Not, perhaps, since the printing press's invention has European culture experienced so much upheaval. The very underpinnings of the notion of culture and of its modes of production, socialisation and appropriation are under attack. I am speaking, of course, of culture's integration in the creation of economic value. This integration process has accelerated since the beginning of the 1980s through, on one hand, the globalisation and increasing pervasion of finance in the economy, and on the other, the onslaught of so-called "new technologies".
Depending on your needs, we will:
- Help you determine how (and whether!) conferencing can benefit you
- Recommend software that best fits your environment and suits your particular needs
- Install and configure conferencing software at your site
- Design and build a fully customized conferencing space for you
- Facilitate online discussions or train facilitators
Barry's new logo - a dramatic image of One Tree Hill.
19. Simplify If we could abolish knowledge and wisdom Then people would profit a hundredfold; If we could abolish duty and justice Then harmonious relationships would form; If we could abolish artifice and profit Then waste and theft would disappear. Yet such remedies treat only symptoms And so they are inadequate. People need personal remedies: Reveal your naked heart and embrace your original nature; Bind your self-interest and control your ambition; Forget your habits and simplify your affairs.
However, the most difficult part of the system to put in place will be an appropriate educational infrastructure to support the kind of learning needed in the 21st century. The provision of appropriate education and training services to run on the information highway is critical; there is no automatic guarantee that people will use the information highway to an extent that justifies the cost of investment, if services are not provided that meet people's needs. Unfortunately, existing educational institutions were created to meet the needs of a society that are fast disappearing. We need new educational organizations that can exploit the information highway to meet the needs of the 21st century. Economic development will depend as much on the success of creating and supporting such organizations, as on establishing the technological infrastructure. It is critical to get this right because those countries that harness the power of multi-media communications for education and training purposes will be the economic powerhouses of the 21st century
A small profit will start to be made by UBC at the end of the third year. A more substantial profit will be made over the life of the entire program of five courses as start-up costs (which are substantially higher than ongoing/maintenance costs) will have been absorbed in the first course, EDST 565f. This course served as a template for the other four courses, therefore less time (and money) was required to develop the remaining four courses. The profit serves as a contingency in case unexpected costs arise or projected student numbers are not reached.This is just one excerpt from one of may papers on Tony Bate's home page.
Collection of sites with vendors of collaboration tools. We gratefully welcome all contributions and suggestions. DenhamGrey 04/22/99More useful links from Denham on a beautiful wiki site.
Exploring the exciting and emergent world of distance learning tools. Started by DenhamGrey on 04/22/2000.
- Central Technology Support Units for Universities
- "The use of information technologies needs to be coordinated, and policy and investment needs to be planned at the most senior institutional management level."
- Strategic Visioning of Technology-Based Teaching
- "The development of a detailed and clear vision for teaching and learning is essential."
- Visioning Technology-Based Teaching at the Department Level
- "Although visioning can take place at various levels in the organization, the best place to start is at the department teaching level."
- Planning for Technology-Based Teaching at the Institutional Level
- "A plan will only be as good as the vision that drives it."
- Classroom vs. Technology-Based Teaching
- "Good technology does not save bad teaching."
The challenge for universities Many universities are making substantial investments in new technologies for teaching purposes. The increasing ease of use and improved presentational and interactive features of technologies such as the World Wide Web are leading many academics to use technology for teaching for the first time in a significant manner. However, although there has been widespread adoption of new technologies for teaching in the last few years, they have yet to bring about major changes in the way teaching is organized and delivered. Without such changes, though, technology-based teaching will remain a marginalized activity, while at the same time leading to increased unit costs. For technological change to be effective, it usually needs to be accompanied by major structural and organizational changes for its full potential to be realised. This paper attempts to indicate some of the strategies that universities may need to adopt in order to use technology effectively for teaching and learning.This is a classic paper by Tony Bates 1997 is important and certainly appeals on first glance. He goes on to outline 12 steps in which the University will be reformed, transformed - I'll list them here.
Twelve organizational strategies for change 10 1. A vision for teaching and learning 11 2. Funding re-allocation 12 3. Strategies for inclusion 13 4. Technology infrastructure 15 5. People infrastructure 15 6. Student computer access 16 7. New teaching models 18 8. Faculty agreements and training 20 9. Project management 21 10. New organizational structures 23 11. Collaboration and consortia 26 12. Research and evaluation 27
To be effective, online courses must do two things, says Fernando Senior, an instructional designer recently hired by the University of Minnesota's distance-education department. They must focus on learners, and they must capitalize on the medium. In other words, students should demonstrate learning in different ways than they might in a classroom, because they have at hand the tools to do so. ... Constructing such rich learning environments wouldn't be possible without technology, say its enthusiasts, but to make courses this sophisticated, schools are tapping project-management teams. And these bring their own set of pros and cons to education. On the plus side, instructors say that working with teams makes them better teachers, and that different perspectives enhance their courses. They say they also see a difference in what students take away from their work: "Students take much more responsibility for their own learning and use the online environment to supplement and enhance their learning experiences," says Trisha SwanWisdom here. Good article. The site it comes from is worth noting too: ComputerUser Many articles on file and I can flick them straight into the Palm! Beutifully done.
Berge Collins Associates are consultants in online and web-based teaching and learning at a distance.
Since the late 1980's, we've been hearing about the coming "convergence" of existing media with emerging media. From Hypercard hype, to George Gilder's groundbreaking treatise on new media, Life Beyond Television, to the present day hype fest surrounding convergence, broadband, interactive, and other flavor of the month terms, there has been a hope and promise of media one day "bridging the proscenium" of the broadcast model and delivering true narrowcast content. Until very recently, this promise has fallen flat on its face when it comes to actual delivery. The landscape is littered with the corpses of abandoned interactive T.V., integrated "tele-puter", and on demand media projects. Is it any wonder that interactive media professionals, investors, and consumers alike are jaded to the near quarterly output of the mainstream media’s "next biggest thing?” However, media professionals should not let the media's proclivity to drive terms and concepts into the ground cause them to lose sight of the fact that a lot of these ideas are fundamentally good, potentially profitable, and moreover, almost certainly ripe with the potential of changing the way we communicate with each other, receive and process information and entertainment, and by extrapolation, view and relate to the world around us.Looks interesting... also interesting is Mightywords where one can publich papers like this.
George P. Landow Landow's advice on making the leap into hypertext includes a chapter on "Reconfiguring the Text" in which he discusses the fragmentation of text into small units. (52) One of these small units is an item on a list. Do readers have assumptions about the order of these small units? Dispersed Text "Hypertext linking, reader control, and variation not only militate against the modes of argumentation to which we have become accustomed but have other, far more general effects,...the text appears to fragment, to atomize, into constituent elements (into lexias or blocks of text), and these reading units take on a life of their own as they become more self-contained, because they become less dependent on what comes before or after in a linear succession." (52) Argumentation, Organization, and Rhetoric "...the movement from manuscript to print and then to hypertext appears one of increasing fragmentation. As long as a thematic or other culturally coherent means of ordering is available to the reader, the fragmentation of the hypertext document does not imply the kind of entropy that such fragmentation would have in the world of print. Capacities such as full-text searching, aautomatic linking, agents, and conceptual filtering potentially have the power to retain the benefits of hypertextuality while insulating the reader from the ill effects of abandoning linearity." (57)
"The sequential processing and spatializing of the word, initiated by writing and raised to new order of intensity by print, is further intensified by the computer, which maximizes commitment of the word to space and to (electronic) local motion and optimizes analytic sequentiality by making it virtually instantaneous." (136) Ong's history of print, including remarks on lists and on indexes proposes a transformation of consciousness that accompanies the move from orality to literacy and print. The move to print includes the technology of virtually identical reproduction of pages, as well as text and images. Modern science developed from such technology. As the book gives way for certain purposes to the computer (and Ong theorizes that the book will remain an important and sometimes preferred technology alongside the computer) will a "secondary orality" come into play? Can the noetic navigation of "places" on the Internet be that play? Ong says yes. Has an evolution in human consciousness been under way as a continuation of Ong's discussion of the interiorization of words and print? When a medium like hypertext meets late twentieth century readers and writers, will they make choices from lists of links and as a result know simultaneously a more open-ended and more interiorized experience of language and meaning? Will readers and writers experience an intensified "sequential processing and spatializing of the word?" Ong says yes. (136)I have just come across Ong. Student of Mcluhan apparently. I am looking for more stuff...
Evaluation includes getting ongoing feedback, e.g., from the learner, trainer and learner's supervisor, to improve the quality of the training and identify if the learner achieved the goals of the training.
The Post-Alphabet Future The real world of digital reality has always been post-alphabetic. Probably because the letters of the alphabet were too slow to keep up with the light-time and light-speed of electronics, the alphabet long ago shuddered at the speed of light, burned up and crashed to earth. Writing can't keep up to the speed of electronic society. The result has been the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy and the beginning of the Image Millennium. Images moving at the speed of light. Images moving faster than the time it takes to record their passing. Iconic images. Special-Effect Images. Images of life past, present and future as culture is fast-forwarded into the electronic nervous system. Images that circulate so quickly and shine with such intensity that they begin to alter the ratio of the human sensorium.
(This essay appears as Chapter 2 in my book The Second Media Age (Blackwell 1995) ... "In the twentieth century electronic media are supporting an equally profound transf ormation of cultural identity. Telephone, radio, film, television, the computer and now their integration as "multimedia" reconfigure words, sounds and images so as to cultivate new configurations of individuality. If modern society may be said to foster an individual who is rational, autonomous, centered, and stable (the "reasonable man" of the law, the educated citizen of representative democracy, the calculating "economic man" of capitalism, the grade defined student of public education), then perhaps a postmodern society is emerging which nurtures forms of identity different from, even opposite to those of modernity. And electronic communications technologies significantly enhance these postmodern possibilities. Discussions of these technologies, as w e shall see, tend often to miss precisely this crucial level of analysis, treating them as enhancements for already formed individuals to deploy to their advantage or disadvantage."
I offer you professional counselling by email, for a fee. This is genuine human contact between you and me which is confidential and secure. You may use my email counselling service and remain anonymous.My friend Barry has recently aquired a new .com url! Looking good Barry!
"...In my early professionals years I was asking the question: How can I treat, or cure, or change this person? Now I would phrase the question in this way: How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?" -- Carl Rogers, On Becoming a PersonA Rogers Page, with links to books.
"Robo Sapiens: Evolution of a New Species" takes this notion and runs with it. Journalist Faith D'Aluisio and photographer Peter Menzel have assembled an accessible guide to the field of robotics that's part photo essay and part primer, with a healthy dose of fatalistic futurism. They start out with a bang -- the shocking cover image of an eerily fetuslike robot head is possibly the most disturbing photo ever to appear on a coffee-table book -- and manage to turn interviews with more than 100 of the geekiest humans around the world into a curious peek at the future that will satisfy both the layperson and the engineer alike.amazon
Reviewed by Adrian MihalacheAmazon
This page begins with a brief synopsis preceding an excerpt from "Seeing through the Interface: Computers and the Future of Composition," by Nancy Kaplan and Stuart Moulthrop. The synopsis contains links to themes within the excerpt.I seem to be surfing a wave here that is going backwards into what might now be seen as classics, though i did not know of this stuff at the time!
I want to open a metaphor for you. A word. Door. With language I can create an opening; on the other side describe, perhaps, a classroom: the space of the room lit with flickering greens or whatever other colors flow from electric screens, the ambiance the humming fans of computers, the cackling of keys. In a MUD I can do that: create a room, or an object, structure it to my liking with my words. I can do that here as well, use my words to create a scene. The disparities between a word world described here and one erected in a social MUD may not be that great. While a MUD is more directly a text-based reality, the reality of this room, this gathering, can depend on the coming together of our language, talk either constructed here through mutual agreement, or mediating our cognitive selves.This paper has nice words for this very Psybernettic notion.
I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the "cathedral" model of most of the commercial world versus the "bazaar" model of the Linux world. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", suggest productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.Wanted this link handy. It keeps coming up. Damn. I dont actually like the fundamental idea here, but it is still quite a seminal essay!
But then, the web isn't really a geography. Or if it is, it's a geography akin to that of dreams and literature as well as to that of the physical world.From Mike Gunderloy's short article. He maintains his own site with journal and weblog, Larkfarm as well as cybering
The Internet is filled with junk and jerks. It is commonplace for inhabitant of the Internet to complain bitterly about the lack of cooperation, decorum, and useful information. The signal-to-noise ratio, it is said, is bad and getting worse.This might be useful in the "commodification" discussion.Even a casual trip through cyberspace will turn up evidence of hostility, selfishness, and simple nonsense. Yet the wonder of the Internet is not that there is so much noise, but that there is any significant cooperation at all. Given that online interaction is relatively anonymous, that there is no central authority, and that it is difficult or impossible to impose monetary or physical sanctions on someone, it is striking that the Internet is not literally a war of all against all. For a student of social order, what needs to be explained is not the amount of conflict but the great amount of sharing and cooperation that does occur in online communities.
The Jung Page was founded in 1995 to encourage new psychological ideas and conversations about what it means to be human in our time and placeThis is a new address for the jung page. I thought it had gone defunct. A good place to go.
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"Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species.I saw that Dolores O'Brien had written a comment on this article so bought Wired one more time. However it is here online all along. Here is Dolore's article: http://www.cgjung.com/psychtech/endangered.html
What separates humans from animals, Deacon writes, is our capacity for symbolic representation. Animals can easily learn to link a sound with an object or an effect with a cause. But symbolic thinking assumes the ability to associate things that might only rarely have a physical correlation; think of the word "unicorn," for instance, or the idea of the future. Language is only the outward expression of this symbolic ability, which lays the foundation for everything from human laughter to our compulsive search for meaning.It is this ability to do the symbolic thing that is the stuff that dreams and cyberspace is made of.
The hi-tech gift economy heralds the end of private property in 'cutting edge' areas of the economy. ... Net users will always obtain much more than will ever be contributed in return. By giving away something which is well-made, they will gain recognition from those who download their work. For most people, the gift economy is simply the best method of collaborating together in cyberspace. Within the mixed economy of the Net, anarcho-communism has become an everyday reality.I think it is all marvelous, but something is not quite right. Perhaps it is more that there is a revolution brewing, that the means of production - and the nature of the fundamental commodity has changed. Its not communism thats for sure.
Virilio: The body has a dimension of simulation. The learning process, for instance: when one learns how to drive a car or a van, once in the van, one feels completely lost. But then, once you have learnt how to drive, the whole van is in your body. It is integrated into your body. Another example: a man who pilots a Jumbo Jet will ultimately feel that the Boeing is entering his body. But what is going on now, or should happen in one or two generations, is the disintegration of the world. Real time 'live' technologies, cyberreality, will permit the incorporation of the world within oneself. One will be able to read the entire world, just like during the Gulf War. And I will have become the world. The body of the world and my body will be one. Once again, this is a divine vision; and this is what the military are looking for. Earth is already being integrated into the Pentagon, and the man in the Pentagon is already piloting the world war - or the Gulf War - as if he were a captain whose huge boat would have become his own body. Thus the body simulates the relationship to the world.That is isnteresting on the connection between the body and the virtual world!
Seth Godin's company, Yoyodyne Entertainment, developed games and contests consumers played via e-mail to sell products. Yahoo bought Yoyodyne and Godin received $30 million in stock. In addition to working at Yahoo, Godin has written Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends, and Friends into Customers.Free Chapters available here: http://www.permission.com/ Amazon All this is leading up to an article by steve beard in MUTE where he talks about Virilio and Godin.
The day when virtual reality becomes more powerful than reality will be the day of the big accident. Mankind never experienced such an extraordinary accident.
JAMES DER DERIAN: Is the author dead? PAUL VIRILIO: There is a great threat to writing. The written work is threatened by the screen, not by the image. There have always been images in books. There have always been images in architecture, like frescoes or stain glass windows. No, it is the evocative power of the screen, and in particular the live screen. It is real time that threatens writing. Writing is always, always, in a deferred time, always delayed. Once the image is live, there is a conflict between deferred time and real time, and in this there is a serious threat to writing and the author.I am following up on some references here for a discussion on the possibility of commodification of dreamwork on the net. Some more references to come!
