blog de notas de juan freire

… The real work of architecture that adapts and reflects this new mediated world is yet to come. A discussion about “social media and architecture” is still more likely to consider how architects can use Facebook—or Architizer—to market their work, rather than how social media changes our experience of it. And a conversation about “technology and architecture” is probably about parametric modeling, not about how the two spaces we inhabit—one physical, one virtual—might be pulled together. A world where we are all “alone together,” in Turkle’s formulation, is a haunting image of the future. But there remains the possibility of a new richness arriving along with our divided attention, an additional layer in our experience of the built world.
“Public spaces are always going to be sites of negotiation. They are not places, like your laptop screen, where you can do whatever you want,” David Benjamin, of The Living, told me. But what if our screens engaged in that conversation? If our building facades didn’t just communicate information to us (à la the Jumbotron), but we communicated back, communally? After all, what makes cities vital are their color and diversity, the wild mix of scales, even the noise and confusion. This has been the defining sensation of modernity, from the Parisian boulevard to the contemporary aerotropolis. Social media has the potential to amplify this quality, making people feel disoriented and overwhelmed—but also focused and inspired. Great cities have always done both, and architecture’s role has always been to help make sense of it all. It took Mies to show how the lowly industrial I-beam could be transmuted into something as grand and symbolically profound as the columns of a Greek temple. What architect will turn the networked screen into a chapel?

We are witnessing quick changes in the ways people communicate and consume information. We have moved from a context where information was in the hands of a few to a context with increasingly decentralized information networks. Citizens with access to an Internet connection can now empower themselves through technology to share their stories in first person and build upon their own narratives without a need for intermediaries, as we have seen during the recent mobilizations in the Middle East and North Africa region.

During this conference we will focus on the relationship between Internet Social Media and their impact on the ground, focusing on the specific context of the Middle East and North Africa region. Are Social Media like Facebook, Youtube or Twitter bringing more power to citizens in order to have an impact on their own context? Do citizens´ aspirations conflict with these companies interests? How is technology reconfiguring voices, authorities and power systems?

The timing of the November 2010 inaugural meeting of the Bad Ragaz Group could not have been more propitious. As signs of economic recovery clashed with the realities of the Irish bailout and renewed concerns about additional financial contagion in the eurozone, the meeting’s theme—”What’s Next for Europe?”—was already on the minds of the senior business executives, economists, policymakers and thought leaders who gathered at Switzerland’s Bad Ragaz resort for two days of discussions.

Forty European executives—current and next-generation leaders representing multiple industries and sectors from 12 countries—gathered at the Swiss alpine resort of Bad Ragaz in November 2010 to ponder Europe’s future challenges and opportunities. Discussions by these members of the Bad Ragaz Group (BRG) centered on the risks and opportunities associated with integration and globalization during these challenging geopolitical and economic times.¹Specifically, members discussed the outlook for the European economy, the impact of social media, Europe’s uncertain energy prospects, and the future of the euro. This paper summarizes the discussions.

The attraction of social media to companies and buisnesses is obvious: can spread information better and faster than any traditional marketing outlet. As a result, companies insist on having a social media strategy, or at least want to ensure they appear to have one. Yet I can’t help but feel that this confuses the issue. Social media is not an entity in it’s own right. It is far less defined than that. Instead it is more of a haze surrounding and infiltrating events and daily life. In keeping with that image, it is equally difficult to manipulate, at least in the quantifiable ways such companies intend. And given that, to impose a formal strategy is a time-consuming distraction.

… To have a social media strategy seems to me to be redundant. If your content is good, it will be represented across social media platforms by the people you were trying to reach in the first place…

The International Journal of Learning and Media (IJLM) provides a forum for scholars, researchers, and practitioners to examine the changing relationships between learning and media across a wide range of forms and settings. Our focus is particularly, but by no means exclusively, on young people, and we understand learning in broad terms to include informal and everyday contexts as well as institutions such as schools. We are especially interested in the broader social and cultural dimensions of these issues and in new and emerging media technologies, forms, and practices. We are particularly keen to promote international and intercultural exchange and dialogue in the field and encourage contributions from a variety of academic disciplines and perspectives, including papers from practitioners and policy-makers. Through scholarly articles, editorials, case studies, and an active online network, IJLM seeks to provide a premier forum for emerging interdisciplinary research and debate and to help shape the development of the field around the world. We publish contributions that address the theoretical, textual, historical, and sociological dimensions of media and learning, as well as the practical and political issues at stake. While retaining the peer review process of a traditional academic journal, we also provide opportunities for more topical and polemical writing, for visual and multimedia presentations, and for online dialogues…

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

Conventional wisdom about young people’s use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today’s teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networks sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youth’s social and recreational use of digital media. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings—at home, in after school programs, and in online spaces. By focusing on media practices in the everyday contexts of family and peer interaction, the book views the relationship of youth and new media not simply in terms of technology trends but situated within the broader structural conditions of childhood and the negotiations with adults that frame the experience of youth in the United States.

Integrating twenty-three different case studies—which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music-sharing, and online romantic breakups—in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Outis distinctive for its combination of in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis.

This book was written as a collaborative effort by members of the Digital Youth Project, a three-year research effort funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.

… The report “The impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy”, published today by the JRC Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), finds that in 2008, 41% of EU Internet users were engaged in social computing activities through Social Networking Sites (SNS), blogs, photo and video sharing, online multi-player games and collaborative platforms for content creation and sharing. This percentage rises to 64% if users aged under 24 only are considered.

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In particular I examined the radical work of influential 60’s architecture collective Archigram, who I found through my research had coined the term ‘social software’ back in 1972, 30 years before it was on the lips of Clay Shirky and other internet gurus.

Rather than building, Archigram were perhaps proto-bloggers - publishing a sought-after ‘magazine’ of images, collage, essays and provocations regularly through the 60s which had an enormous impact on architecture and design around the world, right through to the present day…

They referenced comics - American superhero aesthetics but also the stiff-upper-lips and cut-away precision engineering of Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare and Eagle, alongside pop-music, psychedelia, computing and pulp sci-fi and put it in a blender with a healthy dollop of Brit-eccentricity. They are perhaps most familiar from science-fictional images like their Walking City project, but at the centre of their work was a concern with cities as systems, reflecting the contemporary vogue for cybernetics and belief in automation.

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This is a follow-up to my recent research about Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age.  I’ve spent considerable time thinking about how to alter the classes I teach to re-center them on a core of flexible learning.  In all of my classes this semester, students will be completing a variety of learning projects that involve alternative ways to learn (e.g. blogging, making mindmaps, teaching a lesson, making a video presentation, or designing a non-digital game).

The difficult part about including these alternative learning methods is teaching the students all the necessary technology skills first.  Most of my students are the traditional freshman-level age-range  (18-25).  For the most part, they “get” technology (cell phones, facebook, video games, and gadgets), but they haven’t been taught how to do anything productive with technology - at least, not with regards to learning or career skills.

If America wants to continue to be a world-leader, we can do it with a technology advantage - but only if we actually know how to leverage that technology to continue to be more productive.

So, I began to write out a list of the tech skills that I think students should learn before they leave college.  Ideally, these are skills that would be integrated throughout K-12 and college curricula.

Basic Web Stuff
1. Basics of HTML (bold, underline, italics, special characters)
2. How to use EMBED code or make a live link
3. How to make and share a screenshot
4. How to make and share a short video explaining something or asking for help
5. Learn basic abbreviations and emoticons (e.g. ROFL, IMHO)
6. How to build a landing page for your web-based stuff (e.g. iGoogle, NetVibes)
7. How to add gadgets or plug-ins for various sites
8. How to make a simple website (e.g. Google Sites)
9. Build a clickable resume / digital portfolio
10. How (and when) to use collaborative documents or spreadsheets
11. How (and why) to create tags and labels
12. How (and why) to use URL-shortening sites (e.g. TinyURL)

Organization
13. How to set up a web-based calendar and use it to manage your time
14. How to set up and manage an RSS reader
15. How to find a common meeting time (e.g. Doodle)
16. How to set up a communication aggregator (e.g. Digsby, Trillian, TweetDeck)

Communication
17. How to manage email
18. How to write a good “first-contact” email
19. How to write a good subject line
20. How to write a good email response
21. Texting etiquette (when it’s appropriate, when it’s not)
22. How to summarize your thoughts in 140 characters or less
23. How to use Twitter (reply, retweet, direct message)
24. How to determine whether you should share it in a public forum (will it affect your future job prospects, your current employment, etc.)
25. How to manage an online meeting
26. How to give an effective webinar
27. What are the differences between various social networks and how they are used? (e.g. Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn)

Finding and Managing Information
28. How to use web-based bookmarks
29. How (and when) to use library search databases
30. How (and when) to use an image-based search engine
31. How (and when) to use alternate search engines (e.g. Clusty)
32. Who writes Wikipedia articles and when can they be trusted?
33. How to build a custom search engine
34. When can you trust the information you find?
35. How to use article citations to find better references
36. How to manage a bibliography online (e.g. Zotero)
37. How to set up web alerts to track new information (e.g. Google Alerts)

Privacy, Security, and the Law
38. Creative Commons – what is it and how to choose appropriate license?
39. How to read the legalese that tells you who owns it after it is shared online
40. What should you share and how does that change for different audiences?
41. How to manage usernames & passwords
42. How to find and tweak the privacy settings in common social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter)
43. How do data-mining sites get your information? (e.g. participating in FB quizzes)
44. What are the security concerns with GPS-based tracking systems?

Presentation
45. How to determine the audience and appropriate length for your presentation
46. Good presentation design principles
47. Principles of storytelling
48. How to share a set of slides on the Internet
49. How to build a non-linear presentation
50. How to build a flashy presentation (and when to use it)
51. How to find high-quality images that can be used in presentations (with appropriate copyrights)
52. How to find audio that can be shared in a presentation (with appropriate copyrights)
53. How to create a captioning script for a video
54. Ways to caption an internet-based video
55. How (and when) to use a virtual magnifier with your presentation

Ways to Learn
56. How to build an interactive mindmap to organize ideas
57. How to use a blog to track your learning process
58. How to find good sites, blogs, and other online publications for the topic you are learning about
59. How to cultivate a personal learning network (PLN)
60. How to participate in a live learning chat (e.g. TweetChats)