"Being" Online // Living the Digital Life // Lessons in Social Media // Higher Education, Christian Sector, Individuals
Fascinating to watch a bit of a battle going on in the trending topics:
“Only fat people” was trending for a while, although most of the comments had become similar to the below:
And this kind of tweet has caused ‘everybody is beautiful’ to start to appear higher up the trending topics:
Here’s another on the wishlist!!
In a lively and compell
ing read, Melissa Gregg examines the impact of technologies on the work and lifestyles of employees in the knowledge economy. This book covers a lot of ground in a relatively slim volume, and considers mobile working; part-time and contract working; online team interactions; the use of social networking; online branding; and the implications of work being done in the home environment.
Times Higher Education readers may see parallels with their own working lives in the examples cited, and Gregg’s observations about how we relate to work may cause readers to reflect on how information and communication technologies have impacted on their own responses to, for example, being able to work remotely and pressures to be ever connected and available.
Gregg draws on a study of 26 professionals working for large organisations in education, government, broadcasting and telecommunications who were interviewed annually over a three-year period. Their experiences of, and responses to, remote working and the use of online technologies are traced in detail throughout. Overall, a picture of expanding work boundaries is presented, but responses to this shift are mixed.
Read full story or buy the book.
Advertised on the maker’s site as:
““Lemme tell ya, these ain’t no ordinary finches we’re talkin’ about. These here are the Angry Birds, the ones that’s gonna kick you in the ‘nads. And they’re the ones on your side. They must be from Galapadapados, or sumptin’.” – Col. Angus, Bird Expert.
The survival of the Angry Birds is at stake. Dish out revenge on the green pigs who stole the Birds’ eggs. Use the unique destructive powers of the Angry Birds to lay waste to the pigs’ fortified castles.
Angry Birds features hours of gameplay, challenging physics-based castle demolition, and lots of replay value. Each of the 120 levels requires logic, skill, and brute force to crush the enemy.
Protect wildlife or play Angry Birds!”
I’m not a great online game-player, but I enjoy a bit of Angry Birds (fills in a few stops on the Tube), so I had seen enough of it to really enjoy the following video, where cartoon is produced back in “real”-life:
Don’t T-Mobile produce some great ads?
A generation ago in universities, talk was of “computer literacy”; nowadays it’s “media literacy” – if we can’t handle Web 2.0, then we are failing our students. Having built a career around initiatives to meet this purported challenge, I offer some cautionary advice.
First, lay off the “literacy” metaphor. The ability to read and write needs to be achieved in childhood in order for cognitive development to proceed. Learning about information and communication technologies is much less vital. It is also asserted that digital technologies are so fundamental that someone ill at ease with them will be for ever disadvantaged. But hey, food is essential to everyday life, yet I don’t hear calls that we become “food literate”, even if lack of knowledge has demonstrably horrible consequences.
Media literacy is typically about technical skills, but the reasoning behind this prioritisation is flawed. There appears to be a belief that if students don’t learn about the new technologies, they might cede power to experts who are technically able. But it can’t be said loud enough that technical skills do not translate into power. The fact is that we live in an era when we are all dependent on expertise of one sort or another. We can’t acquaint ourselves with every expertise going. We have to trust those experts who in their turn must rely on others. It is hard to see anything exceptional about ICTs in this regard. These technologies are indispensable, but as Max Weber observed about slavery, we ought not to confuse indispensability with power.
The fact is that how to use digital technologies is much less important than what the information accessed is for and what might be done with it. For this, one needs information skills – the sort provided by librarians and teachers. Here, educationalists might warn of risks with regard to lack of attentiveness, especially among the “digitally native”. There is good evidence that most are superficial “skimmers”, clicking hyperlinks and changing pages after a perfunctory glance. A few enthuse about this as a novel, non-linear practice, but most are concerned about the risks to logic and reasoning that can accompany a trend that succours facile and immediate gratification. As one student said about YouTube: “You can get a whole story in six minutes. A book takes so long.”
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This seems like a nice idea, although my Dad will probably never see it, as he’s a “digital alien”! I saw a few people had changed their pictures to pictures of their Dad… thought it would be nice to have one with my Dad… was looking for a more up to date one, but then thought I quite like this one… Are you going to change yours?
A student is reading a book. A message beeps from an iPhone. Eyes flick to the screen in curiosity. During the glance from paper to screen, an iPod continues to shuffle a soundtrack.
From screen to sound, from paper to pixels, digital cultures accompany, replace and cannibalise earlier platforms and meaning systems. In Digital Cultures, Milad Doueihi probes these accelerated movements, migrations and manifestations. First published in French in 2008 as La Grand Conversion Numérique, the book’s English-language version has not been updated. As a result, social networking is underplayed.
But while it may seem unwise to leave the text unchanged considering the rapidity of software and hardware transformation, Doueihi’s argument remains revelatory and important. He presents the diversity of digital practices and the importance of digital literacy in an increasingly complex textual environment. Moving beyond basic functional literacy, Doueihi asks how digitisation configures a meta-literacy, “of what it means to be literate”.
The book’s four sections – “Digital divides and the emerging digital literacy”, “Blogging the city”, “Software tolerance in the land of dissidence” and “Archiving the future” – align to investigate new relationships between the production and communication of knowledge and the transformations of past modes of reading and thinking.
The innovative concept created and developed throughout the book is “anthology”. Doueihi defines this as “constituted by assembling various pieces of material under a unifying cover, and for the use of an individual or a group brought together by a common interest”. Such a mode of reading is comparative, collaborative and decontextualised. A wiki-enabled form of bricolage, the “new sociability” through social networks gathers references into an innovative anthology.
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Martyn Poliakoff, a student once told him, has two great assets as a scientist: a funny name and funny hair.
Both should prove useful to the research professor of chemistry at the University of Nottingham, who is soon to take on a new role as foreign secretary of the Royal Society – effectively an amb
assador for British science.
His hair, Professor Poliakoff admits, has undoubtedly caused a lot of interest on the internet, where he has become something of a sensation thanks to the science-related videos he regularly posts on YouTube.
“I get quite irritated when people accuse me of dressing up as a mad scientist for the videos and I sometimes post comments saying: ‘No, it’s me’,” he said.
He has always been a keen teacher, making use of unusual props such as a toy for dogs called a Wiggly Giggly, which he “bought at a pet shop and is the same shape as the methane molecule but squeaks when you rotate it”. He also uses a furry bone that has the same shape and symmetry as ethylene.
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I have a sneaking suspicion that we university lecturers are so good at incorporating new media into our work that we may do ourselves out of a job.
When I was an undergraduate student, the only technology a lecturer had was a microphone. That was, of course, about 300 years ago – well, it was the 1980s, but that was before most of my current students were born, so for them it might as well have been the 1700s.
There was no such thing as taking the register at classes. As a colleague put it recently: “If you had a lecture or a tutorial, you just went.” No roll call was needed, because you had to attend classes in order to get the information.
If you missed a lecture, you hoped a kind friend would give you their notes – and prayed that they had paid attention and written down the right thing.
I don’t remember any photocopied sheets, handouts with the basic material you needed or even unit guides, unless you were doing distance courses (off-campus or extramural). University learning was about attending lectures and furiously taking notes, applying that knowledge at tutorials, and reading widely about the subject from the reading list and beyond. You had to think about and source material for yourself.
With the wonders of digital technology, university learning has become high-tech. In my lectures, I love to use PowerPoint slides with links to YouTube clips and other material. My slides are posted on the unit’s website each week, and my lectures are recorded and made available via the library website.
Read full article, and think whether we’re doing ourselves out of a job, or whether we now have a bigger audience, and that we need to be thinking of new ways to capture that audience.
Even in the web age, academic get-togethers remain relevant, says Alice Bell
There’s a lot of talk about the ways in which digital communication might help academics talk to each other and find new ways to connect with those outside the academy, too. Much as I find this incredibly exciting, I’d like to speak up for the humble seminar.
I don’t mean seminars run as part of taught courses: I mean the departmental seminar, the work-in-progress seminar, the seminar series linked to some cross-institutional research strand – discrete little academic events where a group of people get together to share their scholarship.
Done well, a seminar should be the highlight of any academic’s week. It offers a chance to hear from a scholar directly, to enjoy their humour and asides, and the special tone they reserve for particular phrases (or for the names of certain colleagues…). Best of all, it’s a chance to ask questions afterwards, and to chat about it with others over a drink, too; a chance for a department to get together and invite friends; a chance to collectively experience something new, and learn from each other in the process; a chance for diverse and exciting conversation, not the dreary reading out of notes.
Sadly, however, they rarely are this good. I think the low point came a year ago when I realised that the guy sitting next to me (a highly educated and expert colleague, I might add) was holding his phone, watching a video of cats playing bagpipes. Others were checking emails, quietly marking essays or playing Sudoku. I was concentrating hard on this badly presented paper, giving it the benefit of the doubt, trying to find something original and coherent in it. Everyone else had switched off. Moreover, jaded by previous experiences, they’d expected to. They had brought along something “to play with”, just as they might do for a long train journey. And those are the ones who turned up at all.
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