Archive for the ‘Internet’ Category
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways.
Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection.
Web Intelligence
We aim to enable synergetic collaboration between people and between people and computers to enlighten them and enrich their lives.
To achieve our mission, we develop scalable automatic content analysis methods and quality metrics to analyze a huge amount of online text such as blogs, community-based question answering, forum discussions, news, reviews, Twitter, Wikipedia, etc. and to harvest explicit and implicit knowledge from these media. To ensure the quality of harvested knowledge, we automatically construct per-topic global and local expert rankings through statistical analysis of the people who created the online contents. The results are not only used to rate harvested knowledge but also to form an active expert network to which users can connect. To leverage the collective intelligence of the crowd, we design smart applications that simplify users’ tasks and also learn and improve from their interaction with users.
Read also: Participation Maximization Based on Social Influence in Online Discussion Forums
More pedagogic change in 10 years than last 1000 years – all driven by 10 technology innovations
Pedagogy – one of those words that’s used when people want to sound all academic. So let’s just call it learning practice. Of one thing we can be sure; teaching does not seem to have changed much in the last 100 years. In our Universities, given the stubborn addiction to lectures, it has barely changed in 1000 years. So what’s the real source of pedagogic change? Here’s my theory – the primary driver for pedagogic change is something that has changed the behaviours of learners. independently of teachers, teaching and education – the internet.
Asynchronous and online should be the default to argue against
The Internet as a Self-Organizing Socio-Technological System
The Internet is a global socio-technological system that is based on a technological structure consisting of networked computer networks that works with the help of the TCP/IP protocol and stores objectified human knowledge, human actors permanently re-create this global knowledge storage mechanism by producing new informational content, communicating in the system, and consuming existing informational content in the system; the technological infrastructure enables and constrains human communication. The Internet consists of both a technological infrastructure and communicating human actors. Together these two parts form a socio-technological system, the technological structure functions as a structural mass medium that produces and reproduces networked communicative actions and is itself produced and reproduced by communicative actions. The technical structure is medium and outcome of human agency, it enables and constrains human activity and thinking and is the result of productive social communication processes. Important qualities that are connected with the Internet as a socio-technological system are Open Source, Virtual Reality, globalization, and many-to-many dialogue. Tradtional mass media have been based on one-to-many-communication, whereas the Internet is based on many-to-many-communication. Hence the Internet has a large intrinisc democractic potential. In the terminology of Vilém Flusser it can be said that it could support a shift from discursive media society to dialogic media society.
China’s Connectivity Revolution
Long the most fragmented nation on earth, China is being brought together like never before by a new connectivity. Its Internet community is expanding at hyper speed, with profound implications for the Chinese economy, to say nothing of the country’s social norms and political system. This genie cannot be stuffed back in the bottle. Once connected, there is no turning back.
Internet Freedom Fighters Build a Shadow Web
Governments and corporations have more control over the Internet than ever. Now digital activists want to build an alternative network that can never be blocked, filtered or shut down.
The Internet was designed to be a decentralized system: every node should connect to many others. This design helped to make the system resistant to censorship or outside attack. Yet in practice, most individual users exist at the edges of the network, connected to others only through their Internet service provider (ISP). Block this link, and Internet access disappears. An alternative option is beginning to emerge in the form of wireless mesh networks, simple systems that connect end users to one another and automatically route around blocks and censors. Yet any mesh network needs to hit a critical mass of users before it functions well; developers must convince potential users to trade off ease of use for added freedom and privacy.
Emerging Practice in a Digital Age – A guide to technology-enhanced institutional innovation
So what role does emerging practice in the use of technology to enhance learning play in responding to these key drivers for change and why do institutions need to nurture emerging practice? Emerging Practice in a Digital Age explore how colleges and universities are embracing innovation and respond to changes in economic social and technological circumstances in a fast-changing world.
The focus of the guide is on emerging practice rather than emerging technology, looking at how institutions are responding to changes in the way we connect, communicate and collaborate and using the themes of working in partnership with students, developing students’ employability potential and preparing for the future to investigate how these changes can benefit learning. The case studies describe a series of exploratory journeys that make use of both freely available, free to use or easy to implement technologies as well as some that are more complex. The guide also looks at what is necessary to embed use of technologies within institutional culture and practice including consideration of new approaches, structures and roles.
In an Open-Source Society – Creativity and Innovation
The Internet isn’t really a technology. It’s a belief system, a philosophy about the effectiveness of decentralized, bottom-up innovation. And it’s a philosophy that has begun to change how we think about creativity itself. This technical strategy has led to the creation of a gigantic network of far-flung innovators who develop standards with one another and share the products of their work in the form of free and open-source software.
I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.
Neoteny, one of my favorite words, means the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood: idealism, experimentation and wonder. In this new world, not only must we behave more like children, we also must teach the next generation to retain those attributes that will allow them to be world-changing, innovative adults who will help us reinvent the future.
Occupy the Net! – Our Internet is a paradise for consumers but a hell for citizens
It’s time that citizens articulate a vision for a civic Internet that could compete with the dominant corporatist vision. Do we want to preserve anonymity to help dissidents or do we want to eliminate it so that corporations stop worrying about cyber-attacks? Do we want to build new infrastructure for surveillance—hoping it will lead to a better shopping experience—that would be abused by data-hungry governments?
Oddly enough, the political institutions needed to act on such a civic vision are forming even before the requisite ideology is in place; the electoral success of the Pirate Parties across parts of Europe is an encouraging sign. But most such movements are simultaneously too radical and not radical enough. It’s not just geeks and tech-savvy young people who need to think hard about what an alternative civic Internet may look like; for such visions to have any purchase on society, they need to originate from (and incorporate) much broader swathes of the population.
In fact, there is hardly any aspect of political life—in domestic and foreign policy alike—that would not be affected by the Net. Finding a way to articulate a critical stance on these issues before technology giants like Facebook usurp public imagination with their talk of “frictionless sharing” should be top priority for anyone concerned with the future of democracy. A paradise for citizens and a purgatory for consumers: That’s the Internet we can believe in! Occupy the Net, anyone?
Share This!: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking
The development of the social web–the set of digital tools that allow people to connect with one another and share their stories—offers extraordinary potential to change what voices get heard in the global conversation. This is unlike anything the world has seen in a thousand years. Change agents working to make the world a better place need not just to be on board with social media–we also need to drive and shape the conversation. Because whoever’s story gets heard is in the driver’s seat. Share This! explains the importance of social media as a part of an overall ecosystem of tools for change, and examines how broader participation by marginalized voices can foster opportunity on both the individual and collective levels. Tech-savant Zandt devotes special attention to the challenges that women face, including concerns about privacy, security and reputation, and includes interviews with Shireen Mitchell, Danah Boyd, Cheryl Contee, Beka Economopoulos, and other social media experts who work within specific communities addressing race, class, and gender disparities. In a voice both authoritative and irreverent Zandt provides an accessible guide to what the social networking tools are, how woman and minorities can use them strategically, where on the web readers can directly experience their power, and why these technologies are so critical to transforming our daily lives.
