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Ed Webb

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

  • 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).
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  • 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
       
      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

Please Sir, how do you re-tweet? - Twitter to be taught in UK primary schools - 0 views

  • The British government is proposing that Twitter is to be taught in primary (elementary) schools as part of a wider push to make online communication and social media a permanent part of the UK’s education system. And that’s not all. Kids will be taught blogging, podcasting and how to use Wikipedia alongside Maths, English and Science.
  • Traditional education in areas like phonics, the chronology of history and mental arithmetic remain but modern media and web-based skills and environmental education now feature.
  • The skills that let kids use Internet technologies effectively also work in the real world: being able to evaluate resources critically, communicating well, being careful with strangers and your personal information, conducting yourself in a manner appropriate to your environment. Those things are, and should be, taught in schools. It’s also a good idea to teach kids how to use computers, including web browsers etc, and how those real-world skills translate online.
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  • I think teaching kids HOW TO use Wikipedia is a step forward from ordering them NOT TO use it, as they presently do in many North American classrooms.
  • Open Source software is the future and therefore we need to concentrate on the wheels and not the vehicle!
  • Core skills is very important. Anyone and everyone can learn Photoshop & Word Processing at any stage of their life, but if core skills are missed from an early age, then evidence has shown that there has always been less chance that the missing knowledge could be learnt at a later stage in life.
  • Schools shouldn’t be about teaching content, but about learning to learn, getting the kind of critical skills that can be used in all kinds of contexts, and generating motivation for lifelong learning. Finnish schools are rated the best in the world according to the OECD/PISA ratings, and they have totally de-emphasised the role of content in the curriculum. Twitter could indeed help in the process as it helps children to learn to write in a precise, concise style - absolutely nothing wrong with that from a pedagogical point of view. Encouraging children to write is never a bad thing, no matter what the platform.
  • Front end stuff shouldn’t be taught. If anything it should be the back end gubbins that should be taught, databases and coding.
  • So what’s more important, to me at least, is not to know all kinds of useless facts, but to know the general info and to know how to think and how to search for information. In other words, I think children should get lessons in thinking and in information retrieval. Yes, they should still be taught about history, etc. Yes, it’s important they learn stuff that they could need ‘on the spot’ - like calculating skills. However, we can go a little bit easier on drilling the information in - by the time they’re 25, augmented reality will be a fact and not even a luxury.
  • Schools should focus more on teaching kids on how to think creatively so they can create innovative products like twitter rather then teaching on how to use it….
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    The British government is proposing that Twitter is to be taught in primary (elementary) schools as part of a wider push to make online communication and social media a permanent part of the UK's education system. And that's not all. Kids will be taught blogging, podcasting and how to use Wikipedia alongside Maths, English and Science.
anonymous

British universities need urgent reform - 1 views

  • British universities are undergoing an identity crisis
  • They no longer relate comfortably to schools, parents, students, would-be students, the examination system, the education marketplace, the British government – or each other.
  • As we report today, as many as one in five universities is staging its own entrance exam because it no longer trusts the state's A-levels to distinguish between averagely bright and very bright pupils: teenagers from both these groups routinely arrive on their doorsteps with grades worthy of a Nobel prize winner.
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  • Clearly, they are here to stay – unless the Government summons up the nerve to reform education far more radically than it is already doing.
  • Tuition fees reflect fast-changing circumstances that will force good universities to raise the academic as well as the financial bar in order to compete internationally. As they do so, they will increasingly question the arguments for remaining shackled to a British state that not only genuflects in front of the altar of egalitarianism (albeit a bit less piously than before) but also, as we are reminded again today, cannot even devise a proper set of exams for sixth-formers.
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    Telegraph View: British universities no longer know exactly what they are and what they are for. - British universities are undergoing an identity crisis. They no longer know exactly what they are and what they are for, now that social engineering has stretched the definition of "university" to breaking point. They no longer relate comfortably to schools, parents, students, would-be students, the examination system, the education marketplace, the British government - or each other. Every week brings fresh evidence of the weakening of these bonds, even in the middle of the Christmas holidays. - As we report today, as many as one in five universities is staging its own entrance exam because it no longer trusts the state's A-levels to distinguish between averagely bright and very bright pupils: teenagers from both these groups routinely arrive on their doorsteps with grades worthy of a Nobel prize winner...
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    news popularity Shoes information Home design interior all about insurance
Claude Almansi

What's the real game that Mobster World is playing on Twitter? | Technology | guardian.... - 0 views

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    But what you rapidly find is that you're taken by the scruff of the internet over to Twitter where you're, um, encouraged to authorise the game to access your Twitter feed. (It uses the OAuth system, which means that the people behind playmobsterworld don't get your username or password. The owners have chosen to hide their identities by using Domainsbyproxy, and haven't left an email address on their website, so we don't know who they are, and couldn't contact them.) Once you've done that, the "game" will then spew that invitation in the form of a direct message to everyone it can. (The people who receive it are the ones who follow you, and who you also follow. They're the only group you can direct message on Twitter.) And so those DMs turn up in peoples' feeds, and they click them.. and so on. You'd think that by now Mobster World would be played by everyone. Not so. Instead many people - the non-players - get annoyed by it.
Maggie Verster

The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades - 0 views

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    "Despite the widespread use of social media by students and its increased use by instructors, very little empirical evidence is available concerning the impact of social media use on student learning and engagement. This paper describes our semester-long experimental study to determine if using Twitter - the microblogging and social networking platform most amenable to ongoing, public dialogue - for educationally relevant purposes can impact college student engagement and grades. A total of 125 students taking a first year seminar course for pre-health professional majors participated in this study (70 in the experimental group and 55 in the control group). With the experimental group, Twitter was used for various types of academic and co-curricular discussions. Engagement was quantified by using a 19-item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement. To assess differences in engagement and grades, we used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, with class sections nested within treatment groups. We also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. The ANOVA results showed that the experimental group had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages. Analyses of Twitter communications showed that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities. This study provides experimental evidence that Twitter can be used as an educational tool to help engage students and to mobilize faculty into a more active and participatory role."
Ed Webb

Air Force used Twitter to track NY flyover fallout - Yahoo! News - 0 views

  • WASHINGTON – As the Pentagon warns of the security risks posed by social networking sites, newly released government documents show the military also uses these Internet tools to monitor and react to coverage of high-profile events. The Air Force tracked the instant messaging service Twitter, video carrier YouTube and various blogs to assess the huge public backlash to the Air Force One flyover of the Statue of Liberty this spring, according to the documents. And while the attempts at damage control failed — "No positive spin is possible," one PowerPoint chart reads — the episode opens a window into the tactics for operating in a boundless digital news cycle.
  • a unit called the Combat Information Cell at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida
  • A Utah Air National Guard unit, the 101st Information Warfare Flight in Salt Lake City, was also monitoring the social sites
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  • The issue of aliases is at the heart of a complaint stemming for the Army Corps of Engineers' performance in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. On Tuesday, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., asked the Pentagon inspector general to examine allegations that Corps employees posed as ordinary citizens and posted comments on a New Orleans web site defending the organization from criticism following the disaster. Jon Donley, former editor of NOLA.com, said in a June 9 affidavit that there were as many as 20 registered users who developed a pattern of not only defending the Corps, but at times being "overtly abusive" to any critics. He said he was able to trace their posts to a Corps Internet address. Ken Holder, a spokesman for Corps' New Orleans District, said it will cooperate with any investigation.
Ed Webb

Neuro-tweets: #hashtagging the brain - Research - University of Cambridge - 0 views

  • human brain networks represent a balance between high efficiency of information transfer and low connection cost
  • Members of the audience and other Twitter users were asked to tweet during the lecture about the concepts that were being discussed, using the hashtag #csftwitterbrain. At the end of the talk Professor Bullmore displayed the resulting image showing the interconnectivity of the hashtagged tweets, and explained how Twitter networks can be compared to the human brain network. “We found that the #twitterbrain network was somewhat like the brain network in being small-world and modular with highly connected hub nodes; however the brain network was more clustered and less efficient than the twitter network. So at first sight there were some points in common and some points of difference between these two information processing networks.”
  • “It has been intriguing to see the spectacle of watching the twitter network grow or evolve over the course of several days. And I have learnt a lot about the power of new media to engage and communicate, and the potential scientific value of using Twitter to map and measure social networks.”
Ed Webb

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

  • 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.
Claude Almansi

Jurors' smartphones upset the scales of justice - IHT - John Schwartz March 17 09 - 0 views

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    On Monday, defense lawyers in the federal corruption trial of a former Pennsylvania state senator, Vincent J. Fumo, demanded that the judge declare a mistrial after a juror posted updates on the case on Twitter and Facebook. The juror even told his readers that a "big announcement" was coming on Monday. But the judge decided to let the trial continue, and the jury found Mr. Fumo guilty. His lawyers plan to use the Internet postings as grounds for appeal.
Ed Webb

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

  • 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
       
      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

Twitter keeps it simple with new terms of service by AP: Yahoo! Tech - 0 views

  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
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  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own
  • Twitter wanted to leave no doubt that the short messages that people post on their profiles will always be their own,
Roger Zuidema

Web Addresses May Go Beyond English - 1 views

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    The Internet is set to undergo one of the biggest changes in its four-decade history, with the expected approval this week of international domain names - or addresses - that can be written in languages other than English, an official said yesterday. That change could potentially open up the Web to more people around the world as addresses could be in characters as diverse as Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Greek, Hindi and Cyrillic, in which Russian is written. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann - the non-profit group that oversees domain names, or website addresses - is holding a meeting this week in Seoul.
Ed Webb

Teaching and the dangerous "culture of doing". | Teaching it Real - 0 views

  • The invisible nature of great teaching becomes apparent when we try and make some kind of judgement on what we see in the classroom
  • I think the problem actually goes much deeper than teachers demonstrating teaching for lesson observations and learning walks. I worry that it has permeated the culture and led to teachers focusing on the demonstration of learning too. A culture of doing.
  • fetishisation of visible signs of teaching and learning that infects our professional culture. The activity becomes the thing. When a teacher cries out “but you did this!” in the face of blank stares a few weeks later, we are seeing this problem played out. “Did” and “learnt” are two very different beasts
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  • The desire to demonstrate we are teaching well distorts this good practice and leads to us spending time and energy making our work visible. Not only is this less efficient it may also be less effective.
  • The actual business of invisible teaching is unglamorous. No one is going to see those tiny decisions you make to teach well. They won’t know, or appreciate, the feedback you gave a pupil there and then in the moment. There is no external reward. No praise.
  • We put our energy into what is done rather than what is learnt
Ed Webb

It's Time To Hide The Noise - 3 views

  • the noise is worse than ever. Indeed, it is being magnified every day as more people pile onto Twitter and Facebook and new apps yet to crest like Google Wave. The data stream is growing stronger, but so too is the danger of drowning in all that information.
  • the fact that Seesmic or TweetDeck or any of these apps can display 1,200 Tweets at once is not a feature, it’s a bug
  • if you think Twitter is noisy, wait until you see Google Wave, which doesn’t hide anything at all.  Imagine that Twhirl image below with a million dialog boxes on your screen, except you see as other people type in their messages and add new files and images to the conversation, all at once as it is happening.  It’s enough to make your brain explode.
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  • all I need is two columns: the most recent Tweets from everyone I follow (the standard) and the the most interesting tweets I need to pay attention to.  Recent and Interesting.  This second column is the tricky one.  It needs to be automatically generated and personalized to my interests at that moment.
  • search is broken on Twitter.  Unless you know the exact word you are looking for, Tweets with related terms won’t show up.  And there is no way to sort searches by relevance, it is just sorted by chronology.
Barbara Lindsey

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

  • 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.
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    "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

Why Twitter Will Endure - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • nearly a year later, has Twitter turned my brain to mush? No, I’m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible, and instead of spending a half-hour surfing in search of illumination, I get a sense of the day’s news and how people are reacting to it in the time that it takes to wait for coffee at Starbucks. Yes, I worry about my ability to think long thoughts — where was I, anyway? — but the tradeoff has been worth it.
  • open standards that become plumbing
  • The act of publishing on Twitter is so friction-free — a few keystrokes and hit send — that you can forget that others are out there listening. I was on a Virgin America cross-country flight, and used its wireless connection to tweet about the fact that the guy next to me seemed to be the leader of a cult involving Axe body spray. A half-hour later, a steward approached me and said he wondered if I would be more comfortable with a seat in the bulkhead. (He turned out to be a great guy, but I was doing a story involving another part of the company, so I had to decline the offer. @VirginAmerica, its corporate Twitter account, sent me a message afterward saying perhaps it should develop a screening process for Axe. It was creepy and comforting all at once.)
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  • people on Twitter who serve as my Web-crawling proxies
  • The best people on Twitter communicate with economy and precision, with each element — links, hash tags and comments — freighted with meaning.
Ed Webb

Views: How Tweet It Is - Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • Part of my interest in this turn to Twitter comes from disappointment with most university press blogs, which often seem more like PR vehicles than genuine blogs with discussion, disagreement, expressions of real enthusiasm or curiosity or whatever. Reading very many of them at one sitting feels like attending a banquet where you are served salt-free soda crackers and caffeine-free Mountain Dew that's gone flat.By contrast, university-press publicists seem more inclined to experiment and to follow tangents with Twitter than they do on their own official websites. They link to material they have posted at the press’s blog, of course – but also to news and commentary that may be only obliquely related to the books in their catalog. It’s as if they escape from beneath the institutional superego long enough to get into the spirit of blogging, proper.
  • The range and the interest of Duke's tweets make its presence exemplary, in my opinion. Between drafting and rewriting this column, for example, I followed Duke's tweets to a newspaper article about whether or not English was approaching one million words, a blog post about rock songs cued to Joyce's Ulysses, and the Twitter feed of Duke author Negar Mottahedeh, who has been posting about events in Iran.
  • She then makes a point that bears stressing given how often university-press blogs tend to be coated in institutional gray: “I think that any kind of social networking needs to have a personality tied to it in order for it to be successful. Also, I think you really need to participate in the media in order for it to be successful. We ask people for questions and opinions, offer giveaways sometimes. My main goal is to try to get people talking -- either with me or with each other about our books and authors.... You can't just provide information or news feeds to reviews and articles about your books. Involving the Press in what is going, contributing to the various discussions, and asking (and answering) questions is really the way to grow your following.”
Maggie Verster

Working the Social: Twitter and FriendFeed - 0 views

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    Information overload is so five years ago, but the problem it describes is all too real. Fortunately, there's hope yet for the savvy librarian: Twitter and FriendFeed turn information dissemination on its head, using friends and subscribers as a filter for the best, most credible, and most engaging information out there. As Clay Shirky said at the Web 2.0 Expo keynote in January, the problem isn't "information overload. It's filter failure."
Claude Almansi

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview. ENG 3... - 0 views

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    As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers. Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new "Lost Generation" of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness.
Ed Webb

Paul Carr challenges Evening Standard film critic to try Twitter for a week | Technolog... - 0 views

  • We can all agree that, whenever an Evening Standard or Daily Mail headline asks a rhetorical question, there's usually only one correct response: take the paper, tear it into thin strips, crumple those strips into a tight ball and set fire to the ball, before hurling it into the sea, screaming "shut up, shut up" over and over at the top of your lungs.
  • I had to spend twenty hours a day for two long weeks in Second Life before I was able to say with certainty that all of its users can bite me.
  • until eight months ago, I felt exactly the same way. And then I got hooked.
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  • Eight months and 2537 updates later, I honestly have no idea how I lived without Twitter. I've lost count of the number of adventures I've had because of it, or how many spontaneous lunches, or parties or – let's not be coy here – hook-ups have resulted from a simple 140-character message (that's 140 characters not 160, Nick). I know friends who have been offered jobs through Twitter, I've flown to other continents to attend events purely on the strength of Twitter chatter surrounding them, and I can't remember the last time I Twittered a difficult question that wasn't answered in minutes, often by someone half a world away.
  • Suddenly these were not just nameless faces on the news, but people who hours earlier had been Twittering about their pets or how they were eating a sandwich, but who now feared for their lives. You can't read that stuff and not realise that, as humans, we're all in this together. And that's where Twitter, unlike Facebook, has the potential to change the world. You don't have to be my 'friend' or my 'contact'. If you're on Twitter, we're connected. You can follow my updates, and I can follow yours. If you want to say something to me personally, just begin your update with @paulcarr and I'll hear you. On Twitter, everyone is equal.
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