Category: Psyber

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Books of the Month: December 2002

Books of the Month — Index

December 2000

Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet. MIT Press, 1999. Reviewed by Linda Baughman.

Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures. MIT Press, 2000. Reviewed by Bryan Alexander.

Review Essay: Anthony Wilhelm, Democracy in a Digital Age: Challenges to Political Life in Cyberspace (Routledge, 2000); Elaine Kamarck and Joseph Nye, Democracy.com? Governance in a Networked World (Hollis Publishing, 1999); and Richard Davis, The Web of Politics: The Internet’s Impact on the American Political System (Oxford University Press, 1999). Reviewed by Philip Howard.

Three reviews, as regular as clockwork. Well maintained site. I get notified every time – see the spyonit link on the left.

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Dreaming in Cyberspace

Walter Logeman –  ASD Dream Time – Dreaming in Cyberspace

A description of an online group approach to dream work that can give deep insight into the unconscious. Use of the Internet can add a dimension to dream work that was not possible without it. The Internet presents us with features that enhance and reveal the psychological depth of the work. The DreamEvents are private and confidential so publicly available and generalised material are used in this article.

This is a reference to an article I wrote earlier this year. I needed ready access to the link!

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Foolish Luddism?

Preview of an e-learning book

Beware of too much technology

Everything in moderation, nothing in excess the ancient Greeks taught us. E-learning is one of those areas where we might get excessive. An example of excessive use of the technology is seen in some courses where participants need to spend hours downloading files or reading documents online. In some courses students waste time working in groups. In other courses students are expected to read long documents on a computer monitor. It would be better to send them paper versions of the documents. Placing huge documents on CD-ROM, or DVD sounds like a great idea, but who reads them? Video conferencing appeals to the techie in us, but is it more effective than video tapes or even audio tapes? Is video conferencing worth the additional cost and the effort? You can get too much of a good thing. E-learning does not need to be 100% pure. It may be appropriate to combine leader-led courses, paper-based documents, video tapes and audio tapes with e-learning instructional materials.

One of the dangers of online learning is that we will try to do too much with new technology. We need to guard against replacing existing, valid approaches with new, less-effective ones.

Later: Thursday, April 8, 2010

They have gone, but will be here forever: http://web.archive.org/web/20020205132359/http://www.e-learninghub.com/effective.html

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Is The Virtual Community A Myth?

Slashdot | Is The Virtual Community A Myth?

Berkeley scholar Joseph Lockard (a doctoral candidate in English Literature) claims the idea of the virtual community is a Ponzi scheme, promoted by benighted utopians and elitists who equate access to the Net and the Web with social and democratic enlightenment. This myth has been virtually unchallenged for years, he says, and in a provocative and interesting essay called Progressive Politics, Electronic Individualism, and the Myth of Virtual Community, Lockard claims that it’s nothing more than a bunch of hooey.

This item is posted by Jon Katz and his commentary concludes:

Online people do make powerful connections and the virtual realm does permit us to share information (including software), research and commerce and and encounter all sorts of people in all kinds of places — something that has never been possible before. But when the dust settles, and if the history of technology offers any clues, people will always hang out with their friends, get drunk. They’ll still be logging off their computers to have sex, get married, fight with their parents, send their kids off to school and go to the movies, and seek out the company of human beings to meet human needs. The best virtual communities have always complimented that need, not supplanted it.

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Educational Media

Educational Media by Tony Bates

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

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What Kind of University?

What Kind of University?

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

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Online Learning

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 Swan

Wisdom 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! Beautifully done.

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Postmodern Virtualities


Postmodern Virtualities
Mark Poster

(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 transformation 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 gradedefined 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.”

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