explore Google+. I believe our collective intelligence, enhanced by multiple discussions and plural perspectives and belkiefs, will show ways to use it intelligently, widsely, awarely AND FREELY
David McGavock

Mastering Google Plus Circles | Social Media Sun - 0 views

  • So first, what the heck is a circle? Well, on Google+, it’s the way you can sort and organize your connections. It’s a bit like Facebook lists but a lot more dynamic. Basically, circles are the groups that you categorize your connections in.
  • “Should I circle people back?”
  • When they circle you, it means they are interested in following your content. You will not see their content unless you circle them back.
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  • circle back only people who post about things you are interested in or that relate to you.
  • you can just remove them.
  • How Do I Know Who Circles Me Back?
  • You can see if a specific person has circled you back by clicking on their profile. It will say “so-and-so has you in circles”You can also go to your main circles tab and click on “people who have added you”The final way is to use your Notifications to see who has added you to circles and who has added you back
  • I have “close” friends and family in a specific circle because I may share different types of content with them than with people I do not know intimately. I also have a circle for “prospects” or potential clients. If they become a client, I move them from “Prospects” to the “Clients” circle. I also create circles for some things not related to my business such as hobbies.
  • Can People See What Circles They Are In?No. They can only see that you have them in circles.
  • Do I Make My Posts Public?Making your posts public will increase the amount of people who will see your stream but be cautious of over sharing. You may overrun someone’s stream and they are likely to remove you for it.
  • you can go back and organize existing circles at any time you wish.
  • You can choose to post content to:PublicYour circlesExtended circlesAnd below those options you will see all of your circles listed by name
  • If you want to tag specific people in the post, you can do so using the +. For example, to tag me on Google+, you would type +LisaMason.
  • curate shared circles with other people.
  • you have the ability to share those groups with other friends
  • There are hundreds of shared circles already assembled for everything from Google employees, to social media , to photographers.
  • Curating circles specific to your niche is a networking strategy
  • finding pre-made circles for your favorite interests is the Shared Circles on G+ page
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    Google+ is actually a very powerful business tool when you know how to use it correctly. It can help you make connections with the right types of people and using it will also add a highly visible profile to Google search results for your personal brand and business. The key to success with Google+ lies in mastering your circles.
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