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Vanessa Vaile

Education and the social Web: Connective learning and the commercial imperative - 0 views

  • I argue that commercial social networks are much less about circulating knowledge than they are about connecting users (“eyeballs”) with advertisers
  • not the autonomous individual learner, but collective corporate interests that occupy the centre of these network
  • business model restricts their information design in ways that detract from learner control and educational use
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  • Just as commercialism has rendered television beyond the reach of education, commercial pressures threaten to seriously limit the potential of the social Web for education and learning.
  • Web 2.0 and online social networking have been the subject of sustained and lively interest among practitioners and promoters of educational technology
  • what is seen as the radical potential of these services
  • Social networking is so central to these new versions of education that a new “connectivist” theory of learning has come to be closely associated with them
  • a theory in which “knowing” itself is seen to be “defined by connections” making “learning primarily a network forming process”
  • described in terms of the liberation of learners from traditional constraints, as allowing them go beyond the classroom, to network “with peers worldwide,” and ultimately, to “take control of their own learning”
  • These visions are above all associated with the “personal learning environment
  • The personal learning environment is envisioned as a set of applications and services — to a large extent, logos and brands — organized around a single user, according to his or her learning and informational preferences and needs.
  • Through these services, the user is to be connected with teachers, mentors and other learners
  • some advocates of these approaches to learning have been raising concerns about the commercial nature of many of these services.
  • “You are not Facebook’s customer. You are the product that they sell to their real customers — advertisers. Forget this at your peril”
  • “This simple reality underlies almost all considerations having to do with these tools,
  • To use these tools is to reinforce, however indirectly, the ‘advertised life,’
  • The question is whether there is a role for higher education to promote ‘safe spaces’ free of this influence.”
  • the business model of commercial social networks is based on advertising, assisted by the data collection, as well as powerful tracking and analysis capabilities.
  • powerful surveillance functions
  • theories of media ideology and hegemony developed some time ago by Raymond Williams and Todd Gitlin
  • constraints presented by commercialized forms and contents rendered educational television a failure decades ago
  • similar structural issues threaten to sharply limit the potential of much newer social media for education and learning
  • Facebook, Google and other Web 2.0 and social networking services are making enormous sums right now from the users and advertisers they attract, and they are in aggressive competition to do this more efficiently
  • The absence of references to advertising (and also to tracking and analysis) in many discussions of the personal learning environments is surprising given the proliferation of logos and brands of commercial services
  • Because advertising is the raison d’être of services like Google and Facebook, it also provides the basis for the design, organization and maintenance of all of these other services and functions.
  • This way of understanding advertising and Web 2.0 draws on critiques of television (and the role of advertising in it) that were articulated decades ago.
  • the goal of these media organizations, he says, is to sell a product, and the product that “the networks sell is the attention of audiences; their primary market is the advertisers themselves”
  • One thing that is different today is that there is no one monolithic audience that forms a generic product to sell to advertisers.
  • An obvious objection to be raised at this point is that Facebook or Google, unlike television, do not have significant control over the content that is used to assemble audiences for advertisers
  • users have a clear choice regarding the kinds of content that they wish to view and disseminate
  • complex and subtle but very effective ways in which advertisers’ interests shape online social contexts.
  • Raymond Williams’ 1974 critique, Television: Technology and cultural form.
  • Williams’ text requires only minor revision to speak to the situation of commercial Web services today:
  • whether there is a role for higher education to promote ‘safe spaces’ free of this influence.”
  • Williams is making the point that the relationship between content and advertising is subtle and insidious, and that it is slightly different in the case of content “made for TV” than for its non–commercial counterpart.
  • “a dominant cultural form;”
  • what is important for the similarly non–commercial content of the social Web is informational design, architecture, and algorithm.
  • operation in otherwise non–commercial programming is registered in terms of sequence, rhythm and flow
  • Users of Facebook are sure to have been struck by the numerous and varied ways in which it cultivates gregarity and interaction, the way in which it relentlessly structures and supports sociality and connection
  • It is common to observe that the term “friend” itself is emptied of meaning by this incessant use and quantification;
  • Facebook exemplifies a way of generating and circulating information that encourages the expansion of interconnections between users
  • The controversy arises from the possible addition of a corresponding “Dislike” button.
  • lowers the psychological barrier to connecting with commercial entities
  • Gregarious behaviour is rewarded on Facebook
  • approval of a resource will draw ever more attention to it.
  • To provide the option of expressing dislike for a brand like Coca–Cola or to disapprove of a newspaper report or an article like this one is contrary to Facebook’s business interests
  • The dynamics here are rather reminiscent of what television of a bygone era had to offer: In both cases, you can either watch (i.e., “Like”) the products and lifestyles being showcased, or simply walk away.
  • “Like buttons” similar to many other connective features of social networks, “are about connection; Dislike buttons are about division.”
  • Similarly, other services will also systematically exclude possibilities for the expression of dissent and difference.
  • Despite the current prominence of social–psychological and connectivist theories, it is easy to make the case that learning is just as much about division as it is about connection.
  • In fact, the consistent pattern of suppressing division, negativity and interpersonal dissent that is central to the business model of social networking services runs counter to some of the most common models and recommendations for online student interaction and engagement.
  • Opportunities for social selectivity, discretion, privacy and detachment are an important precondition for the acts of disclosure and mutual critique, falsification and validation central to these models
  • selectivity and discretion — the “safe spaces” hoped for by Lamb and Groom — are rendered structurally impossible in convivial, commercially–contoured environments
  • Knowledge is not exclusively embodied in ever growing networks of connection and affiliation, and it does not just occur through building and traversing these proliferating nodes and links
  • Education is clearly a social process, but it is probably much closer to an ongoing discussion or debate than an extended feast or celebration with an ever-expanding network of friends.
  • advertising, tracking and analysis functions of commercial social media present, as Raymond Williams says, “a formula of communication, an intrinsic setting of priorities”
  • It only remains to be seen whether this dynamic renders commercial social networking services as fully unsupportive of educational ends as commercial television has long been.
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    In recent years, new socially‏oriented Web technologies have been portrayed as placing the learner at the centre of networks of knowledge and expertise, potentially leading to new forms of learning and education. In this paper, I argue that commercial social networks are much less about circulating knowledge than they are about connecting users ("eyeballs") with advertisers; it is not the autonomous individual learner, but collective corporate interests that occupy the centre of these networks. Looking first at Facebook, Twitter, Digg and similar services, I argue their business model restricts their information design in ways that detract from learner control and educational use. I also argue more generally that the predominant "culture" and corresponding types of content on services like those provided Google similarly privileges advertising interests at the expense of users. Just as commercialism has rendered television beyond the reach of education, commercial pressures threaten to seriously limit the potential of the social Web for education and learning.
TESOL CALL-IS

Learning Never Stops: Zeen - Create interactive digital publications - 0 views

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    "Zeen is a free site (in beta) that allows you to gather your favorite pictures and videos from the internet and add your own text to create an interactive digital magazine that you can share with other people. Zeen is easy to use and your end product is a very dynamic and interactive publication. This site is a fantastic tool for school projects, invitations, online memory books, business portfolios, and advertising just to name a few options."
Vanessa Vaile

Personal Learning Environment (PLE) Project - 0 views

shared by Vanessa Vaile on 03 Jun 10 - Cached
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    The National Research Council of Canada's Institute for Information Technology (Learning and Collaborative Group) has started a research and development project exploring the Personal Learning Environment. The project researches how new technologies can be used in a personalized informal learning environment and focuses on two dimensions. The first dimension is the pedagogical: given the new affordances offered by web technologies, how can access to a wide variety of learning opportunities best be managed in an online environment? The second dimension is technical. Given a set of desired types of connections, what technologies can be assembled to best provide seamless access to a large variety of educational resources and services? Existing learning management technology (such as the Learning Management System) is centered on the institution that owns and operates it as enterprise software. With the increase of lifelong and student-centered learning, individuals are more frequently enrolling in learning opportunities from multiple institutions and have a need to manage their learning through an entire career. Thus there is a need for a type of application that is centered on the learner and would constitute the person's personal learning record, portfolio, business and educational contacts, communications and creativity tools, library and resource subscription management, and related services.
Vanessa Vaile

A special report on managing information: Data, data everywhere | The Economist - 3 views

  • the world contains an unimaginably vast amount of digital information which is getting ever vaster ever more rapidly. This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.
  • also creating a host of new problems
  • the proliferation of data is making them increasingly inaccessible
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  • Scientists and computer engineers have coined a new term for the phenomenon: “big data”.
  • Epistemologically speaking, information is made up of a collection of data and knowledge is made up of different strands of information. But this special report uses “data” and “information” interchangeably because, as it will argue, the two are increasingly difficult to tell apart.
  • business of information management
  • Chief information officers (CIOs)
  • statistician and storyteller/artist
  • many reasons for the information explosion
  • technology
  • digitising lots of information that was previously unavailable
  • access to far more powerful tools
  • many more people who interact with information
  • shift from information scarcity to surfeit has broad effects
  • “Data exhaust”
  • in aggregate the data can also be mined
  • In a world of big data the correlations surface almost by themselves.
  • The way that information is managed touches all areas of life. At the turn of the 20th century new flows of information through channels such as the telegraph and telephone supported mass production. Today the availability of abundant data enables companies to cater to small niche markets anywhere in the world.
Vanessa Vaile

The Souls of the Machine: Clay Shirky's Internet Revolution - The Chronicle Review - Th... - 1 views

  • the goal is to study technology and society by making gadgets that challenge assumptions of how machines fit into daily life and get people interacting
  • as Web sites become more social, they will threaten the existence of all kinds of businesses and organizations, which might find themselves unnecessary once people can organize on their own with free online tools
  • Who needs an academic association, for instance, if a Facebook page, blog, and Internet mailing list can enable professionals to stay connected without paying dues?
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  • those who make playful social networks improve society more than all those now-unnecessary offline organizations.
Vanessa Vaile

Multiliteracies at newlearningonline.com - 1 views

  • The term ‘Multiliteracies’ refers to two major aspects of language use today.
  • The first is the variability of meaning making in different cultural, social or domain-specific contexts.
  • the business of communication and representation of meaning today increasingly requires that learners are able figure out differences in patterns of meaning from one context to another.
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  • The second aspect of language use today arises in part from the characteristics of the new information and communications media
  • extend the range of literacy pedagogy so that it does not unduly privilege alphabetical representations, but brings into the classroom multimodal representations, and particularly those typical of the new, digital media
  • pedagogy of synaesthesia, or mode switching.
Vanessa Vaile

Opinion: Internet and Education -- Back to the Future - AOL News - 0 views

  • The education industry, like so many others, is busy being transformed by the Internet.
  • he best possible system of education actually existed thousands of years ago. And what the Internet can help us do is go back to it, with one important modern twist: scale.
  • individual relationship between an enlightened tutor and an eager student
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  • there simply aren't enough expert teachers with enough time to bring every child along
  • If the 21th century is to be a time of progress, education must continue to expand. This makes it even more difficult to provide individual instruction for all the world's students.
  • That's the promise of the Internet, which excels above all else at scale: scale of information, social interactions, geographic reach.
  • The acid test I apply to every new initiative is: to what extent does it bring us closer to the old system of individualized, personal, expert instruction, except with scale?
  • Online tutoring is an example of a promising Internet-driven innovation. Companies like TutorVista and Smarthinking let hundreds of thousands of students get on-demand personal help in their homes at a reasonable cost.
  • online systems that can "diagnose" individual students' strengths and weaknesses and dynamically generate a tailored curriculum.
  • Other innovations lie somewhere in between the two
  • It's important to remember that many of the most important education innovations lie outside the Internet.
  • But the Internet will also disrupt. Textbooks, for example, can't continue in their present form
  • two principles: first, invest in Internet innovations that bring us closer to the vision of universal, personalized instruction; and second, champion those designed to complement, rather than replace, traditional academic institutions.
Vanessa Vaile

Too Busy to Read This? Save it for Later with ReadItLater's Newest Service - 1 views

  • Unfortunately, the ability to quickly tap a button to add something to your reading list was so easy - perhaps too easy - that users ended up with long, unwieldy lists of saved content. Now ReadItLater is introducing a new Digest feature which helps you get caught up by automatically sorting and organizing articles for you.
  • Digest: Imposing Order on the Chaos of Unread Items
  • "Read It Later with a brain."
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  • filtering and organization is performed automatically
  • Articles you saved about the latest gadgets would end up in one section, for example, and those about politics would end up in another
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    This one's for Nina
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    I could do with sth like this too!
Vanessa Vaile

What Does Yahoo!'s Delicious Decision Mean for the Social Web? - Alexandra Samuel - Har... - 0 views

  • Given the source and Yahoo's decision to refrain from comment, the rumor is now widely taken as fact. And it's a fact that should trouble every user of the social web.
  • What do we users pay for the privilege of keeping our bookmarks online and accessible from any Internet-connected computer, 24/7? Not a thing. Not a cent, anyhow. But we're contributing in other ways. Every time I store a bookmark in Delicious, I'm giving the system another piece of information
  • You might call that point of common interest a relationship. And for many Delicious users, those relationships are a key benefit to using the bookmarking system
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  • Those relationships, as much as the bookmarks themselves, represent a common asset. Yahoo! doesn't own the relationships among its users, any more than a party host owns the relationships among her guests.
  • It's the bargain that underpins much of the social web. Twitter gives us 140 characters worth of storage and a killer API, and we fill it up with our latest thoughts and experiences. Foursquare gives us a nice way of converting GPS locations to actual intuitive locations, and we give it the scoop on where we hang out. Facebook gives us a way to connect with friends, and we tell it who we know and what we have to say to them. This bargain amounts to the world's most ambitious marriage of public and private value creation. On the one hand you've got private companies trying to monetize their social networks and web apps, generating at least enough revenue to keep the lights on. And on the other hand you've got individuals who voluntarily engage in the social production of common value:
  • It's that collectively created value that distinguishes today's social web from previous generations of on- and offline media.
  • the only imaginable reason to shut down instead of selling is to avoid offering a competitive advantage to another company, in a truly egregious example of placing competition ahead of customers.
  • countless blog posts about different ways to use Delicious
  • all those bookmarks! — add up to an investment
  • The investment of users like me is what makes Web 2.0 fundamentally different from Web 1.0,
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