Skip to main content

If I Knew Then...

Learning more about the intellectual property and the creative commons this week and looking through the tools has been enlightening and to be honest a little frustrating. LOL!

I was looking through the Merlot.org website and I am so upset that I didn't know about this site while I was teaching. The amount of materials that I could have used to supplement the class readings on both historical and literary topics would have been so helpful. 

As a result, I will be sending several of the resources I have discovered so far in this course to many of my high school teacher friends in an effort that they may benefit from my learning and discovery. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Culture of Connectivity - Jose Van Dijck - Chapter 4

Chapter 5 focuses on Twitter. Originally the creators of Twitter were striving to create a utility. A piece of information infrastructure that was an everyday and unnoticeable part of our lives, like electricity or phones. Van Dijck says that this created a paradox in that is "presumes Twitter to be a neutral platform upon which users freely interact, much like the Web itself...indifferent to the contents they exchange" but that "the streams of data are engineered to promote certain uses and users over time" (p.69). Van Dijck says this paradox of "enabling connectedness while engineering connectivity" and "propagating neutrality while securing profitability" show up in every aspect of the platform. This is kind of a trend in all social media platforms as the start out about the user, but need to pay the bills... The Twitter platform has has some pivotal contributions to the culture of connectivity (culture influence tech while tech influences cul...

The Culture of Connectivity - Jose Van Dijck - Chapter 2

In chapter 2, van Dijck gets a little more technical. He presents definitions for various aspects of the social media construction.  Technologies included: data, metadata, algorithm, protocols, interfaces, and defaults He broke down the concepts of users and usage: " Implicit participation is the usage inscribed in the engineer's design by means of the coding mechanisms" (p.33).  " Explicit use refers to how real or actual users interact with social media" (p.33). He discuses content (text, music, or videos) and how these display the opinions of the users, the things they are interested in or want, and other social trends and consumer practices.  He describes ownership of the social media site, governance (mechanisms, communication and data traffic management), and business models and intentions of the site and how these 3 things work with the previous 3 things (content, user agency, and content) to create online sociality. Ultimately the focus of this chapter...

The Culture of Connectivity - Jose Van Dijck - Intro and Chapter 1

One of the adventures I've decided to take on during this course is an additional reading of a book titled: The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media . The book is written by Jose Van Dijck (2013) with the aim to:  "offer an analytical model to elucidate how platforms have become central forces in the construction of sociality, how owners and users have helped shape and are shaped by this construction; in other words, it wants to enhance a historical understanding of social media's impact on the everyday lives of families" (p.23). She begins with an introduction of social media and defines it as a group of online applications, inspired by the ideology and foundations of Web 2.0, that focus on the generation of content by its users. The ideology behind Web 2.0 tech is focused on connectedness and a participatory culture. He identifies several types of social media: social network sites (SNS), user-generated content (UGC), trading and marketing sit...