Web 2.0, new literacies, and the idea of learning through participation

In this paper I identify some current elaborations on the theme of participation and digital literacy in order to open further debate on the relationship between interaction, collaboration, and learning in online environments. Motivated by an interest in using new technologies in the context of formal learning (Merchant, 2009), I draw on in-school and out-of-school work in Web 2.0 spaces. This work is inflected by the new literacies approach (Lankshear and Knobel, 2006a), and here I provide an overview of the ways in which learning through participation is characterised by those adopting this and other related perspectives. I include a critical examination of the idea of ‘participatory’ culture as articulated in the field of media studies, focusing particularly on the influential work of Jenkins (2006a; 2006b). In order to draw these threads together around conceptualizations of learning, I summarise ways in which participation is described in the literature on socially-situated cognition. This is used to generate some tentative suggestions about how learning and literacy in Web 2.0 spaces might be envisioned and how ideas about participation might inform curriculum planning and design

The oculometer Summary report

Summarized description of oculometer for computing eye directio

Systematic errors in global air-sea CO2 flux caused by temporal averaging of sea-level pressure

International audienceLong-term temporal averaging of meteorological data, such as wind speed and air pressure, can cause large errors in air-sea carbon flux estimates. Other researchers have already shown that time averaging of wind speed data creates large errors in flux due to the non-linear dependence of the gas transfer velocity on wind speed (Bates and Merlivat, 2001). However, in general, wind speed is negatively correlated with air pressure, and a given fractional change in the pressure of dry air produces an equivalent fractional change in the atmospheric partial pressure of carbon dioxide (<i>p</i>CO_2air). Thus low pressure systems cause a drop in <i>p</i>CO_2air, which together with the associated high winds, promotes outgassing/reduces uptake of CO₂ from the ocean. Here we quantify the errors in global carbon flux estimates caused by using monthly or climatological pressure data to calculate <i>p</i>CO_2air (and thus ignoring the covariance of wind and pressure) over the period 1990?1999, using two common parameterisations for gas transfer velocity (Wanninkhof, 1992 (W92) and Wanninkhof and McGillis, 1999 (WM99)). Results show that on average, compared with estimates made using 6 hourly pressure data, the global oceanic sink is systematically overestimated by 7% (W92) and 10% (WM99) when monthly mean pressure is used, and 9% (W92) and 12% (WM99) when climatological pressure is used