| | Sat, 16 Aug 2008 04:35:20 PDT | | The more I proceed, the more I see how badly it is needed: media literacy. Understanding what information is, making sense of the different communication paradigms, from interpersonal to mass and social media, the creation of reality and consensus, the role and use of new technologies are all very critical elements of the puzzle we all are trying to solve: Communicating and understanding better the world we live in.
Photo credit: D'Arcy Norman
George Siemens, Master New Media official guest guide on media literacy, not only takes you through another fascinating journey to the issues, tools and content resources that can stretch and bend your present technology and media view, but has also accepted my invitation to be a special guest inside a one-on-one short video interview I will do with him in the coming days.
This is a great opportunity to hear George in first person and to ask him directly the toughest questions you may have. In fact, the best contribution and thank you you can provide to the work he has so kindly contributed here, is for you to add some relevant questions in the comments section at the end of this article, so that I will be able to throw them at him directly in our next week video interview.
Here another fascinating journey into making sense of media and new technologies around you:
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| | Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:50:16 PDT | | "If you have mastered the blogging paradigm, have made your blog an authority and a reliable source of information, commentary or news in your selected field(/s) of interest, it is about time to "scale yourself up" - Work Less and Look More At The Bigger Picture (= See the Future). "
(Source: MasterNewMedia, 2006)
Photo credit: Solarseven
I have first thought about newsmastering and newsradars over four years ago, in 2004, when RSS feeds were taking off like wildfire in the early adopter community. As I had been using them for many months already, I had strong feelings against what Robert Scoble was promoting at the time, trumpeting his ability to subscribe and follow to over a thousand different RSS feeds.
Scaling yourself up means transforming your role from one of contributor, writer to one that is more focused on being a filter/collector/aggregator of news from other sources.
Newsmastering is a new and emerging skill that involves gathering, filtering and selecting from the chaos of information that saturates the internet, and delivering the resulting news feed to niche-targeted audiences.
The internet is so vast, that finding what you are looking for is becoming increasingly difficult. Google searches, however well refined, can produce hundreds of thousands of results.
With the amount of news and information arriving to us daily, this is a space that someone will need to fill in any case. The value provided to others by having someone filter and select ahead of them relevant news fitting a specific topic/ theme will increase its value by orders of magnitude in the near future.
And while it takes really no special cognitive skill the process of subscribing to so many feeds, you can easily imagine the result of such an approach. You need more time to scan / browse all feeds, you have less time for inspecting each one item, and as a consequence the quality of information gathering and analysis you can perform goes down with each new feed you add (unless you have unlimited time in your normal days).
If you missed my past writings on the topic of newsmastering, I am just going to provide you with a short refresher intro to what RSS newsmastering and newsradars are all about.
Here the details:
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| | Sat, 09 Aug 2008 02:48:14 PDT | | What is connectivism? If you were to ask Wikipedia without paying too much attention you would discover that this unfamiliar word originates right here in Italy.
Photo credit: Clix
"...at the beginning of the 21st century in Italy, where is known as Connettivismo. It originated in Italian science fiction as an initiative of a group of writers, bloggers and artists. The name is derived from the imaginary doctrine that connects the specific knowledge of other disciplines, as introduced by Canadian science fiction author Alfred Elton van Vogt."
(Source: Wikipedia)
But connecitivism is also something else. If you searched just a little bit deeper you would also find out that ""Connectivism, is a learning theory for the digital age," has been developed by George Siemens based on his analysis of the limitations of behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism to explain the effect technology has had on how we live, how we communicate, and how we learn."
(Source: Wikipedia)
Connectivism combines important elements of many different learning theories, social structures, and of new communication technologies while having been designed to give birth to new ways of learning in the digital age.
Educational technologists and connectivism prime evangelist George Siemens introduces what characterizes this educational model and what are the key ideas that make it so special.
Here all the details: | |
| | Sat, 02 Aug 2008 01:03:46 PDT | | To understand the times and changes we are going through, it is necessary to keep scanning the horizon for changes and new emerging patterns. Looking only at your close, surrounding community and environment doesn't help you see beyond your existing assumptions and prejudices.
Photo credit: RGBSpace
To ride them you not only need to scan deep and wide outside your familiar comfort zones, but you need to have enough bravery to test, expose yourself to some of these new media and technologies as much as placing under critical questioning many of your well established assumptions about how learning, work, collaboration need to be.
Educational technologist and connectivism evangelist George Siemens takes you through another journey into issues, ideas, research, and technology innovations that have a direct impact on how we live, work and learn from each other.
Here his weekly report:
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| | Sat, 26 Jul 2008 04:40:02 PDT | | "Just as literacy is a skill that equips one to understand and communicate through language, media literacy is a skill that equips students to understand and communicate through media."
Photo credit: RGBSpace
"Media literacy (classes) provide students with skills, tools, insights, and a vocabulary to understand the important role the media play in shaping, reflecting, and sometimes subverting our social realities."
(Naomi Rockler- Gladen)
"Two seemingly contradictory trends are shaping the current media landscape: on the one hand, new media technologies have lowered production and distribution costs, expanded the range of available delivery channels, and enabled consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and re-circulate media content.
At the same time, there has been an alarming concentration of the ownership of mainstream commercial media, with a small handful of multinational media conglomerates dominating all sectors of the entertainment industry.
No one seems capable of describing both sets of changes at the same time, let alone show how they impact each other.
Some fear that media is out of control, others that it is too controlled. Some see a world without gatekeepers, others a world where gatekeepers have unprecedented power."
(Henry Jenkins)
Like every week, George Siemens, is your expert guide on the latest trends, changes and announcements transforming the world of media but with an eye that doesn't pay too much attention to the financial backing or to the possible IPO but focuses exclusively on the relevance and impact that these changes will have on our ability to learn and change this world in the direction we want.
Here his digest for this week:
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| | Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:08:18 PDT | | Learning and understanding how things work is for many, including me, the end goal of this unique journey called life. When you look down to it, no matter what your ideals or character inclinations may be, having the ability to learn and get better by extracting the best from each one of your experiences is really the greatest asset one can maintain in a lifetime.
Photo credit: zoid
Educational technologists and connectivism evangelist George Siemens takes you once again into a small journey into key tools, issues and trends that are transforming the way we think, learn, engage with others, as he has found them in this last seven days.
Here his precious findings: | |
| | Fri, 11 Jul 2008 23:05:23 PDT | | If you look at the fast changing media and at new emerging technologies you may be endlessly enchanted by the new ideas, capabilities and traits that each one integrates. At the same time, the more you closely follow such change without taking critical and analytical distance from it the more you risk of never being able to capture the essence, the wave, the overall emergent pattern shaping its direction and character.
Photo credit: Rudat
George Siemens, connectivism guru and respected scholar of the effective use of educational technologies and social media, takes you in this weekly digest to places, writings and people that can help you explore, chart and understand these critical grounds in a serendipitous, explorative fashion.
My personal advice is to follow George in his wanderings as the pointers and resources he shares are always of the greatest value.
Here what he has found for you this week:
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| | Sat, 05 Jul 2008 00:50:40 PDT | | Making sense of the future of technologies emerging is more than often tightly connected to deeply understanding what has happened before. Unless you know where you are coming from, it is difficult to guess where you will be arriving next.
Photo credit: Bruce Rolff
This is why I value and recommend you so much the ongoing
research work by Dr Siemens, who sifts through hundreds of potentially interesting content, video and lectures to cherry-pick those illuminating resources that can help you expand your media and new technology making sense puzzle.
Educational technologies, elearning and new media scholar George Siemens takes you into another great journey into the stories, news and people that can best help you understand the technology
revolution taking place.
Here the details:
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| | Tue, 01 Jul 2008 01:53:14 PDT | | Sense-making is the extraordinary new unconscious effort the Internet avant-garde has moved into. After an initial phase of discovery, experimentation and pure exploration, web publishers, bloggers and educators are gradually turning their efforts into looking at what they have learned and making it accessible to everyone.
Photo credit: V Ribakov
This is why you see such an explosion of screencasting and presentation tools, story-building services and video publishing venues. We have now understood how important it is to stop, explain it in simple, easy digestible terms, and get more people on board this new fantastic communication infrastructure which is the Internet.
Connectivism guru and educational technologies expert George Siemens takes you, into his weekly journey around some of the fascinating changes and discoveries taking place around you. If you want to expand your technologies and media horizon by learning from highly varied and diverse viewpoints, George has got the resources, research and articles to keep you busy and interested.
Here what he has found this past week:
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| | Sat, 17 May 2008 11:49:06 PDT | | A new search and "discovery" engine has been recently unveiled and made accessible to everyone online. The new search engine called Powerset, promises to improve the entire search process by allowing you, the user, to express your search queries via keywords, phrases, or simple questions. On the search results page, Powerset provides search results while also aggregating information from multiple sources and leveraging the best content available inside Wikipedia.
"Powerset’s goal is to change the way people interact with technology by enabling computers to understand our language. ...Powerset is first applying its natural language processing to search, aiming to improve the way we find information by unlocking the meaning encoded in ordinary human language."
(Source: Powerset)
Here, media and content business analyst John Blossom, takes you into a closer look at this new entry in the search engine marketplace:
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managing editor