Clippings

Mobiles for Literacy

November 3rd, 2010 by Graham Attwell
Thoughtful and incisive essay looking at how communication and thought takes place in ‘continua’ of orality and literacy as well as through visual communication. The author, Marion Walton discusses.the Shuttleworth Foundation’s m4Lit (Mobiles for Literacy) project and the implications for our understandings for literacies and the use of mobile devices.
clipped from newsletter.alt.ac.uk
The notion that there is a causal relationship between literacy and particular thinking patterns may be an old one, but it is far from universally accepted. One famous study of the effects of literacy on cognition (Scribner and Cole, 1981) set out to prove that literacy had cognitive consequences, only to find that actual interactions between thinking, literacies, and schooling were far more complex than the researchers expected. Science and technology studies depict the mutual interdependence between society and technology (e.g. MacKenzie & Wajcman 1985). Studies of oral literature even find it hard to even define what might be distinctively ‘oral’ or ‘literate’ given the huge diversity of cultural forms and human societies.
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Google and our knowledge

October 31st, 2010 by Graham Attwell
This is an interesting article in the Guardian newspaper. Although the central thrust of the article is the domination of advertising on the internet, the other point the author makes is the social, cultural and political consequences of how we organise knowledge. there has been far too little discussion around this.
clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

There is no system for organising knowledge that does not carry with it social, political and cultural consequences. Nor is an entirely unbiased organising principle possible. The trouble is that too few people realise this today. We’ve grown complacent as researchers; lazy as thinkers. We place too much trust in one company, a corporate advertising agency, and a single way of organising knowledge, automated keyword indexing.

The danger of allowing an advertising company to control the index of human knowledge is too obvious to ignore. The universal index is the shared heritage of humanity. It ought to be owned by us all. No corporation or nation has the right to privatise the index, commercialise the index, censor what they do not like or auction search ranking to the highest bidder. We have public libraries. We need a public search engine.

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Data trafiic on moble networks

October 27th, 2010 by Graham Attwell
Interesting data from UK mobile network 3 from a research paper describing traffic use and behaviour among its mobile broadband customers. It seems Zynga and Farmville’s positions in the list are explained by the data-intensive graphics and imagery of the games,.
clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

In decreasing order:
Facebook 7023 gigabytes of data
Zynga 3584
Apple 2491
Google 1717
Farmville 1680
MSN 947
Hotmail 708
YouTube 678
Microsoft 657
Bebo 304

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You couldn’t make it up

October 12th, 2010 by Graham Attwell
This is unbelievable rubbish from the UK government review of university financing. The idea that allowing universities to charge what they want puts students in charge is quite mind boggling.
clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

“Under these plans universities can start to vary what they charge but it will be up to students whether they choose the university. The money will follow the student ,who will follow the quality. The student is no longer taken for granted; the student is in charge.

Browne said: “Our higher education system is world-renowned, but too often it enshrines the power of universities and not the power of students. These reforms will put students in the driving seat of a revolutionary new system.

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blogging, Twitter and Conferences

September 16th, 2010 by Graham Attwell
interesting post by James Clay tracing the use of blogging and Twitter at Alt C conferences over the past seven or so years.

Also worth a look at Andy Powell’s comment …Andy says “the top 10 twitterers at ALT-C 2010 accounted for almost a quarter of the tweets (or, to put it another way, 80% of the tweets were made by under 20% of the twitterers) – unfortunately, I can’t split those numbers into those people at the event and those who weren’t.

There’s nothing particularly unusual in those numbers so, whilst I wouldn’t use the word ‘clique’ to describe what is happening, I do think there’s a very long tail of very low volume twitter users – at ALT-C 2010 46% (331) of the twitterers only tweeted once. See http://summarizr.labs.eduserv.org.uk/?hashtag=altc2010

clipped from elearningstuff.net

ALT-C 2010 in Nottingham for me was as much about the formal learning as it was about the social learning. An opportunity to learn both in formal and informal social settings. I was concerned slightly that the use of Twitter by certain people and FALT would be slightly cliquey. However no matter how cliquey people think it is, it is a relatively open clique. This year it was very easy to join in conversations using Twitter and then meet up socially, quite a few people I know has never been part of the ALT-C family (first time at the conference) and are now probably part of the clique.

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Achieving the impossible

September 3rd, 2010 by Graham Attwell
interesting post by Mark van Harmelen. Mark argues that Personal Learning environments can support self directed learning and that we need to develop new models of education with teachers and lecturers collectively developing personally relevant and meaningful learning experiences?
clipped from hedtek.com
The only course that remains, then, is for learners to construct these learning experiences for themselves. In fact, self-directed learning is the only economically feasible means of providing a personalised and meaningful learning experience on any kind of massified scale.
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