First Looks: CATaC '98\ud

The First International Conference on Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication (CATaC’98), and its affiliated publications, seek to bring together current insights from philosophy, communication theory, and cultural sciences in an interdisciplinary dialogue. The synthesis of disparate scholarly ideas will shed greater light on just how culture impacts on the use and appropriation of new communications technologies. Beyond the individual contributions themselves, some of our most significant insights will emerge as we listen and discuss carefully with one another during the conference itself. As a way of preparing for that discussion, I offer the following overview of the CATaC papers and abstracts, along with a summary of the insights and questions they suggest

What Next? The Quest to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Defenders in a Digital World

Around the world, governments and non-state actors are using sophisticated techniques to monitor, threaten, and harass human rights defenders (HRDs) and journalists. The growing use of digital technology has empowered activists to rally citizens around common causes and hold governments accountable, but it has also opened new doors for surveillance and harassment of activists and citizens' activities online. On November 14 -- 15, 2013, Freedom House, funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), held a global conference in Mexico City entitled "What Next? The Quest to Protect Journalists and Human Rights Defenders in a Digital World," which brought together over 60 policymakers, donors, and activists to explore the full range of emerging threats and best strategies to overcome them; take an honest look at what is and is not working; and chart a path forward for more proactive and realistic solutions to build the resilience, sustainability, and relevance of HRDs and their movements. The conference sought to answer "what's next?" by identifying opportunities that can be exploited to build up frontline defenders and their ability to uphold human rights principles fearlessly and strategically at home and abroad

The role of mentoring in facilitating the process of repurposing OER

This paper presents the initial data analysis of a research that is work in progress. It discusses the role of mentoring and peer support in facilitating the process of repurposing open educational resources (OER). It also reports on the lessons so far learned from the analysis of two distinct but related case studies on working with learners to use and disseminate OER. The first case study is based on the 2009 presentation of the distance learning Masters’ course of the Institute of Educational Technology of the Open University UK (from now on OU) entitled “Technology Enhanced Learning: Practices and Debates”. In this course the registered students were guided through the repurposing of content within the OER repository of the OU, OpenLearn, as part of their course activities. The aim was to provide the students with substantial information about and knowledge of finding, using and repurposing OER. The second case study relates to the activities of the online community COLEARN, an initiative of the Knowledge Media Institute of the OU which started in 2006. COLEARN is an online community hosted within the OpenLearn platform, bringing together researchers and practitioners from Brazil, Portugal and Spain mostly. The aim of COLEARN is to offer a community-supported environment in which research and ideas about the use of collaborative technologies for learning can be shared. All the activities in COLEARN are available to the world as OER, as well as all the resources shared the by participants. Mentoring in these two cases happen in different ways. In the first case we term it ‘formal mentoring’ because the mentoring is part of the course activities of registered students in the course. The students are guided step by step on how to find OER, assess its relevance and how to make use of web 2.0 technologies to modify the content to fit specific purposes. In particular, they are prompted to use an in situ editing tool offered by OpenLearn to modify and re-publish content. The mentoring in this case is offered through the task design of the course material and through the tutoring available. In the case of COLEARN, the mentoring process happens through peer and tutor support from the community to the community. This is why we term it ‘informal mentoring’, although at a times the user performing the mentor’s role is a tutor of another learning setting (e.g. a tutor associated with a higher education institution). By means of pre-booked learning sessions (e.g. brainstorming sessions based on a web-videoconference tool such as Flashmeeting ), workshops and discussion forums the participants of this community get substantial support and guidance on how to use OER and technologies that facilitate OER repurposing. By analysing the activities of the mentors and participants in the two case studies, we aim to explore how both forms of mentoring seem to address the needs of the practitioners/students in terms of learning how to work with OER

Argumentation in large, complex practices

Differences arise in macro-activities, such as the production of energy, food, and healthcare, where the management of these differences happens in polylogues as many actors pursue scores of positions on a variety of issues in numerous venues. Polylogues are essential to the large-scale practices that organize macro-activities but present significant challenges for argumentation theory and research. Key to the challenge is conceptualizing the variety of argumentative roles that go beyond the classic normative definition of protagonist and antagonist. A macroscope is devised for identifying argumentative roles in the communicative work of organizations, and the communicative work of the network of organizations, related to the production of gas from shale in the Marcellus region of the Northeastern United States. The macroscope scaffolds a design thinking inquiry into the variety of argumentative roles in the communicative work of organizations in a polylogue and finds: (1) innovation and entrepreneurialism in the design of organizations as devices for managing disagreement; (2) argumentative roles as services specializing in particular aspects of argument; and (3) networks of organizations with prominent types of specialized roles that give shape to the disagreement space around a large, complex practice. It is proposed that the varieties of argumentative roles in polylogue are not random or arbitrary but derive from more general pragmatic principles about how disagreement is organized and how methods of disagreement management emerge within communication relative to a macro-activity

Mediating boundaries between knowledge and knowing: ICT and R4D praxis

Research for development (R4D) praxis (theory-informed practical action) can be underpinned by the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) which, it is claimed, provide opportunities for knowledge working and sharing. Such a framing implicitly or explicitly constructs a boundary around knowledge as reified, or commodified – or at least able to be stabilized for a period of time (first order knowledge). In contrast ‘third-generation knowledge’ emphasizes the social nature of learning and knowledge-making; this reframes knowledge as a negotiated social practice, thus constructing a different system boundary. This paper offers critical reflections on the use of a wiki as a data repository and mediating technical platform as part of innovating in R4D praxis. A sustainable social learning process was sought that fostered an emergent community of practice among biophysical and social researchers acting for the first time as R4D co-researchers. Over time the technologically mediated element of the learning system was judged to have failed. This inquiry asks: How can learning system design cultivate learning opportunities and respond to learning challenges in an online environment to support R4D practice? Confining critical reflection to the online learning experience alone ignores the wider context in which knowledge work took place; therefore the institutional setting is also considered

Mapping Big Data into Knowledge Space with Cognitive Cyber-Infrastructure

Big data research has attracted great attention in science, technology, industry and society. It is developing with the evolving scientific paradigm, the fourth industrial revolution, and the transformational innovation of technologies. However, its nature and fundamental challenge have not been recognized, and its own methodology has not been formed. This paper explores and answers the following questions: What is big data? What are the basic methods for representing, managing and analyzing big data? What is the relationship between big data and knowledge? Can we find a mapping from big data into knowledge space? What kind of infrastructure is required to support not only big data management and analysis but also knowledge discovery, sharing and management? What is the relationship between big data and science paradigm? What is the nature and fundamental challenge of big data computing? A multi-dimensional perspective is presented toward a methodology of big data computing.Comment: 59 page

'TV Format Protection through Marketing Strategies?'

Commercially successful programme ideas are often imitated or adapted. Television formats, in particular, are routinely copied. Starting from radio formats in the 1950s to game shows and reality programme formats of today, producers have accused others of “stealing”. Although formats constitute one of the most important exports for British TV producers, there is still no certainty about the legal protection of TV formats from copycat versions. Since TV formats fail to fall neatly within the definitions of protected material under international copyright and trade mark regimes, producers have been trying to devise innovative means to protect their formats from plagiarism. The globalization of cultural and entertainment markets may itself have contributed to the rise of TV formats, interconnecting programming industries in a world of multiplying channels. This paper theorizes that global broadcasting and programme marketing strategies can also be used by TV format producers to protect their formats. Specifically, eight different strategies may be used: (a) trade show infrastructure and dynamics; (b) visual brand identity and channel fit; (c) brand extension and merchandising; (d) corporate branding; (e) national branding; (f) genre branding; (g) constant brand innovation; (h) fan communities. The paper develops a methodology for capturing the use and effectiveness of these eight strategies in preventing the copying of formats

Evaluative Language and Its Solidarity-Building Role on TED.com: An Appraisal and Corpus Analysis

Language is a key resource in the formation of online communities, which are in turn central to an understanding of contemporary social relations. This study looks at TED.com, an educational video-hosting platform with few in-built community-building functionalities, to explore the potential for users to affiliate through their language choices. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study uses the Appraisal framework, extended using corpus linguistic methods, in order to analyse users’ reactions to TED videos. The study shows that online participants use evaluative language to align with certain ideas and, based on these affinities, form affiliations characterized by sociability and solidarity. These affiliations raise important questions about the conception of ‘community’ in twenty-first century society