Saturday, February 17, 2007

Blog Post # 4 Podcasts are Neat!

I have been playing around in iTunes lately, browsing for podcasts to get an idea what is available. I found some really great stuff! There are podcasts for everything! Fun, educational-it's all there. Here are a few highlights of what I've found just to get anyone new to the medium started. I love the idea of getting information and entertainment in this format, you can even subscribe to a podcast and visit the accompanying website if available AND you can also subscribe to the RSS feed if there is one available to get any image and text content sent to your RSS aggregate. Pretty cool (if you need even more information to sort through and time to kill)

For your indie music needs: NYUB music podcast

For world news:
BBC

Educational enrichment:
Grammar tips fromGrammar Girl
Language instruction Podcast directory-Language
Entertainment combined with learning-These are very silly, their great! Princeton Review Vocab Minute

For kids and young adults:
Children's books
Reading Rockets
Storytelling
by and for kids
Comic book podcast

Health:
Pregnancy topics

Library info and Book reviews:
NY Times Book Reviews
School Library Journal
"Geek Out"here-Library Geeks


And much much more of course. Podcasts are a great way to share information and to entertain, I look forward to learning more about them in our last class this semester. I plan to look into ways to use this tool in the library and for education.

P.S. Here's something completely unrelated to podcasting, just for fun.
Introducing...The Book
A very funny skit about the challenges of learning new technology. Sigh, if only we still used the scroll.
enjoy!

Saturday, February 3, 2007

Blog Post 3: Wikiality-The New Reality

I am very optimistic that online global collaboration and DIY information gathering and reporting (for instance, Wikipedia and citizen bloggers) are a positive and exciting development in the area of education and social networking.

But (dun! dun! dun!) there is also a "dark" side to Web 2.0.

I hope the above tag line was sufficiently dramatic, I was trying for a serious and menacing mood but...
Next time I'll leave the scare tactics to the mainstream news networks.

Recently, I have had a great time exploring some of the ideas and current events related to Web 2.0 and social software in the context of popular culture and how it has been portrayed. It turns out that many television and cable shows, news agencies, books, music videos, movies, and even cartoons have all been referencing the online, social phenomenon for good and bad. Of course this is not surprising, pop culture has always attempted to mirror reality and to be contemporary and relevant but what I did find particularly entertaining (as well as strangely relevant to our class) were the commentaries of one of my favorite entertainers, Stephen Colbert.

Perhaps some of you are already familiar with the Colbert Report on Comedy Central, if so you know that it is a fake news show that is essentially a parody of Fox News and in particular, commentator Bill O'Reilly. Recently, Stephen mentioned Wikipedia on several of his shows and coined the term Wikialty to describe the concept of democratic information or reality by consensus. He has even gone so far as to encourage people to make fraudulent changes to several entries on Wikipedia to create a new truth. His sarcasm, dry humor, and willingness to taunt the creators and "mediators" of Wikipedia and the functionality of the site itself creates a platform to introduce these serious issues in a fun and entertaining way.

Although I personally think Stephen is a comedic genius and that his show is largely for entertainment and not to be taken too seriously, I think he does bring to light some important issues and concerns surrounding the dissemination and creation of information resources by the general public. Again, I do have faith that these issues are ones we can overcome or at least learn to work around but thinking about and discussing the possible failures and/or abuses of these technologies is worth our time and attention.


Some issues worth discussing that Stephen addressed on his show and have been in recent headlines include:

What is the truth when information is consensus based and how easily can it be altered? Colbert and the population of African Elephants.
Read some of the mixed opinions and responses to Stephen's antics by CBS news and several bloggers.

How does the commercialization and/or manipulation of information affect social web 2.0 tools?
Microsoft pays contributor to edit content on Wikipedia. It's not as cut and dry as it sounds, read both perspectives.


If information is linked and/or sited by other sources does this make the information seem credible when perhaps it is not?
The snowball effect and unverified stories. The madrasa story: how does information shape our perspectives on reality?
Wikilobbying:
Stephen will corroborate any rumor you post!


It all makes for an interesting discussion, lets talk about it.

On a side note,
I can't imagine an encyclopedia has ever gotten so much attention by popular culture-this has to be good for education and the information profession!!!
Encyclopedias and information are on the pop culture radar!