Last time

Where you present last time? Make sure you contribute to each session wiki (=attendance).

Last time's assignment

Add link to your Shelfari bookshelf!
• Your books read/reading/planning to read
• Tags
• Community
• Invitations
• Groups
Comments on the usefulness of Shelfari?
Where to find books.
Where to find articles: Links on course web pages, EBSCO.
Advanced recommendation and association system: Amazon.com

Exam

• Essay deadline 14.11.2008

DEFINITIONS

Goals

• Decompose and analyse commonplace concepts
• Reveal the underlying ambiguities
• Seek and negotiate for common professional understanding of the concepts
• Manage ambiguity

Interactive (interaction)

• Etymology 
Etymology: "act" + "among"
Who interacts? User, consumer or participant, member of coproducer?
With man or machine?
More than just browsing and following links?
More than just messaging?
The idea of a two-way dynamics is essential!
HCI = human computer interaction. Relevant for IMKE?

Medium and media

Study the Internet and explain (in the wiki):
Medium? Etymology?
Media?
Multimedia?
Mass media?
Mediating?
Mediterranean?
What's wrong: Mass media is dead? New medias are cool?
Other meanings of media, perhaps irrelevant?
• Last year's discussion

Medium, practice and tools

• Medium = carrier (like hard disk)
• Medium = Mediating practice + mediating means (technology)
• =>Emphasis on practices

Distribution patterns of mediation

• Few-to-many (Radio, TV, press, Web 1.0)
• Many to many (Web 2.0)

Directions of mediation

• Top-down (authority ot owner to subscribers)
Bottom-up: Participants to authorities

Object of media

• What is mediated? Message
What is the message? Novelty, truth, information...
Medium as the message: McLuhan 1963

Subject of media

They?
• We? (Gillmor, D. (2004)

New and old media

Old media

TV has been a mass medium but things may be changing.
Can newspaper media become interactive?
• Mass media
• Power of mass media, Crispin Miller 2001
• Mechanical reproduction, in contrast to original art. Benjamin 1936
• Analog (not digital)
Broadcasting: TV, Radio
Broadcasting
Press: Newspapers, journals, books
• Mediating knowledge as facts or news from above , top-down media
• From few to many
• Owners' media,

New media

• Generic term
Interpretation 1: Yesterday's new media appear now mostly as digital extensions of old analog mass media. TV was regarded as a new medium => Outdated or meaningless term
Interpretation 2: 'New' is a moving target, referring by definition the new (whatever it is) => Novelty becomes a value per se.
• Postmodern in contrast to modern
Avantgarde, always new!?

The Internet

• Internet 1993-, A brief history by Leiner et al 2003
The Internet itself seen as a new medium. => Still new?

Web 1.0

Digital without user participation or contribution, used to count as 'new'.
Typical examples:
• Bronchures
• Business cards
• Link catalogues
• Search engines (old generation)
• Online services
• Web shopping
Top-down media: Mediating knowledge as facts or news from above (few-to-many)

Web 2.0

• What is Web 2.0, O'Reilly 2003
• Hype word for Community and Collaboration Media (CCM)
• Two-way interactive media
• User as participant, contributor, producer
• "Prosumer" = Producer + consumer (Tapscott & Williams 2007)
• Bottom-up & top-down dynamically bound
• Horizontal, democratic, flat
• Online communities
• Mediating human & human with IT
• Creating information & content collaboratively
• Sharing information & content
• Tagging, sharing an ontology, folksonomy
• Building shared knowledge
• Media stimulating creativity between technologies and arts
Because 'new' is such an ambiguous word, should one abandon it? Which term would you use instead?
Web 2.0 is more than just searching the Internet

Web 3.0?

What could Web 3.0 be about?

Knowledge

• Definition
• => Most of CCM environments can be seen as knowledge environments
CCM is characterized by collaboration and content sharing, amounts to knowledge building.
What's knowledge: Something that exists a priori, or something to be constructed?
The object of knowing: ontology
The origin or way of gaining knowledge: epistemology
What's the nature of knowledge e.g. in a content sharing site?
What's information?

Environment

• System and space (of knowledge construction or elaboration)
• Application, such as an intranet or learning environment
• Ecology, knowledge ecology
• Physical, social, economical etc. context (of knowing)
• Household (='eco'nomy)
• Knowledge environment (Wikipedia)

In plain words?

Explain (to an assumed naiive person) what you actually study?

Assignment

Individual work/collaborative writing:
1) Choose an article (one of the 10) either from the links given above, or from EBSCO (see email for password/username) and read it. Give a title in the wiki, and under it describe with a few sentences how you understand its main points, with a Harvard-style reference!
What counts as an article? Characteristics: author known, date known, references in the text, reference list.

New IMKE community blog

http://imke-community.blogspot.com/