In a useful article from Nick Galvin of the Sydney Morning Herald, entitled, The kiss and tell of social networks, possibly the most apt and thought-provoking observation is the one at the end of this quote:
Among many younger net users there is now an assumption that everything should be shared and a casualness about what was once thought of as personal information that makes many older people shudder.
"I don't know what it is like to live your entire life publicly online," says social media expert Jeffrey Veen. "But there are kids today who are figuring it out."
Veen has been at the heart of the internet revolution all his working life. Among other things, he has been a key designer behind hugely successful social media applications such as Flickr and the blogging service TypePad.
He says attitudes to privacy and information sharing are easily defined by the generation you belong to.
"There is a generational divide that is as strong today as the divide that existed between kids and their parents over music in the 1950s," says Veen, visiting Sydney last week for an industry conference, Web Directions South.
"People older than 25 years think of everything they do on their computer as being private unless they share it, where people younger than that think of everything they do on a computer as public unless they choose to make it private. This is a fundamental difference."
(my highlighting)
The article points out some of the traps of this thinking - eg. the use of social networking/googling by employers to assess prospective employees, which can be a plus or minus, depending on what they discover.
Monday, October 20, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
The secrets of storytelling
Our love for telling tales reveals the workings of the mind, according to Jeremy Hsu in his article, The secrets of storytelling, from Scientific American. The article covers the following key concepts:
Storytelling is a human universal, and common themes appear in tales throughout history and all over the the world.
These characteristics of stories, and our natural affinity toward them, reveal clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy in the mind.
By studying narrative’s power to influence beliefs, researchers are discovering how we analyze information and accept new ideas.
Which means to me as a TL that stories/fiction (and I've heard people say it could be done by local libraries, and the fiction section isn't necessarily an essential part of a school library...) are most important to education and learning. Who'd'a thunk?!
We tell stories about other people and for other people. Stories help us to keep tabs on what is happening in our communities. The safe, imaginary world of a story may be a kind of training ground, where we can practice interacting with others and learn the customs and rules of society. And stories have a unique power to persuade and motivate, because they appeal to our emotions and capacity for empathy.
Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history.
Worth reading. I found the reference to this article here. Hmmm. Might save this article to use to promote the next round of holiday borrowing.
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Storytelling is a human universal, and common themes appear in tales throughout history and all over the the world.
These characteristics of stories, and our natural affinity toward them, reveal clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy in the mind.
By studying narrative’s power to influence beliefs, researchers are discovering how we analyze information and accept new ideas.
Which means to me as a TL that stories/fiction (and I've heard people say it could be done by local libraries, and the fiction section isn't necessarily an essential part of a school library...) are most important to education and learning. Who'd'a thunk?!
We tell stories about other people and for other people. Stories help us to keep tabs on what is happening in our communities. The safe, imaginary world of a story may be a kind of training ground, where we can practice interacting with others and learn the customs and rules of society. And stories have a unique power to persuade and motivate, because they appeal to our emotions and capacity for empathy.
Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history.
Worth reading. I found the reference to this article here. Hmmm. Might save this article to use to promote the next round of holiday borrowing.
.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Twilight movie: third and final trailer/release date/soundtrack/new poster
The third and final trailer for the Twilight film. Sourced from this page at TrailerSpy, so fingers crossed not blocked by DET filters.
Also viewable on the Twilightthemovie home page.
The imdb page for the film still lists the release date for Australia as 11 December 2008.
There's a new poster:
and the official Stephenie Meyer website, stepheniemeyer.com has a track listing for the soundtrack.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Fiction Friday: graphic novels
We're about to put our graphic novels in a separate section - some manga, bought this year, but also Raymond Briggs' When the Wind Blows, and Shaun Tan's The Arrival, and The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. Be interesting to see how it goes. My plan for next year is to have students who like manga form some sort of advisory committee to make suggestions for additions. The Children's Bookshop in Beecroft is one specialist bookseller making a particular effort to learn about manga so it can advise teacher librarians. Their suggestion is not to go deep in one series, but thin and broad, a few from many, to meet the widest range of user interests. Realistically, I'm not sure that a school library can fully support every manga reader's every wish, given the volume/frequency of issue; unlike what one tries to do with popular fiction series such as Ranger's Apprentice, Redwall and Twilight, to name just three, where you do try to stock all titles.
It was therefore thought provoking to find this article from the Guardian in the UK, about a US graphic novel venture aimed at teenage girls that hasn't worked: and that one of the main issues may have been quality.
A quote from the article (which is by Ned Beauman):
Although it does have some big hits, the manga industry is mostly a triumph of market segmentation: among the thousands of titles published every year in Japan, there is something for every conceivable taste. Coming out of this giant, delirious laboratory, a popular title may keep up such an intimate dialogue with its specific teenage audience that it is almost unintelligible to anyone else.
Discovered via Read Alert. Image source: the Guardian article .
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It was therefore thought provoking to find this article from the Guardian in the UK, about a US graphic novel venture aimed at teenage girls that hasn't worked: and that one of the main issues may have been quality.
A quote from the article (which is by Ned Beauman):
Although it does have some big hits, the manga industry is mostly a triumph of market segmentation: among the thousands of titles published every year in Japan, there is something for every conceivable taste. Coming out of this giant, delirious laboratory, a popular title may keep up such an intimate dialogue with its specific teenage audience that it is almost unintelligible to anyone else.
Discovered via Read Alert. Image source: the Guardian article .
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Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Social networking - how many of these do you know?
Upon finding a very interesting article about storytelling - about which I'll post shortly - I was also fascinated by the list it supplied of ways in which to share this via social networking. Myself, being neither whizz nor Luddite, but somewhere on the continuum in between, I expected to recognise some - but there were certainly a number new to me. I posted about the list on Barack Obama's website a couple of weeks ago: well, here's another list to test you (from the choices provided by Scientific American):
So, how many did you recognise? And how many would our students recognise?
The fact that these are options offered by an established publication such as Scientific American also gives this list some authority as another snapshot of significant social networking sites.
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- del.icio.us
- Technorati
- Yahoo Bookmarks
- MySpace
- Google Bookmarks
- Newsvine
- Mixx
- Yahoo! My Web
- Propeller
- FriendFeed
- Windows Live
- Digg (32)
- StumbleUpon
- Xanga
- Blinklist
- Furl
- ma.gnolia
- Mister Wong
- N4G
- Blogmarks
- Faves
- Current
- Simpy
- Slashdot
- Meneame
- Yigg
- Oknotizie.alice.it
- Fresqui
- Diigo
- Care2
- Funp
- Kirtsy
- Hugg
- Sphinn
So, how many did you recognise? And how many would our students recognise?
The fact that these are options offered by an established publication such as Scientific American also gives this list some authority as another snapshot of significant social networking sites.
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Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Search Google 2001
As part of its 10th birthday celebrations, Google is, for a limited time, offering you the chance to search the net with the 2001 version of the Google search engine, complete with that snazzy logo and results from the Internet Archive. Gee, is it really ten years since I remember reading something in, was it Time magazine? about a search engine that would have us abandoning Yahoo and AltaVista and Dogpile?
Play here. But it is only there for a limited time, it will be gone sometime in October 2008. Could be an interesting voyage for kids - YouTube, for example, didn't exist.
To quote from the FAQ:
So what exactly happens when I do a 2001 search using this cool interface?
We've set up this search page to return many of the webpages from our 2001 index as results. When you click on a webpage result, you get taken to today's live version of the website. When you click on the link to "View old version on the Internet Archive," you are taken to the earliest 2001 copy of that webpage on the Internet Archive so you can see what the full webpage used to look like.
Books by ISBN
Just suppose you have an ISBN (although why you'd have it without the book, I'm not sure. But the world is an amazing place, after all) and you want to know which book it belongs to.
The internet is an amazing place. Try Books-by-ISBN, a site that mainly collects data from assorted Amazon sites. And then lets you search by ISBN. It appears to be a private venture (eg. it's not a bookselling site) run out of Germany (written in English - covers English speaking areas, German, French and Other).
Books-by-ISBN is here, and its FAQ page here.
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The internet is an amazing place. Try Books-by-ISBN, a site that mainly collects data from assorted Amazon sites. And then lets you search by ISBN. It appears to be a private venture (eg. it's not a bookselling site) run out of Germany (written in English - covers English speaking areas, German, French and Other).
Books-by-ISBN is here, and its FAQ page here.
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