Will Richardson's Public Library

06 Nov 09

Finland makes broadband access a legal right | Technology | guardian.co.uk

"According to local reports, the Ministry of Transport and Communications in Helsinki has pushed through a law that will force telecommunications providers to offer high speed internet connections to all of the country's 5.3 million citizens.

The agreement means that by July next year, telecommunications companies will be obliged to provide all Finnish residents with broadband lines that can run at speeds of at least 1 megabit per second.

Finland is already one of the world's most connected countries, with 96% of citizens online - but the communications minister, Suvi Linden, said that the mandate was necessary in order to improve the availability of internet in Finland's remote rural areas

In an announcement in September, Ms Linden committed to making 100Mb internet access - one hundred times faster than the connections mandated under the current law - available to all Finnish residents by 2015."

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finland shifts broadband

Edge In Frankfurt: THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE— A Talk with Frank Schirrmacher

"We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on."

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shifts mustread09 quoteable

thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body. And that's the Internet and it's the cloud. And very soon we will have the brain in the cloud. And this raises the question of the importance of thoughts. For centuries, what was important for me was decided in my brain. But now, apparently, it will be decided somewhere else.
We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, its just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on.
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- "What if the price of machines that think is people who don't?"
- We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember.
- we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.
- And so what interests me is that we are, because we have the Internet, now entering a phase where Darwinian structures, where Darwinian dynamics, Darwinian selection, apparently attacks ideas themselves: what to remember, what not to remember, which idea is stronger, which idea is weaker.
- And so this question of what survives, which idea survives, and which idea drowns, which idea starves to death, is something which, in our whole system of thought, is very, very known, and is quite an issue. And now we encounter this structure, this phenomenon, in everyday thinking.
- we have a crisis of all the systems that somehow are linked to either thinking or to knowledge. It's the publishing companies, it's the newspapers, it's the media, it's TV. But it's as well the university, and the whole school system, where it is not a normal crisis of too few teachers, too many pupils, or whatever; too small universities; too big universities.
  
  Now, it's totally different. When you follow the discussions, there's the question of what to teach, what to learn, and how to learn. Even for universities and schools, suddenly they are confronted with the question how can we teach? What is the brain actually taking? Or the problems which we have with attention deficit and all that, which are reflections and, of course, results, in a way, of the technical revolution?
- thinking itself somehow leaves the brain and uses a platform outside of the human body. And that's the Internet and it's the cloud. And very soon we will have the brain in the cloud. And this raises the question of the importance of thoughts. For centuries, what was important for me was decided in my brain. But now, apparently, it will be decided somewhere else.
- the concept of the informavores, the human being as somebody eating information
- So you can, in a way, see that the Internet and that the information overload we are faced with at this very moment has a lot to do with food chains, has a lot to do with food you take or not to take, with food which has many calories and doesn't do you any good, and with food that is very healthy and is good for you.
- The tool is not only a tool, it shapes the human who uses it.
- But now, when you have a generation — in the next evolutionary stages, the child of today — which are adapted to systems such as the iTunes "Genius", which not only know which book or which music file they like, and which goes farther and farther in predictive certain things, like predicting whether the concert I am watching tonight is good or bad. Google will know it beforehand, because they know how people talk about it.
- The way we predict our own life, the way we are predicted by others, through the cloud, through the way we are linked to the Internet, will be matters that impact every aspect of our lives.
- This is Darwinism, the whole question. And, in a very real sense, look at the problem with Google and the newspapers. Darwinism, but as well the whole question of who survives in the net, in the thinking; who gets more traffic; who gets less traffic, and so.
- The question is to understand which is important. What is important, what is not important is something very linear, it's something which needs time, at least the structure of time. Now, you have simultaneity, you have everything happening in real time. And this impacts politics in a way which might be considered for the good, but also for the bad.
- Google, he saw all the books they were scanning, and noted that they said they are not scanning these books for humans to read, but for the artificial intelligence to read.
- Take the intellectual values that are timeless and indisputable: objectivity, truth, factual discovery, soundness of argument, insight, explanatory depth, openness to challenging ideas, scrutiny of received dogma, overturning of myth and superstition. Now ask, are new technologies enhancing or undermining those values? And as you answer, take care to judge the old and new eras objectively, rather than giving a free pass to whatever you got used to when you were in your 20s.
  
  One way to attain this objectivity is to run the clock backwards and imagine that old technologies are new and vice-versa. Suppose someone announced: "Here is a development that will replace the way you’ve been doing things. From now on, you won’t be able to use Wikipedia. Instead you’ll use an invention called The Encyclopedia Britannica. You pay several thousand dollars for a shelf-groaning collection of hard copies whose articles are restricted to academic topics, commissioned by a small committee, written by a single author, searchable only by their titles, and never change until you throw the entire set and buy new ones." Would anyone argue that this scenario would make us collectively smarter?
- The fact is that most of our longstanding, prestigious informational institutions are, despite their pretentions, systematically counter-intellectual.
- For all their flaws, media such as Wikipedia, news feeds, blogs, website aggregators, and reader reviews offer the potential for great advances over the status quo — not just in convenience but in intellectual desiderata like breadth, rigor, diversity of viewpoints, and responsibility to the factual record. Our intellectual culture today reflects this advance — contrary to the Cassandras, scientific progress is dizzying; serious commentary on the internet exceeds the capacity of any mortal reader; the flow of philosophical, historical, and literary books (many of doorstop length) has not ebbed; and there is probably more fact-checking, from TV news to dinner tables, than an any time in history. Our collective challenge in dealing with the Internet is to nurture these kinds of progress.
- If the Internet is a massive work of art, as I believe it is, it has modernist properties: it regularly promotes a feeling of unease and inadequacy (rather than jubilation, satisfaction, smugness, serenity, etc). As Schirrmacher's interview suggests, perhaps this is because the Internet user feels as though he is forever trying to eat or be eaten, and he's both undernourished and afraid.
- The way to get on top of all this, of course, would be to have some inkling of how these "thinking" devices were programmed — or even to have some input into the way they do so. Unlike our calculators, we don't even know what we are asking our machines to do, much less how they are going to go about doing it. Every Google search is — at least for most of us — a Hail Mary pass into the datasphere, requesting something from an opaque black box.
  
  So we continue to build and accept new technologies into our lives with little or no understanding of how these devices have been programmed. We do not know how to program our computers. We spend much more time and energy trying to figure out how to program one another, instead. And this is potentially a grave mistake.
- Convenient, cheap, and ubiquitous, the great shared computer
  that is the Internet is rapidly absorbing all our other media.
  It's like a great sponge, sucking up books, newspapers, magazines,
  TV and radio shows, movies, letters, telephone calls, even face-to-face
  conversations.
- Thoughts and ideas will need to be compressed if they're
  to survive in the new environment. Ambiguity and complexity, expansiveness
  of argument and narrative, will be winnowed out. We may find ourselves
  in the age of intellectual bittiness, which would certainly suit
  the computers we rely on. The metaphor of brain-as-computer becomes
  a self-fulfilling prophecy: To keep up with our computers, we have
  to think like our computers.
- It is not our fear of information overload that stalls our egos, it's the fear that we might be missing something.
- The new generation, born connected, does not feel the need to consume all the information available at their fingertips. They consume what they want and then affect or change it, they add to it or negate it, they share it and then swiftly move along the path. They rely on their community, their swarm, to filter and share information and in turn they do the same; it's a communism of content. True ideology at it's best. They, or should I say I, feel the same comfort from a pack of informavores rummaging together through the ever-growing pile of information while the analog generation still feels towards an edited newspaper or the neatly packaged one-hour nightly news show.
- importance is individualism. What is important to me is not important to you, and vice-a-versa.
- The interview vividly expresses the sense many of us are getting that when we are bathed in information (it is not really snippets of information, we need the metaphor of living in a liquid that is constantly changing in flavor and feel) we no longer know precisely what we have learned, nor do we know where our thoughts come from, or indeed whether the thoughts are our own or absorbed from the bath.

05 Nov 09

School lures author with Facebook video invitation - Off the Shelf - Boston.com

A group of seniors at Beaver Country Day are fans of Mary Karr, the award-winning poet and memoirist.

But they're not like the "we love you and have read all your books'' kind of fan. These students have named their English class after one of her books, "The Liar's Club,'' made a special "I (heart) Mary Karr'' t-shirt, and after learning that Karr would be in the Boston area on Thursday and Friday promoting her newest book, "Lit,'' posted a video on Tuesday to Karr's Facebook page inviting her to visit. "

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facebook 4thedition connective_reading

BCDS Live Stream | BCDS mashUp

"This page provides a timeline for all of BCDS’s online activities — from our web site’s news feed to our YouTube channel to our Facebook stream. All our social media updates displayed in one place, in real time.

But the best part is that you’ll be able to see examples of the exciting work Beaver students are doing. All this and more on BCDS mashUp."

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4thedition school social parent_book mashup

BCDS mashUp

"The BCDS mashUp showcases Beaver Country Day School student and faculty work. The material is in different media (writing, photos, videos) that we combine (or mash up) on this site."

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schools 4thedition social parent_book

The WA Mash

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4thedition school social

Social Media in Action at Beaver Country Day School - mStoner - Blog

"At Beaver Country Day School, an independent school in Brookline, MA, social media plays an increasingly important role in marketing and communications and in the classroom. Jan Devereux, BCDS director of communications, said that the school’s laptop initiative and significant investment in information technology and professional development has accelerated the momentum for these (and other) online communications. "

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schools social parent_book 4thedition

» Would You Please Block? Bud the Teacher

"What we’ve decided is that we will no longer use the web filter as a classroom management tool. Blocking one distraction doesn’t solve the problem of students off task – it just encourages them to find another site to distract them. Students off task is not a technology problem – it’s a behavior problem. It is our intention that we help students to learn the appropriate on-task behaviors instead of assuming that we can use filters to manage student use. Rather than blocking sites on an ad hoc basis, we will instead be working with folks to help them through computer and lab management issues in a way that promotes student responsibility. We know that the best filters in a classroom or lab are the people in that lab – both the educational staff monitoring student computer use as well as the students themselves."

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4thedition parent_book network_Literacy classrooms filtering

Facebook Business Guide: How Companies Can Utilize Facebook Pages For Social Media Marketing - Part 1

"In March 2009, Facebook changed their page offering for brands and businesses, introducing enhanced design and functionality options that more closely echoed the format of personal profiles. We believe this is a fundamental shift, going beyond just a new layout. It compels brands to now use the Facebook platform "socially".

Until now, many brand presences on pages have featured fixed design and layout at the top, using either static graphic panels or Flash animations. Most of these simply linked off-network. Facebook social activity - wall posts, discussion groups, photo and video albums - were pushed "below the fold"."

www.masternewmedia.org/-social-media-marketing-part-1 - Preview

facebook business

In March 2009, Facebook changed their page offering for brands and businesses, introducing enhanced design and functionality options that more closely echoed the format of personal profiles. We believe this is a fundamental shift, going beyond just a new layout. It compels brands to now use the Facebook platform "socially".

Until now, many brand presences on pages have featured fixed design and layout at the top, using either static graphic panels or Flash animations. Most of these simply linked off-network. Facebook social activity - wall posts, discussion groups, photo and video albums - were pushed "below the fold".

Educational Video Games With a Mix of Cool and Purpose - NYTimes.com

"KC is one of a growing number of children who are playing educational video games as part of their school curriculum, in after-school programs or via the Web from home. After years of watching technology transform the way children play, socialize and learn, a range of academics, foundations and now start-ups are working on games that will put the passion children have for the genre to good use.

Gamestar Mechanic, for example, is part of the curriculum of Quest to Learn, a New York City public school focused on game-based learning that opened in New York City this fall. A nonprofit group called the Institute of Play set up the school, and its executive director, Katie Salen, helped design the game with financing from the MacArthur Foundation. "

www.nytimes.com/...02games.html - Preview

gaming schools new_models

KC is one of a growing number of children who are playing educational video games as part of their school curriculum, in after-school programs or via the Web from home. After years of watching technology transform the way children play, socialize and learn, a range of academics, foundations and now start-ups are working on games that will put the passion children have for the genre to good use.
Gamestar Mechanic, for example, is part of the curriculum of Quest to Learn, a New York City public school focused on game-based learning that opened in New York City this fall. A nonprofit group called the Institute of Play set up the school, and its executive director, Katie Salen, helped design the game with financing from the MacArthur Foundation.

The Greatest Generation (of Networkers) - WSJ.com

"Because so many people in their teens and early 20s are in this constant whir of socializing—accessible to each other every minute of the day via cellphone, instant messaging and social-networking Web sites—there are a host of new questions that need to be addressed in schools, in the workplace and at home. Chief among them: How much work can "hyper-socializing" students or employees really accomplish if they are holding multiple conversations with friends via text-messaging, or are obsessively checking Facebook?

Some argue they can accomplish a great deal: This generation has a gift for multitasking, and because they've integrated technology into their lives, their ability to remain connected to each other will serve them and their employers well. Others contend that these hyper-socializers are serial time-wasters, that the bonds between them are shallow, and that their face-to-face interpersonal skills are poor."

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shifts kids network_literacy parent_book

Because so many people in their teens and early 20s are in this constant whir of socializing—accessible to each other every minute of the day via cellphone, instant messaging and social-networking Web sites—there are a host of new questions that need to be addressed in schools, in the workplace and at home. Chief among them: How much work can "hyper-socializing" students or employees really accomplish if they are holding multiple conversations with friends via text-messaging, or are obsessively checking Facebook?

Some argue they can accomplish a great deal: This generation has a gift for multitasking, and because they've integrated technology into their lives, their ability to remain connected to each other will serve them and their employers well. Others contend that these hyper-socializers are serial time-wasters, that the bonds between them are shallow, and that their face-to-face interpersonal skills are poor.
He argues that because young people are so adept at multimedia socializing, their social skills are actually strengthened. They're good at "managing conversations" and getting to the pithy essence of an issue, he says, which will help them in the workplace.
- Social networking teaching skills kids need? What a concept. - on 2009-11-05
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- Educators are also being asked by parents, students and educational strategists to reconsider their rules. In past generations, students got in trouble for passing notes in class. Now students are adept at texting with their phones still in their pockets, says 40-year-old Mr. Gallagher, the vice principal, "and they're able to communicate with someone one floor down and three rows over. Students are just fundamentally different today. They will take suspensions rather than give up their phones."
- More schools are now allowing students to use their cellphones between classes, or even as a learning tool in the classroom. Some teachers are having students text their friends during classes to share feedback on what's being taught. The mantra among educators who try to be enlightened: It's no longer about attention span. It's about attention scope—being able to concentrate on many things at once.

Times Higher Education - Next-gen PhDs fail to find Web 2.0's 'on-switch'

"Interim results, released to Times Higher Education, show that only a small proportion of those surveyed are using technology such as virtual-research environments, social bookmarking, data and text mining, wikis, blogs and RSS-feed alerts in their work. This contrasts with the fact that many respondents professed to finding technological tools valuable.

Just under half of those polled used RSS feeds and only about 10 per cent used social bookmarking, with Generation Y students exhibiting the same behaviour as other age groups.

The study found that Google and Google Scholar are the main sources used by doctoral students to locate information; that only about half have been trained to find journal articles; and that far fewer have received any training in using more advanced technological research tools, such as e-research."

www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp - Preview

plpresearch research shifts statistics network_literacy

The study found that Google and Google Scholar are the main sources used by doctoral students to locate information; that only about half have been trained to find journal articles; and that far fewer have received any training in using more advanced technological research tools, such as e-research.
- Der. Who's teaching them? - on 2009-11-05
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04 Nov 09

Social networks and kids: How young is too young? - CNN.com

"In two surveys reported this year by Pew Internet Research -- of 700 and 935 teens, respectively -- 38 percent of respondents ages 12 to 14 said they had an online profile of some sort.

Sixty-one percent of those in the study, ages 12 to 17, said they use social-networking sites to send messages to friends, and 42 percent said they do so every day.

The data in the study was from 2006, so it's not a stretch to assume those numbers are higher this year. Research on younger children is limited, but anecdotal evidence shows that many of them are also logging on.

"Of course they are," said Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher at Pew and one of the report's authors. "They're using them because that's where their social world is. Because there's no effective way to age-verify ... children very quickly realize, 'I just say I'm 14 years old, and they'll let me use this.' ""

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facebook parent_book research social

The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave

"Google Wave is a new web-based collaboration tool that's notoriously difficult to understand. This guide will help. Here you'll learn how to use Google Wave to get things done with your group. Because Wave is such a new product that's evolving quickly, this guidebook is a work in progress that will update in concert with Wave as it grows and changes. Read"

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google_wave

03 Nov 09

About Us | The Texas Tribune

"We’ll tee them up. Because the Trib’s focus is exclusively public policy, politics, and government, there’s nothing to distract us from the task at hand. Because we’re non-profit, we don’t have to sacrifice our mission at the altar of commercial considerations. Because we’re nonpartisan, we’ll give you the straight skinny—the facts—without an agenda or bias. Because we work for you, the people of Texas, not shareholders or other corporate overlords, we’ll never get our priorities out of whack.

Beyond that, what will differentiate us from other media is our voice (strong, clear, authorial, magazine-like in our love of a good narrative), our innovative use of technology (how we present our reporting will be as much a measure of our success as what that reporting uncovers), our ambition (couldn’t be higher), and our willingness to try new and risky things—even we ultimately fall flat. These days, many media organizations don’t have the luxury of giving their reporters permission to fail, because the cost of failure is too high to bear in difficult economic times. We have no such apprehensions. To the contrary, we’re operating with a “fail fast” mindset that allows our reporters and editors to think big, to think creatively and differently. If it doesn’t work out, no problem—move on to the next attempt to be great, to be the best."

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journalism shifts pres_ideas

02 Nov 09

BBC NEWS | Technology | File-sharers are big spenders too

"People who download music illegally also spend an average of £77 a year buying it legitimately, a survey has found.

Those who claimed not to use peer-to-peer filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay spent a yearly average of just £44.

Almost one in 10 of those questioned aged between 16 and 50 said they downloaded music illegally. "

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copyright shifts music

01 Nov 09

YesICan Polar Science 2009

"In 2005 and 2006 we followed the Antarctic field seasons of a team of scientists from the United States and Canada. Led by Dr. Shane Kanatous, the team is trying to answer the question - how do the skeletal muscles of seals develop to work during deep dives, even when the animal is not breathing for long periods of time. The researchers believe the answers to this question may have tremendous implications for human medicine. By understanding how another mammal has successfully overcome the debilitating effects of working under low oxygen conditions, we may be able to learn new therapeutic approaches to assist humans with heart or lung disease.

While 2009 is not a field season for Dr. Kanatous and his research team, we will be working with both Dr. Kanatous and Dr. Hawke from their labs in Colorado and Ontario. They are very generously giving their time to help us investigate the physiology of the Weddell seal, and its amazing ability to exercise deep under water without the need to take a breath. Along the way, you'll gain a better understanding of the workings of your own cardiovascular system. "

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classroom 4thedition environment

Makers » Download for Free

"Why am I doing this? Because my problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks, @timoreilly for this awesome aphorism). Because free ebooks sell print books. Because I copied my ass off when I was 17 and grew up to spend practically every discretionary cent I have on books when I became an adult. Because I can't stop you from sharing it (zeroes and ones aren't ever going to get harder to copy); and because readers have shared the books they loved forever; so I might as well enlist you to the cause."

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copyright ebooks connective_reading shifts publishing plpresearch

31 Oct 09

Connected Classrooms - Home

"hree classrooms in Ontario will raise awareness to important issues around the world using a variety of resources and technologies. They will also seek opportunities to connect their classrooms to each other using tools available online. "

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environment activism social_justice

ePals Global Community

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environment collective_action