Tag: THE

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Digital

"Born into a second life"

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Some interesting thoughts here re ‘digital natives‘:

In my field, we are accustomed to rehearsing all the usual anxieties about threats to material book culture: we lament the loss of research skills, we worry about deserted archives and lost arts of palaeography. We champion independent booksellers over Kindles, and heatedly debate the merits of open access publishing. In our wider culture, we are nostalgic for elegant penmanship, we issue apocalyptic cautions about diminished attention spans, physical inactivity and eroded social ties.

For my own part, I don’t fear the tide of technological progress, but I am conscious of how hard it is, even when game, to keep up to speed with the latest advances. I am foxed by online grade books and iTunes alike. Even the language can leave us behind. “Virtual reality” rings with a Nineties naffness, as though its claim to reality no longer needed the qualification. We are asked to trust in innocuous “cloud” technology as though the substance of our thoughts and lives could be dissolved into thin air.

Read full story… am not convinced that current students “are a completely different operating system altogether”!

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Digital

#FollowFriday: Using Twitter in Learning

twitter-iconInteresting story in THE, with Rosie Miles, who I heard from at Winchester in the past:

Dr Miles used Twitter, she said, as a kind of “ludic learning” tool, allowing students to connect with Victorian literature in a very 21st-century way.

Students adopted Twitter personas based on fictional characters: Dr Jekyll became @Doubleface1886, while Dracula’s enemy Van Helsing could be found at @Istakevamps, and Dorian Gray at @Consciencefree1.

The role play allowed students to connect with their characters and become more digitally literate, according to Dr Miles, who spoke about the experiment at Bett 2015, an annual education technology conference held last week in London.

Read full story.

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Reviewer

Book Review: Pressed for Time by Judy Wajcman

27494_book-review-pressed-for-time-by-judy-wajcmanWell, this looks interesting:

Pressed for Time – Judy Wajcman’s clearly, interestingly and highly accessibly written investigation into the many facets of the acceleration of time in our increasingly digital society – is just such a book. If, in this rapidly changing world, one may dare to make a prediction, it is that this work will soon shoot to the top of citation index scores as a core text that goes on to spur numerous research projects in a range of fields, as well as establishing the sociology of time, its diverse structure and differential distribution, as a major research field in its own right.

Read full review.

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Reviewer

[BOOK REVIEW] Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness

Now, here’s an interesting looking boo26976_book-review-wikipedia-and-the-politics-of-openness-by-nathaniel-tkaczk, and this first couple of paragraphs sums up a lot:

The relationship between academics and Wikipedia is a complex one. At one level we love it: however much some of us may deny it, we all use it, at the very least as a route to other information, and often as a way to start to get an idea about something new. At another level we hate it, knowing how unreliable it is and knowing how much students are likely to rely on it.

So what do we do? For many academics it becomes a pragmatic exercise. We accept Wikipedia, we use Wikipedia – and we tell our students to use it with a great deal of care, particularly in terms of reliability of information. “Never cite Wikipedia” is pretty much a mantra. And yet although we thoroughly question the reliability of the information, do we question the Wikipedia project itself? Do we ask what lies behind Wikipedia – or what the project itself really means? It often seems as though Wikipedia is part of the furniture or even part of the environment: taken for granted, on its own terms. Its collaborative “openness” is seen as admirable, its neutrality accepted and respected – without either that openness or that neutrality really being critically examined or questioned.

Read full book review.

 

Categories
Digital

GoogleGlass in the Classroom

GoogleGlass

We’ve had a GoogleGlass in CODEC since the summer, but it’s not been used to much acclaim by the team, but this is an interesting experiment where it seems to be contributing to university teaching:

Academics exploring uses of the device’s in-built camera unexpectedly found that wearing the head-mounted display broke down barriers between staff and students.

“There was a coolness factor that I really appreciated and, in a way, I felt it brought me closer to my students,” said Adina Dudau, a lecturer in management.

Dr Dudau has been using Google Glass to record the classroom contributions of students, initially for research purposes, but the next step could be to use the camera to aid assessment of seminar contributions.

Read full post.