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Museums are increasingly using digital video presentation to engage with visitors. Moving away from traditional VHS and DVD delivery, new dedicated digital media players offer an extremely low cost, yet highly reliable option for all types of looping content. Digital View - a specialist in the provision of these solid state digital media players - has even added a range of low cost interactive options to its range of ViewStream™ & VideoFlyer™ digital presentation tools. Everything a museum needs; from buttons, levers and motion sensors, to touch screens, RS-232 and full AMX / Crestron connectivity. Interactivity that is simple to program, simple to integrate and fast-to-the-touch - ensuring the best visitor experience.`

Home/Magazine Archive/July 2009 (Vol. 52, No. 7)/Are We Losing Our Ability to Think Critically?/Full Text News Are We Losing Our Ability to Think Critically? By Samuel Greengard Communications of the ACM, Vol. 52 No. 7, Pages 18-19 10.1145/1538788.1538796 Comments (3) View as: Print ACM Digital Library Full Text (PDF) In the Digital Edition Share: Send by email Share on reddit Share on StumbleUpon Share on Tweeter Share on Facebook More Sharing ServicesShare Society has long cherished the ability to think beyond the ordinary. In a world where knowledge is revered and innovation equals progress, those able to bring forth greater insight and understanding are destined to make their mark and blaze a trail to greater enlightenment. "Critical thinking as an attitude is embedded in Western culture. There is a belief that argument is the way to finding truth," observes Adrian West, research director at the Edward de Bono Foundation U.K., and a former computer science lecturer at the University of Manchester. "Developing our abilities to think more clearly, richly, fully—individually and collectively—is absolutely crucial [to solving world problems]." To be sure, history is filled with tales of remarkable thinkers who have defined and redefined our world views: Sir Isaac Newton discovering gravity; Voltaire altering perceptions about society and religious dogma; and Albert Einstein redefining the view of the universe. But in an age of computers, video games, and the Internet, there's a growing question about how technology is changing critical thinking and whether society benefits from it. Although there's little debate that computer technology complements—and often enhances—the human mind in the quest to store information and process an ever-growing tangle of bits and bytes, there's increasing concern that the same technology is changing the way we approach complex problems and conundrums, and making it more difficult to really think. "We're exposed to [greater amounts of] poor yet charismatic thinking, the fads of intellectual fashion, opinion, and mere assertion," says West. "The wealth of communications and information can easily overwhelm our reasoning abilities." What's more, it's ironic that ever-growing piles of data and information do not equate to greater knowledge and better decision-making. What's remarkable, West says, is just "how little this has affected the quality of our thinking." According to the National Endowment for the Arts, literary reading declined 10 percentage points from 1982 to 2002 and the rate of decline is accelerating. Many, including Patricia Greenfield, a UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles, believe that a greater focus on visual media exacts a toll. "A drop-off in reading has possibly contributed to a decline in critical thinking," she says. "There is a greater emphasis on real-time media and multitasking rather than focusing on a single thing." Nevertheless, the verdict isn't in and a definitive answer about how technology affects critical thinking is not yet available. Instead, critical thinking lands in a mushy swamp somewhere between perception and reality; measurable and incomprehensible. It's largely a product of our own invention—and a subjective one at that. And although technology alters the way we see, hear, and assimilate our world—the act of thinking remains decidedly human. Back to Top Rethinking Thinking Arriving at a clear definition for critical thinking is a bit tricky. Wikipedia describes it as "purposeful and reflective judgment about what to believe or what to do in response to observations, experience, verbal or written expressions, or arguments." Overlay technology and that's where things get complex. "We can do the same critical-reasoning operations without technology as we can with it—just at different speeds and with different ease," West says. What's more, while it's tempting to view computers, video games, and the Internet in a monolithic good or bad way, the reality is that they may be both good and bad, and different technologies, systems, and uses yield entirely different results. For example, a computer game may promote critical thinking or diminish it. Reading on the Internet may ratchet up one's ability to analyze while chasing an endless array of hyperlinks may undercut deeper thought.

Reading on the Internet may ratchet up one's ability to analyze while chasing an endless array of hyperlinks may undercut deeper thought.

Within these contexts, the act of arranging objects, images or sounds into an order that may or may not have meaning has proliferated throughout the creative and cultural industries. The curator is now a producer: you might curate your Flickr feed, your mates playing records at a bar or an exhibition in your own apartment – a trend showcased by the Serpentine Gallery's co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist, a master orator of what he calls a "global dialogue… in space and time".

A space has now opened up – both physically and online – where anyone can give curating a go.

What, then, if we're looking in the wrong place for qualified, ground-breaking curators? Perhaps they are no longer in museums, galleries or cultural institutions, but instead in front of a screen – sociable and connected. Curating in the age of the internet is the act of responding to social and technological developments: their usability, instability and the various networks of communication in which they are presented online.

students and teachers can use social networks to enhance instruction.

schools pay thousands of dollars for digital storage, communication systems,

free! This

The data suggest that for these students the dimension of time is in complex, dynamic and contingent interplay with a range of networked devices and shifting material domains and practices, which are mobilised for textual engagement and production. It will argue that student entanglements with devices and digitally mediated texts serve to pause, distribute, elongate and render simultaneous the temporal nature of their practices in emergent 'temporal practices' in complex relationships of co-agency with devices and technologies. It will conclude that a typological analysis is inadequate to understanding these complex, emergent engagements.

The entire infrastructure of the ad industry has been re-architected, and redeployed.  The critical change is that the infrastructure is now open across the entire "stack" of technologies, and pretty much every major platform is open and extensible. This means that new companies can innovate on specific problems without having to build out their own copy of the stack.  They can build the pieces they care about, the pieces that add specific value and utility for specific purposes – e.g. New Monetization Models for Publishers and Brand Advertisers, New Ad Formats, New Ad Inventory Types, New Impression Standards, New Innovation across Mobile, Video and Social, and so on.

targeting systems

Pandora continues to grow with 250 million registered users

There are one billion FM radios in the US and 160 million smartphones and 160 million PCs, so it’s still a subset of the FM marketplace.

Pittman doesn’t believe streaming hours will overtake traditional radio in his lifetime.

Ahead of its launch in France, Netflix is reportedly set to order an exclusive original series in France, according to news channel BFMTV’s website.

Netflix approached select local producers to submit pitches for original series

France wouldn’t be the first overseas territory where the company has targeted specific original programming, having already done so in Latin America.

After analyzing more than 3 million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog posts, a new study finds that social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring.

“Our evidence suggests that social media carried a cascade of messages about freedom and democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, and helped raise expectations for the success of political uprising,” said Philip Howard, the project lead and an associate professor in communication at the University of Washington.  “People who shared interest in democracy built extensive social networks and organized political action. Social media became a critical part of the toolkit for greater freedom.”