We empathize with others because we smell the whiff of death in their vulnerabilities and so we celebrate their life. There's no such thing as empathy in heaven because there's no mortality, no suffering. Empathy is about encouraging another person's struggle to be. It's a tough feeling to have. In utopia there's no struggle, there's nothing to empathize with. Empathy is more than just, "I feel your pain". We root for each other's struggle to live out this mystery of life.
Networks thin classroom walls. Experts are no longer “out there” or “over there”. Skype brings anyone, from anywhere, into a classroom. Students are not confined to interacting with only the ideas of a researcher or theorist. Instead, a student can interact directly with researchers through Twitter, blogs, Facebook, and listservs. The largely unitary voice of the traditional teacher is fragmented by the limitless conversation opportunities available in networks. When learners have control of the tools of conversation, they also control the conversations in which they choose to engage.
Course content is similarly fragmented. The textbook is now augmented with YouTube videos, online articles, simulations, Second Life builds, virtual museums, Diigo content trails, StumpleUpon reflections, and so on.
In talking with nearly a dozen professors, Mr. Phinney has heard their concern about violating copyright by making materials available online, about having to censor their remarks, about whether filming lectures will stifle discussion or drive students to skip class, and about running afoul of departmental politics. Mr. Kamdar finds professors generally supportive but also ambivalent, sentiments reflected in a series of faculty interviews that his group has published online.
The cases underscore how far universities are from the "free culture" advocated at the conference.
Bit of a teaser here about what I'd like to talk about with fellow campers in a few weeks.
Students wishing to study English Romanticism ought to have more than Wikipedia-level knowledge about German Idealist philosophy and Romantic poetry; students interested in the 18th-century English novel should be familiar with the Spanish picaresque tradition; and so on and so forth. Comp lit alone cannot break down the walls of literary protectionism.
Clark's latest work shows much promise. He's built four engines that visualize that giant pile of data known as Twitter. All four basically search words used in tweets, then look for relationships to other words or to other Tweeters. They function in almost real time.
For many chefs in the current economic climate, cooking no longer seems enough. To make their names, they need to develop online personas as well as culinary ones. And with instant access to the Web, chefs — who have traditionally been walled up behind the dining room — are bursting out and talking back, often more profanely than can be conveyed here.
At the beginning of each semester of my class, I tell my students that they’re going to leave with a skillset that helps them negotiate human interaction with social technology. I’ve sat up at night, pondering the value of such a skillset. More than anything, the Buzz fiasco has driven home the point that we need interdisciplinary information professionals that can work with teams in negotiating the social implications of their tools. These are the students I’m working with, and I wonder how Buzz would have rolled differently if their voices were brought to the table.
Twitter is a special case. As beautiful and real as I think it is, the code doesn’t reflect the depth of the social experience. They keep losing/erasing/not finding what you’re building. You’re always a stranger with a few days worth of tweets to Twitter, even if you’ve used it for years as an important pathway for defining and refining what you’re becoming and the stories you tell yourself and how that makes you what you are.
In 50% of the countries included in this study, online photo sharing dominated the list of social media applications. It is also among the oldest of social services within the included mix.
44% of the countries in this survey embrace online profiles in social networks suggesting that their personal brand, whether for engaging in personal or professional interactions, is becoming increasingly important.
81% shared photos and online profiles as the top 1 and 2 activities with the exception of Japan, China, and South Korea where blogging displaced social profiles as a top application.
94% of countries reported that micro-blogging (think Twitter) were among the least pervasive with the exception of Japan, where it ranked fourth – just below social network profiles and above video.
Imagine self-tracking games that reward people for recording their health with badges of recognition; passive monitoring devices that remove the need to actively track yourself; social pressure in the form of online group challenges; prizes awarded to algorithms that turn messy data into beautiful insight.
new business measures for assessing the effectiveness of social media marketing:
- Attention: how many people are clicking on your site, blogs or tweets?
- Engagement: how much interaction there is between the community and you?
- Authority: your influence in the community and on the Web?
- Virality: how your information spreads by digital word of mouth?
- Health: the strength of the community and your online presence?
What if instead of leafing through pages or scrolling through an online manual, you could simply see your way through a task? Just slide on a headset and work your way through a bit of customized, augmented-reality education.