Tim Lauer - Bookmarks

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Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

Tags: no_tag on 2008-04-27 and saved by70 people -All Annotations (3) -About

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Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships
broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not
be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the
people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go
through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's
Island, they just assume that media
includes consuming, producing and sharing.
Well,
the TV producer did not think this was going to be a big deal; she
was not digging this line of thought. And her final question to me
was essentially, "Isn't this all just a fad?" You know,
sort of the flagpole-sitting of the early early 21st century? It's fun to go out and produce and share a little bit, but
then people are going to eventually realize, "This isn't as good
as doing what I was doing before," and settle down. And
I made a spirited argument that no, this wasn't the case, that this
was in fact a big one-time shift, more analogous to the industrial
revolution than to flagpole-sitting.
So
I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to
have a conversation about authority or social construction or
whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and
she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?"
That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No
one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the
time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been
masking for 50 years."
However lousy it is to sit in your
basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal
experience it's worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if
Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

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Dr. King, Forgotten Radical | The American Prospect

Tags: no_tag on 2008-04-05 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Ozzy Knows Best | PBS

Tags: cringely, education, gaming on 2008-04-05 and saved by7 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.pbs.org

Stories came out this week from the NPD Group announcing that 72 percent of Americans play PC or video games with 58 percent of those played online. Those numbers -- which apparently don't include kids, by the way -- are HUGE and explain all by themselves much of what is happening to traditional mass media like TV, magazines and newspapers.
So forget about personal computers: the future of education probably lies with digital games.
The truth is we won't. If we have more students, we just build more devices. Classrooms aren't absolutely necessary, nor will location even matter.
People want to do new stuff with their Wii's, so why not use them to learn?
I am not saying schools will disappear. I AM saying that new modes of instruction will emerge and they will inevitably involve processing power and context. We took our kids to Washington, D.C. for Spring Break and I would have loved to outfit them with MP3 players loaded with age-appropriate descriptions of what we saw. That's just scratching the surface.
And at a time when what we're decrying is the lack of attention our children and grandchildren are paying to traditional modes of education, they are spending hundreds of hours learning to steal virtual cars and play lead air guitar.