24 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2016
    1. We also need to recognize the risks of blogging/tweeting, which include opening avenues for abuse. We should not be throwing students into the public domain to discuss sensitive topics without having conversations with them on what they might face and which of these risks they are willing to take, how they would handle it, and how they might support each other. Then we should give them a private option if they so choose.

      Social media can be a very unwelcoming place to be. One word that's wrong and it's like you started WWIII. Although a bit exaggerated, ultimately true. Social media, if anything is a modern day battle ground where people are going to get offended by basically anything and everything. That is why it is better that there are warnings before and during conversations in a public domain, so that students may avoid such conflict, or even create a community where everyone feels comfortable to state their opinions without being shot down, while still keeping it public. I wouldn't necessarily think to put them in a private domain, though the option will always be there, only because students deal with a harsh society on a daily basis, behind a digital surface. There at least needs to be some level of trust given to the students that they can handle themselves in a public environment. I do understand that no one willing wants to put their students in a high-risking environment, and I'm certainly not saying that by doing so will you be a great, or even a bad teacher or professor; but what it really is, is that by putting students in a public domain, it gives them a chance and experience to go not only digital skill, but digital literacy. By having students in a public domain, a domain that they have all experienced one way or another through social media sites, and giving them meaningful tasks to do, you will essentially see digital literacy. Students not only gain digital skills, to effectively use technology, but they also gain awareness for not only their fellow peers, but respect for the public domain as well. If the issue is still that of high-risk, then it is the professor and the student's job to make sure that the the risk level is not as high as it might be. For example, as I mentioned earlier, warning students before and during the tasks of using public domains will help bring the risks down. However if the goal is to in fact gain digital literacy as well as digital skill, would not such a high-risk factor actually go down as these are gained, therefore having public domain be the most efficient way to do so?

    1. DocumentversioningTrack the history of all previous versions ofa document, and note forks in the versiontree where versions diverged from acommon ancestor.CVS for code versioning;"Track changes" feature inMS WordInteraction logs If interactions are mediated, the mediatingcomputer logs user behaviors.Web log files, email logs;purchasing historyExplicitfeedbackPeople comment on the quality ofinformation or interactions.Buyerandsellerfeedbackabout each other on eBay;epinions.comNetwork maps Group members can reflect on their owninteraction patterns, by looking at a visualrepresentation of the graph of connectionsbetween members.IKNOW (Contractor, Zink etal. 1998), Krackplot(Krackhardt, Blythe et al.1995)

      Again there seems to be an efficiency about these opportunities that help to better communication. This opportunity of managing history helps to develop more useful, productive and very much so, more efficient, system of communicating for smoother, future interactions. With this social capital is raised, that being the idea of sociotechnical capital.

    2. Notification When an event occurs, the user is notified,so that user need not keep checking to seewhether the event has occurred yet.Beeper, smoke alarmConcurrencycontrolsWhen people work together, technology canprevent them from overwriting each other'swork, either by preventing simultaneousaccess or by merging changes that resultfrom simultaneous access.Transaction processing;check-out, check-in andmerge features in RCS andCVS for software source code

      The very purpose of what sociotechnical capital essentially functions as, and that is to raise social capital by making it easier for people to communicate with each other. This being done with easy access to notifications, into different schedules and appointments that help better communication, so that no complications rise in scheduling. This opportunity creates an efficiency to communication with easier access due to technology.

    3. Anonymity Information about the identity of interactionpartners may be partially or completelyhidden.Anonymous remailers;pseudonymsRestrictedmodalityCommunication may not have the fullrichness and nuance of face-to-facecommunication.Text-only for email messages;voice-only for voice mail; nosmell in video conferencingAccess controls Some people may be prevented fromreading or writing information or interactingwith certain people or services.Password-restricted areas onWeb sites; firewalls;moderated email lists

      This type of opportunity seems to contradict the very idea of how sociotechnical capital functions, seeing as the function is to raise social capital. With restriction of information, communication and sharing of knowledge also seems to be restricted as well. Although the concession lies in privacy rights, and such, the entire idea of this being an opportunity seems to false, as it is more a hindrance that helps the decline of social capital as now real connections or social relations come out of secrets and hidden information.

    4. Large fan-out One sender can send information to a largenumber of recipients.Email lists, news groups, WebsitesLarge fan-in One recipient can receive information frommany sources, and have them automaticallyaggregated.Voting; information filteringand summarization; shopbots

      The opportunity to send and receive in mass, will greatly help social capital from it's recent decline. Due to being able to send and receive in mass, it will most likely enable future interactions thus raising social capital.

    5. Affordance Description ExamplesDistantcommunicationThe sender and receiver need not becollocated.Video conferencing, email,instant messaging, webcamAsynchronouscommunicationThe recipient of communication accesses itat a later time.Voice mail, emailPeripheralpresentationAn interaction need not take the user's fullattention, and may not come to the attentionof other people who are co-present.Vibrating beeper, headphones,heads-up display inautomobile

      Seeing as sociotechnical capital is a combination of social relations and technology, as well as a way to help people interact with each others with communication technology, this is exactly an opportunity that is well placed. The opportunity deals with issues of communication that will be justly resolved through technology.

  2. Oct 2016
    1. The researchers emphasize that these are only correlations. Although they controlled for some aspects of students’ backgrounds, such as the education levels of their parents, it’s possible that other factors are responsible as well.

      Although correlation does not imply causality, even with the concept of experiment that shows the difference between those who are considered “thrivers,” and those who are considered “divers,” there is still a plethora of factors that affect the outcome of the experiment. Due to this, a variety of people actually identify with both the “thriver” and the “diver” which in statistical data would be an error, where in fact a “diver” has the traits of a “thriver,” but in the experiment are identified as the latter, or vice versa. Each of these categories, do however seem to stereotype different types of students, those who fail, and those who achieve; and something that the experiment does seem to reveal however, is that such traits are based on the study habits of the students, whether one strives to focus and not procrastinate versus one who constantly procrastinates and is easily distracted. However, given the number of factors that disrupt such an experiment, the study is inconclusive, but essentially is a step in the right direction to understand why students succumb to the pressures of college.

    1. The students were all willing to talk (event the student who told me in the previous class that she was ok with being recorded as long as she didn’t have to speak in the discussion), but they were all just talking to me

      A thing to point out is often found that students are motivated by their grades to speak in a class discussion, which brings up a question of whether or not that has to with talking more to the teacher than their peers. However, despite this, the willingness to talk in a discussion fundamentally needs to be directed towards one another rather than the professor.

  3. Sep 2016
    1. too concerned with consensus and too little with conflict

      Social History is more concerned with what the people think and how many people think it versus the various opinions that may or may not contradict one another. This essentially being the emphasis on politics being left out.

    2. 'the history of the people with the politics left out.'

      Therefore social history is something that is in regards to everything but without taking sides to it, like one would do with politics. Or is it that there are just multiple sides, but it is not thought of on a political level?

    1. A 2015 report by the Carnegie Foundation made this clear, stating the Carnegie Unit “sought to standardize students’ exposure to subject material by ensuring they received consistent amounts of instructional time. It was never intended to function as a measure of what students learned.”

      This is very understandable as each level of school requires a student to have learned a surmountable number of facts and knowledge in a certain period of time, which is what the unit was essentially measuring, however over the years that was lost in translation, as it soon became something to measure the amount of time students had learned.

    1. If students are not permitted to spend serious, devoted time steeped in the life of the mind, stepping away from their lives and onto college campuses, then it does not matter how many credits they have piled up. Focused, devoted time really matters. The same is true for competency-based education or any other approach.

      This particular statement goes back to the idea of not just doing something for the sake of doing it, but rather doing it because you want to. But then the question is what qualifies as wanting to do something? Sure there must be some level of compromise of time, but how much time are you willing to give if you even if you want to do it?

    2. lifeworld in which skills take on meaning

      Essentially then, college or university, or even just education overall is all about real world meanings and lessons.

    3. The purpose of these fields is to help students achieve some of the hard-earned insights that the liberal arts have gained about the human and natural worlds.

      So we spend time in school not for the purpose of gaining knowledge or skills about the particular subject, but rather to gain insight about the world itself?

    4. Cognitive science has made clear that knowledge combines information with activity, that all real learning is active learning.

      I think perhaps the question then is what exactly qualifies as active when it comes to learning. Is it just reading something, or is being engaged in an actual activity such as labs?

    5. The most prominent alternative to the credit hour is competency-based education

      So instead of getting credit for showing up, which is a flawed system, we have moved to a competency-based education, which in itself is still flawed as well, as then a number of students are still at a disadvantage.

    1. “inferior” learning

      This would explain why we tend to lean towards to one task when multitasking, as one task requires a superior learning method to be completed.

    2. According to the article, brains acquire learning in two fundamentally different manners

      If we acquire learning in two different ways, then we certain couldn't multitask as some tasks would require one learning and the another task the other. If that's the case then the idea of multitasking is indeed a fallacy.

    3. who multitask actually prove more inefficient than people who focus on one task at a time. Because our brains are incapable of performing two conceptual tasks literally simultaneously

      In a particular case study that I read about regarding multitasking, they had each volunteer play a driving simulator, while trying to memorize the words that flashed on the screen. And during the experiment it proved that people would lean towards one activity more than the other. As a result some either memorized the majority of the words and did poorly in the driving simulator or had trouble memorizing the words, but did very well on the simulator.

    4. quite obvious that people are capable of at least some level of simultaneous activity.

      Of course there are the exceptions, like for instance I can listen to music and read/write at the same time. But one of the things I've found is that even when I do these things simultaneously I tend to do one more than the other. Continuing my example, I would either be more focused on what I was reading or writing rather than listening the actual song I was playing at the time.

    5. microprocessors in a multi-core system must occasionally interrupt each other for purposes of synchronicity in PC operations.

      If we apply this to the human level, it's basically like doing one thing and then stopping to do another, while thinking that we are doing both at the same time. So are we really multitasking then?

    6. advantageous to have multiple microprocessors literally running simultaneously

      It's not as if it's one computer doing multiple things at the same time, in this sense it's multiple computers all doing a different task at the same time. In this regard, if we were to multitask, it would be like having multiple versions of your self that are doing different things at the same time, rather than just the one version attempting to do multiple things at once.

    7. Microprocessors, as well as their current programmable cousins, cannot literally perform several tasks simultaneously.

      Even computers are not able to literally multitask, it's just a term that we use to say the computer is doing multiple things, but not at the same time.

    8. concept of multitasking itself

      We seem to think that this concept means that we can do multiple things at once, but the argument or even just the refute against it, is can we really do more than one thing at the same time. Although we tend to believe we can, in some studies it has proven that we really can't.