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Tim Ferris, guru of the “New Rich” and those “Becoming Superhuman” who was an early investor in Twitter and owns shares of Facebook once said in an interview that:
“At its core I don’t view Facebook as a social network. I think it could become the driver’s license of the internet. And beyond that it can become the pipes and the plumbing upon what most of the internet is build. I think it’s very well positioned.”
While that may at first sound like a straightforward statement, there’s more to this than meets the eye. Here’s problem number one:
The majority of people on Facebook are not computer nerds or even people with particularly developed knowledge of technology, although ironically, it was built by exactly those, the socially awkward with over-firing left brain capacities.
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As regular readers know, much of my writing circles around the awesomeness of being connected, like being able to work from anywhere and get access to all kinds of cool people and information – and the looming recognition- that being connected all the time warps our daily life into something which is characterized by being constantly distracted, suffering from ultra-short attention span, and when subjected to closer scrutiny isn’t really all that desirable. Or is it?
Now, there are tons of blogs out there that talk about “time-management”, “productivity”, the need for “deep thinking” etc. and while much of what they say cannot be denied, there is a problem with thesesimplistic approaches, perfectly depicted in the above comic.
img credit: xkcd
We all have heard it before that someone is “addicted to the Internet” and secretly fear that we might be in danger of turning into online junkies, ourselves.
It’s what our parents had warned us from. Only now it’s not the television. It’s bigger, better, brighter, more addictive: The Internet!
But according to a study (1996–2006) published in the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior Quantitative Research there seems to be no real basis for the so-called condition of Internet addiction.
“Hey, cool!”, some will now say. “Does that mean we can play World of Warcraft now 24/7 instead of doing anything worthwhile with our lives?”
image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/icofuma/3554448803/
For quite a while now I’ve been fascinated with pseudo-vintage photography as popularized by Instagram, Hipstamatic, etc. For those of you who’ve never heard about them, those are (smartphone) apps that make your photos look as if they’ve been taken with a Polaroid or other pre-digital technology.
They come with light filters, add noise and scratches, imitate a paperframe around the picture, etc. In other words: They let you take a photo and make it age - without the waiting.
But it’s not the pictures themselves I’ve been fascinated with, although some of them create nice and/or eerie atmospheres.
img: http://www.flickr.com/photos/darrenshilson/5599116842/sizes/m/in/photostream/
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The Internet is a big place.
Sometimes it feels so big that we get tired of exploring, ploughing through endless fields of data, looking for fertile ground to build our businesses and grow personal relationships.
Which makes us look for that comfortable corner, a familiar place where we meet our friends. And can return to many times a day.
Welcome to the world of Facebook. A 500+ million userbase, but a corner of the Internet, nevertheless.
img: Some rights reserved by appel
Here’s one idea:
Discussions in character
An effective way to use Twitter is to have students tweet in character. Let’s look at a specific example based upon Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Divide your class into groups of about five students each and have a Romeo and Juliet tweetup. Assign each group a unique hashtag (i.e. #chsenglit11 for CHS English Literature Period 1 Group 1). If you are using TodaysMeet, create a separate room for each group. Then assign each student a character from the play. Each group will be assigned the same set of characters. In our example, you will now have several groups with a Romeo, a Juliet, a Mercutio, etc. For the assignment, have the students tweet in character about important parts of the play or even tweet new scenes. A directive might be, “Tweet your character’s thoughts immediately after Juliet’s wedding gets moved to the next morning (before she drinks the poison.)” Make sure they tweet in the Shakespearean writing style! This assignment could be a one-time event or a continuous assignment throughout the entire unit of study.
