shifts - Will Richardson on Diigo

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."

www.guardian.co.uk/...finland-broadband - Preview

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."

www.edge.org/...schirrmacher09_index.html - Preview

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.
26 more annotations...
- "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

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."

online.wsj.com/...4746304574505643153518708.html - Preview

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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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."

www.texastribune.org/about - Preview

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. "

news.bbc.co.uk/...8337887.stm - Preview

copyright shifts music

01 Nov 09

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."

craphound.com/download - Preview

copyright ebooks connective_reading shifts publishing plpresearch

22 Oct 09

The Facebookization of Twitter has begun | Janet Fouts

"Facebook is where I have more casual discussions, share pictures and stories with my friends and co-workers. It’s where I follow causes and groups I’m interested in and get more involved through their fan pages and groups."

janetfouts.com/okization-of-twitter-has-begun - Preview

twitter facebook shifts aiu3

FaceBook couldn’t buy Twitter, but now you can get your FaceBook friends’ statuses right alongside Twitter updates through some of the apps that work with both. FaceBook Connect is one of the smartest things FaceBook has ever done.
Honestly I’m not sure how I feel about this. FaceBook just went through some major changes that may make it a little more user-friendly, but I still think of Twitter and FaceBook as two very different networks, and I use them differently.
- Incas - on 2009-10-22
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- Facebook is where I have more casual discussions, share pictures and stories with my friends and co-workers. It’s where I follow causes and groups I’m interested in and get more involved through their fan pages and groups.

Marketers salivating over smartphone potential - USATODAY.com

"Mobile users are an important part of the mix for behemoths Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. But many folks are migrating to a new crop of mobile-only social networks such as MocoSpace, Mig33 and Peperonity. MocoSpace has emerged as a favorite in the U.S., where it is available in 22 cities, including New York, Seattle and Los Angeles. It offers chat, instant messaging, photo- and video-sharing, and games.

The number of people who use social networks from their smartphones skyrocketed 187%, to 18.3 million unique users, in July, compared with the same month a year earlier, says Nielsen. Social networking is among the fastest-growing activities on mobile devices, along with search and checking news, says Jon Stewart, Nielsen's research director for technology and search."

www.usatoday.com/...ocial-network-smartphone_N.htm - Preview

mobile stats shifts parent_book

Web 2.0 speakers see mobile devices taking over - USATODAY.com

"The last few years have seen dramatic change as we shifted our lives to the PC and the Internet, but now it's all about mobile. If you don't sport a cool new iPhone, Android or Palm Pre smartphone yet, you will."

www.usatoday.com/...-10-21-web-future-summit_N.htm - Preview

mobile shifts

Op-Ed Columnist - The New Untouchables - NYTimes.com

"Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of “A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster, cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity."

www.nytimes.com/...21friedman.html - Preview

schools shifts future assessment Friedman innovation parent_book

21 Oct 09

How Local Politicians are Using Social Media

"Local and state offices, from the governor down to the alderman are taking note and there has been a huge increase in the number of local and state politicians getting involved in social media; and not just in a cursory manner, but in ways that have opened the lines of communication to an audience clamoring for transparency."

mashable.com/...social-media-local-politics - Preview

politics shifts parent_book

Putting the Public in Public Media

"NPR's Social Media Guidelines for Reporters

This list, released last week, includes concerns about expressing political views online and how reporters should present themselves on Twitter and Facebook. It's a great starting point for other organizations concerned about similar issues. Carvin says that while NPR reporters are using online tools more and more, it still can be a challenge.

"The one thing I never do is show up and insist that they use a particular tool simply because lots of other people are using it," he says. "People are often resistant to learning new tools simply because they don't seem relevant to them, so you need to figure out with them what may or may not be relevant.""

www.readwriteweb.com/...the_public_in_public_media.php - Preview

journalism shifts public

19 Oct 09

Does your social class determine your online social network? - CNN.com

""MySpace has one population, Facebook has another," said the 26-year-old, who works for an affordable-housing nonprofit in San Francisco, California. "Blue-collar, part-time workers might like the appeal of MySpace more -- it definitely depends on who you meet and what they use; that's what motivates people to join and stay interested."

Is there a class divide online? Research suggests yes. A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace. "

www.cnn.com/...social.networking.class - Preview

social parent_book shifts facebook myspace network_literacy

24 Sep 09

Education Week: Literacy Accountability in a New-Media Age

Walking through the hallways of the middle school where I teach, I inevitably hear students talk about music Web sites, blogs, Web-based photo albums, Facebook pages, and other forms of new media.

If we judged these students’ ability to interpret and gather information solely based on their mastery of print media, we’d be doing ourselves—and society—a huge disservice.

Oh wait, we already do just that.

www.edweek.org/...04barnwell.h29.html - Preview

literacy shifts iu13pa09 education

23 Sep 09

Real-time Web keeps social networkers connected - USATODAY.com

Such is life in the post-Web 2.0 world. The latest iteration of the Internet — deemed the "real-time Web" by some analysts, is exemplified by the obsessive use of PCs or cellphones for quick interactions and dips into the online information stream. This hyper-connectedness is fueled by the rise in social media and distinguished by quick, short communication and, increasingly, an absence of privacy.

More than four in five U.S. adults online use social media at least once a month, according to a new Forrester Research report. While young people march toward almost universal adoption, the most rapid growth has occurred among consumers 35 and older. Now, established companies and start-ups are scrambling to develop real-time Web applications for gaming, intuitive online searches, location services and customer support. The market potential is huge, tech analysts and others say.

www.usatoday.com/...networking-real-time-web_N.htm - Preview

social shifts hyperconnected 4thedition pres_ideas

Such is life in the post-Web 2.0 world. The latest iteration of the Internet — deemed the "real-time Web" by some analysts, is exemplified by the obsessive use of PCs or cellphones for quick interactions and dips into the online information stream. This hyper-connectedness is fueled by the rise in social media and distinguished by quick, short communication and, increasingly, an absence of privacy.
"There is a generational divide between co-location vs. no location," he says. "These digital tools diminish the importance of geography, especially in relationships."
1 more annotations...
- The impact of this latest evolution of the Web — good and bad — can be measured in everyday life. People are more likely to attend high school and college reunions because of shared interests with friends, thanks to social-networking services such as Ning and Facebook, according to both companies. Automated stock trades have replaced human-generated ones, O'Reilly points out.
  
  But privacy and simple communication are often sacrificed in the process, say privacy advocates and academics.

03 Sep 09

IPhone Users Love the Device, but Hate Its Slowness - NYTimes.com

“It’s been a challenging year for us,” said John Donovan, the chief technology officer of AT&T. “Overnight we’re seeing a radical shift in how people are using their phones,” he said. “There’s just no parallel for the demand.”

www.nytimes.com/...03att.html - Preview

iphone shifts future

22 Aug 09

JOHO - August 18, 2009

For example, simply by being on the Web you learn:

Ideas can be joined by links.

The structure of ideas joined by links is extremely loose and disorderly overall.

You can easily express yourself. You may not know how to make your own blog or create and post a video, but you come across plenty of sites that have a "comment" button.

Your friends are a click away even after they've moved away.

Lots of people like you are creating stuff. Some of it is good.

Lots of people are spammers.

You can find what you want whenever you want to, not when Web Guide Magazine tells you that it's on.

There's just about always more information about anything you want to know about.

There's more stuff than you could ever ever ever look at.

One idea leads to another; attempts to confine ideas usually fail and do not express the shape of the ideas themselves.

Many people have different views than you, and they seem to take their own views quite seriously.

www.hyperorg.com/...joho-aug18-09.html - Preview

network_literacy david_weinberger shifts cluetrain

The coming generation, the one that's been brought up on
the
Internet, isn't going to love it the way that we do. (Note:
Throughout, I am, of course, talking about the
affluent parts of the world, and America in particular.)
So, when middle class, educated, white men of a certain age
talk as if what they're excited about on the Net is what everyone is
excited about, those white men are falling prey to the oldest fallacy
in the book.

Of course that's right. My experience of the Web is not
that of, say,
a 14 year old Latina girl who's on MySpace, doesn't ever update
Wikipedia
articles, doesn't have a Twitter account, considers email to be a tool
her parents use, and — gasp — hasn't ever tagged a single page. The
difference is real and really
important.
- See danah boyd: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2009/08/20/some_thoughts_o_1.html - on 2009-08-22
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4 more annotations...
- For example, simply by being on the Web you learn:
  
  Ideas can be joined by
  links.
  
  The structure of ideas
  joined by links is extremely loose and disorderly overall.
  
  You
  can easily express yourself. You may not know how to make your
  own blog or create and post a video, but you come across plenty of sites
  that have a "comment" button.
  
  Your friends are a click
  away even after they've moved away.
  
  Lots of people like you
  are creating stuff. Some of it is good.
  
  Lots of people are
  spammers.
  
  You
  can find what you want whenever you want to, not when Web Guide
  Magazine tells you that it's on.
  
  There's
  just about always more information about anything you want to know
  about.
  
  There's more stuff than you could ever ever ever look at.
  
  One idea leads to another; attempts to confine ideas
  usually fail and do not express the shape of the ideas themselves.
  
  Many people have different views than you, and they seem
  to take their own views quite seriously.
- But with such basics the
  techno-determinism ends. Having learned these lessons, you may become a
  full time digital creator, a
  passive watcher, a freedom-loving rebel, a tagline-spouting
  consumer, a corporate gamer of the system, a bit-based
  artiste... None of that is determined by the
  technology. But the technology does have an effect on how we think
  about who we are and what our world is, just as growing up in the city
  or in the country conditions your expectations.
  - Key idea - on 2009-08-22
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- So, that’s one sense in which transparency
  is the new objectivity. What we used to believe because we thought the
  author was objective we now believe because we can see through the
  author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that
  position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can
  undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases.
  Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.
  - Lovin' this idea. Are we teaching this? - on 2009-08-22
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- This change is epochal.

20 Aug 09

apophenia: some thoughts on technophilia

There are also no such things as "digital natives." Just because many of today's youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don't. Most of you have a better sense of how to get information from Google than the average youth. Most of you know how to navigate privacy settings of a social media tool better than the average teen. Understanding technology requires learning. Sure, there are countless youth engaged in informal learning every day when they go online. But what about all of the youth who lack access? Or who live in a community where learning how to use technology is not valued? Or who tries to engage alone? There's an ever-increasing participation gap emerging between the haves and the have-nots. What distinguishes the groups is not just a question of access, although that is an issue; it's also a question of community and education and opportunities for exploration. Youth learn through active participation, but phrases like "digital natives" obscure the considerable learning that occurs to enable some youth to be technologically fluent while others fail to engage.

www.zephoria.org/...some_thoughts_o_1.html - Preview

mustread09 shifts learning network_literacy

There are also no such things as "digital natives." Just because many of today's youth are growing up in a society dripping with technology does not mean that they inherently know how to use it. They don't. Most of you have a better sense of how to get information from Google than the average youth. Most of you know how to navigate privacy settings of a social media tool better than the average teen. Understanding technology requires learning. Sure, there are countless youth engaged in informal learning every day when they go online. But what about all of the youth who lack access? Or who live in a community where learning how to use technology is not valued? Or who tries to engage alone? There's an ever-increasing participation gap emerging between the haves and the have-nots. What distinguishes the groups is not just a question of access, although that is an issue; it's also a question of community and education and opportunities for exploration. Youth learn through active participation, but phrases like "digital natives" obscure the considerable learning that occurs to enable some youth to be technologically fluent while others fail to engage.

19 Aug 09

Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

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Until fairly recently, online education amounted to little more than electronic versions of the old-line correspondence courses. That has really changed with arrival of Web-based video, instant messaging and collaboration tools.

The real promise of online education, experts say, is providing learning experiences that are more tailored to individual students than is possible in classrooms. That enables more “learning by doing,” which many students find more engaging and useful.
- Bingo - on 2009-08-19
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“The technology will be used to create learning communities among students in new ways,” Mr. Regier said. “People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.”

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