From the Internet as Playground and Factory conference at The New School, November 12-14, 2009:
The Internet as Playground and Factory - Howard Rheingold from Voices from The Internet as Play on Vimeo.
[...]
From the Internet as Playground and Factory conference at The New School, November 12-14, 2009:
The Internet as Playground and Factory - Howard Rheingold from Voices from The Internet as Play on Vimeo.
[...]I have persuaded Jim Fishkin to put the introductory chapter of his important new book, “When The People Speak: Deliberative Democracy & Public Consultation” online. For those who think that the idea of improving the publish sphere by putting together citizens with varying political views in the presence of [...]
I’ve been interested in the public sphere for a long time, and I’m increasingly concerned about the amount of misinformation, disinformation, sloganeering, and brutal polarization among citizens. I grew interested in Jim Fishkin’s work long before I started teaching in the Communication Department at Stanford (Fishkin is dept [...]
Students in my Stanford social media course are conducting a survey on social media marketing - any participation on the part of Smart Mobs readers will be appreciated.
[...]Andy Carvin says, in regard to a potential emergent collective disaster response:
So it looks like we’re going to get a hurricane after all this season. Ida is expected to make landfall on the Gulf Coast near the Alabama/Florida border late Monday or early Tuesday. I’ve already started updating the [...]
The new Personal Networks and Community Survey, sponsored by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, takes issue with previous research that suggested social ties supported by internet and mobile phone are weak and dispersed:
This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated [...]
In Infotention Part One, I introduced dashboards, radars, and filters as means for balancing need-to-know with protection against information overload. In this video, the second in the series, I show how to build an information dashboard using an RSS reader. In this case, I concentrate on Netvibes.
I’ve been a fan of Mizuko Ito’s work for a long time, and I was fortunate to be one of the 2008 winners in the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC Digital Media and Learning Competition (and a judge in 2009), so I was delighted to hear of the launch of the [...]
Shel Israel has published part 2 of his interview with me, “Where we’re going:”
Students are accustomed to having knowledge delivered to them. But in an era where knowledge, media, and professions change so rapidly, storing knowledge is not adequate. Students need to learn how to learn, learn how to [...]
Shel Israel, author of the excellent new book, Twitterville, has published the first part of an interview with me: SM Global Report: Howard Rheingold, Part 1:
With a billion people on the Internet and 4 billion mobile phones, the ability to gain information, to process it computationally, to [...]
Help expose bad journalism — and fight the spin that is spreading in the news media and on the Internet.
This week, NewsTrust is organizing a ‘News Hunt for Bad Journalism’ to identify news reports and opinions that are inaccurate, biased, irresponsible or superficial. They will be joined by journalism students [...]
I am proud to be on the board of advisors of Newstrust, a non-profit effort to build a non-partisan/bi-partisan community of intelligent news consumers who keep journalists and news publications honest by rating and recommending news stories on a more sophisticated basis than a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down. NewsTrust now features [...]
I was asked to contribute a short video about my most inspiring teacher, for a site that launched today: My Teacher, My Hero. Check it out. And add your own story! In my case, my hero teacher was also my mother, who died at age 99 almost a [...]
In my continuing examination of 21st century literacies at my SFGate City Brights blog, I get into more detail about mindful infotention:
Knowing what to pay attention to is a cognitive skill that steers and focuses the technical knowledge of how to find information worth your attention. More and [...]
The Traveling Geeks’ tour of the UK this summer was one of the most intense junkets I’ve ever been sucked into. Among other things, I gave my first major talk at Reboot Britain about 21st Century Literacies, and JD Lasica captured a 6 minute interview with me [...]
I’m ruminating here and on my City Brights blog about issues related to 21st Century literacies. I’m putting together videos, widgets, blogs, a website to pull it all together, and eventually a book. I started looking for domain names, and of course everything remotely connected to literacy, [...]
This blog was an early supporter of peer-to-patent, and I’m proud to have introduced Beth Simone Noveck to her early funder, Omidyar Network. Henry Jenkins showcases a post by Daren C. Brabham, based on his Ph.D. dissertation, about Get Ready to Participate: Crowdsourcing and Governance:
Crowdsourcing is a killer [...]
Clay Spinuzzi has a long and thoughtful post about the top-down vs bottom-up arguments of the recent right-wing-sponsored health care legislation town hall protests:
Now, in 2009, some on the Right are bringing up these 2005 protests to suggest moral equivalence as they defend the health care protests. That’s [...]
(Via Alan Moore)
The Guardian writes
In the first of our Activate videos, Gerry Jackson, founder and director of SW Radio Africa, delivers a powerful and humbling presentation on the difficulties of providing independent information to a country stripped of its most fundamental freedoms.
As you’ll see when you watch the videos, [...]
When I wrote Smart Mobs in 2001 and launched the smartmobs.com blog with the book in 2002, I made a number of forecasts about the convergence of the mobile phone, the personal computer, and the Internet. Some of these forecasts, particularly in regard to the use of mobile communications [...]
If you want the 6 minute version, rather than the 40 minute version of my talk about 21st century literacies, check out the interview JD Lasica did in front of King’s College, Cambridge, UK, during the last part of the Travelling Geeks tour:
This is my edit of a talk on 21st century literacies that I gave in London at the Reboot Britain conference in July, 2009. It was part of the action-packed, fun-filled Travelling Geeks tour. About 40 minutes.
The Web exists because Tim Berners-Lee didn’t require any network operator to rewire its central switch. Google exists because nobody has to ask permission to create a new way to use the Web. These affordances for innovation are no accident: Sir Tim could give away the Web and Larry and [...]
A great finale for an intense week with the Travelling Geeks in the UK: I streamed video from the Nokia N79 phone I had on loan while I punted on the Cam River with TG organizer JD Lasica and his family in Cambridge, UK:
The sound isn’t great, and I didn’t use a tripod so it is a little shaky, but I was streaming video from a Nokia N79 from a balcony overlooking the Thames (in a restaurant in the Globe Theater) when Mathys van Abbe, founder of Mobypicture came along — he [...]
I knew it would be intense when I said yes to the call to adventure, but if the first day is any indication, the Traveling Geeks tour redefines intense. The day starts with an exercise in cat-herding, with the whole crazy crew piling into three London taxis. Try [...]
I’m heading for the airport, anticipating meeting up with the Traveling Geeks. Look for posts, pix, maybe streaming video next week.
[...]I just posted Crap Detection 101 to my SFGate “City Brights” blog:
Unless a great many people learn the basics of online crap detection and begin applying their critical faculties en masse and very soon, I fear for the future of the Internet as a useful source of credible news, [...]
I learned from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle that “unexpected travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” This explains why I knew I could not turn down the opportunity to spend an intensive week in London and Cambridge with the Traveling Geeks. I already knew Renee Blodgett, JD Lasica, Craig' [...]
I’ve been particularly interested in literacies of attention ever since I started observing the way students in my classrooms treat the seductive distractions of wireless Internet access, so I was particularly interested in Designing Choreographies for the “New Economy of Attention” by Eric Gordon and David Bogen:
The [...]
Some empirical data on smartmob behavior and civil society: Political Involvement in “Mobilized” Society: The Interactive Relationships among Mobile Communication, Social Network Characteristics, and Political Life (PDF) by Scott W. Campbell and Nojin Kwak was presented at “Mobile 2.0: Beyond Voice?” Pre-conference workshop at the International Communication Association (ICA) [...]
The talk I gave at TED in 2005 is now available with Spanish subtitles. If you want to subtitle that talk in languages other than Spanish, here’s how.
[...]I’m travelling today. I got the news that Leonard Shlain has passed away. He was a friend, neighbor, walking and talking buddy, wonderful father, original thinker, immensely entertaining speaker, and he was a mensch. I didn’t know Len, although we were Mill Valley neighbors, until the San Francisco Chronicle sent [...]
My latest post on SFGate, Twitter Literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) builds on previous Smart Mobs blog posts about “Why I’m hooked on Twitter” and “Tuning and Feeding: Myy Best Practices for Getting The Most Out of Twitter”
Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, [...]
Everyblock, “a news feed for your block,” pioneered the mashup of municipal public information and maps, part of the beginning of what is starting to be known as “computational journalism.” EveryBlock is now available as an iPhone app.
The EveryBlock iPhone app lets you explore news that’s happened recently [...]
Institute for the Future recently held a conference on the future of video. I was one of the participants, along with one of my inspirations, Mike Wesch, and other very interesting people. They have edited the video and have invited the public to remix, add their own video [...]
My latest post, this one on attention literacy, is up at SFGate:
I want my students to learn that attention is a skill that must be learned, shaped, practiced; this skill must evolve if we are to evolve. The technological extension of our minds and brains by chips and nets [...]
Smart mobs have ceased to be anything new, and are becoming part of the landscape. Both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times cited Smart Mobs in regard to the tea parties (which were, of course, strongly promoted by Fox News — like the Obama campaign, [...]
The new Pew survey shows that, for the first time, the Internet is the primary source of political news for a majority of Americans during a national election. It’s not just about getting news — citizens actively debted, blogged, organized online. That’s not news insofar as so many of [...]
I’ve started blogging for SFGate.com. I expect to devote most of my blog posts on City Brights to the subject of the first post: 21st Century literacies. Comments at SFGate.com encouraged.
Will our grandchildren grow up knowing how to pluck the answer to any question out of the air, [...]
I will be attending the Digital Media and Learning Showcase in Chicago on April 16-17. My Social Media Classroom project, realized in partnership with developer Sam Rose, will be exhibiting, and I will be speaking:
A Digital Media and Learning Competition winner, PLOrk is a visionary musical ensemble [...]
An audiovisual inspection of the way I’ve reworked the boundaries between work, plan, mind, art, office, studio. Costarring Garuda, Barong, Ganesh, Gumby, my mother, gnomes, painted shoes, painted spiderwebs, books, computer screens, chthonic spirits. Pixels, plywood, alabaster, acrylic. †
[...]
Very interesting proposal for a technology that could enhance citizenship: YOUROWNDEMOCRACY.ORG: Democracy’s Online Feedback Loop
Today’s technology allows for innovative online collaboration, networking, transactional, and information visualization. Integrated together in a coherent set of solutions for the citizens of democracy, it is now possible to conceive of a single-platform which [...]
Today is Ada Byron Lovelace day. I wrote about her in Tools for Thought, published in 1985. I didn’t do original historical research — my writing is based on secondary sources — but I did place her in the lineage of thought that led to electronic digital computers.
My digital journalism students produced this widget as a project — they only had a couple of months to get it together:
We are going to build and document the process of building a widget dealing with the crisis in the U.S. newspaper industry. The widget will show a map [...]
I suspect that people in the Obama administration who are charged with moving US information and communication policy into the 21st century are paying attention to “Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets: The Political Economy of Innovation,” by Peter F. Cowhey and Jonathan D. Aronson. I first [...]
Social networks are as old as humans. Are social media, a more recent invention, extending ancient limits on individual ability to maintain large networks? Anthropologist Robin Dunbar, now at Oxford, hypothesizes that the leap in brain growth in our species is directly and co-causally connected with sociality — the [...]
The second in a series about network literacy. The value of networks shifts as they scale, and as the networks accomodate human social activity as well as interconnection of machines. Click on the thumbnail below to see the video.
Another student from my digital journalism class, Anthony Weeks, has written a provocative post about the role of “public listening” in general, and in the online public sphere:
While I have said that public listening is less an act and more a credo, there are several examples of public [...]
This is not very smart-mobby, but it is the work of one of my students in the Stanford Digital Journalism class, and I think it’s worth spreading the word about Mining Our Landfills:
Behold the future of our garbage: Landfill mining. Yesterday I spoke to David Assmann, deputy [...]
I spoke at the Open University of Catalonia in December. I’m working with them to plan online communities for their students, staff, and alumni.
For further information and videos, please visit UOC UNESCO Chair in e-Learning blog
[...]Another blog post by one of my students in this year’s Digital Journalism class at Stanford: “How Christian media almost saved a wretch like me”. This one is a recommendation by a documentary video maker and — his blog beat for my class — a critic of documentary [...]
Puget Sound Off is a wonderful site by and for young people in the Puget Sound (Seattle environs) region. They have just launched a How-to site for young people seeking to learn digital skills, starting with interactive videos about blogging, digital storytelling, and social networking.
Need some digital [...]
“Detag” is a term that has recently entered the vocabulary, and which implies a whole world of concerns about privacy literacy — what people know and don’t know about possible repercussions from casual revelations on MySpace, Facebook, or other sites. I remember the students in my class who were among [...]
Yes, I am online most of the time I’m at home. What cyberpeople don’t see is that for much of that time, I’m sitting in my garden. This 7 1/2 minute video is a quick look at a year in my garden:
I met Roland in Paris a few years ago, and he blogged for us every Sunday. I just learned of his passing. Rest in peace, Roland. Many of us appreciated what you did.
Roland passed away Monday in Paris. He was hit with a digestive virus [...]
The notion that online social relationships should be dismissed as somehow “less real” than face-to-face relationships — or “real community,” whatever that means — is an old one. It’s a good question to ask, and all online information should be critically examined, including online relationships. But when people dismiss the [...]
Every year, John Brockman asks an interesting group of people to answer one question. This year, he asked about what we thought would be game-changing knowledge.
ANNOUNCING THE EDGE ANNUAL QUESTION - 2009
New tools equal new perceptions.
Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate [...]
(Thanks, Ryan!)
Who knows? This might work! Virtual Peace combines gaming, conflict resolution, and disaster relief training.
Virtual Peace: Turning Swords to Ploughshares brings together digital learning technologies and international humanitarian assistance efforts. Students and educators enter an immersive, multi-sensory game-based environment that simulates real disaster relief and [...]
(Thanks, Alec!)
It’s hardly news any more that demonstrations, riots, get out the vote campaigns are coordinated via social media. In other words…smart mobs. Here is an interesting perspective from a group of journalists who happened to have gathered in Athens during the recent violent manifestations.
At the onset of [...]
Pew Internet Project interviewed a bunch of people, including me, about the Internet a decade and more hence. The report is out.
Here are the key findings on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and [...]
I first became aware of Apture when it was in beta, through one of my digital journalism students. I would be doing Apture a disservice by describing it only as an online tool useful to journalists. By teaming up with WashingtonPost.com, Apture demonstrates exactly how it is also [...]
This seven minute screencast overview of OpenCongress, by Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman of RyanIsHungry.com as a volunteer project, is a great introduction to the project sponsored by Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation. A great example of how transparency in government and social media [...]
I’m planning to participate in the Future of Technologies Conference in Leicester this Thursday, organized by my friends at De Montfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies. Leicester itself has been undergoing interesting changes, from a classically industrial textile-based economy to a knowledge-based economy, from an entirely white city [...]
(Thanks, Megan!)
Several times a day, with increasing frequency and accuracy, one of the people who follows my personal account on Twitter — someone I’ve never heard from before — sends me a specific URL to check out. I check it out. Yes, indeed: this is something I need to [...]
Success in life and as a citizen increasingly depends not so much on access to devices as access to knowledge — knowledge of the skills necessary to use widely available technology to achieve one’s ends as an individual and a citizen. In other words: literacy. This video is only three [...]
With current news industry organizations in financial trouble, how is investigative reporting going to be funded in the future? One experiment is well worth keeping an eye on. Spot.Us has launched. I contributed to its first “truthiness” campaign — to fund local reporters to research claims by local political [...]
Be a Vote Chaser with The UpTake:
Protect the Vote With Your Camera Phone - Here’s How
Do you have a video-enabled camera phone (iPhone, Nokia N95, etc.)? Here’s how you can help protect the vote on election day! Join The UpTake and the “Video the Vote” coalition’s effort to [...]
Jaap van de Geer made this four minute video interview of me after I finished speaking at the Internet Librarians conference:
Internet Librarian 2008: Howard Rheingold from Jaap van de Geer on Vimeo.
Monitor Talent Network (which represents me as a speaker) is publishing a blog, Now, New, Next, for the Harvard Business Review. The lead post is my short rant about social media in education.
It’s time for social media literacy to enter mainstream education.
Learning to use online forums, [...]
(Thank you, Garsett)
BBC reports on “Kashmir’s Cameraphone Chroniclers:”
Minutes after 35-year-old Javed Amir Mir was shot in the head by security forces in Srinagar, capital of Indian-administered Kashmir, a young boy recorded his death on his mobile phone camera.
The shaky and grainy clip shows a blood splattered face lying [...]
On September 7, in Santiago Chile, I interviewed Luis Ramirez and Paloma Baytelman about "the penguin revolution" – Chilean schoolchildren used social media to organize widespread protests against underfunded public schools. Here is that brief video interview.
Yeeyan translates my 2005 TED talk video on “Way New Collaboration” into Chinese:
Howard Rheingold是《智慧的乌合之众》(Smart Mobs)一书的作者，以下是他在2005年的TED大会上发表的一个演讲的汉译稿。演讲者指出，以往被认为是铁律的“生存竞争”，“适者生存”等话语如今正在退到边缘，而群体合作的兴起，则为人类实现新财富的创造带来了全新的理念与可能。他还指出我们对于这种行为的研究还仅仅出于起步阶段，呼唤不同学科领域的人能走到一道，共同研究这一话题，因为它必将为我们带来好处。
HASTAC, the same folks who have enabled me to build the Social Media Classroom, are sponsoring a competition for young innovators, age 18-25, who are working on “smaller-scale, forward thinking, conceptually exciting and original participatory learning projects.”
Young Innovator Awards encourage innovators aged 18-25 to think boldly about [...]
Institute for the Future, let by Jane McGonigal “Resident Game Designer” is experimenting with Superstruct, “the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game,” starting in September — and you are invited:
This fall, the Institute for the Future invites you to play Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. It’s [...]
HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) has been sponsoring an online discussion of participatory learning.
Welcome to this discussion about participatory learning. You can stop the video widget below from playing (and start it again, if you wish), by hovering your mouse over the video window, which [...]
(Tweeted by ckreutz)
CNN reports that the use of mobile telephones to monitor elections has been effective in countering electoral manipulation and corruption in Africa:
LONDON, England (CNN) — The humble mobile phone is driving a new revolution which some experts hope could bring fairer elections and democracy to some [...]
Institute for the Future announced that I have been named their first Research Fellow. IFTF supported years of research into cooperation theory, for which I am grateful. And I’m happy with the honor.
We are pleased to announce the appointment of Howard Rheingold as Research Fellow at IFTF. [...]
The awardees of the Digital Media and Learning Competition are beginning to report on the Digital Media and Learning Competition Hub. Some juicy stuff!
For example, Always With You: An experiment in Hand-held Philanthropy:
Our project is a partnership between Interactive Filmmaking, UN HABITAT, Microsoft Research India and the Environmental [...]
I was very fortunate to be one of the winners in last year’s HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Competition. Applications are now open for the next round.
Focus: Participatory Learning
Application Deadline: October 15, 2008
Full information at: www.dmlcompetition.netApplication Deadline: October 15, 2008
The second HASTAC/MacArthur Digital Media and Learning [...]
Admission is by permission of instructor. Students who find out about it online and contact me before the syllabus is posted on Coursework/Axcess will have an edge. Virtual Community/Social Media, Fall 2008, Stanford University. Educators who are interested in joining a community of interest around the Social Media [...]
Larry Lessig says this is “huge and important:”
In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is [...]
(Thanks, Jeff! Via Valleywag)
I met this intrepid traveller/documenter/world citizen journalist in Copenhagen at Reboot.
Activist Twitterer noneck (aka Noel Hidalgo) was in Tiananmen Square on Saturday for a free-Tibet protest. After he Twittered the event and broadcast it live over Qik, Chinese authorities deported him.
I’m still hooked on Twitter (I’m [twitter.com]), but it’s clear that many of the people I talk to about my enthusiasm just don’t get why anyone wastes their time on it. So I tell them that to me, successful use of Twitter comes down to tuning and feeding. [...]
(Thank you, Lee!)
Ever since he started to use video in his ethnography classes, and turned his students into coproducers, the university professor known to millions on Youtube as mwesch has been brilliantly demonstrating how Web 2.0 tools can be used to turn the entire old knowledge delivery [...]
In addition to the how-to documentation included with the Social Media Classroom/Co-Lab, this is one of a series of "why to" videos, addressing the need for forums when many people discuss many topics over an extended period: video.
At Reboot 10, Matt Balara video-interviewed me about design. I talk about the social media classroom and participative pedagogy.
I’m using this widget as an experimental learning object. You can hover over it to find the link that will shut me up. You can click on reply, and if you have a Seesmic account, you can post a video reply, and a tiny thumbnail will appear that will enable [...]
An experiment: This brief video mashes up remarks I made in previous episodes to convey a meta-message: From The Martian Report (1977) to The WELL(1989) to TED (2005) to the New Media Consortium (2007) to Jim Lehrer’s 2008 Newshour documentary, By The People, [...]
I have been asked to give a brief address when I am awarded the “Doctor of Technology” degree Wednesday, at De Montfort University. Here’s what I am planning:
Brief remarks by Howard Rheingold at De Montfort University, July, 2008
I’ll give you the advice part at the very beginning. Then [...]
I rarely post press releases, but I had a great experience with ooVoo when Robin Good interviewed me, and this looks kinda cool, so I will pass it along
Podcamp Boston 3 takes place on July 18, 19 and 20 in the Harvard Medical School. ooVoo the [...]
This is a long flight for a very cool floppy hat that I get to wear once a year, but it’s also an honor from the people I know and respect at De Montfort University, especially my colleagues at the Institute of Creative Technologies, Sue Thomas [...]
