Interesting TDC teatime talk today,
Net Smart - an online session with Howard Rheingold
Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. Howard Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or ""crap detection""), and network smarts. He explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; and examines how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways. He also presents a lesson on networks and network building.
There is a bigger social issue at work in digital literacy, one that goes beyond personal empowerment. If we combine our efforts wisely, it could produce a more thoughtful society: countless small acts like publishing a Web page or sharing a link could add up to a public good that enriches everybody.
Howard Rheingold, an influential writer and thinker on social media, is the author of Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (both published by the MIT Press), and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. A former Visiting Professor at the IOCT, he received an honorary degree from DMU in 2010. Net Smart is his latest book, published April 2012"
I had a somewhat different experience than I had expected.. jumping in to act as 'curator' for the online session. Howard Rheingold introduced the 'dashboard' space that he works with, and invites his students to use, suggesting that we adopt roles of searcher, lexicon-maker (I forget his term) and curator (gathering the loinks and definitions retrieved into some sort of curated document). 
Great plan, however not fully realised in this setting as we had some 17 people gathered in the TDC around the one laptop that was acting as interface for Howard to see us, and projecting him onto a large screen, behind the essential table of tea and biccys. Three or four more people logged on remotely, so they acted as searchers and lexicon-maker.
Because I hadn't anticipated this role, I had to start up my laptop, download and install the Blackboard app, as well as retrieving various logons for the session and a googledoc intended to be the curatorial pad. Unfortunately it was read-only at first, so I copied and pasted to good old word! The blackboard app only showed me the chat from the time I'd logged in, so I had to ask one of the others online to copy and email that across (she couldnt get in to edit the google doc either..)
By the end we were all up to scratch, email and chat adding to word, google doc, tweets going out and screengrabs of slides. Howard recorded the session at his end so I may even get to listen again! I can see this model working really well with a few minutes set-up and agreed roles in advance.
Collaborative supertasking for infotention training works well!
... and the content of the talk was great too!
Note: recording of the talk available: see TDC post for link and download info.
Note: recording of the talk available: see TDC post for link and download info.
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