New Study Released By The Center For The Digital Future and AARP Shows Internet Users 50+ Are Rapidly Closing the Digital Divide with Booming Online ActivityThink about it people, round these parts "the Internet" became popular from the early nineties. The early nineties is now ten to fifteen years ago. People who are now just 50+ were then just 35-40+ is anyone really surprised that they actually use the Internet? I'm now 60+ and I've been publishing content and using "social networking" sites and email groups (a surviving pre-Web 2.0 social networking technology) since the early to mid nineties... Back then I did not feel particularly old to be involved, the surprise would be if few people in the 50-70 age bracket were making significant Internet use.
News Release
June 19, 2008
Labels: 1sam, 2sam, bible, internet, teaching
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”Reading online is different from reading print, think Jakob Nielsen's studies back in the 90s which showed that online readers scan. Then bring it up to date and apply it to "academic" readers as well as the metaphorical "ordinary user":
As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it.Factor in the fact that today we live online much more than we did then, and the result is obvious: "the Internet" is changing the way we think. Reducing our capacity to process lengthy complex writing. In short, making us stupid!
It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.Carr's argument presupposes that "reading in the traditional sense" is both traditional and good. Yet for the purposes of the "readers" assessed by the study, academics researching prior literature on a topic, reading has perhaps never been the long drawn out sequential process Carr inagines. I have been trying to teach students "How to avoid reading books" for decades. Why? Because scanning not reading works, for researching prior literature scanning beats reading! As MarkG commented "
The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.In other words: reading differently is worse because we lose the capacity for sustained attention. This is like Socrates argument in Plato's Phaedrus that the new technology of alphabetic writing (to which ironically we owe our "memory" of Socrates) "will produce forgetfulness in those who have learned it. They will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written."
Labels: culture, internet, writing
This is much fuller and richer than the simple binary choice we plan to give to authors of the HBC_ volumes. We just offer the choice of "explanation" or "justification" and links to HBD_ articles or Bible references. But then our goals are much more focused... Her "descriptive" sounds like our "explanation" but I don't find in her list anything that corresponds to our "justification" yet intuitively I suspect that we are not the only ones wanting to link to material that gives in more details the reasons that justify a particular ideas expressed.
- Denotative: The link goes to a node that provides either the site or text itself (such as a link to Google) or a definition or clarification of the linked word or phrase. This is a common type of link in encyclopedias, newspapers, etc.
- Connotative: The link between the origin text and destination text implies something that is not explicitly stated--the originating node gives a new context to the destination node that can suggest some other meanings are lurking under the surface.
- Similar or repetitive: The link goes to a similar node or a continuation of the same theme as the originating text.
- Opposition or contradiction: The link goes to a node that contradicts or opposes the originating text.
- Descriptive: The link goes to a further description or explanation of the linked word or originating text.
- Advertisements: The link goes to a site that sells that particular item. While this is a common type of link in commercial websites (as many sites receive their funding from these links by counting hits and click throughs), this has been used in electronic literature. The link from Deena Larsen's Disappearing Rain: "How many credit cards are in it?" goes to a credit card site. (These outside links are thus commented on within the story and subvert these commercial endeavors into playing a role in tracking down Anna, a missing character from the novel).
- Political: The piece hopes to provoke a reaction in the reader and provides a link to follow up on that reaction. For example, Jennifer Ley's War Games shows the horrors of land mines and connects to Adopt a Minefield.
Labels: children, internet, video
Britannica will help them with research and publishing tools and by allowing them to easily use text and non-text material from Encyclopaedia Britannica in their work. We will publish the final products on our site for the benefit of all readers, with all due attribution and credit to the people who created them. The authors will have the option of collaborating with others on their work, but each author will retainIs this Britannica "getting" the commercial potential of Web 2.0, and like Google and YouTube planning to profit from it, or is it more?
control of his or her own work.
You can preview the new site, which is still in beta testing, at http://www.britannica.com/bps/home. A portion of the people who visit Britannica Online today are being routed to this site and are using it now; soon it will replace our current site at www.britannica.com entirely, and the new features we have described above will be introduced in the weeks and months ahead.I can't wait to see how this attempt to marry the best of the new with the best of the old works out, in the years and decades, rather than weeks and months ahead! One thing is for sure, at last the "old" is gone, buried and dead... I still wonder what the new will look like, and wonder at what it has already given us.
We believe that to provide lively and intelligent coverage of complex subjects requires experts and knowledgeable editors who can make astute judgments that cut through the on a topic.This reads to me dangerously like the tyranny of "experts" that every successful totalitarian regime in the 20th century ensured.Give me the "cacophony of competing and often
Labels: digital, internet, open.access.scholarship, scholarship, web2.0
Labels: distance, internet, teaching, technology
Labels: audio, bible, digital, internet
This collection of sources supplements a bibliography published by Baker under the auspices of the Institute for Biblical Research: D. Brent Sandy and Daniel M. O’Hare, Prophecy and Apocalyptic: An Annotated Bibliography (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007).
In the process of compiling sources, hundreds were entered into our data base (many of which were annotated), but in the end they could not be included in the final selection for the printed edition of the bibliography. Hence, those sources are here made available.
One advantage of thisWhich is not so great... because what it means is that I can easily search the supplementary material, but the material in the print book must be inconveniently searched by hand. In other words the bibliography would have been better published online or at least electronically in the first place! BUT some criterion other than the advantage to the user caused it to be published in print, and now in order that the print book may sell the online more convenient and usable version cannot contain the full dataset.
digital version of the bibliography is that you may search for specific
words pertinent to your research.
Labels: digital, internet, open.access.scholarship, open.biblical.studies
print journalism is going through a wrenching transformation, and its future is in doubt. Over the past two decades, newspaper readership in the United States has plummeted. After peaking in 1984, at 63 million copies, the daily circulation of American papers fell steadily at a rate of about 1 percent a year until 2004 when it hit 55 million. Since then, the pace of the decline has accelerated. Circulation fell by more than 2 percent in 2005 and by about 3 percent in 2006.A print newspaper is a "bundle" of services but:
When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else.This, it is sometimes argued, is promoting an "unbundling" of traditional newspaper services, with some becoming free on the Internet, and other more specialised services being paid for, yet users do not want to pay online, and:
few newspapers, other than specialized ones like the Wall Street Journal, are able to charge anything for their content online, the success of a story as a product is judged by the advertising revenues it generates. Advertisers no longer have to pay to appear in a bundle.Neither the first article, nor Clay Shirky's followup, which argues that What Newspapers and Journalism Need Now: Experimentation, Not Nostalgia, really offers a clear prediction of the future of investigative journalism, though Clay seems to see blogging filling this role [?] ;).
If you take as a given that academic publishing must change to meet the new realities of the Internet economy (i do), which parts will become essentially free goods, and which parts will continue to require a high level of professional competence. Even more importantly, assuming some of these services can’t be easily replaced, what are the new economic models that will provide the required compensation for them?My answers really haven't changed much over recent years. I still see the "content" of tertiary education (textbooks and lectures typically in the current system) becoming free, or at least dirt cheap. See "Gatekeepers, Open Courseware and the future of the University". That others have joined MIT since 2004 just reinforces this view. Nichthus will ask: How will such content be financed? Basically I suspect long term through either advertising or cheap prices and high volume (a sort of iTunes University ;-)
Labels: digital, education, internet
Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parceque je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." Pascal, Lettres provinciales, 16, Dec.14,1656.It is a cliche among preachers too that 'less is more', to speak shorter takes more preparation but is usually more effective. There is a virtue in brevity.
Labels: commentary, hypertext, internet, scholarship
Labels: commentary, internet, scholarship
Singapore airport was already my favourite, and the only airport where I am happy to spend a few hours! It has confirmed this impression this time. As well as writing blog posts I've got up to date again with my email, including a note to say that Kipling's American Notes has now gone live on Librivox. I wonder of Barak Obama's progress in the US pre-elections would make Kipling rethink his best-known quote from the book? "It is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave." I also wonder what today's Americans make of his take on their ancestors - do let me know, whether you read a print edition, read the Guttenberg edition, or listen to my Librivox edition.Labels: audio, internet, librivox, travel
Grab the nearest book.Back then I had a library book, I must have been blogging quietly in bed before the day started:
- Open the book to page 123.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
- Dont search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do whats actually next to you.
- Tag five others with the infection.
Our motto: 'We collect strings'.Still strikes me as a great sentence, but (since I never finished the book - but got bored and dropped it) I still don't understand who or what had the motto concerned! The book was Paul Di Filippo Ribofunk if anybody read beyond p.123, do tell me what it was all about ;-)
The man shall be free from iniquity, but the woman shall bear her iniquity.Which, at least without context seems more than a little injust! However, this book is (I've just noticed with a sigh of relief.) interesting in that it also has a page 123 in the appendix:
When they heard this, they entered the temple at daybreak, and went on with their teaching.
They said: Here we send you money; so buy with the money burnt offerings and sin offerings and incense, and offer them on the altar of the Lord our God; and pray for the life of kingNebuchadnezzer of Babylon and for the life of his son Belshazzar, so that their days on earth may be like the days of heaven.Which, is an appaulingly long sentence! And comes in the middle of the page, so the others are as bad ;) so I have well and truly served mine!
Labels: book, evolution, internet, memes
The problem is that often people look at only the front end of what technology has to offer instead of the back end, or the outcome. An elementary principal told me that his fifth- and sixth-grade teachers are having problems when assigning research projects. The students view it as a procedure where they cut and paste information off a Web site, add some sentences of their own and turn it in. The information passes too quickly from the screen to the homework papers and isn't processed through the mind. The speed and ease of the digital resources actually conspires against producing long-term understanding.Now, I know exactly what this is about, I've seen it. My daughter preparing work for school, and slowly I am becginning to see it in my Intro class students. What makes me want to scream and cry is that the fault is not the students, it's the teachers! I said I was beginning to see the problem crop up in younger students in the Intro classes. Why do I not find it in the same students in level 2? Because we have taught them better. Returned work saying it is unacceptable, and explaining why it is unacceptable, and students learn to behave differently. They learn the behaviour proper to an academic environment, they learn to interact with and process what they read. Why can't this school principal get his teachers to do the same - after all the younger kids are brighter and more adaptable than the young adults we teach ;-)
You improve your writing only when you are pulled up and challenged. The blogs keep them [young people] networking only with their peers and that holds them at the same level.Duh! Of course, but what is the teacher's role in this, the technology of blogging allows the student (at whatever level they are) to interact with writers who are more advanced than themselves. I've watched that work in a blogging community of Biblical Scholars. Now so far as I know no secondary students have interacted with that community, but there is no reason, if the student has some humility and common sense they could not. I'd bet it would be the same with communities of organic Chemists, or Poodle Fanciers. It is not the technology that is the problem producing dumb students, it is the teaching that is lacking, allowing dumb students!
Labels: humour, internet, teaching
Like so many in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, I thought the Web wouldSo, the one time author of a manifesto "Piracy Is Your Friend" now admits "I was wrong. We were all wrong." He also writes:
increase business opportunities for writers and artists. Instead they
have decreased. Most of the big names in the industry — Google,
Facebook, MySpace and increasingly even Apple and Microsoft — are
now in the business of assembling content from unpaid Internet users to
sell advertising to other Internet users....
There’s an almost religious belief in the Valley that charging
for content is bad. The only business plan in sight is ever more
advertising. One might ask what will be left to advertise once everyone
is aggregated.
To help writers and artists earn a living online, software engineersIt is an exaggeration, there are other factors at work (as I have argued in "Back to the Future: Virtual Theologising as Recapitulation" Colloquium, 2005, 37,2, 115-130.), but it is an exaggeration that points towards truth. If the digerati agreed, and convinced the big holders of "content" the movie distributors, TV companies, music labels, "timeless" magazine publishers (things like National Geographic and others whose content does not date fast)... we could have a system that allows a very small charge to access, widespread acceptance, and the new age of digital creativity could begin.
and Internet evangelists need to exercise the power they hold as
designers. Information is free on the Internet because we created the
system to be that way.
In the presence of the naked woman, one does not find in one's inmost being the same terrifying emotion that one feels before the revelation of the cosmic mystery. There is no rite, there is only a secular act, with all the familiar consequences ….He comments drolly:
Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom
Eliade never experienced fear in the presence of a naked woman?Something about this quote did not ring true, I followed Q's link to his source (the Quelle of Q?), and found a post Dangling Listicles dealing with magazine covers (never a strong field of my interest, I read from the "back" like any good Hebraist ;-) Their version of the quote looks even more "wrong", so I checked with Google books (nul return) and Amazon online reader (p.259). Bingo! The quote should read:
The ritual nudity of the yogini has an intrinsic mystical value: if, in the presence of a naked woman, one does not find in one's inmost being the same terrifying emotion that one feels before the revelation of the cosmic mystery, there is no rite, there is only a secular act, with all the familiar consequences…Much less entertaining, but more accurate I suspect...
In a post "You Talk - PodBible interactive" I mentioned that Mark Brown (the CEO of Bible Society in NZ) had become some kind of Anglican Bishop of Second Life well, now Wired blog has featured the story: "Anglican Second Life Inhabitants Construct Medieval Cathedral".Labels: internet, virtual.theology
Now, assuming such a tool were available online, would people pay?
- A text of the New Testament with apparatus. This means that textual variants would be noted in an online format. To my knowledge, this is not done in a thoroughgoing way on a website, even now.
- Texts from the Roman, Greek, Jewish, and Ancient Near East worlds that have interest on their own and that may shed light on the Bible. These texts should be both in English and in their original tongues.
- Cross-references between texts to note connections (like the "e-Catena" and the Thomas commentary's parallels do in miniature).
Labels: internet