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BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Whither the AP

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:09:56 -0000

How to mine local news instead of syndicated news.

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

So what does the world look like without the AP? It pains me to ask but it’s a possible universe. Local papers can get local content from their own networks and national, international, sports, business and other content via links.

This is a really interesting point for the article on how media is shifting. posted by willrich

Tags: media journalism

Posted by: willrich

Weblogg-ed

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:05:05 -0000

Tags: no_tag

Posted by: willrich

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:57:02 -0000

Great piece by Nick Carr in the Atlantic on how the Web is changing the way we read.

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

(Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

the Net is becoming a universal medium

They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.

What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition.

we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think.

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

“We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.”

Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition.

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds.

Tags: reading shifts required_reading

Posted by: willrich

Current Affairs, Politics, and Government - Penguin Group (USA)

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:39:01 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Group action gives human society its particular character, and anything that changes the way groups get things done will affect society as a whole. This change will not be limited to any particular set of institutions or functions. For any given organization, the important questions are 'When will the change happen?" and "What will change?" The only two answers we can rule out are never, and nothing. The ways in which any given institution will find its situation transformed will vary, but the various local changes are manifestations of a single deep source: newly capable groups are assembling, and they are working without the managerial imperative and outside the previous strictures that bounded their effectiveness. These changes will transform the world everywhere groups of people come together to accomplish something, which is to say everywhere.

Now that there is competition to traditional institutional forms for getting things done, those institutions will continue to exist, but their purchase on modern life will weaken as novel alternatives for group action arise.

Something similar is happening today, with newer tools. Most of the institutions we had last year we will have next year. In the past the hold of those institutions on public life was irreplaceable, in part because there was no alternative to managing large-scale effort. Now that there is competition to traditional institutional forms for getting things done, those institutions will continue to exist, but their purchase on modern life will weaken as novel alternatives for group action arise.

Tags: no_tag

Posted by: willrich

Online Collaboration Tools - New Technologies And Web Services - Sharewood Picnic May27 08 - Robin Good's Latest News

Wed, 28 May 2008 21:46:21 -0000

Some stuff on Twitter

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

ADrive is a new web-base file hosting solution which gives you 50 GB of online free storage for free.

This is amazing! Great for schools. posted by willrich

Tags: Twitter amphconf08

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MediaShift . Microblogging Mania::Twitter Helps with Reporting, Filtering the News | PBS

Mon, 12 May 2008 03:22:24 -0000

Tags: twitter shifts

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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

Thu, 01 May 2008 22:51:08 -0000

Tags: social media clay_shirky shifts reading

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horizonproject2008 » Video Specifications

Thu, 01 May 2008 11:20:46 -0000

Tags: video neccstream08

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When Young Teachers Go Wild on the Web

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:18:18 -0000

It's almost like Googling someone: Log on to Facebook. Join the Washington, D.C., network. Search the Web site for your favorite school system. And then watch the public profiles of 20-something teachers unfurl like gift wrap on the screen, revealing a sense of humor that can be overtly sarcastic or unintentionally unprofessional -- or both.

Tags: privacy literacy googleable netbook

Posted by: willrich

Clueless in America - New York Times

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:17:23 -0000

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Tags: schools education netbook

Posted by: willrich

How We Use Twitter for Journalism - ReadWriteWeb

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:47:12 -0000

Tags: twitter Journalism

Posted by: willrich

NAIS - Annual Conference - Sir Ken Robinson

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 00:45:18 -0000

Tags: ken_robinson creativity genius

Posted by: willrich

Digitally Speaking wiki / Voicethread

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:32:08 -0000

Tags: voicethread digital_storytelling

Posted by: willrich

The FASTForward Blog » Obama’s Answer Center - CRM from RightNow on the Campaign Trail: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:15:21 -0000

Tags: politics obama shifts

Posted by: willrich

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 22:58:29 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

And in a rapidly changing world, these ecosystems must not only supply this workforce but also provide support for continuous learning and for the ongoing creation of new ideas and skills.

Few of us today will have a fixed, single career; instead, we are likely to follow a trajectory that encompasses multiple careers. As we move from career to career, much of what we will need to know will not be what we learned in school decades earlier. We are entering a world in which we all will have to acquire new knowledge and skills on an almost continuous basis.

Nor is it likely that the current methods of teaching and learning will suffice to prepare students for the lives that they will lead in the twenty-first century.

shifted attention from access to information toward access to other people

The most profound impact of the Internet, an impact that has yet to be fully realized, is its ability to support and expand the various aspects of social learning.

understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions.

This is a really crucial point that we haven't come anywhere close to fully understanding. Understanding comes not through the publishing but through the conversations. posted by willrich

The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning.⁵

The Cartesian perspective assumes that knowledge is a kind of substance and that pedagogy concerns the best way to transfer this substance from teachers to students. By contrast, instead of starting from the Cartesian premise of “I think, therefore I am,” and from the assumption that knowledge is something that is transferred to the student via various pedagogical strategies, the social view of learning says, “We participate, therefore we are.”

There is a second, perhaps even more significant, aspect of social learning. Mastering a field of knowledge involves not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in the field.

In this open environment, both the content and the process by which it is created are equally visible, thereby enabling a new kind of critical reading—almost a new form of literacy—that invites the reader to join in the consideration of what information is reliable and/or important.

But viewing learning as the process of joining a community of practice reverses this pattern and allows new students to engage in “learning to be” even as they are mastering the content of a field. This encourages the practice of what John Dewey called “productive inquiry”—that is, the process of seeking the knowledge when it is needed in order to carry out a particular situated task.

We sold more books today that didn't sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday

As more of learning becomes Internet-based, a similar pattern seems to be occurring. Whereas traditional schools offer a finite number of courses of study, the “catalog” of subjects that can be learned online is almost unlimited. There are already several thousand sets of course materials and modules online, and more are being added regularly. Furthermore, for any topic that a student is passionate about, there is likely to be an online niche community of practice of others who share that passion.

How do we prepare our students for this passion-based learning environment? posted by willrich

We need to construct shared, distributed, reflective practicums in which experiences are collected, vetted, clustered, commented on, and tried out in new contexts. One might call this “learning about learning,” a bootstrapping operation in which educators, along with students, are learning among and between themselves. This can become a living or dynamic infrastructure—itself a reflective practicum.

But the Web 2.0, which has emerged in just the past few years, is sparking an even more far-reaching revolution. Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging systems, mashups, and content-sharing sites are examples of a new user-centric information infrastructure that emphasizes participation (e.g., creating, re-mixing) over presentation, that encourages focused conversation and short briefs (often written in a less technical, public vernacular) rather than traditional publication, and that facilitates innovative explorations, experimentations, and purposeful tinkerings that often form the basis of a situated understanding emerging from action, not passivity.

We now need a new approach to learning—one characterized by a demand-pull rather than the traditional supply-push mode of building up an inventory of knowledge in students’ heads. Demand-pull learning shifts the focus to enabling participation in flows of action, where the focus is both on “learning to be” through enculturation into a practice as well as on collateral learning.

The demand-pull approach is based on providing students with access to rich (sometimes virtual) learning communities built around a practice. It is passion-based learning, motivated by the student either wanting to become a member of a particular community of practice or just wanting to learn about, make, or perform something. Often the learning that transpires is informal rather than formally conducted in a structured setting. Learning occurs in part through a form of reflective practicum, but in this case the reflection comes from being embedded in a community of practice that may be supported by both a physical and a virtual presence and by collaboration between newcomers and professional practitioners/scholars.

The demand-pull approach to learning might appear to be extremely resource-intensive. But the Internet is becoming a vast resource for supporting this style of learning. Its resources include the rapidly growing amount of open courseware, access to powerful instruments and simulation models, and scholarly websites, which already number in the hundreds, as well as thousands of niche communities based around specific areas of interest in virtually every field of endeavor.²²

Tags: education pearlsplp learning schools

Posted by: willrich

Canadian Education Association

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 17:23:24 -0000

Tags: my_articles

Posted by: willrich

Swift Kick Central: Teaching The Google Effect and Digital Identities

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:51:48 -0000

Tags: privacy shifts google safety

Posted by: willrich

NAIS - Publications - Independent School Magazine - The Hyperconnected Classroom

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:33:23 -0000

Article for NAIS journal.

Tags: my_articles shifts teaching learning classrooms

Posted by: willrich

What is the (Next) Message?: Reflections of an Adult Educator, Redux

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:25:43 -0000

Tags: reform learning

Posted by: willrich

edublogs: A new way for kids to know their mum is picking on them

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:53:13 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Her Tweetcloud, a grouping of all the words she uses most commonly in her messages, reveals, though, that one brother (ewanmcintosh) is getting more nags than the other (nmcintosh).

New Twitter tool posted by willrich

Tags: no_tag

Posted by: willrich