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

newmedialiteracies.org/...ning-a-digital-media-cours.php media litteracy education do-it-yourself ethnocentrism planet disadvantaged multi-cultural cultural assumptions citizenship
shared by Charles van der Haegen on 16 May 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 16 May 11
     
    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
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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 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 30 Jul 11
     
    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!"
  • Charles van der Haegen on 30 Jul 11
     
    An amazing disciovery for me, Thanks Carla Cassidy
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‪George Siemens on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)‬‏ - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch online distributed learning global community network self-managed self-determined PLN Tools
shared by Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11
     
    Thanks Howard for having conducted this interview and having allowed George Siemens to expose the philisophy behind his MOOKC idea. Great educational content. Also a path is shown for the future of self-determined and self-managed, life-long autonomous, learning in teams and around personal and wider, global, community networks "George Siemens, at the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca Universityhas been running "Massive Open Online Courses" (MOOCs). I talk to him about what a MOOC is, how it works, and the educational philosophy behind it." Excellent Interview by Howard Rheingold
  • Charles van der Haegen on 27 Jul 11
     
    This video is really great. Howard is a master interviewer. George Siemens is provoked in answering the kind of questions that allow the viewer to reallt comprehend his thinking and the power of his MOOC. By the same token, it gives a nice indication of the similarity in design that Howard is following for his course... When will the two combine to a greater whole
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The International Society for Ecological Economics - 0 views

www.ecoeco.org/content ecology economics eco-economics ISEE fragmentation social science dialogue
shared by Charles van der Haegen on 23 Jul 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 23 Jul 11
     
    "ISEE is a not-for-profit, member-governed, organization dedicated to advancing understanding of the relationships among ecological, social, and economic systems for the mutual well-being of nature and people. Ecological economics exists because a hundred years of disciplinary specialization in scientific inquiry has left us unable to understand or to manage the interactions between the human and environmental components of our world. While none would dispute the insights that disciplinary specialization has brought, many now recognize that it has also turned out to be our Achilles heel. In an interconnected evolving world, reductionist science has pushed out the envelope of knowledge in many different directions, but it has left us bereft of ideas as to how to formulate and solve problems that stem from the interactions between humans and the natural world. How is human behaviour connected to changes in hydrological, nutrient or carbon cycles? What are the feedbacks between the social and natural systems, and how do these influence the services we get from ecosystems? Ecological economics as a field attempts to answer questions such as these."
  • Charles van der Haegen on 23 Jul 11
     
    ISEE's Dedication: Advancing understanding of the relationships among ecological, social, and economic systems for the mutual well-being of nature and people: My question: Did this understanding ever exist. If yes, why was this understanding lost ??? If not: How come?
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Greenmarkets Provide Fresh Ideas For Staycations - NY1.com - 0 views

manhattan.ny1.com/...de-fresh-ideas-for-staycations NY1.com BL Ochman
shared by B.L. Ochman on 02 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • B.L. Ochman on 02 Aug 11
     
    me and benny were on TV!
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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.
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When Did We Become Mentally Modern? : NPR - 0 views

www.npr.org/...story.php evolution darwin mental development modern alex spiegel symbolic thinking
shared by Charles van der Haegen on 08 May 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 08 May 11
     
    "Ever since Darwin came up with the whole idea of evolution, there's been one dominant picture of the moment we truly became human. It's that cartoon sequence: You see a hairy ape man with a heavy brow hunched in profile. Then, bit by bit, his back uncurls and straightens until all of a sudden there is he, upright, truly a man. Recently I've been thinking about this image, because I've decided that we somehow ended up with the wrong one - that there's something much more fundamental to being human than our ability to stand upright."
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Manuel Castells on Vimeo communication Power - 3 views

vimeo.com/7484903 social media communication power information journalism democracy
shared by Charles van der Haegen on 16 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 16 Jul 11
     
    1h14 lecture in Oxford to introduce the ideas of the book "communication power"
  • Charles van der Haegen on 16 Jul 11
     
    I believe this again to be a fundamental perspective that can inform our study of Cooperation Theory especially its aspect in relation to the spontaneous upcoming (and possible threaths to the flourishong) of social media
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YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. - 1 views

www.youtube.com/testtube youtube labs Creative Commons Personal learning network Infotention
shared by B.L. Ochman on 09 Jul 11 - Cached
  • B.L. Ochman on 09 Jul 11
     
    YouTube idea incumbator/lab
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Global Voices · About - 0 views

globalvoicesonline.org/about bloggers blogs reporting world international community citizen media uncomfortable knowledge
shared by Charles van der Haegen on 26 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 26 Jun 11
     
    "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
  • Charles van der Haegen on 26 Jun 11
     
    Sourcing uncomfortable knowledge, buried under the avalange of info overload, or repressed from appearing??? To be verified
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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."
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…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.
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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! "
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Digital Skills Can Be Quickly Acquired - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-can-be-quickly-acquired.html skills Infotention Personal learning network twitter literacy learning culture
shared by David McGavock on 24 Dec 12 - No Cached
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 24 Dec 12
       
      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.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • 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.
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Q&A: David Eagleman, Director, Initiative on Neuroscience and the Law | SmartPlanet - 1 views

www.smartplanet.com/...922 learning culture neuroscience law augmentation thinking tools
shared by David McGavock on 30 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • David Eagleman is about as close to a rock star that a neuroscientist can be.
  • Eagleman was excited to talk to SmartPlanet about his work at both the Initiative on Neuroscience and Law, a national, interdisciplinary organization he founded that’s looking at how to remake the U.S. legal system; and the Laboratory for Perception and Action, at Baylor College of Medicine. The former initiative tackles topics such as how brain imaging and analyses of “Big Data” on crime patterns can help communities better understand and prevent violent behavior in new ways. The latter looks broadly at how individual brains are not at all alike — and how the differences might be significant for how we construct and manage our societies.
  • His work is particularly relevant in policy-related discussions in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy in Connecticut.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • “To the newsreaders who feel that mental illness is best viewed as an excuse, let me suggest instead that we might more effectually recognize it as a national priority for social policy,” he wrote on his blog shortly after the shootings.  “If we care to prevent the next mass shooting, we should concentrate our efforts on getting meaningful diagnoses and resources to the next Adam Lanza.”
  • Because we are able now to measure things we have never been able to measure before, this allows us potentially to customize sentencing and rehabilitation. The goal is to have the whole system be more just and have more utility.
  • Our system is built on the assumption that if you’re over 18 and over the IQ of 70, you’re a practical reasoner, free to choose how you act. But modern neuroscience suggests that those are not good assumptions.
  • I have to emphasize, though, that this is not about exculpation. I have to be very clear that this is really about customized sentencing and rehab that works.
  • It’s helpful to be able to talk about science in basic ways that anyone can understand. What I tell my students in my lab is that they need to be able explain their research to an 8th grader.
  • I’m an amateur history buff, and if I want to read about the Roman Empire, I don’t want to read an academic debate, but instead a narrative by a trusted guide who’s done their homework, who will offer the filter of how they understand the Roman Empire, to shepherd me through its history in only 200 pages.
  • Rather than “playful,” I’d say that my approach is simply the opposite of boring. It’s about looking for and then trying to answer questions that are poweful enough to get you out of bed at 5AM.
  • My intuition on this idea: being a good scientist or creative writer is about maintaining the wide-eyed wonder of a child and asking questions all the time. That’s what really makes discovery happen in any field.
  • Science is changing really rapidly. One way is that lots of scientists are moving into Big Data
  • Right now we’re involved with serious crunching to pull out statistical info on recidivism and crime. Our first challenge is visualizing it. So in this sense, creativity and art also relevant. Data visualization is really valuable stuff; you can discover a trend when you see, wow, I didn’t realize that bump would be there. To be able to tie together data in beautiful ways allows us to see and discover patterns.
  • I don’t have any fear about losing the mystery of creativity. If I explain every single chemical piece in the process of why you enjoy the taste of a soy latte, it wouldn’t diminish your enjoyment of a soy latte. It might even enhance it
  • Neuroscientists work on how to understand how brains construct reality in general, but we are in the position of fish trying to understand water. What I mean by that is that we only know one way of seeing the world very well, like a fish only knows water.  Learning about how synesthesia works allows us to get out of our fishbowl,
  • You don’t need to know anything about the brain to understand what shape or style will be appealing. We may come scrambling up behind advertisers and product designers and validate them. If Apple wanted to hire me, sure, I’d say yes immediately and do the best job I could! But honestly, they already know how to do it. They’re the design experts. We neuroscientists would in come with our fancy machines and theories and explain why what they do is already true.
  • David McGavock on 30 Dec 12
     
     "To the newsreaders who feel that mental illness is best viewed as an excuse, let me suggest instead that we might more effectually recognize it as a national priority for social policy," he wrote on his blog shortly after the shootings.  "If we care to prevent the next mass shooting, we should concentrate our efforts on getting meaningful diagnoses and resources to the next Adam Lanza."
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From Brain to Mind: Using Neuroscience to Guide Change in Education « Learnin... - 0 views

learningwithscience.wordpress.com/...e-to-guide-change-in-education augmentation Personal learning network thinking tools neuroscience brain education
shared by David McGavock on 20 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • Zull begins his journey with sensory-motor learning, and how that leads to discovery, and discovery to emotion. He then describes how deeper learning develops, how symbolic systems such as language and numbers emerge as tools for thought, how memory builds a knowledge base, and how memory is then used to create ideas and solve problems. Along the way he prompts us to think of new ways to shape educational experiences from early in life through adulthood, informed by the insight that metacognition lies at the root of all learning.
  • he argues that self-knowledge, awareness of how and why we think as we do, and the ability to adapt and learn, are critical to our survival as individuals; and that the transformation of education,
  • David McGavock on 20 Dec 11
     
    "This book offers the reader an engrossing and coherent introduction to what neuroscience can tell us about cognitive development through experience, and its implications for education."
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Jason Silva's Captivating Videos Deliver a Dose of 'Techno-Optimism' | Underwire | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...1 augmentation techno-optimism Jason Silva tools solution
shared by David McGavock on 14 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • video maker and self-described “philosophical performer” Jason Silva has a much more optimistic (and logically sound) mode of thinking about the future and all the technologically awesome possibilities it has to offer.
  • As technology has advanced, it acts as a buffer that shrinks the lag time between what we dream about and what we can create and substantiate in the world.”
  • Techno-optimism is a belief in the power of technology to extend our sphere of possibilities, and ultimately a belief that technology helps us solve and transcend problems, limitations and obstacles.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • we should decide that we need to make better tools to solve the problems caused by the initial tools
  • The world’s best IT is the alphabet
  • it can be used to compose Shakespearean sonnets
  • But you can also use the alphabet to compose hate speech
  • I’m interested in inspiring people to see the ways in which it has extended our possibilities for the better
  • we’re in need of a new narrative. I see my place as somebody who wants to help craft that narrative.
  • I begin by deciding on a specific idea I want to ecstatically explore
  • the videos are noncommercial, they are meant to be seen as mashups.
  • we map out the vibe and the “feeling” we want. We discuss examples, certain placement and “moments” I want to create, and then she sits on it, gets inspired, interprets and plugs it in. Then we discuss and exchange until we’re happy with it.
  • David McGavock on 14 Jun 14
     
    Interview in Wired magazine describing an optimistic view of technology, used for good not evil.
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Is Google Making Us Stupid? - Nicholas Carr - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...306868 Nicholas Carr Scientific Management Information distracted
shared by David McGavock on 13 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • 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
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      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
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      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
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      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
      David McGavock on 13 Jun 14
       
      I like this metaphor. Pancake people
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Are Babies Born Good? | Science | Smithsonian - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...are-babies-born-good-165443013 babies moral compass debate neuroscience Cooperation Smithsonian
shared by David McGavock on 06 May 14 - No Cached
  • The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn’t there.
  • “When our infant was only four months old I thought that he tried to imitate sounds; but I may have deceived myself,” Charles Darwin wrote in “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” his classic study of his own son.
  • Even well-behaved babies are notoriously tough to read: Their most meditative expressions are often the sign of an impending bowel movement.
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • “People who’ve spent their whole careers studying perception are now turning toward social life, because that’s where the bio-behavioral rubber meets the evolutionary road,” Konner says. “Natural selection has operated as much or more on social behavior as on more basic things like perception. In our evolution, survival and reproduction depended more and more on social competence as you went from basic mammals to primates to human ancestors to humans.”
  • The lab’s initial study along these lines, published in 2007 in the journal Nature, startled the scientific world by showing that in a series of simple morality plays, 6- and 10-month-olds overwhelmingly preferred “good guys” to “bad guys.” “This capacity may serve as the foundation for moral thought and action,” the authors wrote. It “may form an essential basis for...more abstract concepts of right and wrong.”
  • spate of related studies hinting that, far from being born a “perfect idiot,” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, or a selfish brute, as Thomas Hobbes feared, a child arrives in the world provisioned with rich, broadly pro-social tendencies and seems predisposed to care about other people.
  • No seasoned parent can believe that nurture doesn’t make a difference, or that nature trumps all. The question is where the balance lies.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 06 May 14
       
      Key thought - where is the balance?
  • Wynn and her husband, the psychologist Paul Bloom, collaborated on much of Hamlin’s research, and Wynn remembers being a bit more optimistic: “Do babies have attitudes, render judgments? I just found that to be a very intuitively gripping question,” she says.
  • Infant morality studies are so new that the field’s grand dame is 29-year-old J. Kiley Hamlin, who was a graduate student at the Yale lab in the mid-2000s.
  • she stumbled on animated presentations that one of her predecessors had made, in which a “climber” (say, a red circle with goggle eyes) attempted to mount a hill, and a “helper” (a triangle in some trials) assisted him, or a “hinderer” (a square) knocked him down.
  • When I visited, Tasimi was recreating versions of Hamlin’s puppet shows as background work for a new project.
  • The child shot her a woebegone look before dutifully hauling himself out of the ball pit, picking up the pen and returning it to the researcher.
  • When babies at the Yale lab turn 2, their parents are tactfully invited to return to the university after the child’s third birthday.
  • The next lab I visited was at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it has made this age group something of a specialty, through work on toddler altruism (a phrase that, admittedly, rings rather hollow in parental ears).
  • One advantage of testing slightly older babies and children is that they are able to perform relatively complicated tasks. In the Laboratory for Developmental  Studies, the toddlers don’t watch puppets help: They themselves are asked to help.
  • Warneken was initially interested in how little children read the intentions of others, and the question of whether toddlers would assist others in reaching their goals. He wanted to sound out these behaviors in novel helping experiments—“accidentally” dropping a hat, for instance, and seeing if the kids would return it.
  • prominent psychologists had previously argued that children are selfish until they are socialized; they acquire altruistic behaviors only as childhood progresses and they are rewarded for following civilization’s rules, or punished for breaking them.
  • One day he and a toddler were bouncing a ball together. Truly by accident, the ball rolled away—“the moment of serendipity,” as Warneken now calls it. His first impulse was to retrieve the toy and carry on, but he stopped himself.
  • The little boy watched him struggle, then after a moment heaved himself up, waddled over to the toy and—defying the scientific community’s uncharitable expectations—stretched out his own chubby little arm to hand the ball to his gigantic playmate.
  • In the following months, Warneken designed experiments for 18-month-olds, in which a hapless adult (often played by him) attempted to perform a variety of tasks, to no avail, as the toddlers looked on. The toddlers gallantly rescued Warneken’s dropped teaspoons and clothespins, stacked his books and pried open stubborn cabinet doors so he could reach inside.
  • videotaped experiment of a toddler wallowing in a wading pool full of plastic balls.
  • But the elements that underpin morality—altruism, sympathy for others, the understanding of other people’s goals—are in place much earlier than we thought, and clearly in place before children turn 2.”
  • Because they were manifested in 18-month-olds, Warneken believed that the helping behaviors might be innate, not taught or imitated. To test his assumption, he turned to one of our two nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzee.
  • The first chimps Warneken studied, nursery-raised in a German zoo
  • as the caretaker dropped the first object: As if on cue, the chimp bounded over and breezily handed it back.
  • Warneken wondered if perhaps human-reared chimps had been conditioned to be helpful to their food providers
  • They would consistently help when the person was reaching for the object,” even in the absence of any payoff.
  • The final step was to see if chimps would assist each other. So Warneken rigged apparatuses where one caged chimp could help a neighbor reach an inaccessible banana or piece of watermelon. There was no hope of getting a bite for themselves, yet the empowered chimps fed their fellow apes regardless.
  • But under what circumstances are toddlers altruistic?
  • Some recent chimp studies suggest that chimps won’t help others unless they witness the dismay of the creature in need. Are human children likewise “reactive” helpers, or can they come to another’s assistance without social cues?
  • “You can see the birth of this proactive helping behavior from around 1.5 to 2.5 years of age,” Warneken explains. “The children don’t need solicitation for helping. They do it voluntarily.” Proactive helping may be a uniquely human skill.
  • Criticisms of the “nice baby” research are varied, and the work with the youngest kids is perhaps the most controversial.
  • such method­o­­­logical worries are never far from baby researchers’ minds.
  • Other critics, meanwhile, fault the developmental philosophy behind the experiments.
  • these researchers argue, but actually they start from scratch with only senses and reflexes, and, largely through interaction with their mothers, learn about the social world in an astonishingly short period of time.
  • And still other scientists think the baby studies underestimate the power of regional culture.
  • Ideas of the public good and appropriate punishment, for instance, are not fixed across societies: Among the Matsigenka people of the Peruvian Amazon, where Henrich works, helping rarely occurs outside of the immediate household, if only because members of the tribe tend to live with relatives.
  • Plenty of bleak observations complicate the discovery of children’s nobler impulses. Kids are intensely tribal: 3-month-olds like people of their own race more than others, experiments have shown, and 1-year-olds prefer native speakers to those of another tongue.
  • Babies, in addition, are big fans of punishment. Hamlin likes to show a video of a young vigilante who doesn’t just choose between the good and bad puppets; he whacks the bad guy over the head.
  • Perhaps babies are not really trying to help in a particular moment, per se, as much as they are expressing their obliging nature to the powerful adults who control their worlds—behaving less like Mother Teresa, in a sense, than a Renaissance courtier. Maybe parents really would invest more in a helpful child, who as an adult might contribute to the family’s welfare, than they would in a selfish loafer—or so the evolutionary logic goes.
  • A different interpretation, Warneken says, is that in a simpler world maybe toddlers really could help, pitching in to the productivity of a hunter-gatherer group in proportion to their relatively meager calorie intake.
  • For many researchers, these complexities and contradictions make baby studies all the more worthwhile.
  • “I’m trying to think of a lesser-of-two evils study,” he says. “Yes, we have our categories of good and bad, but those categories involve many different things—stealing $20 versus raping versus killing. Clearly I can’t use those sorts of cases with, you know, 13-month-olds. But you can come up with morality plays along a continuum to see...whether they form preferences about whether they like the guy who wasn’t as bad as the other bad guy.”
  • David McGavock on 06 May 14
     
    "The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn't there."
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