Category: social informatics

Call: closed systems / open worlds

Closed Systems / Open Worlds Edited by: Jeremy Hunsinger (Wilfrid Laurier University), Jason Nolan (Ryerson University) & Melanie McBride (York University) This book will consist of explorations at the boundaries of virtual worlds as enclosed but encouraging spaces for exploration, learning, and enculturation. Game/worlds like Second Life, OpenSim, Minecraft, and Cloud Party are providing spaces […]

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10 things that i think i know about learning ecologies

10 things that i think i know about learning ecologies 1. human beings learn; we don’t stop learning, we learn while we are awake, we learn while we are asleep, we learn when under stress, and we learn when comfortable and happy. 2. human beings do not always learn what others know,  or think is […]

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“Down the Rabbit Hole” day

This dissociation of cultural subject and cultural production problematizes much of the scholarship being done in virtual worlds which depends on the assumptions that subject/s create or exist in relation to objects, but in the messiness of programmable systems, the mixing of subjects/objects into quasi-subjects, quasi-objects, and the pluralization of the relationship between a persons interface and their ‘avatar’, causes one to be immediately skeptical of the reported experiences of people acting through their interfaces in the virtual world. … In short, when exploring culture in virtual worlds, we need to take care in our methodological choices and their assumptions for even the most basic assumptions such as, “my student in my virtual classroom had the same experience as my other students” is likely to be false in ways that are profoundly different than the ways it may be false in a f2f classroom.

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Fellowship and Conference

Since Tuesday I have been in Milwaukee visiting SOIS and CIPR as part of my Information Ethics fellowship. I attended a discussion about a possible future conference on translating intercultural information ethics across the situated understandings that term implies across a plurality of contexts. That seems like a great project, I’m happy to help out […]

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center for new humanities

— this is an interesting presentation for a center for new humanities at rutgers. I’m not sure that humanities are centered around creativity, but I am sure that i think that they humanities lead the way in terms of the skills that allow creativity and innovation to flourish.

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Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom

Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom: Wiki becomes textbook in Boston College classroom —- This is a great idea, I know that when i’ve had my students contribute to wikipedia they’ve learned a fair amount about wikipedia, usually after their additions were deleted, or changed.

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History of social media

History of social media: How the Social Web Came To Be (part 1, part 2) is a slideshow history from Trebor Sholz, for his class on social media.  Very solid, rich stuff. (via Stephen Downes) —- two good slideshows from trebor

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who owns web 2.0?

who owns web 2.0?: Via Tama Leaver, I found this great overview of who owns what from Amy Webb– as you can see, Google, Yahoo and the rest are far more likely than Murdoch, at this point, to end up controlling our media lives in five or ten years time. Amy Webb suggests printing it […]

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Public access group challenges Smithsonian over copyrights

Public access group challenges Smithsonian over copyrights: Grabbing pictures of iconic Smithsonian Institution artifacts just got a whole lot easier. Before, if you wanted to get a picture of the Wright Brothers’ plane, you could go to the Smithsonian Images Web site and pay for a print or high-resolution image after clicking through several warnings […]

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Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops – New York Times

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops – New York Times: So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse. —– […]

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