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.
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Personal Democracy Forum 2011 | June 6-7 | Personal Democracy Forum - 3 views
personaldemocracy.com/pdf-2011
personal democracy politics technology impact participative people empowerment public
shared by Charles van der Haegen on 30 Jul 11
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Technology is changing politics "PdF 2011 was a complete sell-out! We'd like to thank our energized and active community of attendees, sponsors, speakers, and volunteers - together, we pulled off one of the most engaging and informative conferences we've had in our eight years of PdF. The feedback we've received so far suggests that everyone in attendance took something away from our conference, whether a new lesson, a new idea, or a new friend. If you couldn't make it to PdF this year, be sure to check out Micah Sifry's conference wrap-up post on techPresident. We also encourage you to check out our video archives, where you'll find videos of our keynote speakers. Thanks again for your continued support, and stay tuned for more on PdF 2012!" -
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shared by Charles van der Haegen on 29 Jul 11
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Ribbonfarm and Venkatesh Rao - 1 views
www.ribbonfarm.com/about
unusual perspectives refactored perception philosophy sociology business innovation technology
shared by Charles van der Haegen on 29 Jul 11
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"My name is Venkatesh Rao (I go by 'Venkat') and I started writing the ribbonfarm blog in 2007. Since March, 2011, it has been my base for full-time writing, independent research, consulting and other random activities. I am also the author of a book on the interplay of timing and decision-making, Tempo and write an email newsletter called Be Slightly Evil. Between 1997 and 2011, I pursued a traditional research/entrepreneurial career (a PhD, a postdoc, a startup, and an industrial R&D lab where among other things, I founded trailmeme.com as Entrenrepeur-in-Residence). Ribbonfarm is a blog about looking at things from unusual perspectives (that's the "refactored perception" bit). The topics range from philosophy, art and sociology to business, innovation and technology. Unlike blogs that serve as content marketing channels for other products and services, Ribbonfarm is the main act here, and I try to organize the rest of my life and work around it.
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I am looking for more people like this , looking at things from unusual perspectives (that's the "refactored perception" bit). The topics range from philosophy, art and sociology to business, innovation and technology. If you can indicate them to me, please do...
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Writing, Reading, and Social Media Literacy - Howard Rheingold - Now, New, Next - Harva... - 5 views
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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.
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Social Media's Slow Slog Into the Ivory Towers of Academia - Josh Sternberg - Technolog... - 0 views
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If you took a soldier from a thousand years ago and put them on a battlefield, they'd be dead,"
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"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."
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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.
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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
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Instead of understanding social media as products, students are encouraged to treat status updates as part of a larger information ecosystem.
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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?"
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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.
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"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."
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"no positive incentives for innovating in pedagogy."
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Rheingold puts it,
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Underpinning a disdain for social media in higher education is the assumption that incoming students already have an inherent aptitude for new technologies
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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.
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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?"
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the lack of critical literacy.
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ce students of the Digital Age have not had to acclimate to this sweeping change from analog to digi
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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.
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"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
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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.
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"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."
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Pop-Up University | DMLcentral - 0 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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The first acts on the first day of class are crucial – what chaos theorists call "sensitive dependence on initial conditions."
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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
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Theory of mind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views
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The emerging field of social neuroscience has also begun to address this debate, by imaging humans while performing tasks demanding the understanding of an intention, belief or other mental state.
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The theory of mind (ToM) impairment describes a difficulty someone would have with perspective taking. This is also sometimes referred to as mind-blindness.
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Individuals who experience a theory of mind deficit have difficulty determining the intentions of others, lack understanding of how their behavior affects others, and have a difficult time with social reciprocity.[27]
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ToM deficits have been observed in people with autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenics, persons under the influence of alcohol and narcotics, sleep-deprived persons, and persons who are experiencing severe emotional or physical pain.
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Research by Vittorio Gallese, Luciano Fadiga and Giacomo Rizzolatti (reviewed in [51]) has shown that some sensorimotor neurons, which are referred to as mirror neurons, first discovered in the premotor cortex of rhesus monkeys, may be involved in action understanding.
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Neuropsychological evidence has provided support for neuroimaging results on the neural basis of theory of mind. A study with patients suffering from a lesion of the temporoparietal junction of the brain (between the temporal lobe and parietal lobe) reported that they have difficulty with some theory of mind tasks.[49] This shows that theory of mind abilities are associated with specific parts of the human brain.
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However, there is also evidence against the link between mirror neurons and theory of mind. First, macaque monkeys have mirror neurons but do not seem to have a 'human-like' capacity to understand theory of mind and belief. Second, fMRI studies of theory of mind typically report activation in the mPFC, temporal poles and TPJ or STS,[54] but these brain areas are not part of the mirror neuron system.
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The presumption that others have a mind is termed a theory of mind because each human can only intuit the existence of his/her own mind through introspection, and no one has direct access to the mind of another.
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Doug Rushkoff: Program or be Programmed | WEBLOGSKY: Jon Lebkowsky's Blog - 0 views
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how quickly things become polarized in this era, the bad-trip bizarre extremes suggested by the Tea Party and the Palinites.
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“running obsolete code” socially
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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,
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invention of the printing press assigns more control to those who control the means of production/replication
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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.
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In the era of computers and the Internet, we’ve seen the evolution of a more decentralized, diverse “social” media
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How free are we from a the centralized set of biases associated with mass publishing?
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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.
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bias followed by commandment
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1) Time: “Thou shalt not be always on.”
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2) Distance: “Thou shalt not do from a distance what can be done better in person.”
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you have to be clear whether you’re using the technology where it’s most effective, or simply conceding to its inherent bias.
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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.”
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4) Discrete: “You may always choose none of the above.”
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5) Complexity. “Thou shalt never be completely right.”
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Real scholarship acknowledges, embraces, and digs into that complexity.
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6) Anonymity. “Thou shalt not be anonymous.”
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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.
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7) Contact. “Remember the humans.” Content is not king in a communications environment – CONTACT is king.
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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.
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Reminds me of Alan Watts and his description of money in "Does it Matter"
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9) Openness. “Thou shalt not steal.”
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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.
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10) End users. Here the bias is toward making all or most of us end users rather than programmers. “Program or be programmed.”
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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.