The power of the internet to change (record) history

AOTUS: Collector in Chief

The Archivist’s Take on Transparency, Collaboration, and Participation at the National Archives.

UK Writer about the internet - Paul Carr

Bringing Nothing To The Party: True Confessions of a New Media Whore is the painfully true story of how Paul Carr attempted to become a dot com billionaire and in doing so lost his reputation, the love of his life and very nearly his freedom.

I've just finished this 'novel' and really enjoyed the 'insight' into this world I teach about. Scary actually - how volitile it is. It was relieving to see Carr has given up 'drinking rum' as his alcoholism was tedious. I will be following his blog. I had some good laughs. I'll also be using the 'story' of facebook and the million dollar webpage in my classes for a long time. Thanks Paul.

Hole in the wall

Very cool project that brings access to kids without computers.
Hole in the Wall

Tag clouds

Verrry cool tag clouds.
A tag cloud or word cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, typically used to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are normally listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus, both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity are possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.

In principle, the font size of a tag in a tag cloud is determined by its incidence. For a word cloud of categories like weblogs, the frequency of use for example, corresponds to the number of weblog entries that are assigned to a category. For small frequencies it's sufficient to indicate directly for any number from one to a maximum font size. For larger values, a scaling should be made. In a linear normalization, the weight t_i of a descriptor is mapped to a size scale of 1 through f, where t_min and t_max are specifying the range of available weights.

for t_i > t_min; else s_i = 1

• s_i: display fontsize
• f_max: max. fontsize
• t_i: count
• t_min: min. count
• t_max: max. count

Cyberbullying in its place

Some info sheets for teens experiencing bullying via facebook.

Coming soon..

Literacy of Literacies!

From Howard Reinhold Essay 'Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies'
"we must develop a participative pedagogy, assisted by digital media and networked publics, that focuses on catalyzing, inspiring, nourishing, facilitating, and guiding literacies essential to individual and collective life in the 21st century. Literacies are where the human brain, human sociality and communication technologies meet. We're accustomed to thinking about the tangible parts of communication media−the devices and networks−but the less visible social practices and social affordances, from the alphabet to TCP/IP, are where human social genius can meet the augmenting power of technological networks. Literacy is the most important method Homo sapiens has used to introduce systems and tools to other humans, to train each other to partake of and contribute to culture, and to humanize the use of instruments that might otherwise enable commodification, mechanization and dehumanization. By literacy, I mean, following on Neil Postman and others, the set of skills that enable individuals to encode and decode knowledge and power via speech, writing, printing and collective action, and which, when learned, introduce the individual to a community. Literacy links technology and sociality. The alphabet did not cause the Roman Empire, but made it possible. Printing did not cause democracy or science, but literate populations, enabled by the printing press, devised systems for citizen governance and collective knowledge creation. The Internet did not cause open source production, Wikipedia or emergent collective responses to natural disasters, but it made it possible for people to act together in new ways, with people they weren't able to organize action with before, in places and at paces for which collective action had never been possible. Literacies are the prerequisite for the human agency that used alphabets, presses and digital networks to create wealth, alleviate suffering and invent new institutions. If the humans currently alive are to take advantage of digital technologies to address the most severe problems that face our species and the biosphere, computers, telephones and digital networks are not enough. We need new literacies around participatory media, the dynamics of cooperation and collective action, the effective deployment of attention and the relatively rational and critical discourse necessary for a healthy public sphere."
I'm trying to put something together for us. Stay tuned..

News in the Age of Participation by Gerrit Visser

How to Recognize The Future When It Lands On You
Technologies of Cooperation
March 1st, 2010

News is changing. How we get news, where we get news, how we react to news, what we do with news when we get it and on and on.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project published today a report that takes a look at this rapidly changing area of our lives and the impact it has.

Full Pew Survey report via Frank Reed Marketing Pilgrim via smartmobs.com blog

In the digital era, news has become omnipresent. Americans access it in multiple formats on multiple platforms on myriad devices. The days of loyalty to a particular news organization on a particular piece of technology in a particular form are gone. The overwhelming majority of Americans (92%) use multiple platforms to get news on a typical day, including national TV, local TV, the internet, local newspapers, radio, and national newspapers. Some 46% of Americans say they get news from four to six media platforms on a typical day. Just 7% get their news from a single media platform on a typical day.

Here are a few pieces of data to consider about news:

Portable : 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.

Personalized : 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.

Participatory : 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Award winning website

Winner of the Weird section of the Webby Awards!
Very quirky games etc!

www.secrettechnology.com

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We are SA Educators bringing school and work together to form an Industry pathway. Currently looking at assigning components from Industry Training Packages into four categories Print, Screen, Web & Sound Curriculum. If you are an educator tell me how Digital media looks in your school.