Making Facebook Commercial

Here's Facebook's latest advertising plans. It's interesting to watch a "free," (once) user-centered technology becoming more and more commercial in order to achieve a bigger payout for its "founders" when it's eventually sold off. Here's an out-dated history of Facebook, if you're curious about its origins.

Facebook and Sociodigitization

Here's an interesting quotation from an LA Times article about Facebook:

Boiled down, it goes like this: Humans get their information from two places — from mainstream media or some other centralized organization such as a church, and from their network of family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. We’ve already digitized the first. Almost every news organization has a website now. What Zuckerberg [the founder] is trying to do with Facebook is digitize the second.

Question for me is--what, ultimately, are the consequences of digitizing social relations? If these social relations are secondarily, or even primarily, digitized, how does that affect the shape, content, and dispersion of the information? What is lost or gained in this process of digitalization? Finally, how do institutes of Higher Ed. respond to the shifting terrain of information dispersion, both inside and outside the classroom? Apparently, a new word has already been coined to describe this process--"sociodigitization."

Google Map Used to Track Cali Fires

Here's an example of how Web 2.0 is changing the way that we communicate and how information is being dispersed on a large scale.

This blog post discusses how a Google map is being used to track the San Diego fires. KPBS Online created the map that includes up-to-date news on the spread of the fire and shows the location of evacuated areas, Red Cross evacuation centers, and closed highways. They are also providing live streaming radio coverage of the fire. [from the Cool Cat Teacher Blog]

EDUCAUSE's Annual Conference and Technologies to Watch

The annual EDUCAUSE conference is being held this week in Seattle (for updates on what's happening, you can visit The Chronicle's Wired Campus blog). Each year, in conjunction with the conference, EDUCAUSE's "Evolving Technologies Committee" releases their findings on which evolving technologies they believe will have the most direct impact on Higher Education. Here' s their summary.

MacArthur Update

According to Cathy Davidson (one of the reviewers of the grant applications), they received 1001 applications for the eight awards that will be given. They expected not many more than 100. Apparently, we're not the only ones who think that Web 2.0 technologies could have beneficial applications in education. Here's the link to Davidson's post.