Posts Tagged ‘digital culture’
Digital Habitats – Stewarding Technology for Communities
Technology has changed what it means for communities to “be together.” Digital tools are now part of most communities’ habitats. This book develops a new literacy and language to describe the practice of stewarding technology for communities. Whether you want to ground your technology stewardship in theory and deepen your practice, whether you are a community leader or sponsor who wants to understand how communities and technology intersect, or whether you just want practical advice, this is the book for you. You can read the first 45 pages of Digital Habitats now.
Broadband, Social Networks, and Mobility Have Spawned a New Kind of Learner
Students are different today because of technology. Every educator knows this, of course, but this change is about much more than agile thumbs, shriveling attention spans, and OMG’d vocabularies. According the Pew Research Center, the combination of widespread access to broadband Internet connectivity, the popularity of social networking, and the near ubiquity of mobile computing is producing a fundamentally new kind of learner, one that is self-directed, better equipped to capture information, more reliant on feedback from peers, more inclined to collaborate, and more oriented toward being their own “nodes of production.”
Reading a book versus a screen: Different reading devices, different modes of reading?
A book or a screen – which of these two offers more reading comfort? There are no disadvantages to reading from electronic reading devices compared with reading printed texts. “E-books and e-readers are playing an increasingly important role on the worldwide book market. However, readers in Germany are particularly skeptical when it comes to e-books and electronic reading devices. The objective of the study was to investigate whether there are reasons for this skepticism.“
“This study provides us with a scientific basis for dispelling the widespread misconception that reading from a screen has negative effects.”. “There is no (reading) culture clash – whether it is analog or digital, reading remains the most important cultural technology.” However, the result of the study stands in stark contrast with the participants’ subjective reaction. “Almost all of the participants stated that they liked reading a printed book best. This was the dominant subjective response, but it does not match the data obtained from the study.”
What does it mean to be e-literate?
Teachers need to meet students half way and embrace the changing literacies of a digital age.
To get pupils motivated to learn about ICT and computers – and they should, because we live in a world where almost every type of employment uses IT in some form or other – then we do need to rethink what and how we teach it at school. We need to think about merging what they need to know with what is also fun to know. We need to make sure they are aware of how complicated it can get without making them write reams of code to do so.
Kids Closer Up: Playing, Learning, and Growing with Digital Media
While large-scale surveys have documented the types of media to which 5–9-year-olds are devoting increasing amounts of time, we know less about how and why they are using these media and what they might be learning as a result. This research provides rich details on the processes, relationships, and contexts that larger-scale studies on children’s media use cannot by examining two 8-year-old girls’ engagement with video games, the Web, mobile devices, and other emerging technologies against the backdrop of family life. What roles are parents and others playing in their digital media experiences? And how is their engagement with digital media related to family values, relationships with peers and siblings, and what they are doing at school? Ethnographic methods and ecological perspectives on learning were used to craft these portraits. The case studies illustrate how young children’s access to and interest in technology are shaped by cultural, institutional, interpersonal, and developmental forces and, in turn, how access and interest shape individual learning. Findings build upon other fine-grained studies of young children’s digital media use and learning, bringing to bear the particularities of the era, locale, and culture of the two individuals I studied to refine our collective and ever-evolving portrait of the 21st-century child.
The Future Now: Las Indias
In this interview, Shareable publisher Neal Gorenflo, John Robb of Global Guerrillas, and P2P foundation’s Michel Bauwens talk to David de Ugarte, one of the originators of the Spanish cyberpunk scene about his more recent work developing a multinational worker cooperative, Las Indias, that is a culmination of his community’s thinking and work for the last decade. Las Indias is the manifestation of a unique socio-economic philosophy that synthesizes many strains of thinking and culture including cyberpunk, anarchism, and cooperatives – all with a Spanish twist. It’s important because it points to a possible future for those who think outside of national boundaries and desire or need to take control of their own economic destiny. It’s a possible future that takes the centuries old logic of cooperatives and remixes it for the urban-centered, global network society we live in today.
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.
What happens to ownership as the world goes digital?
The launch of Amazon’s new “lending library” feature through its Kindle devices this week means that another form of content or media — namely books — is becoming something that we rent or stream, Netflix-style, rather than owning a physical copy of. There are plenty of reasons to prefer renting or streaming over actual physical goods: It’s often cheaper, and you don’t have to lug around heavy books or CDs or DVDs everywhere, since your content is (theoretically at least) available anywhere. But there are also downsides to renting content; moving to a rental model changes our relationship to that content, and not always in a good way.
Like many services that are enabled by always-on connectivity, rental or streaming of content such as books, movies and music has a lot of potential benefits: It can save money and be more convenient, and it can free us from having to worry about where the content is. But at the same time, it also removes certain rights and abilities that we’ve grown used to — just as renting a home instead of owning does — and that is something we are all going to have to learn more about as the world becomes increasingly digital.
PLAY! – New Media Literacies
The central goal for Project New Media Literacies (Project NML) is identifying and creating educational practices that will prepare teachers and students to become full and active participants in the new digital culture. The Common Core Standards define what all students are expected to know and be able to do, but not how teachers should teach. Following Horst and colleagues, NML’s program PLAY! uses the concept of ecology to describe the “characteristics of an overall technical, social, cultural, and place–based system, in which the components are not decomposable or separable”. Student daily practices are situated within their learning ecologies and hence are dynamically interrelated to their existing conditions, infrastructures of place, and technologies. Although the classroom and interaction among teachers and learners is at the center of this ecology, adults’ and youths’ worlds are co-constituted, suggesting that school, after-school, home, and online places are all organic parts of the ecosystem.
Through integration of the new media literacies into the classroom, both teachers and students alike will gain the ability to make and reflect upon media and in the process, acquire important skills in teamwork, leadership, problem solving, collaboration, brainstorming, communications, and creating projects. Designing and implementing a participatory learning environment fosters:
- Heightened motivation and new forms of engagement through meaningful play and experimentation
- Learning that feels relevant to students’ identities and interests
- Opportunities for creating and solving problems using a variety media, tools and practices
- Co-configured expertise where educators and students pool their skills and knowledge and share in the tasks of teaching and learning
- An integrated learning system where connections between home, school, community and world are enabled and encouraged
