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danah boyd | 1 Nov 15:31
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Why Parents Help Children Violate Facebook’s 13+ Rule

I know that many of you believe that COPPA is intended to curb the practices of companies, but it has serious unintended consequences that affect parenting, education, free speech, and children's rights.  For that reason, I want to share a new study that I've been working on has serious policy implications that affect every aspect of internet studies.  For those who don't know anything about COPPA, it's the U.S. legislation that prompts most major U.S. companies to make their websites 13+.  The regulation is currently being reviewed by the Federal Trade Commission (and they're seeking public comments by Nov 28 so if any of you are interested, please let me know!).

Anyhow, I'm really excited about this study and I hope you will be too!



Title: "Why Parents Help Their Children Lie to Facebook About Age: Unintended Consequences of the 'Children's Online Privacy Protection Act'" 
Authors: danah boyd (Microsoft Research/NYU), Eszter Hargittai (Northwestern), Jason Schultz (UC-Berkeley), and John Palfrey (Harvard) 

danah's blog post: http://bit.ly/tgKZrE
Huffington Post op-ed: http://huff.to/rVocz5
CNet Coverage: http://cnet.co/tnNPw1

Topline: 

A major new nationwide study released today shows that many parents know that their underage children are on Facebook in violation of the site's restrictions.  Parents are often complicit in helping their children join the site.   These new data suggest that, by creating a context in which companies choose to restrict access to children, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which is currently under review, inadvertently undermines parents' ability to make choices and protect their children's data.  This study has significant implications for policy makers, particularly in light of the discussion in Congress and at the Federal Trade Commission about COPPA and other age-based privacy laws.  Based on a national sample of 1,007 U.S. parents who have children living with them between the ages of 10-14, this survey conducted July 5-14, 2011 found:

• Although Facebook's minimum age is 13, parents of 13- and 14-year-olds report that, on average, their child joined Facebook at age 12.
• Half (55%) of parents of 12-year-olds report their child has a Facebook account, and most (82%) of these parents knew when their child signed up.  Most (76%) also assisted their 12-year old in creating the account.
• A third (36%) of all parents surveyed reported that their child joined Facebook before the age of 13, and two-thirds of them (68%) helped their child create the account.
• Half (53%) of parents surveyed think Facebook has a minimum age and a third (35%) of these parents think that this is a recommendation and not a requirement.
• Most (78%) parents think it is acceptable for their child to violate minimum age restrictions on online services.

The authors argue that these data call into question the efficacy of COPPA. Their findings have important implications for COPPA reform and other age-based legislation, such as the "Do Not Track Kids Act" currently being discussed in Congress:

• COPPA is well intended but has major unintended consequences in terms of encouraging general-purpose websites like Facebook, Skype, and Gmail to limit kids under 13 from accessing educational and social opportunities.
• Age-based restrictions imposed in response to COPPA undermine parental authority and limit parents' freedoms to make choices about what their children do and what information is collected about them. 
• As a result of COPPA, lying about one's age has become normal and parents often help children lie. This creates safety and privacy issues.
• Online safety and privacy are of great concern to parents, but most parents do not want solutions that result in age-based restrictions for their children. 
• Parents are open to recommended age ratings and other approaches that offer guidance without limiting their children's access.

The implications of this study go beyond issues of governance.  The age restrictions engendered by COPPA have serious implications for parenting, education, and issues surrounding children's rights.  To learn more, view the complete article at http://bit.ly/ParentSurveyCOPPA



------

"taken out of context, i must seem so strange" -- ani
<at> zephoria






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Nishant Shah | 28 Oct 14:43
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In Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives

Dear All,
I had written earlier around the question of Digital Natives as a preparation to the Mobility Shifts summit earlier this month. It was a pleasure to present at the Summit and present some of the research that we have been doing the last couple of years. Continuing with the argumentation, I am sharing this new blog that I have written for the Digital Media and Learning blog at http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/search-other-decoding-digital-natives

I am replicating the text for people who don't want to click on the link. Given how many people are working around these issues on this list, I hope that this leads to an interesting discussion. I look forward to the conversations.

Warmly
Nishant

In Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives

This is the first post of a research inquiry that questions the ways in which we have understood the Youth-Technology-Change relationship in the contemporary digital world, especially through the identity of ‘Digital Native’. Drawing from three years of research and current engagements in the field, the post begins a critique of how we need to look at the outliers, the people on the fringes in order to unravel the otherwise celebratory nature of discourse about how the digital is changing the world. In this first post, I chart the trajectories of our research at the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and Hivos (The Hague, The Netherlands) to see how alternative models of understanding these relationships can be built.

The Digital Native has many different imaginations. From the short hand understanding of ‘anybody who is born after the 1980s’ (Prensky, 2001) to more nuanced definitions of populations who are ‘born digital’ (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008), the digital native has firmly been ensconced in our visions of technology futures. From DIY decentralized learning environments to viral and networked forms of engagements that span from the Arab Spring to Occupy Together, the Digital Native – somebody who has grown up with digital technologies (and the skills to negotiate with them) as the default mode of being – has become central to how we see usage and proliferation of new digital tools and technologies.

Three years ago, when the identity Digital Native was already in currency but before the overwhelming examples that are now so easily available in the post MENA (Middle East-North Africa) world, we asked ourselves the question: “What does a Digital Native look like?” When we started sifting through the literature (published and grey), practice-based discourse and policy, we started spotting certain patterns: Digital Natives were almost always young, white, (largely male) middle class, affluent, English speaking populations who could afford education and were located in developed Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) contexts of ubiquitous connectivity. These users of technology were treated as the proto-type around which digital natives in the ‘rest of the world’ were imagined. The ‘rest of the world’ was not necessarily an exotic geography elsewhere, but often was a person whose relationships with the digital were impeded by class, education, gender, sexuality, literacy etc.

Moreover, we found that the accounts of Digital Natives that were being discussed across the board were accounts of super stars. They either heralded the digital native as the young messiah who is drastically changing the world, overthrowing governments and building collaborative and participatory structures of openness. Or they feared the digital native as an unthinking, self contained, dysfunctional person who pirates and plagiarizes and needs to be rehabilitated into becoming a civic individual. Very little was said about Everyday Digital Natives – users who, through the presence of digital technologies, were changing their lives on an everyday basis.

Other Digital Natives

Based on this, we began the quest for the Other Digital Natives – people who did not necessarily fit the existing models of being digital but who often had to strive to ‘Become Digital’ and in the process produce possibilities and potentials for social change and political participation in their immediate environments. This was the first step to discover what being a digital native would be in emerging ICT contexts, where connectivity, access, usage, affordability, geo-political regulation, and questions of the biological and of living would give us new understandings of what a digital native is. This quest for the Other inspired us to work across Asia, Africa and Latin America, to talk to some of the most strident voices in the region who claimed to be digital natives, expressed discomfort with being called digital natives, refused to be called digital natives, and sought to provide critique of the existing expectations of digital nativity. The proceedings from these conversations in the Global South have been consolidated in the book Digital AlterNatives With a Cause? available for free download.

For this post, I want to look at some of the presumptions in existing understanding of Digital Natives and how we can contest them to build Digital AlterNative identities.

Presumption 1: Digital Natives are always young.

Even if we go by Mark Prensky’s problematic definition that everybody born after the 1980s is a digital native, we must realize that there is a large chunk of digital native users who are now in their thirties. They are in universities, work forces, governments and offices. They have not only grown older with technologies but they have also radically changed the technologies and tech platforms that they inhabit.

It is time to let go of the Peter-Pan imagination of a Digital Native as always perpetually young. Moreover, we must realize that digital natives existed even before the name ‘Digital Native’ came into existence. There were people who built internets, who might not have been young but were still native to the digital environments that they were a part of.

Instead of looking at a youth-centric, age-based exclusive definition of a digital native, it is more fruitful to say that people who natively interact with digital technologies – people who are able to inhabit the remix, reuse, share cultures that digitality produces, might be marked as digital AlterNatives.

Presumption 2: Digital Natives are born digital.

It does sound nice – the idea that there were people who were born as preconfigured cyborgs, interacting with interfaces from the minute they were born. And yet, we know that people are taught to interact with technologies. True, technologies often define our own conceptions of who we are and how we perceive the world around us, but there is still a learning curve that is endemic to human technology relationships.

Because of the ubiquitous and pervasive nature of certain kinds of technology mediated interaction, it is sometimes difficult to look at our habits of technology as learned interactions. Recognizing that there is a thrust, an effort and an incentive produced for people to Become Digital, is also to recognize that there are different actors, players, promoters and teachers who help young people enter into relationships with technologies, which can often be greater than the first interactions.

Presumption 3: Digital Natives live digital lives.

This is a concern voiced by many people who talk about digital natives. They are posited as slacktivists – removed from their material realities and apathetic to the physical world around them. They are painted as dysfunctional screenagers who are unable to sustain the fabric of social interaction and community formation outside of social networking systems. They are discussed as a teenage mutant nightmare that unfolds almost entirely in the domains of the digital.

But these kinds of imaginations forget that a digital native is not primarily a digital native, or at least, not exclusively digital. Being a digital native is one of many identities these users appropriate. The digital often serves as a lens that informs all their other socio-cultural and political interactions, but it is not an all-containing system. The bodies that click on ‘Like’ buttons on Facebook are also often the bodies that fill up the streets to fight for their rights. The division between Physical Reality and Virtual Reality needs to be dismissed to build more comprehensive accounts of digital native practices.

Presumption 4: Connectivity is digitality.

This is often an easy conflation. It is presumed that once one has constant connectivity, one will automatically become a digital native. Especially in policy and development based approaches, connectivity and access have become the buzzwords by which the digital divide can be breached. However, we have now learned that this one-size, fits-all solution actually fits nobody. Being connected – by building infrastructure and affording gadgets – does not make somebody a digital native.

The digital native identity needs to be more than mere access to the digital. It involves agency, choice, critical literacy and fluency with the digital media that we live with. So instead of thinking of anybody who is connected as a digital native, we are looking at people who are strategically able to harness the powers of the digital to produce a change in their immediate environments. These changes can range from making personal collections of media to mobilising large numbers of people for political protests. To be digital is to be intimately connected with the technologies so that they can augment and amplify the ways in which we respond to the world around us.

I offer these as the building blocks of looking at the ‘Other’ of the Digital Natives as we have discursively produced them. From hereon, in my subsequent posts, I hope to drill deeper to locate nuances and differences, concepts and frameworks that we need to map in order to build a digital native model that is inclusive, differential and context based.



--
Nishant Shah
Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,( www.cis-india.org )
Asia Awards Fellow, 2008-09
# 00-91-9740074884
http://www.facebook.com/nishant.shah
http://cis-india.academia.edu/NishantShah

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Saul Ostrow | 18 Oct 19:16
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Has anyone seen this


The College of 2020 according to the Chronicle of Higher Education

Aaron Brower's scholarship and teaching focuses on the transition from high school to college, and on a variety of issues related to college student life and “integrative learning” innovations in college education. The basic idea is that academic and social outcomes are produced when college environments blend in- and out-of-class learning and experiences to create communities of students, faculty and staff who share common learning goals (i.e., learning communities).

The Chronicle of Higher Education has posted the first of three research reports on future trends in higher education.  This first one, The College of 2020:  Students, reports trends of students--demographic information, interests, use of technology, which sectors of higher education are growing at a faster pace, part-time vs. full-time status, etc. Click here for the free executive summary.

This is a well-done piece, and their primary questions, "What is college, and why should I go?" are exactly right.  One premise of this report is that two economic models of colleges will survive:  4-year residential and research institutions with already-recognized and respected brand names (privates like Harvard as well as public flagships like UW-Madison), and the for-profit institutions that rely heavily on on-line and flexible educational degrees.  Those that are somewhere in the middle are going to have a very rough time.  Here are some of the conclusions from the report:

   * Fewer and fewer students will seek full-time, four-year programs due to their expense, inconvenience, and inflexibility of programs.

   * Thus, an emphasis will be on providing cheap, convenient, flexible education that students can access anywhere.

   * Three-year degree programs will proliferate.

   * To attract more students, colleges may begin to offer one-year remedial programs to high school students who are not yet prepared for college work.  At the same time, adult education and college education will increasingly merge.

   * At some point just after 2020, minority students will outnumber whites on college campuses for the first time.

   * Even for universities that are largely residential, "hybrid" courses will increasingly become the norm:  classroom discussions, office hours, lectures, study groups, and assignments will move on line.

   * Here's a quote I particularly liked because of things I've already mentioned about web 2.0:  "The Internet has made most information available to everyone, and faculty members must take that into consideration when teaching. There is very little that students cannot find on their own if they are inspired to do so. And many of them will be surfing the Net in class. The faculty member, therefore, may become less an oracle and more an organizer and guide, someone who adds perspective and context, finds the best articles and research, and sweeps away misconceptions and bad information." (emphasis added).
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Geert Lovink | 13 Oct 09:43
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Franco Berardi & Geert Lovink: A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software

A call to the Army of Love and to the Army of Software

By Franco Berardi and Geert Lovink

October 2011. The fight opposing financial dictatorship is erupting.

The so-called ‘financial markets’ and their cynical services are
destroying the very foundations of social civilization. The legacy of the
postwar compromise between the working class and progressive bourgeoisie
has all but disappeared. Neoliberal policies are cutting back education
and the public health system and is cancelling the right to a salary and a
pension. The outcome will be impoverishment of large parts of the
population, a growing precarity of labor conditions (freelance, short-term
contracts, periods of unemployment) and daily humiliation of workers. The
yet to be seen effect of the financial crisis will be violence, as people
conjure up scapegoats in order to vent their rage. Ethnic cleansing, civil
war, obliteration of democracy. This is a system we call financial Nazism:
FINAZISM.

Right now people are fighting back in many places, and in many ways.
Occupy Wall Street inspired a mass mobilization in New York that is
extending across the USA every day. In Greece workers and students are
squatting Syntagma square and protesting against the blackmail by the
European Central Bank, which is devastating the country. Cairo, Madrid,
Tel Aviv, the list of the ‘movements of the squares’ is proliferating. On
October 15 cities across the globe will amass with people protesting
against the systemic robbery.

Will our demonstrations and occupations stop the Finazist machine? They
will not. Resistance will not resist, and our fight will not stop the
legal crimes. Let’s be frank, we will not persuade our enemies to end
their predatory attacks (‘let’s make even more profit from the next
downfall’) for the simple reason that our enemies are not human beings.
They are machines. Yes, human beings – corporate managers, stock owners,
traders – are cashing the money that we are losing, and prey upon
resources that workers produce. Politicians sign laws that deliver the
lives of millions of people to the Almighty God of the Market.

Bankers and investors are not the real decision makers, they are
participants in an economy of gestural confusion. The real process of
predatory power has become automated. The transfer of resources and wealth
from those who produce to those who do nothing except oversee the abstract
patterns of financial transactions is embedded in the machine, in the
software that governs the machine. Forget about governments and party
politics. Those puppets who pretend to be leaders are talking nonsense.
The paternalistic options they offer around ‘austerity measures’
underscore a rampant cynicism internal to party politics: they all know
they lost the power to model finance capitalism years ago. Needless to
say, the political class are anxious to perform the act of control and
sacrifice social resources of the future in the form of budget cuts in
order to ‘satisfy the markets’. Stop listening to them, stop voting for
them, stop hoping and cursing them. They are just pimps, and politics is
dead.

What should we do? Living with the Finazist violence, bending to the
arrogance of algorithms, accepting growing exploitation and declining
salaries? Nope. Let’s fight against Finazism because it is never too late.
At the moment Finazism is winning for two reasons. First, because we have
lost the pleasure of being together. Thirty years of precariousness and
competition have destroyed social solidarity. Media virtualization has
destroyed the empathy among bodies, the pleasure of touching each other,
and the pleasure of living in urban spaces. We have lost the pleasure of
love, because too much time is devoted to work and virtual exchange. The
large army of lovers have to wake up. Second, because our intelligence has
been submitted to algorithmic power in exchange for a handful of shitty
money and a virtual life. For a salary that is miserable when compared to
the profits of the corporate bosses, a small army of ‘softwarists’ are
accepting the task of destroying human dignity and justice. The small army
of software programmers have to wake up.

There is only a way to awake the lover that is hidden in our paralyzed,
frightened and frail virtualized bodies. There is only a way to awake the
human being that is hidden in the miserable daily life of the softwarist:
take to the streets and fight. Burning banks is useless, as real power is
not in the physical buildings, but in the abstract connection between
numbers, algorithms and information. But occupying banks is good as a
starting point for the long-lasting process of dismantling and rewriting
the techno-linguistic automatons enslaving all of us. This is the only
politics that counts. Some say that the Occupy Wall Street movement lacks
clear demands and an agenda. This remark is ridiculous. As in the case of
all social movements the political backgrounds and motives are diverse,
even diffuse and quite frequently contradictory. The occupation movement
would not be better off with more realistic demands.

What is thrilling right now is the multiplicity of new connections and
commitment. But what is even more exciting is finding ways that can set in
motion the collective ‘exodus’ from the capitalist agony. Let’s not talk
about the ‘sustainability’ of the movement. That’s boring. Everything is
transient. These fast-burning events do not help us to overcome the daily
depression. Occupying the squares and other public spaces is a way to
respond to the short duration of the demonstrations and marches. We are
here to stay.

We are not demanding a reform of the global financial system or the ECB.
The return to national currencies of the past, as requested by the
rightwing populists, will not make ordinary citizens less vulnerable to
currency speculation. A return to state sovereignty is not the solution
either, and many people already sense this. The demand for more
‘intervention’, control and oversight of markets is a hopeless gesture.
The real issue is that humans are no longer in charge. We need to
dismantle the machines themselves. This can be done in a very peaceful
manner. Hack into their system, publish their crimes through
Wikileaks-type initiatives and then delete their real-time trading killing
networks for good.

Financial markets are all about the politics of speed and
deterritorialization. But we know their architectures and vulnerabilities.
The financial world has lost its legitimacy. There is no global consensus
anymore that the ‘market’ is always right. And this is our chance to act.
The movement has to respond at this level. Decommissioning and
re-programming financial software is not the dream of a Luddite sabotaging
the machine. ‘Market regulation’ will not do the job, only autonomy and
the self-organization of software workers can dismantle the predatory
algorithms and create self-empowering software for society.

The general intellect and the erotic social body have to meet on the
streets and squares, and united they will break the Finazist chains.
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Ramon Sangüesa | 11 Oct 15:13
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Introduction

I am Ramon Sangüesa


My background is very technological (PhD In Artificial Intelligence) but I have been motivated since a long time ago by the interaction between technologies of information and opportunities for change in society. I am currently a professor at the Technical University of Catalunya in Barcelona, but I also have been involved am currently involved in initiatives that promote "the digital". 
And by "the digital" I don't mean just the access to or knowledge of digital technologies but a deep understanding of their (to me) peculiar way in which digital technologie ahve created a culture with their own ways of building knowledge. Also new modes of innovation and organization. Or maybe there was another culture that spawned digital technology processes of innovation and organization?

Anyway,there is an fascinanting change  going on  that revolves around "digital code". I have been working on its influence on citizen participation, learning, and new economic forms. 

Initially I collaborated with "knowledge transfer" with a twist with the creation of the i2cat Foundation in Spain (on advanced internet possibilities). Then become one of the founders of Citilab (Citizen's Lab) to bring citizens to the front of digital innovation. Now I am collaborating with CoCreating Cultures which focuses on collaborative ways to create together new learning possibilities around science and the arts (and the mix of the two). And from time to time and create and use some digital technology;-)

A pleasure to meet you all!

Ramon Sangüesa
--
Blog1: http://fluxchange.typepad.com/en/
Blog2: http://co-creating-cultures.com/eng/
Skype: ramonsang
Cell phones (USA): + 1 646 369 3318 // +1 (646) 755-9830
Mobile (Spain):+ 34  616 290 686
Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ramonsanguesa

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Sean Dockray | 10 Oct 09:40
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Re: Defending UC


I have enjoyed reading some of the exchanges over the last month,  
including this one
over the past day between Blake and Brian.
After three years of adjunct teaching, followed by three years of  
working entirely in an
extra-institutional context, I would have hoped that I have developed  
a balanced perspective,
but in reality it's more confused than ever and that confusion will  
probably be palpable
by the end this...

My short history has paralleled the DIY U discussion: after a while as  
adjunct faculty
at a couple of UC schools, I began to think that the situation was  
kind of miserable. Surely,
there must be a better way of doing it. Talking to sympathetic  
supervisors, joining unions, etc.
felt like a start but didn't really accomplish much, at least it  
didn't feel like it did. So, I started a school,
partly with the fantasy that for all the thousands of unhappy grad  
students and adjuncts in the
UC system alone, there must be some way of gathering all that critical  
thinking and misery
into a new pedagogical project that wouldn't be premised on debt and  
competition. Opposition
seemed less interesting and less productive (from my position) than  
just working to the side.

Well, since then, David Cameron has of course promoted "free schools"  
as part of the
Big Society program, appropriating anarchist terminology in the  
process of breaking apart
public education. And I think that the general form of the argument  
against this has been raised on
iDC about a half-dozen times over the past month, in defense of the  
University - that any attack on the
establishment is in the service of conservative political or at least  
neoliberal economic forces,
regardless of its stated agenda. That "DIY U", broadly understood, is  
hastening the erosion
of the institutional gains that had been made over the previous  
century...

Jumping back to recent exchanges -
phrases like "total corruption" or "eviscerated shell" for the  
University are obviously a little
hyperbolic, but they come close to describing the perception of many  
students and temp
faculty after some time in that environment without a salary,  
benefits, and a future pension.
The important, good work that happens in a University is meant to be  
rewarding enough in
itself to justify the working conditions (or it even obscures the  
understanding of what happens
there as work).

Brian doesn't seem to be advocating "abandoning institutionalized  
higher ed" so much as asking
*how* to both defend social conquests and make further advances in the  
present moment.

OK - I write that, but then I would be lying if I didn't admit to  
wondering *when* we should
begin to consider abandonment? What if the University is a failed  
project? What if we're watching
its implosion? What if the right - waiting all too eagerly for this  
moment when the left's last
remaining outpost would start to crumble - is now getting to frame the  
debate and future of
education because we're worried that moving would weaken our defensive  
posture?

What if the 'defense' of the University was actually best conducted on  
OWS right now?
and in general by supporting and developing extra-institutional  
educational projects with
time, expertise, and available resources? (yes, an appeal to the  
salaried and insured faculty!)
One of my worries about this conference is that because it is framed  
from within the institution,
it poses a question of what can institutions learn from, or gain from,  
extra-institutional projects,
when the inverse question is probably the more urgent one: how can  
these extra-institutional
projects be supported and strengthened by institutions and their  
faculties? How to construct
effective and just counter-institutions while there's still time?

It's great that the occupy protests are continuing throughout the  
conference - how do we see our
discussions in relation to what we're seeing across the US? (not to  
mention London,
Greece, Chile, Cairo, ....)

Sincerely,
Sean
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Jessica F. Lingel | 9 Oct 23:23
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Local Interventions and Mobility Shifts

Hello Mobility Shifts and idc-ers,
I'm writing on behalf of my Mobility Shifts panel, consisting of David Gagnon, Nathan Graham, Germaine
Halegoua and myself, Jessa Lingel.  Our panel is on Saturday (at 3pm) and deals with tools and technologies
for DIY archives, activism and education.  We wanted to extend our shared interest in creating accessible
tools for archiving interactions and conversations beyond our panel, so we created a YouTube based game
intended to provoke discussion from the conference. 
Our YouTube video explains the objective here (www.youtube.com/user/localinterventions) but we
wanted to share on the idclist as well.  Each day of the conference, we will upload a question to our Local
Interventions YouTube channel, as well as the Local Interventions website:
http://www.digitalborn.org/archives/34.  Our first question is drawn from Henry Jenkins' idc post
earlier today, which addresses questions of how educators can bring technology into the classroom when
burdened by restrictive institutional policies on media, how libraries can offer students digital
literacy without adequate staff or funding.  In short, our first question is largely a pragmatic one:
-What obstacles have you faced in your work as an educator, academic and/or activist in terms of media
policies?  What has proven successful in overcoming these obstacles?
We invite you to treat each question as a challenge to interview other conference attendees (or people who
are just interested in the conference topics) about the questions we post, take videos and upload those
videos to the channel.  Our short term objective is to foster dialogue based on content that emerges from
Mobility Shifts, but we also have the long term aim of creating a digital archive of the conversations that
take place as a result of meetings, panels, sessions and Q&As. To upload videos, send them to this e-mail
(4uhg08wkjvkp <at> m.youtube.com - we know it's not easy to remember, so just type it out once and add it to your
smart phone address book.).  You can also use the Twitter hashtag: #localinterventions to send in
questions and comments. 
There will be a prize for the user who uploads the most videos, but really the motivation should be to
contribute to a lasting digital artifact that documents Mobility Shifts as a site of interaction,
discussion and play.
Let us know if you have questions, please join us in our online game, and see you at the conference!
Jessa

Jessa Lingel
PhD Candidate
School of Communication and Information
Rutgers University
http://jessalingel.tumblr.com/

-----Original Message-----

> Date: Mon Oct 03 17:47:39 EDT 2011
> From: "Henry Jenkins" <hgjenkins3@...>
> Subject: [iDC] We've Wired the Classroom -- Now What!
> To: idc@...
> 
> As we get ready for the Mobility Shifts conference, I have been asked to see
> if I can provoke a conversation among attendees.
> 
> Here's what I have on my mind today:
> 
> For some time, those of us who work closely with educators observe a core
> paradox. The work of MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning Initiative have
> focused attention on games-based, mobile, networked, connected,
> participatory, affinity space, geeked-out modes of learning (Hope I got all
> of the buzz words in there) and there's a great deal of research and
> experimentation exploring the value of these approaches. But the story on
> the ground looks very different with schools installing networked computers
> and then, in effect, disabling all of the affordances of Web 2.0 platforms
> from being deployed by teachers and students. So, federal funding comes
> attached with restrictions on access to social media and with the
> requirement of filtering software which makes it hard to use much of the web
> for instruction. Many teachers are blocked from using YouTube and other
> video sharing platforms. In Los Angeles, there are work arounds which allow
> the teacher to punch in a code and authorize the use of YouTube, but it has
> to be punched in for each clip and has to be done very quickly before the
> clip is accessed, so you can not even line up all of the clips you need for
> a particular class period at the start of the period. Teachers are
> discouraging their students from using Wikipedia, because they have not been
> trained in how the online project works. And of course, our hopes that
> librarians might become information coaches for their students have been
> complicated by the fact that whole school districts have fired all of their
> librarians or forced them back into being mostly full time classroom
> teachers. So, we are gaining ground conceptually and losing it on the level
> of policy. So, what are we, as a community of researchers, theorists, and
> educators, going to do about this? What are our prospects for a meaningful
> collective response to what is a set of policy decisions, partially made at
> a Federal level and tied to funding, partially at very local levels and thus
> highly fragmented?
> 
> Talk among yourselves.
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Elaine Savory | 6 Oct 03:14
Favicon

Elaine Savory

I teach at Eugene Lang College, in the Literary Studies Department. I have published widely on Caribbean
and African literatures, especially poetry, drama and theater, women's writing and literary history. I
co-edited the first feminist collection of essays on Caribbean literature (Out of the Kumbla: Women and
Caribbean Literature). I have written two books on Jean Rhys for Cambridge University Press, and also a
volume of poetry (flame tree time). I am completing a book on elegiac poetry in the shadow of empire, as well
as editing the work of two Caribbean writers (Edmund Austin and Bruce St. John) and  the MLA teaching
Approaches to Kamau Brathwaite. I am very pleased to be part of this innovative conference, and look
forward to learning a lot!
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Lev Manovich | 2 Oct 20:34
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Data Literacy and Cultural Analytics

Greetings

I am Lev Manovich and my talk at the forthcoming conference will be
called  "Data Literacy and Cultural Analytics"

Here is what I plan to address:

The joint availability of numerous large data sets on the web and free
tools for data scraping, cleaning, analyzing and visualizing enable
potentially anybody to become a citizen data miner. But how do we
enable this in practice?

What are the necessary elements of “data literacy”?

How do we inspire students in traditionally non-quantiative fields
(art history, film and media studies, literary studies, etc.) to start
playing with big data?

One the limitations of the existing popular data analysis and
visualization tools is that they are designed to work with numbers and
texts – but not images and video. To close this gap, In 2007 we have
established Software Studies Initiative (softwarestudies.com) at
University of California, San Diego. The lab’s focus in on development
of new visualization methods particularly suited for media teaching
and research.

In my presentation I will show a sample of our projects including
visualization of art, film, animation, video games, magazines, comics,
manga, and graphic design. Our image sets range from 4535 covers of
Time magazine to 320,000 Flickr images from “Art Now” and “Graphic
Design” groups, and one million manga pages.

In September 2011 we released ImagePlot -  free software tool that
visualizes collections of images and video of any size. I will discuss
how we use ImagePlot in classes with both undergraduate and graduate
students to create collaborative projects which reveal unexpected
cultural trends and also make us question our existing concepts for
understanding visual culture and media. You can download software
here:

http://lab.softwarestudies.com/p/imageplot.html

best,

Lev

---------------------
Dr. Lev Manovich
Director, Software Studies Initiative, Calit2 <softwarestudies.com>
Professor, Visual Arts Department, UCSD <visarts.ucsd.edu>

email: manovich.lev@...
lab: softwarestudies.com
www.manovich.net
twitter.com/manovich
www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=668367315
youtube.com/user/softwarestudies

Mailing address:
University of California, San Diego,
Lev Manovich, Visual Arts Department,
9500 Gilman Drive. #0084, La Jolla, CA 92093-0084, U.S.A

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 9:19 PM, Trebor Scholz <scholzt@...> wrote:
> Dear Lev,
>
> All participants introduced their contribution to the summit on the iDC mailing list.
>
> Join the discussion by posting to idc@...
>
> The discussion leading up to MobilityShifts:
>
> May 2011
> Call
> https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2011-May/004532.html
>
> June 2011
> Public Library Thread and Introductions
> https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2011-June/thread.html
>
> July 2011
> Public Library Thread continued + The Future of the Humanities  +
> Hackademia as New Structural Transformation of the Public  Sphere
> https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2011-July/thread.html
>
> August 2011
> Discussion: The Edupunks' Guide + Are We Changing?
> https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2011-August/thread.html
>
> September 2011
> From Digital Natives to Digital Outcasts + Can DIY Education be Crowdsourced? + The Aims of Education
> https://lists.thing.net/pipermail/idc/2011-September/thread.html
>
> (initiated and moderated by Trebor Scholz)
>
>
> best,
> Trebor
> =
>
> R. Trebor Scholz, PhD
> Director of the conference series The Politics of Digital Culture
> Chair, MobilityShifts
> The New School
> 65 West 11th Street, New York, NY 10011
>
>
>>>> Lev Manovich <manovich.lev@...> 09/30/11 3:08 PM >>>
> Jennifer
>
> I am very sorry for not being in touch - classes just started at UCSD this week.
>
> yes of course I am participating.. I am finalizing the abstract and
> will send it to you later today
>
>
> I was not aware that you are making travel arrangements for the
> participants - so I already booked both flights and the hotel.
> I am arriving Dec 12 and departing Dec 16.
>
> However, its very possible that you have a better rate in the hotel
> you are working with - which one is it, and what is the rate?
>
>
> again, my apologies for not being in touch
>
> best
>
> lev
>
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 11:22 AM, Jennifer Conley Darling
> <conleydj@...> wrote:
>> Dear Lev Manovich,
>> I'm following up as we have not gotten a response from you regarding the
>> confirmation of your date & time, nor a title and description of your talk.
>> We also have not made any flight arrangements for you. I am currently
>> holding a hotel room for three nights (Oct 13-16) in your name and will need
>> to release these at the beginning of next week if you will not be joining
>> us.
>> Please let us know per the below email if you can accommodate the timing.
>> I look forward to your response.
>> Jennifer
>>
>> On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 10:16 AM, Jennifer Conley Darling
>> <conleydj@...> wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear Lev,
>>> I'm so glad to have you on board for MobilityShifts. The full conference
>>> runs October 10-16. We have you slated to speak in speaker series on Friday,
>>> October 14 from 10-12pm in Wollman Hall located at 65 West 11 Street.
>>> If you'd be so kind as to send a brief description and title of your talk,
>>> we would like to include this in our program, which goes to print late next
>>> week.
>>> Thank you so much and don't hesitate to reach out with questions.
>>> --
>>> Jennifer Conley Darling
>>> Conference Producer
>>> MobilityShifts: An International Future of Learning Summit
>>> October 10-16, 2011
>>> The New School
>>> 65 West 11 Street
>>> New York, NY 10011
>>>
>>> On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 3:18 PM, Lev Manovich <manovich.lev@...>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Yes I confirmed already - very happy to participate
>>>>
>>>> what dates will be the conference - 14-16 ?
>>>>
>>>> and my talk?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> best,
>>>>
>>>> Lev
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 12:15 PM, Losh, Elizabeth <elosh@...>
>>>> wrote:
>>>> > Hi Jennifer,
>>>> >
>>>> > Last I heard Lev was on board, but I am cc'ing him.
>>>> >
>>>> > Liz
>>>> >
>>>> > Sent from my iPhone and thus more likely to include nonstandard
>>>> > spelling or syntax.
>>>> >
>>>> > On Aug 4, 2011, at 11:23 AM, "Jennifer Conley Darling"
>>>> > <conleydj@...
>>>> >  > wrote:
>>>> >
>>>> >> Hi Liz,
>>>> >>
>>>> >> Trebor had asked me to follow up with you regarding Lev's
>>>> >> participation in MobilityShifts. Have you been able to get
>>>> >> confirmation from him? If so, we would like to begin a direct
>>>> >> communication with Lev regarding location, A/V needs, etc.
>>>> >>
>>>> >> Please let me know where things stand as soon as possible.  Thanks
>>>> >> so much.
>>>> >>
>>>> >> --
>>>> >> Jennifer Conley Darling
>>>> >> Conference Producer
>>>> >> MobilityShifts: An International Future of Learning Summit
>>>> >> October 10-16, 2011
>>>> >> The New School
>>>> >> 65 West 11 Street
>>>> >> New York, NY 10011
>>>> >>
>>>> >
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jennifer Conley Darling
>> Conference Producer
>> MobilityShifts: An International Future of Learning Summit
>> October 10-16, 2011
>> The New School
>> 65 West 11 Street
>> New York, NY 10011
>>
>>
>
>
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Trebor Scholz | 6 Oct 11:58
Favicon

Forgive Student Loan Debt

#occupywallst #mobilityshifts

Here's a demand: forgive student loan debt
As US student loan debt nears $1tn, it's time for the banks that stole
these young people's future to do the right thing
		
Robert Applebaum
guardian.co.uk, Monday 3 October 2011 18.08 EDT

As the Occupy Wall Street protest enters its third straight week in New
York and continues spreading all across the country, what is abundantly
clear is that "the other 99%" – as opposed to the super-wealthy 1%
who've been coddled for decades under the failed economic premise that
cutting their taxes and providing them with countless tax shelters,
loopholes and other breaks will "trickle down" to the masses – are
simply fed up with the status quo. So they are doing the one thing
within their power to make their voices heard.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act fell far short of addressing the
practices and behavior that lead to the near-collapse of the world
economy. Corporations are sitting on record levels of cash, but are
refusing to hire. Personal debt, including mortgages, credit cards and
especially student loan debt have reached astronomical levels. All this
is true, yet Washington, DC and the bankers on Wall Street seem tone
deaf to the needs of the people.
		For two and a half years, I have been advocating for a
new way of stimulating economic growth from the bottom-up – a
"trickle-up" approach to rebuilding the economy that reflects the
realities of the 21st century via the campaign Forgiving Student Loan
Debt. The argument is simple: relieving middle-class people of their
educational debts would enable them to begin spending money in ailing
sectors of the economy, start businesses and families and buy homes –
that is, to have the "American Dream" that seems more and more out of
reach with each passing day.

For the first time in history, total student loan debt recently
surpassed total credit card debt in the US: current and former students
collectively owe approximately $946bn in student loan debt, with no sign
of this accumulation slowing down. In fact, it's projected to exceed
$1tn within the year. Student loans have been stripped of nearly all
basic consumer protections that every other type of debt enjoys,
including bankruptcy protections and statutes of limitations. So, while
you can have your business, credit card, mortgage and even your gambling
debts discharged or restructured in bankruptcy court, student loan debt
is with you for life – and sometimes beyond.

By turning education into a commodity where the students must personally
bear the full costs of an educational system that, in fact, benefits all
of society, not just the students themselves, we've shifted the
ever-increasing burden of skyrocketing tuition costs down the
socio-economic ladder onto those who can least afford to shoulder them.
Couple that with a job market that's been utterly decimated by the
irresponsibility and greed of those at the very top, the underlying
reasons for the Occupy Wall Street protests start to come into focus.

If the Federal Reserve can hand out over $16tn in loans, at little to no
interest, to the very institutions that caused the financial collapse in
the first place, why must average Americans borrow money at upwards of
8% or more just to obtain an education?
	
How can we expect the housing market ever to improve when those we
generally rely upon to purchase homes – college grads and professionals –
are buried under tens of thousands of dollars or more in student loan
debt, from which there is almost no escape?
	
If education is "the great equaliser" it's always touted to be, then why
have over 432,000 people signed a petition in favor of student loan
forgiveness as a means of economic stimulus? In the two and a half years
that I've been working on this issue, I have yet to come across a single
person who doesn't want to pay back what they actually borrowed (as
opposed to three, four or five times the sum they borrowed); but they
simply don't have the means to d		
For more than 30 years, the rich have gotten richer, the poor have
gotten poorer and the middle class has been nearly squeezed out of
existence. Forgiving student loan debt would not only provide for a
sustained economic stimulus over the course of the next 20-30 years by
allowing educated Americans to use the money productively – rather than
have to spend it on repaying several times the amount they borrowed to
obtain a degree that no longer has the same value it once did. That
would not only grow the economy, but it would also serve as a
reaffirmation that an education is actually worth pursuing.
		
The American taxpayers bailed out Wall Street for their recklessness.
It's time for Wall Street to do right by the American people who did
absolutely nothing wrong, but who feel punished every day.
		
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/03/demand-forgive-student-loan-debt/print

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Henry Jenkins | 3 Oct 23:47
Picon

We've Wired the Classroom -- Now What!

As we get ready for the Mobility Shifts conference, I have been asked to see if I can provoke a conversation among attendees.

Here's what I have on my mind today:

For some time, those of us who work closely with educators observe a core paradox. The work of MacArthur's Digital Media and Learning Initiative have focused attention on games-based, mobile, networked, connected, participatory, affinity space, geeked-out modes of learning (Hope I got all of the buzz words in there) and there's a great deal of research and experimentation exploring the value of these approaches. But the story on the ground looks very different with schools installing networked computers and then, in effect, disabling all of the affordances of Web 2.0 platforms from being deployed by teachers and students. So, federal funding comes attached with restrictions on access to social media and with the requirement of filtering software which makes it hard to use much of the web for instruction. Many teachers are blocked from using YouTube and other video sharing platforms. In Los Angeles, there are work arounds which allow the teacher to punch in a code and authorize the use of YouTube, but it has to be punched in for each clip and has to be done very quickly before the clip is accessed, so you can not even line up all of the clips you need for a particular class period at the start of the period. Teachers are discouraging their students from using Wikipedia, because they have not been trained in how the online project works. And of course, our hopes that librarians might become information coaches for their students have been complicated by the fact that whole school districts have fired all of their librarians or forced them back into being mostly full time classroom teachers. So, we are gaining ground conceptually and losing it on the level of policy. So, what are we, as a community of researchers, theorists, and educators, going to do about this? What are our prospects for a meaningful collective response to what is a set of policy decisions, partially made at a Federal level and tied to funding, partially at very local levels and thus highly fragmented?

Talk among yourselves.

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