Web Science in SE Asia: cultivating a 'Thai digital Renaissance' through (re)introducing an interdisciplinary science in Higher Education

Inseparable from the communication of knowledge through the World Wide Web, the study of online social interaction and communication in South East (SE) Asia is growing. The teaching of digital media literacy raises challenging debates for those in Higher Education (HE), especially in a burgeoning digital economy such as Thailand. The advances in technology, growth in mobile connectivity and social media have proliferated online political, social and personal movements, as well as providing a convenient alternative for offline communication. Thailand is emerging into a digital renaissance, but its education system is still lacking pedagogy to support learning for young digital natives. The Thailand 4.0 initiative, a government reform, seeks just that; it challenges Thai HE to innovate teaching a digitally empowered, connected body of students who are now interconnected global actors, shaping complex heterogeneous networks as influencers, users, contributors and critics. The increase in not only their power, but knowledge of how to use the Web, an asset to extend their cultural identity and social capital, raises critical questions about such a burgeoning ‘Thai digital renaissance'. Undoubtedly, we need new ways to equip students as critical learners who can reflect on the inescapable interdisciplinary practice of complicated topics in their study, which includes issues like fake news, revenge pornography, social media journalism and even domestic law in SE Asia, which impact censorship and digital rights. Problematically, these are not simply social or technical phenomena; they are interwoven, which for students new to thinking critically is hard to comprehend. Yet, an emerging discipline, Web Science, offers an interdisciplinary approach to solve this, one changing the view that studying the Web is technical, so understood through knowing how to make lines of code. In this paper, we conceptually integrate two core knowledge components that are intrinsic to Web Science, that of interdisciplinarity and sociotechnical heterogeneity, with current issues surrounding public opinion in Thailand, to offer a reintroduction, for a new audience of researchers, to a discipline we playfully conclude as #webscithai. So, a call to the academic community of Thailand to embrace a sociotechnical pedagogy useful for educating and empowering students in Thailand as global digital citizens

Community Development Evaluation Storymap and Legend

Community based organizations, funders, and intermediary organizations working in the community development field have a shared interest in building stronger organizations and stronger communities. Through evaluation these organizations can learn how their programs and activities contribute to the achievement of these goals, and how to improve their effectiveness and the well-being of their communities. Yet, evaluation is rarely seen as part of a non-judgemental organizational learning process. Instead, the term "evaluation" has often generated anxiety and confusion. The Community Development Storymap project is a response to those concerns.Illustrations found in this document were produced by Grove Consultants

Cities Online: Urban Development and the Internet

Examines how institutions in Austin, Texas; Cleveland, Ohio; Nashville, Tennessee; Portland, Oregon, and Washington, D.C., are adapting to the Internet as an economic development and community building tool

Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement and Social Impact

A surprising new breakthrough is emerging in the social sector: A handful of innovative organizations have developed web-based systems for reporting the performance, measuring the outcomes, and coordinating the efforts of hundreds or even thousands of social enterprises within a field. These nascent efforts carry implications well beyond performance measurement, foreshadowing the possibility of profound changes in the vision and effectiveness of the entire nonprofit sector. This paper, based on six months of interviews and research by FSG Social Impact Advisors, examines twenty efforts to develop shared approaches to performance, outcome, or impact measurement across multiple organizations. The accompanying appendices include a short description of each system and four more in-depth case studies

Knowledge society arguments revisited in the semantic technologies era

In the light of high profile governmental and international efforts to realise the knowledge society, I review the arguments made for and against it from a technology standpoint. I focus on advanced knowledge technologies with applications on a large scale and in open- ended environments like the World Wide Web and its ambitious extension, the Semantic Web. I argue for a greater role of social networks in a knowledge society and I explore the recent developments in mechanised trust, knowledge certification, and speculate on their blending with traditional societal institutions. These form the basis of a sketched roadmap for enabling technologies for a knowledge society

ACCESS: An Inception Report

Imagine a world in which all groups of citizens coming together to realize some public benefit measure and communicate the character and consequences of their work. Imagine further that all those groups have adopted a common reporting system that enables their individual reports to be compared, thus creating powerful descriptions of the relative and collective performance of citizen association for public benefit. Imagine, too, that this common measuring and reporting carries across to all forms of public-private partnership and corporate social responsibility. This is the world envisioned by ACCESS.For the past 18 months a growing number of concerned actors have been meeting, studying, and testing opinion around one of the great structural weaknesses in the world's institutional infrastructure -- inefficient and weak social investment markets. This inception report sets out the results of this enquiry in the form of a proposal to establish a reporting standard for nonprofit organizations seeking to produce social, environmental and, increasingly, financial returns. The ACCESS Reporting standard is one important contribution to redressing a major global system weakness, but it is certainly not the only one. Nor is it one that can operate in isolation from other initiatives. Accordingly, the ACCESS proposed plan of work involves convening a global dialogue on NGO transparency, accountability and performance with the objective of promoting ACCESS and other practical solutions to the challenges of social investment and civil society accountability.This report sets out the background and rationale for these proposals. You will meet the ACCESS sponsors and pilot project partners. Parts of the report are descriptive and analytical but other parts are necessarily theoretical and technical in nature. We make no apology for this. Part of the reason that in 2003 the world does not yet have a reporting standard for social actors is that the theory and technique have not been mastered. For those with a strong orientation toward strategy and action, however, these aspects are presented as well

Harnessing Technology: analysis of emerging trends affecting the use of technology in education (September 2008)

Research to support the delivery and development of Harnessing Technology: Next Generation Learning 2008–1

The impact of local ICT initiatives on social capital and quality of life

This paper reviews the evidence for the effects of local ICT initiatives (‘community networks’) on neighbourhood social capital and quality of life and has been developed from the public SOCQUIT D11 report (Anderson et al, 2006)