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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?"
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
Charles van der Haegen

Global Voices · About - 0 views

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    "Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media. Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard. Millions of people are blogging, podcasting, and uploading photos, videos, and information across the globe, but unless you know where to look, it can be difficult to find respected and credible voices. Our international team of volunteer authors and part-time editors are active participants in the blogospheres they write about on Global Voices. Global Voices is incorporated in the Netherlands as Stichting Global Voices, a nonprofit foundation. We do not have an office, but work as a virtual community across multiple time zones, meeting in person only when the opportunity arises (usually during our Summits). We rely on grants, sponsorships, editorial commissions, and donations to cover our costs. Our Projects Global Voices is translated into more than 30 languages by volunteer translators, who have formed the Lingua project. Additionally, Global Voices has an Advocacy website and network to help people speak out online in places where their voices are censored. We also have an outreach project called Rising Voices to help marginalized communities use citizen media to be heard, with an emphasis on the developing world. Read more about our projects. Our History Global Voices was founded in 2005 by former CNN Beijing and Tokyo Bureau Chief, Rebecca MacKinnon and technologist and Africa expert, Ethan Zuckerman while they were both fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The idea for the project grew out of an internat
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    Sourcing uncomfortable knowledge, buried under the avalange of info overload, or repressed from appearing??? To be verified
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."
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

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

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
  • The educational implications include allowing students short ‘technology breaks’ to reduce distractions and teaching students metacognitive strategies regarding when interruptions negatively impact learning.”
  • 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.
  • similar mental limitations in the types of tasks that can be multitasked.
  • 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
David McGavock

You Media :: About Us - 0 views

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    YOUmedia is an innovative, 21st century teen learning space housed at the Chicago Public Library's downtown Harold Washington Library Center. YOUmedia was created to connect young adults, books, media, mentors, and institutions throughout the city of Chicago in one dynamic space designed to inspire collaboration and creativity. High school age teens engaging with YOUmedia can access thousands of books, over 100 laptop and desktop computers, and a variety of media creation tools and software, all of which allow them to stretch their imaginations and their digital media skills. By working both in teams and individually, teens have an opportunity to engage in projects that promote critical thinking, creativity, and skill-building.
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?
Alex Grech

New Media Open-Access Academic Journals - 0 views

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    Invaluable list of new media open access academic journals compiled by Media Malmo University.
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"
Charles van der Haegen

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

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    "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.
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  • 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.
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
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  • 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.
  • 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.
  • new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.
  • 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.
  • 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.”
  • 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.
  • The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.
    • David McGavock
       
      So the net has ethics?? This anthropomorphism takes away our responsibility
  • 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
Charles van der Haegen

Quest to Learn School website - 0 views

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    "Reason and Purpose Learning by Doing Designed to support the digital lives of young people and their capacity for learning, Quest to Learn is a school committed to graduating strong, engaged, literate citizens of a globally networked world. Through an innovative pedagogy that immerses students in differentiated, challenge-based contexts, the school acknowledges design, collaboration, and systems thinking as key literacies of the 21st century. Within an integrated, rigorous Regents-based curriculum students work with teachers to gain the skills necessary to meet these requirements, and even surpass them. On-going evaluation and feedback create opportunities for students to plan, revise, and reflect on their own learning. The overall curriculum is rooted in mathematical practices and the use of smart tools, with an explicit intent to innovate at the level of how students are assessed in context. Most importantly, teachers work with students to build individual and academic competencies and enrich youth identity development within contexts that are relevant and meaningful. The school has been designed to help students to bridge old and new literacies through learning about the world as a set of interconnected systems. Design and complex problem-solving are two big ideas of the school, as is a commitment to deep content learning with a strong focus on learning in rigorous, engaging, and relevant ways. It is a place where digital media meets books and students learn to think like designers, inventors, mathematicians, writers, and more. Q2L brings together teachers with a passion for content, a vision for helping kids to learn best, and a commitment to changing the way students will grow in the world. Quest to Learn has purposely responded not only to the growing evidence that digital media and games offer powerful models for reconsidering how and where young people learn, but also to the belief that access for all students to these opportunities is critical. We beli
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    Following the links ifrom ted's post in the gamification forum item... I bounced on this school. Always interesting to discover new ways of looking at traditional things...
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
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
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  • 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.”
  • 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"
  • 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.
  • you have to be clear whether you’re using the technology where it’s most effective, or simply conceding to its inherent bias.
  • 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.
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    10 biases of digital media, and ten commands that go with them.
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