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Wednesday, 29 November 2006 |
On a visit to India in the 1960s fashionarati Gloria Vanderbilt declared that "Pink is the new Black". In the heavily marketing spun 2000s with journalists and bloggers struggling to carve out breaking or new space the cliche that X is the new Y, or once an X always an X, or X is from Venus Y is from Mars, is carted out ad nauseum. This phenomena has recently been termed a "Snowclone" or a neologism for a formula using an old idium in a new context.
In academic blogging we might find: Once a digital native, always a digital native ... or when it comes to technology Teachers are from Venus, Students are from Mars. But recent surveys indicate that the Web is not the newspaper for youth in the UK and that while young people may be more comfortable generally than older people at navigating the social softwares of Web 2.0 they still lack the critical thinking skills constituting social practices of literacy. Once a human, always a human?
"Those in academia have long suspected that while college-age students can use technology, they don't necessarily know what to do with the content the technology provides," said Irvin Katz, a senior research scientist at ETS. "Our preliminary findings show that, in large part, those suspicions are well founded." |
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Academic Blogging Bulletin |
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Monday, 27 November 2006 |
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As usual if you wait long enough between blog posts you end up with a whole pile of potential ideas for publication. The following are some of the key ones recently across the BlogScholar desk:
- A big discussion in the social sciences these days is the ways and means of conducting online or virtual ethnographies. It is one of those exsciting times when the theory of a research method is taking shape through practice. It is inspired by the need for a real-time response from researchers with access to mountains of real time data about how people are living their lives. According to anthropologist Kambiz Kamrani as people "around the world proactively post to their blogs, stream if not lead parts of their lives online, virtual anthropologists now vicariously live amongst them, at home, at work, out on the streets".
- It is more and more common in research seminars here at the University of London to encounter projects based on the emerging Internet of Things. It describes a world where users of the Internet are numbered in the billions with humans in the minority. It seems like ages ago that we first started to here of how our fridge was going to order the milk when it is empty but there may be a far greater epochal shift underway with the arrival of a ubiquitos network society.
- BlogScholar posted a while back about the project to Google Bomb Egypt in an effort to draw attention to political activism and arrests in the country. Recent posts from inside the country indicate academics continue to run the highest risk of arrest for experssing political views: "When a politically active person is a blogger as well as an academic, the odds are increased exponentially that they will get detained".
- Meanwhile World-Wide-Web founder Tim Berners Lee is leading a team investigating models for the future of the Web. It sounds, at least in principle, as if an olive branch is offered from computing to social science as the growing recognition that use of the Web is both a practice of technical skills and a social practice gathers steam: "The Web is an engineered space created through formally specified languages and protocols. However, because humans are the creators of Web pages and links between them, their interactions form emergent patterns in the Web at a macroscopic scale. These human interactions are, in turn, governed by social conventions and laws. Web science, therefore, must be inherently interdisciplinary; its goal is to both understand the growth of the Web and to create approaches that allow new powerful and more beneficial patterns to occur".
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Friday, 17 November 2006 |
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Here at BlogScholar.com we always appreciate a nice tribute but surely its taking it a bit far to launch an "Academic Blog Portal" without a single reference to our delightful little non-profit enterprise of the same name on the other side of the Atlantic.
The launch of academicblogs.org spins out the Crooked Timber list of academic blogs into a wiki-blogroll of academics involved in blogging. BlogScholar will be watching the relative success of this venture with great interest as the biggest challenge around here is managing the editing process of submissions to the directory. For every blog that is accepted in the directory ten are declined. Typical examples include face reconstrcution treatements entered into "engineering", viagra salesmen into "chemistry", and (the cheek of it all) spam marketing tools in "business". We have worked very hard to keep the blogs in the directory relevent to the disciplines but have been exploring options including wikis on how to expand this capability. |
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