Awakening the Digital Imagination

Dr. Gardner Campbell

Virginia Tech

www.gardnercampbell.net

Our Shared Reality, 2011

“We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.”

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

2

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/magazine/19fob-essay-t.html?pagewanted=all 4

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/05/us/05college.html

The iLie: “my.[your school here].edu”

Herzog_Audio_Clip_1.wav

Herzog_Audio_Clip_2.wav

The Noosphere If one thinks of each human as comprising one cell within the planetary brain, then the realization soon follows that we have now reached a new level in the transfer of information between those cells.… It is obvious that the interrelation of the cells of this global brain has intensified its interconnectivity and ramifications, and the flow of information now reaches passed nations and time zones; information is becoming holographic. Jonathan McGregor Bethel, “Hardwiring of the Noosphere”

Udell_Audio_Clip_1.wav

18

An Integrated Domain

“We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.”

Douglas Engelbart, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A

Conceptual Framework,” 1962

19

“Thought Vectors In Concept Space”--Engelbart

Thought Vectors In Concept Space

It’s actually the attempt to create a one-for-one world in virtual cyberspace that we can use … as a way of understanding our world and a way of doing things in our world. --Alan Kay on Doug Engelbart’s “Online System” (NLS)

21

22

“*Education+ ought to teach and reward initiative, curiosity, the habit of self-motivation, intellectual involvement.” Ted Nelson, “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” (1974)

23

“Educators and computer enthusiasts tend to agree on these goals. But what happens? Many of the inhumanities of the existing system, no less wrong for being unintentional, are being continued into computer-assisted teaching.” Ted Nelson, “Computer Lib/Dream Machines” (1974)

24

Roughly speaking, there are two ways to use computers in the classroom. You can have them measure and represent the students and the teachers, or you can have the class build a virtual spaceship. Right now the first way is ubiquitous, but the virtual spaceships are being built only by tenacious oddballs in unusual circumstances. More spaceships, please. Jaron Lanier, “Does the Digital Classroom Enfeeble the Mind?”, New York Times, September 16, 2010.

25

Digital Citizenship

• Information Literacy

• Digital Fluency

• Meta-Medium Thinking

• A Personal Cyberinfrastructure

• Digital Citizenship

37

Digital Fluency: Flow States

Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Meta-Medium Thinking

[T]he ability to simulate the details of any descriptive model means that the computer, viewed as a medium itself, can be all other media if the embedding and viewing methods are sufficiently well provided…. We think the implications are vast and compelling. Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, “Personal Dynamic Media,” 1977

40

41

Flickr Photo by David Anthony Porter http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidaporter/

42

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume44/APersonalCyberinfrastructure/178431

http://nyulocal.com/on-campus/2011/04/15/lets-build-a-new-internet-in-academia/

A Personal Cyberinfrastructure Every student should at least have a chance to manage their own infrastructure. In some disciplines, such as computer science and journalism, it should be a requirement. How can you have a free press if you’re depending on the goodwill of a corporation to give you your infrastructure. You must control it yourself if you want freedom…. This was also one of the basic tenets of the Internet. With cloud computing, with services like Amazon EC2 and Rackspace, it’s getting easier all the time. There will come a day when your parents will run their own servers…. And your children will too…. Will your generation be lost? Some people think it will. But that’s no answer. You have to answer that question yourself, and I hope you say NFW.

–Dave Winer

46

47

48

49

Digital Citizenship

“a successful publisher and consummate networker with an inventive curiosity” who “would have felt right at home in the information revolution”

(Walter Isaacson).

Udell_Audio_Clip_2.wav

How long will it take before we see the gift for what it is—a single new medium of representation, the digital medium, formed by the braided interplay of technical invention and cultural expression at the end of the 20th century? Janet Murray, “Inventing the Medium”