web strategy + consulting
“The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.”
- Gunter Grass
Gunter Grass’ message is especially critical to those early-to-late majority users (i.e., everybody) who may not know the value or importance of their voice in the battle for a many-to-many democratic internet.
This post seeks to address why this is with resources and activities designed specifically for early-late majority users to find and use their voice for digital democracy.
For those who have experienced inequity on the wrong side of the social and digital divide, social networking sites may not be experienced in quite the same way as those who enjoy material privilege and/or stability. In this sense, webby fun is relative to inclusivity. Especially in spaces that are not designed according to our actual identities, values, beliefs and experiences but the value of our consumer demographic data.
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Continue reading ‘Social networking and social class: Survey’
This weekend, I tried out Seesmic and YLive! with my brand new Microsoft Life cam (nothing fancy but it works - and it’s the best they had at The Source). Some are calling this “life streaming” (AKA streaming chat).
Continue reading ‘YLive! … Seesmic: I can has user controls?’
I got my first twitter notification last spring. I thought: “great, another chat app. So what?”
I didn’t really have time to play with it so I did the laggard thing and let others show me why it mattered. Many months later, I have some reasons to engage it. I’ll be writing a post about this in the next couple of days.
In the meantime, you’ll find me at twitter.com/melmcbride
I’m all about words. And so is the web. If Marshall McLuhan was still around, he’d say this is no coincidence.A while back, I wrote an article about the role of McLuhan’s literacy legacy in his media theory. I argued that his identity as an English professor was not merely a pitstop on the way to media gurudom but the core of his intellectual operating system.From his forecast of the collective unconscious and his understanding of media as extensions of our sensory apparatus to the problem of narcosis and the emergence of a neo-tribalism, he saw the shape of things to come through his academic rear view mirror. For McLuhan, our play with words - arguably the cornerstone of human cognition - offered the most clues about how we organised the world in our own image. These insights are especially prescient in our current technological moment, which is all about the word.
In January 2004 I read a post at Loic Le Meur’s old blog that changed my approach to online life and activity. He warned us to “build and check your virtual identity and online reputation or you will be in trouble.” This post inspired me to establish a more strategic online identity and maintain some consistency in my selected metadata (stated background, interests, visual media) and contact networks. Given recent worst practices in new social networking services, Le Meur’s advice couldn’t be more prophetic.
Facebook’s recent - and obnoxious move - to allow open searching of FB profiles outside of FB should be read as a warning sign of things to come. This, only one week after they permitted a tool called Friend Finder to bypass user settings to allow people to spam you add you as a friend - even if you had specified that access to your profile was “message” or “poke” only. This is what happened to me and others. And if that wasn’t enough, my privacy settings were compromised within hours of the automated public search. Somehow, my privacy setting changed from “friends only” search to “all my friends and all my networks.”
Sir Ken Robinson, from his TED talk on creativity
If you haven’t done so already, you must watch Sir Ken Robinson’s wonderful TED conference talk “Do schools kill creativity.” He’s got the timing and wit of a comedian combined with the uncommon insights into future of learning and business. View it here.
According to Robinson, the problem with creativity is not that we lack it, but that we don’t really get much of a chance to nurture or explore it. And this isn’t our fault. Robinson says we’ve unlearned it as a result of traditional learning models that privilege literacy and numeracy above other forms of learning and effectively “kill” the original gift of creativity we all possess.
Why do some students engage their learning while others disengage?
This is the most intriguing and difficult question I encountered during my teacher training last year at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. The deeper I searched for answers, the more unwieldy my exploration became. I learned, for example, that engagement isn’t simply a matter of ability or attitude but a complex range of social conditions, policy, practice, individual learning differences and many other variables.
But one issue I didn’t see addressed is the role of shifting technological paradigms and the reality of a web2.0 oriented learner. Also notably absent from much discussion is the students’ perspective. Unlike the tech sector, education is not user-driven but largely top down. Like the older developer-driven models, educational stakeholders (academic researchers, teachers, administrators and policy makers) design metrics and methodologies that speak to their own research and policy requirements. Why not measure the efficacy of the system according to the sensory orientations of today’s learners instead of measuring the student against a laggard system? In the context of diffusion of innovations, our students are the innovators and early adopters - so why aren’t we listening to them? As a formerly disengaged learner, I find this lack of connection with the end user problematic. In my view, addressing the web2.0 learner is the path to crossing the chasm of student disengagement.
Delicious | Education
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