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I posted to delicious.com
The Social Media Bubble - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review
http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2010/03/the_social_media_bubble.html
January 11 2012, 4:50pm | Comments
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I posted to delicious.com
230 Cultural Icons: Great Artists, Writers & Thinkers in Their Own Words | Open Culture
http://www.openculture.com/cultural_icons
December 26 2011, 10:03pm | Comments
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I posted to delicious.com
Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia
http://reagle.org/joseph/2010/gfc/
- Tags:
- blogs
- internet
- culture
- Collaboration
- wiki
September 23 2011, 1:53am | Comments
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I posted to beespace.net
Back to the Roots: some background
http://beespace.net/back-to-the-roots-some-background/
Barbara Ganley’s (the bg from bgblogging) invitation to take part in the Guest Series: Food Stories: Memory, Culture, Perspective of her Open View Gardens project took me back in time and roused me from blogging torpor (slow-blogging would be an overstatement), challenging me to mobilize my almost forgotten composition skills. I first met Barbara online around 2003, in the early years of edublogging and followed her journey from a distance, through her photographs and thoughtful posts. Six years later, in the spring of 2009, she gracefully hosted me at her cosy home in the spectacular Green Mountain State. She had just stopped teaching contemporary creative nonfiction at Middlebury College and was launching the Digital Exploration project, whereas I had gone back to teaching EFL at high school after a sabbatical year and was traveling in the US following my keynote “Beyond Bits, Bytes, Pixels and Sprites” for the 56th NECTFL conference in New York. In her garden, in the kitchen, at the table and around the fireplace, we exchanged our stories and perspectives. Her sense of gardening as a cultural endeavour is strongly revealed through the mission statement of her blog: Growing food grounds us in the relationships between earth and nourishment; preparing food brings us into relationship with our culture and community; sharing meals brings us into close contact with those gathered at the table with us. What better way to build healthy inclusive communities than through growing locally and cooking globally? Now, two years later, I see that Barbara successfully integrated her diverse interests: I’ve discovered how to weave together the various strands of my interests and abilities as I grapple with the relationship between the local and global: through a new LLC, Open View Gardens, I’ll be combining writing, photography, storytelling,– and my two other creative passions: cooking adventures and gardening. While Barbara and I share the same name, pursue many of the same interests, and have embarked on a similar quest, our cultural context, experience and past trajectories are very different. I have not yet been able either to bring together all these bits, bytes and sprites and connect the dots. Her call, however, gave me the opportunity to focus, try my hand at some creative nonfiction, which I had been contemplating for some time, and reflect on the process. The result is the brief essay and video “Back to the Roots”. The text depicts a garden, a season, a perspective, an awareness, a soupçon of Brazilian culture and introduces the reader to a national staple food: cassava. The “Back to the Roots” video, which I uploaded to YouTube, illustrates and complements the text with images and sound. It is an iMovie collage of my own still photographs taken before and after the frost, displayed with slow zooming and panning effects (Ken Burns), and combined with a short video I shot of Clarice, our housekeeper, who dug, washed, peeled, cooked and fried the cassava you see in the film. I used the the Olinda Original Style font for the titles of the cover and credit slides to evoke the idea of back to basics. While I was searching on Jamendo for free music to go with it, I was very lucky to spot Tata Accioly, DJ and percussionist, also known as TataOgan. Coincidentally (and appropriately) the song I found is called “Exodo Urbano” (Urban Exodus), from her first solo project Da Raiz ao Chip (From Root to Chip). Tata’s sound experiments incorporate an eclectic mix of regional Brazilian folklore, Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous elements and ancestral drums combined with the synthetic beats and grooves of electronic music. [She reaches] the “electronic roots”, like a jam session of farmers using their shovels, axes, and knives as musical instruments, or even indigenous rituals harmonically programmed with computerized beats. Here are some bits and bites of a Brazil so large and culturally diverse that an attempt to connect the dots and communicate its hybrid nature, landscape and people must necessarily come through juxtapositions and mash-ups. Many thanks to Rudolf Ammann for his tips on language, layout and design.
- Tags:
- Education
- Technology
- culture
- food
- cooking
- brazil
- back to the roots
- Barbara Ganley
- gardening
- Open View Gardens
July 29 2011, 6:26pm | Comments
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I posted to delicious.com
The Valve - A Literary Organ
March 2 2011, 10:21pm | Comments
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I posted to delicious.com
How To Deconstruct Almost Anything
http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html
January 29 2011, 12:18pm | Comments
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I posted to beespace.net
A Geo-Cultural Perspective
http://beespace.net/a-geo-cultural-perspective/
As I browsed through and responded to the different introductions posted on the LAK11 Moodle forum, I noticed with satisfaction that many participants came from countries other than the US, UK and Canada, with a larger contingent than usual from non-English speaking countries in Europe, South America and Asia. As Stephen Downes mentioned in the first Elluminate recording, a connectivist course is based on 4 pillars : autonomy, diversity, openness and interactivity. I’m going to focus on cultural diversity in this post, which I deem critical in education. Each country has its own educational system, cultural and social norms + expectations which should be taken into account, especially when it comes to finding out what questions are to be asked when building/using tools which gather data, to choosing the right variables, to analyzing and to interpreting data about learners, based on which suggestions are made and many times decisions taken. I believe there is no perfect algorithm, no best way or one best method but many. The assignment given for week 1 of playing around with Hunch has shown it eloquently. Participants expressed many times, among the privacy and ethical issues, the annoyance at the inaccuracy and the US-centred nature of the suggestions, the lack of cultural recognition and the targeted US advertising. Spurred by this observation, John Fritz’s questions yesterday
and bearing in mind that the interest here does not lie in the content but the process, I decided to play and practice by collecting data from the course itself. It’s totally exploratory and I do not yet know where this is going to lead me, what I will encounter on the way or how I will use it, if I ever do. Let’s leave it to serendipity. However, let me take you through my initial steps and thinking process
First, I tried to count (manually) the number of participants from the introduction forum, which would be a gauge to who had made that first step instead of just enrolling. So, (if I have managed to count correctly) out of 228 enrolled members (to this date and time) , 201 have already introduced themselves. Moodle must certainly have an easier way to collect this data but I cannot access it. Google Learning and Analytics group shows 587 members – so I suppose many are following from a distance. As to participants by country, I encountered the same difficulty but managed to produce a graph made online with the online graph maker young kids use at school. (Yes, I am at that level of expertise as math and stats are not my thing, but I am hopefully slowly improving my skills). The graph is primitive but allows me to go over some basic notions and gives you the opportunity to visualize better how participants are distributed by regions. As a learning by-product, and extra time-consuming task, I found out that continents are defined by convention and than their number depends on the country where you are studying, which again shows that visions of the world depend on where you stand and which way you look. For Latin Americans, the world is composed of 6 continents while for China and most English-speaking countries the number seems to be 7. <parenthesis> Somehow related thought that flew by: looking in retrospect, I do not think my Geography teacher mentioned anything about the relativity of continent classification but I do remember my Mum’s comment on how surprised she was to discover that in Brazilian History books (she fled Poland when she was a kid) Napoleon was depicted as an enemy and not the hero who marched together with the Poles against the Russia as she had been taught there…</parenthesis> This obviously did not make my life easier when trying to classify the countries and insert them into continents so I decided to use the UN Geoscheme as reference, which starts with 5 main regions. Here are some of the approximate results of this hunting-gathering data phase, which does nevertheless give you a rough idea of the world inside Moodle. Please correct me if you find gross disparities or if a country has been left out.Americas are well-represented but out of the 134, 116 are from the North. Asia comprises many different countries (Cambodia, China,Kuala Lumpur) including the Middle East (UAE, Quatar, Israel, Turkey) and sports usually 1 per country except for Iran, Israel, China and India (about 2 and 3 per country). In Oceania, 11 are from Australia and 2 from New Zealand. Here some more pie charts per region Americas
There are 58 US and 48 Canada members. Puerto Rico comes next with 6 members, Brazil (5), Mexico (2), Chile (2), while Ecuador, Mexico, Argentina and Guyana have 1 member. Europe In Europe an important representation from the UK (13 with quite a number of Scots), Italy (9), Spain (6), Belgium (5), the Netherlands (5) , Portugal(4), Germany (3), France, Estonia and Ireland (2), and Finland, Sweden, Czech Rep, Romania, Ukraine, Croatia (1).
January 12 2011, 8:04pm | Comments
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I posted to delicious.com
Plain English Campaign homepage
http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/
December 22 2010, 10:10am | Comments
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I posted to delicious.com
Knowtex : le réseau social de la culture scientifique et technique
December 20 2010, 8:01pm | Comments
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I posted to delicious.com
Flusserstudies.net
http://www.flusserstudies.net/pag/current.htm
November 12 2010, 9:57pm | Comments
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I posted to delicious.com
The Landing (beta): Mark A. McCutcheon's blog: Zombies and the political economy of precarity
the current popularity of all things zombie might be used not just to model infectious outbreaks (the adequacy of which modelling, I have to say, leaves me skeptical), but also to stand (or maybe stagger) as a cultural symptom of the globalized political economy that has dispossessed and continues to dispossess so many, leaving them ravenous, their hands outstretched, grasping at any purchase, crazed with rage and frustration, clamouring at the doors and windows of the dwindling few who survive the layoffs and cutbacks -- the embattled few who -- just like in the movies -- usually harbour, whether knowingly or unwittingly, the selfish and treacherous individuals who are responsible for the plague in the first place.
- Tags:
- culture
- Media
- popular
- zombies
- economy
- globalization
- depression
- adaptation
- employment
- precarity
- precariat
- poverty
- allegory
October 27 2010, 8:56pm | Comments
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I posted to delicious.com
Michel Bauwens – The social web and its social contracts: Some notes on social antagonism in netarchical capitalism | Re-public: re-imagining democracy – english version
http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=261
September 22 2010, 1:17am | Comments
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I posted to delicious.com
Avatar activism - Le Monde diplomatique - English edition
http://mondediplo.com/2010/09/15avatar
September 19 2010, 1:33pm | Comments
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I posted to delicious.com
Humanitarian and Cultural Photography; Multimedia Digital Storytelling; Consulting for Non-profit Organizations | Heber Vega
August 18 2010, 10:19pm | Comments
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I posted to delicious.com
Home Page - Television Tropes & Idioms
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage
July 15 2010, 10:14pm | Comments