That weird web thing

Utopies et idéologies fondatrices du réseau numérique: transparence, activisme et action des acteurs

infoneer-pulse:

They text their friends all day long. At night, they do research for their term papers on laptops and commune with their parents on Skype. But as they walk the paths of Hamilton College, a poster-perfect liberal arts school in this upstate village, students are still hauling around bulky, old-fashioned textbooks — and loving it.

“The screen won’t go blank,” said Faton Begolli, a sophomore from Boston. “There can’t be a virus. It wouldn’t be the same without books. They’ve defined ‘academia’ for a thousand years.”

» via The New York Times

practicallymedia:

I want to produce an anti-mega narrative!  

infoneer-pulse:

Many children want to read books on digital devices and would read for fun more frequently if they could obtain e-books. But even if they had that access, two-thirds of them would not want to give up their traditional print books.

These are a few of the findings in a study being released on Wednesday by Scholastic, the American publisher of the Harry Potter books and the “Hunger Games” trilogy.

» via The New York Times

infoneer-pulse:

Eric Darr recently had a moment that a lot of modern parents can relate to. He was watching his 16-year-old daughter click around frenetically on Facebook while juggling several conversations on her iPhone.

“I was frankly amazed,” says Darr, the provost at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology. “I thought, ‘How do you live like this?’ It struck me to think, ‘What if all this wasn’t there?’ ”

So Darr conceived an experiment designed to parse how one lives with social media — precisely by examining how one lives without it. He decided to pull the plug on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and AOL Instant Messenger for one week. But rather than conduct the experiment within his own home, Darr decided to take advantage of his position as Harrisburg’s provost to tap a much larger sample: his institution’s entire student body, faculty, and staff.

On Monday, information technology officials at Harrisburg will block access to those popular social media tools from computers using the campus network. They will also disable the wiki and chat features in the university’s Moodle-based learning management system. The barriers will remain in place for one week.

Students, who will be asked to write essays reflecting on their time in social-media exile, will not be the only ones affected. Faculty and staff will also be unable to visit the sites — at least not through the campus network.

» via Inside Higher Ed

highereds:

The new skills for navigating the communication challenges of the 21st century include: 1) Play: the capacity to experiment with one’s surroundings as a form of problem-solving. 2) Negotiation: the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and respecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative norms. 3) Judgment: the ability to evaluate the reliability and credibility of different information sources. 4) Collective intelligence: the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others toward a common goal. 5) Networking: the ability to search for, synthesize, and disseminate information. 6) Appropriation: the ability to meaningfully sample and remix media content. 7) Responsibility & Awareness: (this is not included in the original and is critical to wise decision making and privacy. Also ethics, responsibility, citizenship, along with issues of copywrite and plagerism) 8] Design & Design Thinking (this is not included in the original and is fundamental to 50%+ of communication online) To me, the failure of the MIT New media literacy list to include the above two is truly re-miss. Howard Garners 5 New Minds for the Future would suggest that at a minimum that Responsibility and Awareness belongs on the list–and given his passion for creativity and different modes of learning and thinking would include #8 as well (it could be the MIT project has a page which contextualizes these two issues–however the failure to prioritize them is a striking omission). In fact, the MIT project has found them important enough to make major subjects and in the case of design thinking00-of their blog discussions–but Secondary list of new media literacy skills: 1) Performance: the ability to adopt alternative identities for the purpose of improvisation and discovery. 2) Simulation: the ability to interpret and construct dynamic models of real-world processes. 3) Distributed cognition: the ability to interact meaningfully with tools that expand mental capacities. 4) Transmedia navigation: The ability to follow the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities. 5) Multitasking: the ability to scan one’s environment and shift focus as needed to salient details. I think the simulation is probably important. Finally, multi-tasking isn’t as important given that students are teaching themselves–also there is a reasonable amount of scholarship to suggest that its a bad thing. Certainly simulation and some of the other skills/goals/objectives listed in this new media literacy list deserve some unpacking (I think 50% or greater of teachers would have no idea what 35% of this is talking about–it would spread/scale better if a single sentance were added to some to provide more context and direction) I think grouping skills together may serve to help teachers of the next generation to best implement these skills in lesson plans and various classroom offerings. To learn more check out the New Media Literacy Blog (which does unpack some of the above issues surrounding social media literacy) and Teaching Tech Saavy Kids. Both the Project New Media Literacy and Teaching Tech Saavy Kids site offer social networking on a Ning-type website, including forums. Please realize my aim is not to do away with or diminish the great research work of these new media scholars (Henry Jenkins, with Ravi Purushotma, Katherine Clinton, Margaret Weigel, and Alice J. Robison), but rather to: 1) have a re-calibrated focus on the issues that matter most to our students of tomorrow 2) to communicate clearly where the focuses of the project lie. For many scholars this list will be the first, last, and only reference to these guiding principles. 3) provide clear(er) communication instead of jargon, loaded language, and solipsism. 4) re-orient some of the less important or redundant skills on the list. 5) borrow on trends which are occurring, which the new media literacy rubric seems to leave out, which could cause it to be a stumbling block to true new media literacy