Author: mtadros

influence, reputation and infotention

mtadros

Influence and reputation – and to add Howard Rheingold’s infotension… those are the new buzzwords around. Very interesting and intriguing concepts. Wish I was at the Future of Influence Summit! what a great lineup of speakers and intriguing ideas!

What are they?

Influence: simply put, according to my understanding of that new term, influence relates to who is influential now. Before the digital age, media such as newspapers and power and wealth all created influence, hence wielded political power and also affected how society worked and changed. Now, influence is based on blogs, Twitter and new media that is created by the masses. This is affecting politics, society and also economics and marketing strategies.  They are called the Influentials or Influencers.

“Increasingly, we primarily find content through aggregated influence. In other words, influencers use Twitter, blog, Delicious, Digg, Reddit etc. to highlight the content they find most interesting. Collectively these influencers make this content highly visible, driving at times massive traffic to articles.” [Ross Dawson]

“Social media is all about human relationships, about how we shape our view of the world based on our peer communication. The extraordinary breadth of information and opinion that we are exposed to today, combined with the ability to converse, means our own opinions are often driven more by peers than traditional sources.

In fact this shift to the social means that media is becoming far more about peer influence than information and reporting.” [Ross Dawson]

Reputation: how influential you are depends on your reputation and credibility.  It is now known as the Whuffie  which  is “the measure of reputation used in Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Since we don’t have any other good words for describing collectively assessed reputation, whuffie has gained traction as a description of this phenomenon.”
Read: The Whuffie Factor and watch the video here.

Infotention: “a combination of ways of thinking and digital tools such as intelligence dashboards, news radars, and info-filters. A combination of attention, information, and intention. Applied infotention. Trained and untrained infotention. And especially mindful infotention” [this is the link to the announcement of the new term] and this is Howard’s concept map of the idea.

communicating with digital natives

mtadros

On short notice I was asked to make a presentation at Pine Manor College in Brookline, MA,  August 27th. The meeting was a collaborative meeting between faculty from New England Institute of Art and Pine Manor College.  I talked about communicating with digital natives.  It was more of a lively discussion and it was GREAT to talk to peers since we all are basically the digital immigrants. 🙂

This is the graph I made to begin the discussion.  Of course there is much more to digital natives that I did not include here, but that is for another discussion.

Based on this graph of the current ‘learning nature’ of our students, here were my initial questions were based on current challenges teachers face:

  • Do digital natives think differently?
  • what are the ways we can communicate digitally to digital natives?
  • what type of digital media do they know as opposed to what students know?
  • do those students who have the skills for gaming and texting also have the skills to use new media?
  • how do we try and instill in them the soft skills – ceativity, innovation, discipline, communication, socialization, team work etc. in such an environment?

We have challenges there but we also have opportunities:

  • we are all in a learning phase
  • we are in a transitional period between old ways of teaching and new, which will determine the future of teaching [because after that, the digital natives will take over and it will be they who are the teachers of the future]

gaming with javascript

mtadros

I was totally into two workshops – both about gaming, and in the end I chose to go to this one.

Teaching basic game programming using Javascript

Presenters: Phillip Chang and Pennsylvania Wu.chang

Need a language: why use Javascript

easy to learn, loosely design structure, cross-platform, os independent, high fault tolerance, require no installation, no complicated compilation, no initial investment – preferably open source. Javascript is a good candidate.

Advantages: loosely designed, cross platform, open source, test games immediately

Disadvantages: scripts, not self-executable programs, poor support on audio and visual efforts, poor support on 3D graphics programming, programmers have less controls on outputs.

wuJavascript browser game: structure is html page layout, css, javascript application.

Professor Wu showed examples of some games and showed their code. Games like Pacman, shooting aliens and Tetris. Games can be animation, handling user inputs, sprite programming, object movement, collision detection [motion], adding sound effects, artificial intelligence.

Javascript is easy to learn and implement, function sufficient, reduces the complexity level of teaching, motivates students by sharing their games online.

There are still problems cross-browser, but maybe we can just write a code to detect the browser first and use the programming based on it.

Javascript is not as functionable as other kinds of languages. Teaching students entry-level codes Javascript is great for that. You can also encouage the student by asking them  to upload to the web.

Remember that this is entry level for students because we see many students who are usuallydiscouraged by debugging and coding so this is a very good tool to encourage students to do gaming.