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Ed Webb

Our Digitally Undying Memories - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...63747

memory history review Chronicle internet forgetting

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Feb 10 - Cached
  • as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues convincingly in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009), the costs of such powerful collective memory are often higher than we assume.
  • "Total recall" renders context, time, and distance irrelevant. Something that happened 40 years ago—whether youthful or scholarly indiscretion—still matters and can come back to harm us as if it had happened yesterday.
  • an important "third wave" of work about the digital environment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw books like Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (Knopf, 1995) and Howard Rhein-gold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993) and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, 2002), which idealistically described the transformative powers of digital networks. Then we saw shallow blowback, exemplified by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008).
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • For most of human history, forgetting was the default and remembering the challenge.
  • Chants, songs, monasteries, books, libraries, and even universities were established primarily to overcome our propensity to forget over time. The physical and economic limitations of all of those technologies and institutions served us well. Each acted not just as memory aids but also as filters or editors. They helped us remember much by helping us discard even more.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 06 Feb 10
       
      Excellent point, well made.
  • Just because we have the vessels, we fill them.
  • Even 10 years ago, we did not consider that words written for a tiny audience could reach beyond, perhaps to someone unforgiving, uninitiated in a community, or just plain unkind.
  • Remembering to forget, as Elvis argued, is also essential to getting over heartbreak. And, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his 1942 (yep, I Googled it to find the date) story "Funes el memorioso," it is just as important to the act of thinking. Funes, the young man in the story afflicted with an inability to forget anything, can't make sense of it. He can't think abstractly. He can't judge facts by relative weight or seriousness. He is lost in the details. Painfully, Funes cannot rest.
  • Our use of the proliferating data and rudimentary filters in our lives renders us incapable of judging, discriminating, or engaging in deductive reasoning. And inductive reasoning, which one could argue is entering a golden age with the rise of huge databases and the processing power needed to detect patterns and anomalies, is beyond the reach of lay users of the grand collective database called the Internet.
  • the default habits of our species: to record, retain, and release as much information as possible
  • Perhaps we just have to learn to manage wisely how we digest, discuss, and publicly assess the huge archive we are building. We must engender cultural habits that ensure perspective, calm deliberation, and wisdom. That's hard work.
  • we choose the nature of technologies. They don't choose us. We just happen to choose unwisely with some frequency
  • surveillance as the chief function of electronic government
  • critical information studies
  • Siva Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. His next book, The Googlization of Everything, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.
  • Nietzsche's _On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life_
  • Google compresses, if not eliminates, temporal context. This is likely only to exacerbate the existing problem in politics of taking one's statements out of context. A politician whose views on a subject have evolved quite logically over decades in light of changing knowledge and/or circumstances is held up in attack ads as a flip-flopper because consecutive Google entries have him/her saying two opposite things about the same subject -- and never mind that between the two statements, the Berlin Wall may have fallen or the economy crashed harder than at any other time since 1929.
Ed Webb

The Wired Campus - Do Students Cheat More in Online Classes? Maybe not. - The Chronicle... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...8073

distance education plagiarism survey chronicle edu_trends

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Sep 09 - Cached
  • You can’t make any sweeping generalizations based on the results
  • older students tend to cheat less frequently than younger students
  • If you are interested in this topic, look for the interesting edited book called Student Plagiarism in an Online World: http://www.igi-global.com/reference/details.asp?ID=7031&v=tableOfContentsI wrote a chapter called, "Expect Originality! Using Taxonomies to Structure Assignments that Support Original Work." In it I discuss the complexities of plagiarism in the context of a digital culture of sharing and suggest that it is rarely black and white. I propose a continuum with intentional academic dishonesty on one end and original work on the other, with gradations in between. Based on my own research and teaching experience, I believe the instructional design and style of teaching can either make it easy-- or very difficult-- to cheat.
Ed Webb

The Trouble With Twitter - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...47443

twitter journalism education socialmedia

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Aug 09 - Cached
  • To those who Twitter, the reporter who investigates a story before offering it to the public must also seem tediously ruminant. On Twitter, the notes become the story, devoid of even five minutes of reflection on the writer's way to the computer. I can see that there are times —an airplane landing in the Hudson, a presidential election in Iran—when this type of impromptu journalism becomes a necessity, and an exciting one at that. Luckily, reporters still exist to make sense of information bytes and expand upon them for readers—but for how much longer? I worry that microblogging cheats my students out of their trump card: a mindful attention to the subject in front of them, so that they can capture its sights and sounds, its smells and tactile qualities, to share with readers. How can Twittering stories from laptops and phones possibly replace the attentive journalist who tucks a digital recorder artfully under a notepad, pencil behind one ear, and gives full attention to the subject at hand?
  • I went home after the lecture and—hypocritically, I admit—updated my Facebook status and my blog to declare how much I despise Twitter.
  • Twitter serves as a source of links to longer news stories.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 23 Aug 09
       
      Which is one of its main uses in journalism. As Jay Rosen (@jayrosennyu) and others have put it, through services like Twitter and, indeed, Diigo we edit the web for one another. We can see it as acting as human filters, intelligent gatherers and sifters of information for the various networks in which we are nodes.
Ed Webb

10 High Fliers on Twitter - Chronicle.com - 0 views

chronicle.com/...31a01001.htm

twitter chronicle educators education college administration

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Twitter is quickly becoming a global faculty lounge. Sure, it's easy to waste a lot of time on the Internet-based microblogging service reading mundane details about people's days. But you can also pick up some great higher-education gossip, track down colleagues to collaborate with, or get advice on how to improve your teaching or research.
  • a rich soup of thought
  • editing the Web in real time
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "A killer application of Twitter is conferences and conference reporting."
  • Academic discussions online often take place on closed e-mail lists, he says, when they should be happening in public forums like Twitter, so that a diverse group of outsiders can join in. "I think academics are actually missing a lot by not being involved in more of these social tools," he told me. "There are a lot of academics who think, 'If it's not coming from some other academic it's not worth a damn,' and that's not right."
  • "This is great for studying or following events as they unfold, but it is also useful for more traditional research if you can form or tap into a good network."
  • he joined Twitter hoping that it would help him demystify the job of college president by sharing details from his daily life. "It shows that you're not just living in a big house and begging" for money, he quipped. "You do get out and work."
Ed Webb

Admission Officials' Tweets Fall on Deaf Ears - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher ... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...25254

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Jul 10 - Cached
  • Rebecca Whitehead, assistant director of campus visits and engagements at Winthrop University, maintains the admissions office’s Twitter account, which currently has 373 followers. She says she uses it largely to connect with other higher-education professionals, to find out about upcoming events or research.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 02 Jul 10
       
      This seems right to me. Twitter is most effective in building and sustaining personal and professional learning networks.
Barbara Lindsey

A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube - Technology - The Chronic... - 3 views

chronicle.com/...65793

youtube videos lecture learning disruptive education

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Watching his videos highlights how little the Web has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges simply replicate the in-person model—often in ways that are not as effective. And what happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years ago (or more). Which is why Mr. Khan's videos come as a surprise, with their informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of multimedia.
  • Mr. Khan has a vision of turning his Web site into a kind of charter school for middle- and high-school students, by adding self-paced quizzes and ways for the site to certify that students have watched certain videos and passed related tests. "This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever," he said.
  • Barbara Lindsey on 07 Jun 10
     
    "Watching his videos highlights how little the Web has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges simply replicate the in-person model-often in ways that are not as effective. And what happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years ago (or more). Which is why Mr. Khan's videos come as a surprise, with their informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of multimedia."
Ed Webb

Practical Advice for Teaching with Twitter - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Educa... - 1 views

chronicle.com/...26416

twitter twittertools tools socialmedia archiving

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Aug 10 - Cached
  • In my own classes I've been deliberately vague about what students should tweet about. I didn’t want overly prescriptive guidelines to constrain what might be possible. Instead, I wanted our integration of Twitter to evolve organically. Given this open-ended invitation, I’ve found students tend to use Twitter for class in three ways: to post news and share resources relevant to the class; to ask questions and respond with clarifications about the readings; and to write sarcastic, irreverent comments about the readings or my teaching. The first two behaviors add to the community spirit of the class and help to sustain student interest across the days and weeks of the semester. The third behavior, when I first noticed it, was an utterly unexpected finding. (And as I've argued elsewhere, it was a good, powerful surprise that legitimated my use of Twitter in and outside of the classroom. I saw students take an oppositional stance in their writing—a welcome reprieve from the majority of student writing, which avoids taking any stance at all.)
  • I strongly recommend creating a permanent Twitter archive. A free service such as TwapperKeeper will track a specified hashtag, collecting the tweets 24/7, and you simply return to TwapperKeeper any time to download the archive. It's so easy to use that I've begun creating TwapperKeeper archives for any hashtag there's even the slightest chance I'll be interested in revisiting later. Another useful archiving tool is called, appropriately enough, The Archivist.
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