"What we're doing now as EduPunks is we're kind of taking the same concept, the same ethos of the punk era and we're applying it to education," says Steve Wheeler, a self-proclaimed EduPunk educator at the University of Plymouth. "We're doing it ourselves. We're using our own tools. We're bypassing the educational systems that have been put in place by the corporate companies and institutions. That's EduPunk."
many social networking sites -– such as the 25 million-strong Viadeo Global Social Networking and Campus Networking — are multilingual. Facebook is available in more than 70 languages.
"Facebook has a number of international offices, and if they're interested in being truly global, they'll need to understand the cultural nuances that they'll face in other countries," says Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motor Co. and overseer of The Social Media Marketing Blog.
It's absolutely essential, he adds, "that Facebook — or any other company doing business globally — does not simply try to take an American approach to its efforts. It absolutely needs to be culturally sensitive and consistent with the norms of the local markets."
When teachers write about their jobs, personal narrative can collide with expectations of student privacy.
It's "an area that we're just beginning to get our arms around," said Stuart Knade, chief counsel of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association. "The limits of what should be our business and what is not still are not clear, and probably won't be for years."
Perhaps that's why the Pennsylvania State Education Association says on its website that teachers should not blog about their "job duties, colleagues, supervisors, or students."
The authors, at least, certainly aren’t advocating drunken speeches. But personally, public speaking at scientific conferences seems as good a reason as any to hydrate with some fast-acting liquid courage. It’s a lot better than drinking while you’re actually conducting the studies that you’re presenting on, anyway. And it’s certainly better than drinking one too many glasses of wine at dinner later that night before driving home. Now of course acting like Anna Nicole Smith at the 2004 Video Music Awards probably isn’t the wisest thing you could do in front of your professional colleagues and I wouldn’t recommend it for job talks. But for me, a carefully calibrated shot or two of vodka or, if there’s a bottle at hand, a glass-and-a-half of Chianti, dispensed precisely 45 minutes prior to going on stage, not only dampens my stress response before giving a nerve-racking talk—that’s all well and fine, of course—but more importantly it dampens the intolerable glare from that burning sea of eyes before me. Alcohol is without rival in its ability to dilute the presence of other minds.
Crowd Science, as it might be called, is taking hold in several other disciplines, such as biology, and is rising rapidly in oceanography and a range of environmental sciences. "Crowdsourcing is a natural solution to many of the problems that scientists are dealing with that involve massive amounts of data," says Haym Hirsh, director of the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation. Findings have just grown too voluminous and complex for traditional methods, which consisted of storing numbers in spreadsheets to be read by one person, says Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist and director of the University of Washington eScience Institute. So vast data-storage warehouses, accessible to many researchers, are going up in several scholarly fields to try to keep track of the wealth of information.
an idea that we have largely taken for granted is in fact the product of a very specific ideology. Despite its Department of Defense origins, the matrixed, hyperlinked Internet was both cause and effect of the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley. The open-source mentality, in theory if not always in practice, proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds. Facebook and Twitter achieved massive scale quickly by creating an open system accessible to outside developers, though that openness is at times more about branding than anything else—as Twitter’s fellow travelers are now finding out. Mainframe behemoths like IBM wave the bloody shirt of Linux, the nonprofit open-source competitor of Microsoft Windows, any time they need to prove their bona fides to the tech community. Ironically, only the “old” entertainment and media industries, it seems, took open and free literally, striving to prove that they were fit for the digital era’s freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar by making their most expensively produced products available for free on the Internet. As a result, they undermined in little more than a decade a value proposition they had spent more than a century building up.
Typically, the concern about our dependence on technology is that it detracts from our time with family and friends in the real world. But psychologists have become intrigued by a more subtle and insidious effect of our online interactions. It may be that the immediacy of the Internet, the efficiency of the iPhone and the anonymity of the chat room change the core of who we are, issues that Dr. Aboujaoude explores in a book, “Virtually You: The Internet and the Fracturing of the Self,” to be released next year.
Dr. Aboujaoude also asks whether the vast storage available in e-mail and on the Internet is preventing many of us from letting go, causing us to retain many old and unnecessary memories at the expense of making new ones. Everything is saved these days, he notes, from the meaningless e-mail sent after a work lunch to the angry online exchange with a spouse.
the majority of experiments that have looked directly at the effects of the internet, video games and online social networking have actually found significant cognitive benefits. Video games improve visual attention and memory, Facebook users have more friends (in real life, too) and preliminary evidence suggests that surfing the web "engages a greater extent of neural circuitry...[than] reading text pages."
Now these studies are all imperfect and provisional. (For one thing, it's not easy to play with Google while lying still in a brain scanner.) But they certainly don't support the hypothesis that the internet, as Carr writes, is turning us into "mere signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory."
Some 25 years after first moving to New York himself with an undergraduate degree in fine arts from Yale University and the hope of making it in theater design, Mr. Shirky has emerged, somewhat improbably, as the leading voice of New York's new school of technological pragmatism.
On June 10, Penguin Press will publish his latest book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. It's a wide-ranging essay about how the emerging forms of the Internet will ultimately provide a net benefit for society, in part by helping to free us all from our decades-long habit of over-medicating with television.
Most of us adjust to this situation more-or-less unconsciously and in an ad hoc way: we might be reading something online and think, I need to print this out; or we might just have an inarticulate feeling that we'd rather read a particular book on paper rather than on a Kindle. But I think teachers are going to have to be more conscious of these matters and adjust their strategies for teaching attentive reading accordingly. Last semester, for the first time, I had students reading some of their assigned books on Kindles, and next summer, when I will be leading a summer study tour of England, I plan to put every text that I can on my Kindle so I don't have to schlep a big pile of books around the island for six weeks. Within a year or two I expect to have a much better handle on how to deal with these changes.