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Antonio Lopez

Practically Nonideological: A Chat with Ethan Zuckerman | Motherboard - 2 views

motherboard.vice.com/...al-a-chat-with-ethan-zuckerman

shared by Antonio Lopez on 02 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • One of the things that I thought was very interesting with Occupy early on was not just the desire to occupy physical spaces, but the desire to occupy media.
  • Now, instead of it being difficult to get footage, what’s really difficult is to edit it down into a narrative in one fashion or another.
  • One thing I’m fairly well known for in my work is trying to be critical about whether we’re adopting technologies because they’re practical, or because they’re ideological.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The reason I push back against this and say, ‘There’s some pretty good tech in Wimax, which probably is an easier way to put a pretty big cloud over an Occupy encampment, and then connect it into the Internet,’ is that I think it’s the Utopian technological politics that have people pursuing a very ground-up, very ad-hoc solution that may or may be the right technological solution.
  • There are two groups right now that are fighting for influence over the Internet. One groups is the guys who’ve run the Internet for a very long time. And I do mean guys. It’s mostly engineers – some with major tech companies, some with major telecom companies – who dominate meetings of things like the IETF, who are representatives of organizations like ICANN.
  • There’s a second camp in all this that is represented by governments, particularly governments of China, Russia, some governments from the global South, that are essentially saying ‘Look, this needs to be run through something closer to the UN system. It needs to be multi-national. It needs to be more representative.’
  • It’s interesting to think about how popular movements might insert themselves in that space. The truth is that with SOPA/PIPA, the traditional tech guys were on one side fighting more or less against Hollywood. And they pulled in support from millions of Internet users who signed up and said ‘We’re with you on this. We’re going to participate.’
  • I don’t see that popular movement [OWS] as the main actor in this space. I see companies like Tumblr, and Twitter, and Google doing a pretty good job of motivating their users. But whether that group of motivated Internet users actually maps onto Occupy…
David McGavock

The Evolution of Cooperation* - 1 views

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evolution cooperation Axelrod prisoners dilemma defection

shared by David McGavock on 31 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • To find a good strategy to use in such situations, I invited experts in game theory to submit programs for a computer Prisoner’s Dilemma tournament – much like a computer chess tournament.
  • the winner was the simplest of all candidates sub- mitted. This was a strategy of simple reciprocity which cooperates on the first move and then does whatever the other player did on the previous move. Using an American colloquial phrase, this strategy was named Tit for Tat.
  • face of an uncalled-for defection by the other, forgiveness after responding to a provocation, and clarity of behavior so that the other player can recognize and adapt to your pattern of action.
  • ...13 more annotations...
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      These conditions are core.
  • data from these tournaments reveals four properties which tend to make a strategy successful: avoidance of unnecessary con- flict by cooperating as long as the other player does, provocability in the
  • What made this mutual restraint possible was the static nature of trench warfare, where the same small units faced each other for extended periods of time. The soldiers of these opposing small units actually violated orders from their own high commands in order to achieve tacit cooperation with each other
  • the individuals involved do not have to be rational: The evolutionary process allows successful strategies to thrive, even if the players do not know why or how. Nor do they have to exchange messages or commit- ments: They do not need words, because their deeds speak for them. Likewise, there is no need to assume trust between the players: The use of reciprocity can be enough to make defection unproductive. Altruism is not needed: Successful strategies can elicit cooperation even from an egoist. Finally, no central authority is needed: Cooperation based on reciprocity can be self-policing
  • An indefinite number of interactions, therefore, is a condition under which cooperation can emerge
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      This condition is especially important in the case of egoists. Relationship over time.
  • So there must be some clustering of individuals who use strategies with two properties: The strategy cooperates on the first move, and discriminates between those who respond to the cooperation and those who do not
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      The check for reciprocation is a bit of evidence that the other side knows the value of the move of cooperation; that they won't be abandoned.
  • Whether the players trust each other or not is less important in the long run than whether the conditions are ripe for them to build a stable pattern of cooperation with each other
  • It turns out that if one waits to respond to uncalled-for defections, there is a risk of sending the wrong signal. The longer defections are allowed to go unchallenged, the more likely it is that the other player will draw the conclusion that defection can pay.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      Immediate feedback appears to be important in many domains.
  • The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship.
  • Waiting for probes to accumulate only risks the need for a response so large as to evoke yet more trouble.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      I have found that testing limits is a factor in working with children and adults. We are alert to the boundaries.
  • For this reason, the only arms control agreements which can be stable are those whose violations can be detected soon enough. The critical requirement is that violations can be detected before they can accumulate
  • Therefore, the advice to players of the Prisoner’s Dilemma might serve as good advice to national leaders as well: Don’t be envious, don’t be the first to defect, reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and don’t be too clever.
  • We are used to thinking about competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such as football or chess. But the world is rarely like that. In a vast range of situations, mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutual defection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but in eliciting their cooperation
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
       
      Herein lies another key... that we have a cooperative (win-win) attitude and understanding of the "game". We see our survival as tied with not exclusive of the fate of the "other".
  • David McGavock on 31 Mar 14
     
    We are used to thinkingabout competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such asfootball or chess. But the world is rarely like that. In a vast range ofsituations, mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutualdefection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but ineliciting their cooperation
David McGavock

Pop-Up University | DMLcentral - 0 views

dmlcentral.net/...pop-university

rheingold university pop up Cooperation learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 01 May 11 - No Cached
  • 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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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Cathy Davidson's bold experiments in peer-to-peer learning, including "crowd-sourcing grading," gave me a working model to emulate and appropriate.
  • 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.
  • David McGavock on 01 May 11
     
    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
David McGavock

Knight Foundation | Reporter Analysis - 0 views

www.knightfoundation.org/...index.dot

networks foundation socialmedia knight socialnetworking cooperation collaboration

shared by David McGavock on 30 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • The way we engage in public dialogue, coordinate, solve problems—all of it is shifting. New networks are emerging everywhere. It’s exciting—and frightening. What is this new network-centric world? What does it mean for community change?
  • How might our grantmaking respond effectively to a world in which loose networks of individuals, not just formal organizations, are becoming powerful creators of knowledge and action? What default practices should we discard and what new behaviors should we embrace?
  • We asked our partner, Monitor Institute, to take a critical look at the role of networks in community life. Our lens was apolitical.
  • David McGavock on 30 Apr 11
     
    we were interested in the potential of networks-to create stronger bonds or to split us apart. This essay highlights groups that are creatively connecting citizens who are making a difference today, and explores how technology might impact public participation and leadership in the future. The pages are rich with useful examples and lessons about how networks are unlocking assets in communities to support open government, care for the elderly, help disaster victims and advance women's rights. Throughout, the report considers the role philanthropy can play in harnessing the best network-centric practices, the ones that might unleash individual interactivity to achieve social impact at a scale and speed never before possible.
David McGavock

Making Science by Serendipity. A review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber's The Tra... - 1 views

jetpress.org/campa.htm

Barber information_literacy critical skills evaluate serendipity

shared by David McGavock on 09 Jul 11 - No Cached
  •  It is worth now turning our attention to the theoretical aspects of serendipity and examining the sociological and philosophical implications of this idea.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      New theme
  • As Mario Bunge (1998: 232) remarks, “Merton, a sociologist and historian of ideas by training, is the real founding father of the sociology of knowledge as a science and a profession; his predecessors had been isolated scholars or amateurs.”
  •  It is true that the American sociologist studies mainly institutions of science, not laboratory life and the products of science (e.g., theories). But he never said that sociologists cannot or should not study other aspects of science.
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  • His attention to the concept of serendipity is the best evidence
  • Some scientists seem to have been aware of the fact that the elegance and parsimony prescribed for the presentation of the results of scientific work tend to falsify retrospectively the actual process by which the results were obtained” (Merton and Barber 2004: 159)
  • Indeed if you are clever enough to take advantage of the opportunity, you may capture a fox thanks to accidental circumstances while searching for hares.
  • Colombus’ discovery of America, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, Nobel’s discovery of dynamite, and other similar cases, prove that serendipity has always been present in research. Merton (1973: 164)
  • “Intuition, scriptures, chance experiences, dreams, or whatever may be the psychological source of an idea.
  • This descriptive model has many important implications for the politics of science, considering that the administration and organization of scientific research have to deal with the balance between investments and performance. To recognize that a good number of scientific discoveries are made by accident and sagacity may be satisfactory for the historian of science, but it raises further problems for research administrators.
  • If this is true, it is necessary to create the environment, the social conditions for serendipity. These aspects are explored in Chapter 10 of The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      Key to the Mindamp group is finding ways to create this environment
  • The solution appears to be a Golden Mean between total anarchy and authoritarianism. Too much planning in science is harmful.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      balance - a good idea
  • Whitney supervised the evolution of the inquiry everyday but limited himself to asking: “Are you having fun today?” It was a clever way to make his presence felt, without exaggerating with pressure. The moral of the story is that you cannot plan discoveries, but you can plan work that will probably lead to discoveries:
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      Applied Serendipity at GE - "having fun?"
  • If scientists are determined by social factors (language, conceptual frames, interests, etc.) to find certain and not other “answers,” why are they often surprised by their own observations? A rational and parsimonious explanation of this phenomenon is that the facts that we observe are not necessarily contained in the theories we already know. Our faculty of observation is partly independent from our conceptual apparatus. In this independence lies the secret of serendipity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      Perhaps an example of embodied cognition. Our senses know something our brains don't.
David McGavock

…My heart's in Accra » CHI keynote: Desperately Seeking Serendipity - 1 views

www.ethanzuckerman.com/...esperately-seeking-serendipity

filter bubble diversity bias cosmopolitan global local

shared by David McGavock on 07 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Cities embody political decisions make by their designers.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like program or be programmed to me
  • It’s much harder to get the architects behind Facebook or Foursquare articulate the behaviors they’re trying to enable and the political assumptions that underly those decisions.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Again - Programmers!
  • An urban planner who wants to make changes to a city’s structure is held in check by a matrix of forces: a desire to preserve history, the needs and interests of businesses and residents in existing communities, the costs associated with executing new projects. Progress is slow,
  • ...49 more annotations...
  • For those planning the future of Facebook, it’s hard to study what’s succeeded and failed for MySpace, in part because an exodus of users to Facebook is gradually turning MySpace into a ghost town.
  • If we learn from real-world cities instead of abandoned digital ones, what lessons might we take?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusions
  • The Jacobs/Moses debate suggests we need to be cautious of architectures that offer convenience and charge isolation as a price of admission. This is the concern Eli Pariser articulates in his (excellent) new book, “The Filter Bubble“.
  • He worries that between Google’s personalized search and the algorithmic decisions Facebook makes in displaying news from our friends, our online experience is an increasingly isolated one,
  • They’re cars, rather than public transit or busy sidewalks.
  • A map of Vancouver overlaid with my friends’ recommendations is one thing; one that recommends restaurants based on paid advertisements and doesn’t reveal this practice is another entirely.
  • The map I want is the one that lets me shuffle not just through my friends’ preferences but through annotations from different groups: first time visitors to the city; long-time Vancouverites; foodies; visitors from Japan, Korea or China.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      A diverse sampling of taste
  • People’s actions inscribe their intentions onto a city.
  • Online spaces are often so anxious to show me how my friends are using a space that they obscure how other audiences are using it.
  • It’s possible to find out what’s popular on Facebook to an audience broader than that of your friends.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Something Google+ should consider
  • One of the reasons curation is such a helpful strategy for wandering is that it reveals community maxima. It can be helpful to know that Times Square is the most popular tourist destination in New York if only so we can avoid it.
  • knowing where Haitian taxi cab drivers go for goat soup is often useful data on where the best Haitian food is to be found.
  • If you want to explore beyond the places your friends think are the most enjoyable, or those the general public thinks are enjoyable, you need to seek out curators who are sufficiently far from you in cultural terms and who’ve annotated their cities in their own ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key to breaking the filter bubbles
  • Geocaching is its own peculiar form of community annotation, where the immediate goal is leaving your signature on someone else’s logbook, but the deeper goal is encouraging you to explore in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.
  • SF0, founded by a trio of Chicagoans transplanted to San Francisco, was designed to encourage players to discover things they’d never seen or done in the city, in a way that encouraged independence and exploration.
  • Combining the insights we may find from studying the organization of cities with the ability to reshuffle and sort digitally may let us think about designing online spaces for serendipity in different and powerful ways.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Conclusion?
  • - How do we design physical spaces to encourage serendipity? - What lessons about serendipity in physical spaces can we bring into the virtual realm? - How can we annotate the physical world, digitally, in ways that expand our encounters with the world, rather than limiting them?
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Questions over conclusion
  • We hope that cities are serendipity engines. By putting a diverse set of people and things together in a confined place, we increase the chances that we’re going to stumble onto the unexpected. It’s worth asking the question: do cities actually work this way?
  • Most of us are fairly predictable
  • We hope for random encounter with a diverse citizenry to build a web of weak ties that increases our sense of involvement in the community, as Bob Putnam suggested in Bowling Alone. And we worry that we may instead isolate and cocoon ourselves when faced with a situation where we feel like outsiders, as Putnam’s recent research suggests.
  • “Census data can describe the segregation of my block, but how about telling me how segregated my life is? Location data points in that direction.
  • Nathan Eagle, who has worked with Sandy Pentland at MIT’s Media Lab on the idea of “reality mining”, digesting huge sets of data like mobile phone records, estimates that he can predict the location of “low-entropy individuals” with 90-95% accuracy based on this type of data
  • We all filter the places we live into the places where we’re regulars and the ones we avoid, the parts of town where we feel familiar and where we feel foreign. We do this based on where we live, where we work, and who we like to spend time with.
  • I’m less concerned about left-right polarization in the US, and more concerned about us/them polarization around the world
  • through the design of the systems we use and our behavior with those systems, I see reasons to worry that our use of the internet may be less cosmopolitan and more isolated that we would hope.
  • There were – and are – reasons to distrust curators, but there’s a critical aspect of their work I believe we need to preserve as we move towards new models for organizing news.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      interesting view of curation
  • Countries that have more than 40 million or more internet users generally have a very strong bias towards local sources – the mean is roughly 95%/5%, which makes Americans look (slightly) cosmopolitan in comparison.
  • US broadcast media focuses much more on entertainment stories than on international news.)
  • What’s striking to me about this preference data is that there’s so little effort required to access international news sources like BBC, the Times of India or the Mail and Guardian – they’re one click away and don’t require crossing a language barrier – and how strong the “local” bias for national news sources appears to be.
  • on January 12th, I published “What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?“… and I got a lot of phone calls when Ben Ali fled the country two days later.
  • The revolution in Tunisia caught intelligence and diplomatic services around the world flat-footed. It didn’t have to – there was a wealth of information being published on Tunisian Facebook pages
  • I’m forced to admit that there’s no way I would have known about the revolution brewing if I didn’t have close Tunisian friends.
  • I’m less interested in the ways in which we limit our paths through cities than in how we constrain what we do and don’t encounter online.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      key point
  • On the other hand, curators invariably have biases
  • We need mechanisms to ensure that search gets complemented with serendipity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Point we have been discussing. Filter bubbles
  • Facebook offers a different answer to the question, “What do I need to know?” – “You need to know what your friends and your friends of friends already know that you do not.”
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Facebook world = ummm....
  • there’s a decent chance that their collective intelligence has some blind spots
  • The problem, of course, is that if your friends don’t know about a revolution in Tunisia or a great new Vietnamese restaurant, you may not know either.
  • It’s worth asking whether that bubble is able to provide us with the serendipity we hope for from the web.
  • Serendipity, at first glance, looks like the positive side of unintended consequences, the happy accident. But that’s not what the term meant, at least originally.
  • The word was coined by Horace Walpole, an 18th century British aristocrat,
  • A Google search turns up 11 million pages with the term, including restaurants, movies and gift shops named “serendipity”, but very few on unexpected discovery through sagacity.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Serendipity vs. Sagacity
  • he refers to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, in which the titular characters were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”
  • Louis Pasteur observed, “In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”
  • In “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity”, he and Barber explore discovery in a General Electric laboratory under the leadership of Willis Whitney, who encouraged a work environment that focused as much on fun as it did on discovery.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Sounds like Google. Tinkering, time to play, time to work.
  • If we want to create online spaces to encourage serendipity, we might start by learning from cities.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 07 Jul 11
       
      Moving to the point of online learning
  • Our loss, I believe, is that we’ve lost sight of the idea that we could prepare ourselves for serendipity, both personally and structurally.
  • vibrancy comes from the ongoing chance encounter between people using a neighborhood for different purposes, encountering one another as their paths intersect and cross.
  • The neighborhoods Jacobs celebrates are certainly not the most efficient in terms of an individual’s ability to move quickly and independently. Vibrancy and efficiency may not be diametrically opposed, but it’s likely that the forces are in tension.
David McGavock

Educational Psychology Interactive: Videos in Educational Psychology - 0 views

www.edpsycinteractive.org/...videos.html

resources psychology education interactive video

shared by David McGavock on 09 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 09 Oct 11
     
    "EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY INTERACTIVE Audio-Video Materials Related to Educational Psychology"
  • David McGavock on 09 Oct 11
     
    A wealth of videos. Many are relevant to critical thinking and the scientific method.
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