Group items tagged

The Cultural Revival Dialog - Building the Europe of the Future Together - was organized by the European Movement Croatia in cooperation with the University of Oslo Knowledge Federation Project, on occasion of the 60th anniversary of the International European Movement. The invitation letter was sent to prominent Croatian researchers, policy makers and media workers, inviting them to a free and open dialog about the prospects for contemporary cultural revival. As always, the purpose of this Key Point Dialog was to come closer to the Key Point - an inspiring vision of the cultural revival, which The Club of Rome considered to be the solution to our global issues, or to the world problematique as they called them. This time we began our dialog by reflecting about a specific theme, the Sheng Zhen Qigong. The intention behind this reflection was to become aware of the nature of our present cultural turning point, of the obstacles that hinder us from changing course, and of the opportunities that a new direction may make available.

"This research is grounded in the anthropological understanding that each individual is a unique 'energy source' (Bateson 1972) responsible for acting upon their socially and culturally inflected interpretations in an equally particular way. These indexes capture the actual moments of interaction, of the coming together of individuals in conversational and behavioural exchange (Rapport and Overing 2000). The indexes in this research focus on the socio-cultural field (rather than physical, archaeological or linguistic sub-disciplines), which has been a key element of the discipline since its establishment in the 19th century. Above all, this report highlights how this Cultural Mapping project will offer unparalleled global access into anthropology's own minimal definition: that is, a means to see the Other as Self, and the Self as Other."

Interesting work, based in anthropology

Mutual respect, trust, and recognition that cultural differences exist, matter, and must be explicitly dealt with are requirements of successful international projects. In summary, I would suggest these principles for the success of international collaboration: * Two (or more) teams share the same goal and seek the overall optimal result, not the local optimum. * Each team should clearly recognize and value the other party's different culture and traditions. * The single most important word in international projects is trust. Team members earn trust by being sincere, honest, and open-minded.

This article describes the motivation for and development of a project I have called PepysMap. PepysMap was inspired by the excellent 'blog of the diary of Samuel Pepys run by Phil Gyford 1. Phil posts diary entries day by day (currently for the year 1662). Each blog post contains the text of the diary entry hyperlinked to pages containing detail of people, places and cultural artifacts referenced from the text. The goal of PepysMap is to shadow the development of the Pepys blog by creating a topic map for each diary entry, showing the relationships between people, places and cultural artifacts.

Kuling.net is a Topic Maps-driven web site where editorially assured cultural historic content meets Web 2.0. In line with the philosophy of collaborative web communities, anyone can contribute at their own level and with their own perspective on content. Kuling.net is developed with pedagogical intent...explanation found at http://www.topicmaps.com/tmc/speaker.jsp?conf=TM2008&id=Tommy_Nordeng

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, has challenged the way that reference works are used and understood, and even the way that the collective enterprise of knowledge construction and circulation is itself conceptualized. The article presents an ethnographic study of Wikiversity, an educationally-oriented sister project to Wikipedia. It begins by providing an overview of the orientations and aims of Wikiversity, which seeks to provide for participants both open educational contents and an open educational community. It then undertakes a detailed examination of this project's emerging, overlapping communities and cultures by providing descriptions produced through a combination of ethnographic techniques. These descriptions focus on the experiences of a participant-observer in the context of an 11-week course developed and delivered via Wikiversity, titled Composing Free and Open Online Educational Resources. These descriptions are discussed and interpreted through reference to qualitative studies of the more developed dynamics of the Wikipedia effort - allowing this study to trace the possible trajectories for the future development of the fledgling Wikiversity project. In this way, this paper investigates the communal and cultural dynamics of an undertaking that - should it meet only with a fraction of Wikipedia's success - will be of obvious significance to education generally.

This article explores relationships between players and the owners of the massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) they inhabit. Much of the language around these large scale communities currently focuses on "management." Viewing these complex social systems as essentially mechanical in nature has led to a preoccupation with creating or retrofitting systems which can be constantly monitored, tuned, regulated, and controlled. Though the language often turns to things like "cheating," "griefing," and "disruption of the magic circle," the underlying anxiety about unruliness, transgressiveness, and the emergent nature of these spaces as sites of culture needs to be more fully addressed, as well as the early formulations of the "imagined player" that shape the design process. Players are central productive agents in game culture and more progressive models are needed for understanding and integrating their work in these spaces. Drawing on the long tradition of participatory design this piece explores some alternative frameworks for understanding the designer/player relationship are proposed.

The present research analyses the 'social visualization' tool Sense.us, a commercial interactive Web application in which U.S. Census data are visualized. Sense.us was developed as a tool for social data exploration and interaction, in which it would be worthwhile to pay attention to the socio-cultural values that have driven the collection and categorization of the underlying U.S. Census datasets. It is argued that closer attention to value driven U.S. Census statistics would greatly enhance the social appeal of Sense.us, and would be a logical next step in the development of online social visualization tools. In order to allow for explicit socio-cultural values of statistics in online visualizations, three strategies are offered: pro-active annotation; more attention to visual aesthetics; and, a tighter integration of user profiles and represented data.

Assuming that meaning is dependent upon the interplay between lived experience and theoretical (cultural and social) constructs, the task of this chapter in analyzing the sensemaking processes and activities which occurred during the field trip is to integrate lived experiences with theoretical constructs in such a way that the meanings generated from this integration resonate as valid for both field trip participants and informed readers. Or to paraphrase Ken Wilber,1 through the integration of subjective truthfulness and objective truth we seek mutual understanding. To achieve this end, my analysis incorporates the three strands of valid knowing (instrumental injunction, direct experience, and communal confirmation), as outlined in chapter two, and the three cultural value spheres (subjective, intersubjective, and objective domains of knowing), also outlined in chapter two, with three sensemaking themes (being there, storytelling, and living together) which emerged directly from the lived experiences of the participants during the course of the field trip.

The mission of Sputnik Observatory is to be the world's foremost institute dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. Sputnik Observatory manifests this commitment by documenting, archiving and disseminating the ideas that are shaping the arts, sciences and technology. Central to Sputnik Observatory's mission is the encouragement of an ever deeper understanding and enjoyment of life-long learning that aims to support the advancement of modern thought in society.

In 1981, based on a decade of Club's [Club of Rome] research, Peccei wrote: "The future will either be the inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future" (Peccei, 1981).

As cultures and languages vanish, along with them go vast and ancient storehouses of accumulated knowledge. And as species disappear, along with them go not just valuable genetic resources, but critical links in complex ecological webs.

Narrative techniques both provide a complementary form of what we will call pre-hypothesis research, but further that the use of narrative research techniques produces, through a single intervention, quantitative conclusions supported by narrative context, fragmented knowledge databases, and a mechanism for measuring impact and more complex issues such as mapping ideation cultures.

Snowden again... Looks like a fairly interesting book is on its way, as well...?

Social capital is the invisible stock of connections between people that makes collaboration possible. It basically measures trust and how people really care for one another. When members of a group know each other very well and share the same values, social capital is high. When they don't and have no shared awareness of the situation facing the group, the same words can mean very different things to them, and the trust level is low. Social capital and culture go hand in hand.

If companies cannot develop a culture of knowledge sharing and innovation, it's primarily because they are having a hard time measuring the benefits. All metrics of intangibles -and KM in particular- are shaky, and the most promising ones, based on network analysis (VNA) still have a long way to go before they become generally accepted practices. In the meantime, organizing a knowledge market might be the best way to go. Let's imagine what it would look like… First, a separate organization for shared knowledge services would have to be set up, if it doesn't exist already. For lack of a better phrase, let's cal it the corporate university. The problem is that corporate universities, when they exist, are focused on executive programs, which is a very small part of the problem.

This is a resource page for CCL's Visual Explorer™ with descriptions of the tool and its multiple uses for creative conversations and dialogue. VE™ supports strategy making, visioning, culture transformation, creative problem solving, coaching, classroom facilitation, teambuilding, visual sensemaking, resolving complex challenges, and leadership development.

A quiet land rush is under way among the buttes of southeastern Wyoming, and it is changing the local rancher culture. The whipping winds cursed by descendants of the original homesteaders now have real value for out-of-state developers who dream of wind farms or of selling the rights to bigger companies.

TAPIR started up as a research project in June 2001. In 2002 the project is sponsored by NORDINFO and the Research Council of The Danish Ministry of Culture. TAPIR aims at investigating the potentials of applying the diversity of cognitive representations pointing to scientific full-text documents following the principle of poly-representation. Poly-representation (or multi evidence) implies to utilize the cognitively different overlapping interpretations, also over time, made by different actors participating in interactive IR. Such cognitive overlaps derive, for instance, from the authors own perceptions of their work (titles, full-text terms), from human indexing (e.g. descriptors), or from citations given to the work by other authors. The assumption is that the more cognitively different the representations simultaneously pointing to a document are, the higher is the probability that the document is relevant to a given set of criteria.

Webology is an international peer-reviewed journal in English devoted to the field of the World Wide Web and serves as a forum for discussion and experimentation. It serves as a forum for new research in information dissemination and communication processes in general, and in the context of the World Wide Web in particular. Concerns include the production, gathering, recording, processing, storing, representing, sharing, transmitting, retrieving, distribution, and dissemination of information, as well as its social and cultural impacts. There is a strong emphasis on the Web and new information technologies. Special topic issues are also often seen.

a particular methodology of Brenda Dervin

Sense-Making is an approach to thinking about and implementing communication research and practice and the design of communication-based systems and activities. It consists of a set of philosophical assumptions, substantive propositions, methodological framings, and methods. It has been applied in myriad settings (e.g., libraries, information systems, media systems, web sites, public information campaigns, classrooms, counseling services, and so on), at myriad levels (e.g., intrapersonal, interpersonal, small group, organizational, mass, national, global), and within myriad perspectives (e.g., constructivist, critical, cultural, feminist, postmodern, communitarian). The approach has been developed by Brenda Dervin and is being expanded, transformed, and enriched daily by the efforts of some 100-plus persons worldwide (academics and practitioners, teachers and students). This web site is designed to provide access to these efforts and links to those who are involved. On this site, Sense-Making (capitalized) refers to the methodology; sense-making (not capitalized) refers to the phenomena of making and unmaking of sense.