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David McGavock

Transom » Radiolab: An Appreciation by Ira Glass - 0 views

transom.org/?p=20139

radiolab storytelling resources

shared by David McGavock on 24 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Real journalism – and by that I mean fact-based reporting – is getting trounced by commentary and opinion in all its forms, from Fox News to the political blogs to Jon Stewart. Everyone knows newspapers are in horrible trouble. TV news continually loses ratings. And one way we broadcast journalists can fight back and hold our audience is to sound like human beings on the air. Not know-it-all stiffs. One way the opinion guys kick our ass and appeal to an audience is that they talk like normal people, not like news robots speaking their stentorian news-speak. So I wish more broadcast journalism had such human narrators at its center. I think that would help fact-based journalism survive.
  • particularly the places where the story turns, or where the hosts are to take different sides of an issue, those moments are always improvised.
  • Thus the utterly effortless chitchat that floats you so cheerfully from plot point to character moment to scientific explanation to the next plot point is actually worked over second by second and beat by beat, over the course of weeks.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Jad’s an Oberlin-trained composer so he’s always either writing the music to fit the stories on his show, the way a composer writes a film score, or he adapts other people’s music so well you can’t tell it wasn’t custom made.
  • And all that meticulous work is in the service of something that’s the opposite of careful and meticulous: this totally chatty, happy, loose, spontaneous-sounding conversation between Jad and Robert and their interviewees.
  • on Radiolab. They invented this insanely concise, entertaining way to tell that story, and they have no problem hurtling through it quickly.
  • For my part, I find it comforting that this level of excellence is so labor intensive that they only can make ten full shows a year (plus, sure, 16 “shorts” that they distribute on the Internet). If they could do an hour of this every week, I think I’d have to quit radio. What would be the point of continuing? How could anyone compete with that?
  • There was an entire hour recently that took up the provocative question: from an evolutionary perspective, why would it be useful for us, or for any creature, to ever help one another? To ever be good? That’s a really hard premise for stories with ideas and emotion and strong characters and interesting plot lines.
  • “In an almost comic attempt to make their job hard, the duo take only the most difficult subjects from science and philosophy: ‘Time,’ ‘Morality,’ ‘Memory and Forgetting,’ ‘Limits.’”
  • What’s striking is the ambition of all this. Jad and Robert seem to be inventing their effects and techniques as they go.
  • Sometimes it seems like the only people who understand how terrific the show is, are listeners.
  • Radiolab also does a beautiful job figuring out a mix of stories that’ll move us from one idea to the next over the course of an hour. Lots of their episodes have a coherent argument to them, an argument that takes an hour and several stories to lay out.
  • Radiolab: An Appreciation I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. Its co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have digested all the storytelling and production tricks of everyone in public radio before them, invented some slick moves of their own, and ended up creating the rarest thing you can create in any medium: a new aesthetic.
  • A 2010 NPR/SmithGeiger survey of news consumers who rightly should be in the public radio audience, showed that one of the biggest reasons adults say they choose not to listen to public radio is that they’re put off by the tone. One survey respondent said: “This type of story could be interesting, but the reporter’s voice and intonation is soooo affected, upper class, wasp, Ph.D. student-like, it detracts from the story.
  • This information is presented quickly and cheerfully. There’s a bounce to the whole thing. Music plays behind. Jad looks at a map, as he’s talking to Laura, naming the cities the balloon passed on its flight across England. It’s visual. Do I need to explain here that part of making great radio is remembering that you always need to give the audience things to look at?
  • All this banter also helps them solve a storytelling problem
  • David McGavock on 24 Sep 11
     
    Radiolab: An Appreciation I marvel at Radiolab when I hear it. I feel jealous. Its co-creators Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have digested all the storytelling and production tricks of everyone in public radio before them, invented some slick moves of their own, and ended up creating the rarest thing you can create in any medium: a new aesthetic.
  • David McGavock on 24 Sep 11
     
    Telling a story - capturing the attention and curiosity of people. Sparking our humanity.
David McGavock

Upaya News » Blog Archive » Zen Brain: Exploring The Connection Between Neuro... - 1 views

www.upaya.org/...en-neuroscience-and-meditation

shared by David McGavock on 24 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • In the Zen Brain retreats, prominent scientists and Zen practitioners explore Buddhist, neuro-scientific and clinical science perspectives on topics like altruism, compassion and consciousness. Lectures and discussions with participants are embedded within zazen (meditation) practice throughout each day.
  • In these unusual programs, participants explore constructs like “affective stickiness,” a phrase coined by Dr. Richard Davidson, Research Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This is the phenomenon by which we interpret an experience as negative and then become so strongly identified with it that it becomes a fixed part of “us.”
  • The particular kind of misinterpreation of self-identification can prevent us from accessing our full range of consciousness and often limits our capacity to make choices regarding a situation.
  • David McGavock on 24 Sep 11
     
    In the Zen Brain retreats, prominent scientists and Zen practitioners explore Buddhist, neuro-scientific and clinical science perspectives on topics like altruism, compassion and consciousness. Lectures and discussions with participants are embedded within zazen (meditation) practice throughout each day.
David McGavock

BPS Research Digest: Has the Internet become an external hard drive for the brain? - 2 views

bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/...ecome-external-hard-drive.html

shared by David McGavock on 03 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • It's as if we've become adept at using computers to store knowledge for us, and we're better at remembering where information is stored than the information itself.
  • it's important to keep these new findings in perspective: they hint at how the Internet could be altering our memory habits, but they haven't demonstrated that this is any different from other forms of memory support.
  • similar results might have been obtained if trivia statements had been written in notebooks or told to friends, as opposed to typed into a computer.
  • David McGavock on 03 Aug 11
     
    Last year's annual question posed by Edge was "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" Several psychologists answered that it was becoming an extension of their minds. "The Internet is a kind of collective memory,' wrote Stephen Kosslyn (Harvard University). "When I write with a browser open in the background, it feels like the browser is an extension of myself."
David McGavock

Digital Diva * Ten Commandments for a Digital Age - 1 views

www.digital-diva.co.uk/...ten-commandments-digital-age

ten commandments Cooperation learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 19 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 19 Jul 11
     
    "1. Thou shall not be always on - Resist the temptation to always being on. Turn your phone off occasionally. 2. Thou shall not do from a distance what can be done in person - Some powerful global brands can become weak at a local level. 3. Exalt the particular - Not everything scales or needs to scale. 4. You may always choose none of the above - Don't tick the gay/straight/married/single boxes. Human beings are more complex than the simple choices 5. Thou shall never be completely right - The internet verses complexities 6. Thou shall not be anonymous - Anonymity has lead to the conversation being well thought out by those who choose to sign in against the hatred spat out by the anonymous 7. Contact is king - Social marketing is an oxymoron. 8. Abstraction - Don't confuse abstract models and the real world. 9. Thou shall not steal - Without a social contract, openness can continue until there is nothing left to give things away. 10. Program or be programmed - We should ask 'What can we make it do?" rather than "What can it do for us?"."
David McGavock

Theory of mind - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Theory_of_mind

mind philosophy cognition awareness scanning

shared by David McGavock on 12 Jul 11 - Cached
  • 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.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 Jul 11
       
      Mirror Neurons
  • The theory of mind (ToM) impairment describes a difficulty someone would have with perspective taking. This is also sometimes referred to as mind-blindness.
  • 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]
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 12 Jul 11
       
      Contrary Mirror Neuron Evidence
  • 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.
David McGavock

JOURNAL: Is Scanning and Situational Awareness a cure for Multitasking Drift? - Global ... - 0 views

globalguerrillas.typepad.com/...re-for-multitasking-drift.html

scanning awareness multitasking drift thinking tools Personal learning network

shared by David McGavock on 12 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • If you are like me, you interact with a flood of information, online networks, and people everyday.  To handle it all, we multitask.  Unfortunately, it's easy to get off track or drift off course while multi-tasking.  
  • the act of multi-tasking -- responding to an e-mail/tweet/phone call, adding a new post/picture, etc. -- becomes an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.
  • How do you build a scan for online multitasking?  Build a checklist. List the online tasks you want/need to keep up with.    Organize the list from the most important task to the least.  Repeat important tasks in the list if the intervening tasks take you away too long from that important task. After you go through enough scans to clear the deck, take a break to work on items that require long term thinking. 
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Some people even drive their careers, businesses and lives off a cliff interacting with it.  They think they are getting things done, but they aren't getting anything done at all. The way to fight this is situational awareness. The little part of your brain that is ALWAYS asking you the questions: Where am I and what am I doing? Am I progressing towards my goal? Am I in any danger or is there a way to get to the goal faster?
  • A set of overarching goals that guide your behavior.  To apply this to online multi-tasking you need to train a part of your brain to ask these questions.
  • You can simulate that with: Asking a friend to lambast you every 10-30 minutes with these questions until you nail it every time.   Setting a random alarm that forces you to lift yourself out of your multi-tasking stupor to ask yourself these questions. Or, and this is the most difficult way, do your entire scan with intentional, conscious thought.  Justifying each and every step until it becomes second nature.
  • David McGavock on 12 Jul 11
     
    "JOURNAL: Is Scanning and Situational Awareness a cure for Multitasking Drift?"
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.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • 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

Users for Sale: Has Digital Illiteracy Turned Us Into Social Commodities? - 1 views

mashable.com/...users-products-rushkoff

shared by David McGavock on 08 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • In answer to your question, engaging with people costs us privacy. It always has. I think the only way to behave is as if nothing is private. And then fight to make what you care about legal and acceptable.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 08 Jul 11
       
      key point
  • You warn against the dangers of “selling our friends” by connecting our social graphs to various networks and apps. How does this damage our relationships, even if we’re doing it unwittingly?
  • Unwittingly, well, it’s more like when your friends keep inviting you to FarmVille or LinkedIn. When they unwittingly turn over their address book to one of these companies that’s really just in the business of swelling their subscriptions so that they can go have an IPO.
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  • You advocate “programming literacy” in the online platforms we use every day. How much can the average web user be expected to understand?
  • I don’t think the average web users of this century will achieve basic programming literacy.
  • If they don’t know how to make the programs, then I’d at least want them to know what the programs they are using are for. It makes it so much more purposeful. You get much more predictable results using the right technologies for the right jobs.
  • I want people to be able to ask themselves, “What does this website want me to do? Who owns it? What is it for?”
  • You note how our traditional social contracts (e.g. I can steal anything I want, but I won’t do it out of shame, fear, etc.) break down due to the anonymity and distance of the web. How can we change this and still maintain an open online culture?
  • We have an economic operating system based in scarcity — that’s how we create markets — so we don’t have a great way yet of sharing abundant resources.
  • It’s a problem of imagination, not reality. We have imaginary boundaries.
  • rather than getting people to use the web responsibly and intelligently, it may be easier to build networks that treat the humans more responsibly and intelligently. Those of us who do build stuff, those of us who are responsible for how these technologies are deployed, we have the opportunity and obligation to build technologies that are intrinsically liberating — programs that reveal their intentions, and that submit to the intentions of their users.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 09 Jul 11
       
      On one hand Rushkoff is saying all people need to become more literate of "programming". On the other hand he says that programmers need to focus on doing the job well (treat humans more responsibly - reveal their intentions more fully).
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

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

weblogsky.com/...hkoff-program-or-be-programmed

WEBLOGSKY doug program or be programmed

shared by David McGavock on 04 Jul 11 - Cached
  • how quickly things become polarized in this era, the bad-trip bizarre extremes suggested by the Tea Party and the Palinites.
  • “running obsolete code” socially
  • How much of this is the bias of a binary medium, and how much of it is attributable to the biases of the people who program our technologies
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Initially “anyone can program reality” via written text,
  • invention of the printing press assigns more control to those who control the means of production/replication
  • In the era of mass media, there’s a sense of mainstream knowledge that’s vetted carefully by editors and publishers who share similar biases and assumptions.
  • In the era of computers and the Internet, we’ve seen the evolution of a more decentralized, diverse “social” media
  • How free are we from a the centralized set of biases associated with mass publishing?
  • Rushkoff argues that there are biases in the way things are programmed – programmers have biases or they’re directed according to the biases of others.
  • bias followed by commandment
  • 1) Time: “Thou shalt not be always on.”
  • 2) Distance: “Thou shalt not do from a distance what can be done better in person.”
  • you have to be clear whether you’re using the technology where it’s most effective, or simply conceding to its inherent bias.
  • 3) Scale – the net is biased to scale up. “Exalt the particular.” Not everything should scale. This makes me think of E.F. Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful.”
  • 4) Discrete: “You may always choose none of the above.”
  • 5) Complexity. “Thou shalt never be completely right.”
  • Real scholarship acknowledges, embraces, and digs into that complexity.
  • 6) Anonymity. “Thou shalt not be anonymous.”
  • By default, we are incomplete in an environment that is mostly textual and binary communication. In this context, it is liberating to adopt a strong sense of identity.
  • 7) Contact. “Remember the humans.” Content is not king in a communications environment – CONTACT is king.
  • 8) Abstraction. “As above, so below.” Text abstracted words from speech. Invention of text led to an abstract god. Also led to treating economy as if it is nature – but it’s not, it’s a game. Don’t make equivalencies between the abstracted model and the real world.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 04 Jul 11
       
      Reminds me of Alan Watts and his description of money in "Does it Matter"
  • 9) Openness. “Thou shalt not steal.”
  • We’re seeing a transitional economy where value and compensation are being redefined, and where especially the value and exchange of social capital is increasingly more relevant.
  • 10) End users. Here the bias is toward making all or most of us end users rather than programmers. “Program or be programmed.”
  • The user and the coder are farther apart. He argues that we should all understand programming, be able to build our own tools or configure tools other have built so that we have more control over the digital environment.
  • David McGavock on 04 Jul 11
     
    10 biases of digital media, and ten commands that go with them.
David McGavock

7 Tips for Better Twitter Chats - 0 views

mashable.com/...better-twitter-chat-tips

tools twitter chat

shared by David McGavock on 04 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 04 Jul 11
     
    "Twitter chats are an increasingly common way for people to discuss a topic or passion online. Basically, a group will organize around a specific hashtag so people can follow a single thread of conversation on Twitter. There are now hundreds, if not thousands of regular Twitter chats going on, and for good reason. It's an easy, low-commitment way to get involved in a conversation with other people in your industry. It's also a great way to network and get new ideas. See Also: HOW TO: Start and Run a Successful Twitter Chat Starting a Twitter chat, however, requires both time and effort. Make sure you're setting yourself up for a positive outcome with these seven tips."
David McGavock

Our mission - Gapminder.org - 0 views

www.gapminder.org/...our-mission

evaluate resources statistics visualisation data gapminder

shared by David McGavock on 03 Jul 11 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 03 Jul 11
     
    "About Gapminder Fighting the most devastating myths by building a fact-based world view that everyone understands. Gapminder is a non-profit venture - a modern "museum" on the Internet - promoting sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals."
David McGavock

CmapTools - Home Page Cmap.html - 0 views

cmap.ihmc.us

mindmapping software freeware visualization concept thinking tools augmentation learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 02 Jul 11 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 02 Jul 11
     
    IHMC Cmap Tools empower users to construct navigate, share, and criticize knowledge models represented as Concept Maps.
David McGavock

Free and Unlimited Web Conferencing | Free Video Conferencing | Online Web Meeting | Mu... - 0 views

www.bigmarker.com/about

web conferencing

shared by David McGavock on 02 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Share contents interactively Use internet desktop sharing, interactive whiteboards, instant messaging system, and live audio and video chat to conduct online web meeting that can be as collaborative and productive as in-person meetings
  • Multipoint video conferencing
  • Whiteboards
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Screen sharing
  • Unique meeting room UR
  • public or remain private
  • David McGavock on 02 Jul 11
     
    "About BigMarker.com BigMarker provides fully-featured web conferencing solution for free to everyone. Here you can host web conferences with friends, family or colleagues, teach online training seminars to students, practice presentation skills, or broadcast events in real time - all free and unlimited! There are no trial period and no monthly fee. BigMarker is also an online virtual community and a hub for live information exchange, providing you a powerful platform to host video web conferences and present to the world. Use BigMarker to connect with others live online, share contents collaboratively, spread ideas, conduct live webinar, or promote business online. Expect instant feedback and responses! "
David McGavock

The Forward Foundation - http://forwardfound.org/ - 1 views

forwardfound.org/About

Cooperation forwardfound.org commons OpenSource foundation

shared by David McGavock on 29 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • About the Forward Foundation   Forward Foundation is a Foresight/Futures studies not for profit research and development group. Our members in the past have worked in the past with http://www.iftf.org/, MacArthur Foundation, Stanford University, MIT Press, MITE, USDA, and hundreds of small groups and networks across the globe. We produce research and forecasting like most "futures studies think tanks", but we also produce open source software and code, open source hardware and designs, and open licensed education materials. Examples include http://code.google.com/p/flows-dev/ http://flows.panarchy.com/ http://socialmediaclassroom.com and some of us have worked on http://cooperationcommons.com with http://iftf.org
  • Our Wealth Generating Ecology building skills and experience includes:   Working with meta and alternative currencies, local economy and social enterprise development, network-based project management, collaborative food, energy, creative output and physical object production, envrionmental scanning for network collaboration ecologies, and more.
  • Our design philosophy is to share not just the rendered output of the education package, but also the standard model that was used to produce the output.  We believe that it is important to design for interoperability first, then to address what works best for you. 
  • David McGavock on 29 Jun 11
     
    "About the Forward Foundation Forward Foundation is a Foresight/Futures studies not for profit research and development group. Our members in the past have worked in the past with http://www.iftf.org/, MacArthur Foundation, Stanford University, MIT Press, MITE, USDA, and hundreds of small groups and networks across the globe. We produce research and forecasting like most "futures studies think tanks", but we also produce open source software and code, open source hardware and designs, and open licensed education materials. Examples include http://code.google.com/p/flows-dev/ http://flows.panarchy.com/ http://socialmediaclassroom.com and some of us have worked on http://cooperationcommons.com with http://iftf.org"
David McGavock

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

socialmediaclassroom.com/...rticipatory-media-lesson-plans

socialmedia lessonplans media Cooperation Rheingold learning culture wiki

shared by David McGavock on 29 Jun 11 - Cached
  • David McGavock on 29 Jun 11
     
    "Wiki: Participatory media lesson plans These are a series of small lesson plans (I call them "labs") I've used as assignments for my students. These pages serve as more permanent reminders of what I show them during the face to face class meeting, as assignments, and as resource pages for further learning. Please feel free to add your own. Introduction to Forums Introduction to Blogging Introduction to Wikis Introduction to Social Bookmarking Introduction to RSS Introduction to Twitter/Microblogging Introduction to Mindmapping Introduction to Info Dashboards, Radars, and Filters Introduction to Setting Up a WordPress Blog Introduction to Map Mashups for Journalists"
David McGavock

5 Steps to Becoming a Twitter Champion | Social Media Explorer - 0 views

www.socialmediaexplorer.com/...to-becoming-a-twitter-champion

Cooperation twitter literacy learning culture Angela Maiers habitude

shared by David McGavock on 29 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • In the Twitterverse; faith is greater than fear; positivity greater than negativity; and inspiration will get you farther than intelligence. Passion is a must!
  • 2.  Be Ready to Engage. Twitter is a full contact sport. If you are not willing to reach out, listen, share and learn…stay home. Engagement is nonnegotiable.
  • On Twitter, that means you have to share killer content – be it a resource, relevant link, amazing photo, great blog post, or inspiring quote. Don’t save the “good stuff” for a select few.  Share something which will make a difference for all.
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  • Once your goals are in place and your engagement formula is in full swing, you might consider the following tools to help you get and stay on track. Take your time, chose wisely, and remember…just becuase it can be measure; doesn’t make it matter.
  • David McGavock on 29 Jun 11
     
    "Champion Tweeters think differently. They approach Twitter and their time in the Twitter community with a different behavior set, mindset and belief system. Their Twitter Habitudes separate them from the pack. If you seek to be more successful on Twitter, reach out to more people, get noticed, and make a bigger impact; you must be willing and ready to think and act like a Twitter Champion! Here are 5 ways to get your Twitter Game on:"
David McGavock

Interpersonal ties - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Interpersonal_ties

ties Interpersonal PLN social learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 27 Jun 11 - Cached
  • more novel information flows to individuals through weak rather than strong ties.
  • Acquaintances, by contrast, know people that we do not, and thus receive more novel information.[1]
  • the fact that two people may know each other by name does not necessarily qualify the existence of a weak tie. If their interaction is negligible the tie may be absent. The "strength" of an interpersonal tie is a linear combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (or mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize each tie.[2]
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • In 1954, the Russian mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport commented on the "well-known fact that the likely contacts of two individuals who are closely acquainted tend to be more overlapping than those of two arbitrarily selected individuals." This argument became one of the cornerstones of social network theory.
  • In a related line of research in 1969, anthropologist Bruce Kapferer, published "Norms and the Manipulation of Relationships in a Work Context" after doing field work in Africa. In the document, he postulated the existence of multiplex ties, characterized by multiple contexts in a relationship.[4][5]
  • Social networks In social network theory, social relationships are viewed in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all of the relevant ties between the nodes being studied.
  • David McGavock on 27 Jun 11
     
    "Interpersonal ties From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Nodes (individuals) and ties (connections) in social networks. In mathematical sociology, interpersonal ties are defined as information-carrying connections between people. Interpersonal ties, generally, come in three varieties: strong, weak, or absent. Weak social ties, it is argued, are responsible for the majority of the embeddedness and structure of social networks in society as well as the transmission of information through these networks. "
David McGavock

Multitude Project - 1 views

sites.google.com/...Home

socialnetworking mindamp learning culture Cooperation social action

shared by David McGavock on 26 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 26 Jun 11
     
    "The scope of the Multitude Project is to drive the multitude social movement. In other words, we try to understand how the new technology is changing the power structure in modern societies, we build a new vision for a brighter future, and we propose a path towards this future, whereby the potential introduced by the new technology is actualized to the advantage of the multitude. Change is clearly on the way, in the natural direction of the emancipation of masses, a trend which can be clearly recognized throughout history. Major institutions will be greatly transformed in the near future due to immense pressure mainly induced by rapid technological advancements. Our goal is to predict some of these changes and to channel the change into a peaceful, incremental and constructive revolution. Along with the aforementioned exploratory and speculative activities, we also propose new methods and tools, to help individuals and groups all around the world in their daily struggle against injustice and economical inequality."
David McGavock

How Technology Evolves | Digital Tonto - 0 views

www.digitaltonto.com/...how-technology-evolves

christensen heidegger kelly memes paradignms dawkins technology relationship

shared by David McGavock on 25 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Perhaps what we fear most about technology is ourselves.  For better or worse, technology’s evolution and our own are inseparable.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 25 Jun 11
       
      I think this is spot on. Technology tempts us, pulls us to go one way or the other. We are concerned about it taking control of us, isolating us from other things and relationships we value, corrupting us. To eat the apple or not, that is the questions.
  • the work of Diamond, Jacobs and Florida all have in common is that they describe technology very much like Heidegger – as an uncovering.   However, they all argue, quite rightly, that the work of uncovering technological principles requires an environment conducive to creativity; including prosperity, leisure time and opportunities for a diversity of ideas to mix.
  • What Does Technology Want? So is technology more worthy of our admiration or our fear?  Kevin Kelly, in his book What Technology Wants, argues for both.  He describes a neverending chain of solutions to problems that create still newer problems.
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  • Technology, therefore, is somewhat dependent on precursors. What you start out with will help to determine what you end up with.
  • Sometimes it’s hard to tell if technology is something to love or to fear. Are computers making us smarter or dumbing us down? Are genetically modified foods a miracle or a menace? What’s really scary is how little control we have over it.
  • Whatever we might think or feel, technology will progress and we need to decide for ourselves how we will interact with it. Yet before we can do that, we need to understand how it evolves into being.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 25 Jun 11
       
      This is an important purpose for the Mindamp group. While the name sounds like a call for amplifying our minds, much of our talk is about managing our minds; understanding (and using) tools to understand the evolution of the tools.
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