Skip to main content

Home/ Mindamp/ Group items tagged Blogging

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Charles van der Haegen

The Google+ Project | Scoop.it - 0 views

  •  
    "he Google+ Project "The strategy, concept, implementation and reactions to The Google+ project." Created and curated by Morten Myrstad Morten Myrstad curates this topic from blogs, tweets, videos and much more: find out how!"
  •  
    Curation asks for more curation, where is the end of it... I must say I feel sometimes completely lost
David McGavock

Tip for Getting More Organized: Don't - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review - 1 views

  • When it comes to investing time, thought and effort into productively organizing oneself, less is more. In fact, not only is less more, research suggests it may be faster, better and cheaper.
  • IBM researchers observed that email users who “searched” rather than set up files and folders for their correspondence typically found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors. Time and overhead associated with creating and managing email folders were, effectively, a waste.
  • The personal productivity issue knowledge workers and effective executives need to ponder is whether habits of efficiency that once improved performance have decayed into mindless ruts that delay or undermine desired outcomes.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • what would really prove more personally productive — folders that sort 15% faster? Or key phrase search capabilities that were 20% better?
  • Ongoing improvement in email/document/desktop and cloud-centric search frees them from legacy information management behaviors like filing.
  • They’re “organizing” for flexibility, adaptiveness and immediate response. More accurately, their technologies exist to give them greater speed and flexibility. Their personal organizational ethos reflects a Toyota Production System “just-in-time” attitude.
  • nstead of better tools for better organizing, people want their organization done for them. Organizing is wasteful; getting its benefits is productivity.
  • They want what I’ve described earlier as “promptware” — a cue and intervention that creates measurable value in the moment, rather than promised efficiencies in the future.
  • We’ll likely get more done better if we give less time and thought to organization and greater reflection and care to desired outcomes. Our job today and tomorrow isn’t to organize ourselves better; it’s to get the right technologies that respond to our personal productivity needs. It’s not that we’re becoming too dependent on our technologies to organize us; it’s that we haven’t become dependent enough.
  •  
    Suggests that we use just-in-time features built into our smart devices rather than take time to manually organize files and folders.
David McGavock

The Hidden Savant in You | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • Savants can perform extraordinary cognitive feats much like trained experts, but unlike experts they usually cannot describe what makes them so talented, seemingly relying on intuition rather than conscious deliberation to quickly make choices.
  • he consensus among many researchers is that intuitions are judgments made by unconscious processes in the brain.
  • Studies have shown that inhibiting activity in certain areas of the brain can facilitate solving geometric puzzles.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Allan Snyder has used transcranial direct current stimulation (DCS) to alter the activity both in the left and right hemispheres.
  • DCS was applied for only ten minutes, specifically to decrease activity in the left hemisphere and increase activity in the right hemisphere, 40 percent of subjects were able to solve the puzzle.
  • Tasks like solving the nine-dots puzzle are notoriously difficult because of our brains are structured in such a way as to limit creativity.
  • The left hemisphere is thought to govern the role that right-brain activity may play in cognition. Inhibiting activity in the left hemisphere of the brain is thought to remove the predisposition to interpret random elements in meaningful ways, allowing for more creative solutions generated in the right brain to make it into consciousness.
  • Savants thus may have a greater degree of conscious access to judgments of unconscious processes than non-savants.
  • As we become more skilled at manipulating brain processes through psychoactive drugs or electronic devices, we may be able to invoke savant-like skills in neurotypical people. 
David McGavock

Kim Peek, The Real Rain Man | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • Kim Peek, who lent inspiration to the fictional character Raymond Babbitt—played by Dustin Hoffman—in the movie Rain Man, was a remarkable savant.
  • He could read both pages of an open book at once, one page with one eye and the other with the other eye
  • He would retain 98 percent of the information he read.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • Unlike many individuals with savant syndrome, Kim Peek was not afflicted with autistic spectrum disorder. Though he was strongly introverted, he did not have difficulties with social understanding and communication.
  • The main cause of his remarkable abilities seems to have been the lack of connections between his brain's two hemispheres. An MRI scan revealed an absence of the corpus callosum, the anterior commissure and the hippocampal commissure, the parts of the neurological system that transfer information between hemispheres. In some sense Kim was a natural born split-brain patient.
  • Michael Gazzaniga and Roger W. Sperry, the first to study split brains in humans, found that several patients who had undergone a complete calloscotomy suffered from split-brain syndrome.
  • the left hemisphere gives orders that reflect the person’s rational goal, whereas the right hemisphere issues conflicting demands that reveal hidden preferences.
  • Despite his brilliant mind, his IQ was 87, significantly below normal. It was also difficult for him to follow directions of certain kinds.
  • Kim Peek may have developed additional subcortical connections for information transfer.
  • Peek's ability to retain large amounts of information may have had something to do with another condition he was afflicted with called macrocephaly. This brain abnormality consists in an excessively large head and a correspondingly huge brain.
  • As a baby the real rain man was diagnosed with mental retardation and the physicians told his parents that he never would be able to read or talk.
  • Despite the recommendation, Kim’s parents chose to raise him at home.
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.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • 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.
  •  
    "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?"
Antonio Lopez

Global unrest: how the revolution went viral | World news | The Guardian - 1 views

  • If you look at the full suite of information tools that were employed to spread the revolutions of 2009–11, it goes like this: Facebook is used to form groups, covert and overt – in order to establish those strong but flexible connections. Twitter is used for real-time organisation and news dissemination, bypassing the cumbersome newsgathering operations of the mainstream media. YouTube and the Twitter-linked photographic sites – Yfrog, Flickr and Twitpic – are used to provide instant evidence of the claims being made. Link-shorteners such as bit.ly are used to disseminate key articles via Twitter.
  • Underpinning the social media is mobile telephony: in the crush of every crowd we see arms holding cellphones in the air, like small flocks of ostriches, snapping scenes of repression or revolt, offering instant and indelible image-capture to a global audience.And in all the theatres of revolution, blogs have offered a vital resource: somewhere to link to.
  •  
    I good explanation for why things are "kicking off" everywhere.
David McGavock

The dreams of readers | ROUGH TYPE - 1 views

  • Psychologists and neurobiologists have begun studying what goes on in our minds as we read literature, and what they’re discovering lends scientific weight to Emerson’s observation.
  • “aesthetic emotions” that we feel when we view art from a distance, as a spectator:
  • We create our own version of the piece of fiction, our own dream, our own enactment.” Making sense of what transpires in a book’s imagined reality appears to depend on “making a version of the action ourselves, inwardly.”
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • The scholars used brain scans to examine the cellular activity that occurs inside people’s heads as they read stories. They found that “readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.”
  • When, for example, a character in a story puts a pencil down on a desk, the neurons that control muscle movements fire in a reader’s brain. When a character goes through a door to enter a room, electrical charges begin to flow through the areas in a reader’s brain that are involved in spatial representation and navigation.
  • More than mere replication is going on.
  • we really do enter, so far as our brains are concerned, a new world — one conjured not just out of the author’s words but out of our own memories and desires — and it is our cognitive immersion in that world that gives reading its emotional force.
  • ” A work of literature, particularly narrative literature, takes hold of the brain in curious and powerful ways.
  • there are the “narrative emotions” we experience when, through the sympathetic actions of our nervous system, we become part of a story, when the distance between the attendee and the attended evaporates
  • A 2009 experiment conducted by Oatley and three colleagues suggests that the emotions stirred by literature can even alter, in subtle but real ways, people’s personalities.
  • Norman Holland, a scholar at the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida, has been studying literature’s psychological effects for many years, and he offers a provocative answer to that question.
  • when we open a book, our expectations and attitudes change. Because we understand that “we cannot or will not change the work of art by our actions,” we are relieved of our desire to exert an influence over objects and people and hence can “disengage our [cognitive] systems for initiating actions.”
    • David McGavock
       
      Theory of mind 
  • The central subject of literature is society, and when we lose ourselves in a book we often receive an education in the subtleties and vagaries of human relations.
  • reading tends to make us at least a little more empathetic, a little more alert to the inner lives of others.
  • can strengthen a person’s “theory of mind,” which is what psychologists call the ability to understand what other people are thinking and feeling.
  • That frees us to become absorbed in the imaginary world of the literary work.
  • Jeff Jarvis, a media consultant who teaches journalism at the City University of New York, gave voice to this way of thinking in a post on his blog. Claiming that printed pages “create, at best, a one-way relationship with a reader,” he concluded that, in the internet era, “the book is an outdated means of communicating information.” He declared that “print is where words go to die.”
  • Society is growing ever more skeptical of the value of solitude. The status quo treats with suspicion  even the briefest of withdrawals into inactivity and apparent purposelessness. We see it in the redefinition of receptive states of mind as passive states of mind.
  • the arts of production and consumption, of getting stuff done, to which most of us devote most of our waking hours.
  • In a 2003 lecture, Andrew Louth, a theology professor at the University of Durham in England, drew a distinction between “the free arts” and “the servile arts.” The servile arts, he said, are those “to which a man is bound if he has in mind a limited task.”
  • free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by “the search for knowledge for its own sake.”
  • We open ourselves to aesthetic and spiritual possibilities.
  • It may be that readers have to enter a state of languid pleasure, a dream, before they can experience the full spermatic vitality of a book. Far from being a sign of passivity, the reader’s outward repose signals the most profound kind of inner activity, the kind that goes unregistered by society’s sensors.
  •  
    "The free arts, among which Louth included reading as well as meditation, contemplation, and prayer, are those characterized, in one way or another, by "the search for knowledge for its own sake." "
David McGavock

Mindful Infotention: Dashboards, Radars, Filters - City Brights: Howard Rheingold - 0 views

  • Tuning and feeding our personal learning networks is where the internal and the technological meet the social.
    • David McGavock
       
      Attention + Tech Tools + Learning Networks
  • Infotention is a word I came up with to describe the psycho-social-techno skill/tools we all need to find our way online today, a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills with computer-powered information filters
  • More and more, knowing where to direct your attention involves a third element, together with your own attentional discipline and use of online power tools – other people
David McGavock

Create more than you consume  - Medium - 1 views

  • The Learning Pyramid states that people retain:90% of what they learn when they teach someone else/use immediately.75% of what they learn when they practice what they learned.50% of what they learn when engaged in a group discussion.30% of what they learn when they see a demonstration.20% of what they learn from audio-visual.10% of what they learn when they’ve learned from reading.5% of what they learn when they’ve learned from lecture.
  • One of the studies reviewed by our lab was on meditation and how being in the moment decreases the noise in your brain, leading to improved scores on working memory and intelligence tests.
  • When you tie an emotion to an experience, a hormone is released that greases the wheels at certain chemical locations in the brain where nerves rewire to form new memory circuits:
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • When you consume in a passive way, by skimming and moving to the next thing, you’re at a learning disadvantage.
  • When I was in University, I worked at a psychology research center under the direction of one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 most influential people, Dr. Richie Davidson.
  • Self-taught individuals, also called autodidacts, are masters of retaining information largely because of their ability to reflect and put into action most of what they consume.
  • Instead of just trying to get to the end of your Twitter feed or articles that you saved for later, read each article as if you would need to tell a friend about it after.
  • 1-page summary immediately after every chapter he reads.
  • Nothing will help you absorb more of what you consume than trying to do. It’s through the mistakes made where the real learning happens.
  •  
    Great article on creation, consumption, learning, memory
David McGavock

Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.
  • I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
  • The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets’reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.
  • For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind.
  • As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought.
  • The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.
  • “I can’t read War and Peace  anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that.
    • David McGavock
       
      Unlikely. He hasn't lost the ability but the desire.
  • new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
  • recently published study of online research habits , conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.
  • we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s
  • “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace.
  • the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains.
  • The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
    • David McGavock
       
      So the net has ethics?? This anthropomorphism takes away our responsibility
  • Lewis Mumford  described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.”
  • In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.
  • The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.
  • The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations.
  • even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”
  • The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”
  • In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.
  • their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized.
  • there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.
  • The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.
    • David McGavock
       
      I find this the most compelling argument. "Business" has an interest in selling things. Moving us faster, increasing our "seeking" instinct is one of the keys to this consumption frenzy. The individual needs to understand and manage these forces.
  • The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.
  • we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.
  • As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin
    • David McGavock
       
      I like this metaphor. Pancake people
David McGavock

(RE)VITALIZE VISUALS » what gives you energy? - 0 views

  • What is it that gives you energy these days? And what at work gives you energy?
  • I love to draw with people to solve problems, gain insights about vision or just have some fun!Adding color and movement to the page via the bodily movement of drawing gives me energy.
  •  
    "My energy rises when there's a challenge involved and I 'really have to think/draw' (thinking & drawing go together in my world). (#drawitout) Conversations where I don't know all the answers give me energy, for I find that it's usually a good question rather than an answer that propels me forward."
David McGavock

I Was So Right About Distraction in Now You See it: Darn it all! | HASTAC - 1 views

  • I aruge that we are always multitasking and sometimes we do it more adeptly than others and it is incumbent on us to take our own internal inventory and decide what we are doing well and what we are not
  • The problem is that I am having to learn everything from scratch, all the time, all at once.
  • Is it the technology or the stream of non-stop decision-making that doesn't seem to stick to a 9-5 workday but follows you home from the office, at night, on weekends, on summer vacation?  
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • I advocate avoiding distraction but going deep, introspective, and finding out what exactly is freaking you out.
  • heartache (emotional overload) and hearburn (physical ailments) are far more distracting than email . . . and they make it harder to learn new technologies too.
  • what makes you distracted is that you are doing too many non-automatic, non-reflexive things at once.
  • The same, by the way, is also true when your worklife depends on technology and the technology changes.
  • your former patterns and reflexes don't serve you invisibly, efficiently, automatically. 
  • unlearning, in fact, makes us pay attention to the world in a new way.  George Lakoff says it is useful to become "reflective about our reflexes."
  • I am hoping that the result of this tedious, difficult, uneven, sometimes triumphant, sometime despairing transition time will be a fresh new way of looking at the world, now that so much of the world I took for granted, so many of the collaborations and processes and bureaucracies and patterns and expertise is so vividly transparent.
  •  
    " I am hoping that the result of this tedious, difficult, uneven, sometimes triumphant, sometime despairing transition time will be a fresh new way of looking at the world, now that so much of the world I took for granted, so many of the collaborations and processes and bureaucracies and patterns and expertise is so vividly transparent."
Donal O' Mahony

Five Forms of Filtering - 0 views

  •  
    creating ECONOMIC value from filters Interesting discussion of forms of filtering that could be applied to creating SOCIAL value
Charles van der Haegen

YouTube - Jonathan Zittrain - The Future of the Internet - 0 views

  •  
    "Jonathan Zittrain, chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute argues that with the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation - and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control."
  •  
    A speech about The future of Internet by Prof. Jonathan Zittrain see my blog http://ow.ly/5asW2
Charles van der Haegen

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

  •  
    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
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 56 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page