The Centre for Internet and Society
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Habits of Living: Global Networks, Local Affects
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living
<b>“Networks” have become a defining concept of our epoch. From high-speed financial networks that erode national sovereignty to networking sites like Facebook that transform the meaning of the word “friend,” from blogs that foster new political alliances to unprecedented globe-spanning viral vectors that threaten world-wide catastrophe, networks allegedly encapsulate what’s new and different. </b>
<p> </p>
<p>To understand the impact of networks, most analyses—scholarly, popular, and strategic—have focused on mapping networks. Using network tools to describe networks, this move conflates description and explanation (it assumes that simply discovering the existence of networks is enough) and transforms specific persons/things and relations into interchangeable nodes and lines in a diagram. Not surprisingly, most analyses also privilege technology as the unifying power behind networks: the term “twitter revolution,” for instance, widely used to describe events from Moldavia to Egypt, erases local political concerns in favour of an internet application. Although understanding universal characteristics of networks is important, this emphasis also risks making the concept of a “networked society” a banal cliché, incapable of addressing the differences between various “networks,” or the odd transformation of networks from a planning tool—a theoretical diagram, a metaphorical description—into actually existing phenomena, into lived experiences.</p>
<p>To renew the conceptual power of networks, <em>Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects</em>—a global collaborative project of which the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University will be an important locus—concentrates on changing habits of living. Habits are crucial to understanding networks not simply as broad organizational structures, but also as structures created through constant actions that are both voluntary and involuntary. As Pierre Bourdieu has famously argued, “habitus” is a “system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function … as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends.”<a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1]</a>; Habits are things that individuals hold that in turn define and hold individuals: they link the individual to society through repeated actions that also tie a person’s inner state (their mind) to their outward appearance (a habit is traditionally a type of clothing). Habits are ‘man-made nature’: they are automatic seemingly instinctual and at times uncontrollable actions (for instance, drug habits) that are learned. Habits in this sense are closely aligned with “affects”: unconscious emotional responses to environmental stimulants that are central to the formation of individual perception. Thus although habits let us address similarities across human, animal, physical and non-physical realms (the characteristic growth of a crystal is a habit), habits are also uniquely personal and societal, and thus allow us to address important differences usually elided in network analyses. Habits are “glocal”: local actions that spread globally, but not necessarily universally; they spread the effects of local actions elsewhere through specific trajectories.</p>
<p>The point, to be clear, is not to oppose habits to networks, but to understand the subtleties and power of connectivity by bringing these two concepts into dialogue with one another. Habits scale from the individual to the network in a number of ways, from the twitchy 'Lifestream' checking of Twitter enthusiasts, to co-ordination arranged by mobile phone and GPS, to the very conceptual foundation of computer science for which classic problems, such as the Travelling Saleman or Dining Philosophers combine strong technical requirements of resource allocation and network design with fables about everyday life. As the work of Dr. Matthew Fuller (a foundational new media theorist / artist and co-organizer from Goldsmiths) reveals, the cross-over between the technical and the experiential is what produces value and novelty in contemporary computing. The point is also to think through habits of living as possible points of transformation and intervention: as the term habitat makes clear, they also imply a certain sheltering and practice of care, something which the SARAI collective in New Delhi has addressed in their work in new media. This notion of habitat and change has also been further addressed, specifically in terms of “the archive in motion,” by Eivind Rossaak—an international expert in film and media—and his research group at the National Library of Norway, Oslo. Their creative rethinking of the archive and the role of media technologies is crucial to understanding the radical mobilization, perpetuation and preservation of habitual media and memory practices. The work of Nishant Shah—the director of the Bangalore Center for Internet and Society and co-editor of the groundbreaking Digital AlterNatives with a Cause —highlights that, to understand how new media affects habits of living, we need to rethink assumptions about “digital natives” and imaginings of “netizens.” He has also started a far-reaching research program investigating the relationship between affect and participation. Dr. Kelly Dobson’s—chair of Digital + Media at RISD and an innovative and much lauded new media artist—work focuses on the intimate “caring” relationship between machines and humans, which emerges from mainly non-intentional interactions, such as noise and vibrations. Lastly, <em>Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects</em> seeks to change the focus of network analyses away from catastrophic events or their possibility towards generative habitual actions that negotiate and transform the constant stream of information to which we are exposed. (This is the focus of my current book project).</p>
<p>As the above paragraph outlines, this inter-disciplinary project will be a global interdisciplinary collaboration. This project initially emerged from discussions between members of SARAI and myself and quickly expanded to include the Center for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London, the Digital + Media Department at RISD, the Bangalore Center for Internet and Society and the National Library of Norway. In addition, we plan to invite participants from: Amsterdam, Buenos Aries, Sao Paolo, Shanghai, amongst other places. At Brown, in addition to faculty in the Department of Modern Culture and Media, we would like to involve people from the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Pembroke Center for the Study of Women, and the Watson Institute for International Studies.</p>
<p>The project, will comprise a series of workshops, artist residencies, a large public conference to be held at Brown University, and eventually leading to an edited online and a print publication. Each workshop will be attended by a core group of five scholars/artists who will participate in all the workshops and the conference, as well as group of participants that will vary according to the location. Ideally, this will continue as a three-year project, with each group playing a major role in convening the events for one year.</p>
<p>Collaborators: Wendy Chun (Professor, Brown University), Kelly Dobson, Chair, Digital + Media, RISD, Providence, Matthew Fuller, David Gee Reader in Digital Media, Center for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London and Eivind Rossaak, Associate Professor, Department of Research, National Library of Norway, Oslo.</p>
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<p>[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>].Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977), 72.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living</a>
</p>
No publisherWendy Chun, Kelly Dobson, Matthew Fuller and Eivind RossaakNet CulturesResearchers at WorkResearch2015-10-24T13:38:42ZBlog EntryInterface Intimacies
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/interface-intimacies/interface-intimacies
<b>Sherry Turkle, in her book Alone Together, talked about how the digital technologies, replacing interface time with face-time, are slowly alienating us from our social networks. There has been an increasing amount of anxiety around how people in immersive and ubiquitous computing and web environments are living lives which are connected online but not connected with their social and political contexts.</b>
<p> </p>
<p>While there are instances and examples of mobilisation, social networking meets, group formations, etc. there is a growing worry that on an everyday basis, we live our lives more in the company of gadgets, ambience technologies and digital platforms than with people.</p>
<p>At the same time, users of technologies often express their engagement with technologies in affective terms, where they seem to form intimate relationships with their technologies. The interfaces that we see all around us, constantly deflect our attention, emotions and desires on to different surfaces, creating flattened universes with the promises of deep immersion. Especially as the internet becomes mobile and digital interfaces become ubiquitous – from large scale billboards to small wearable devices; from sites of work to spaces of pleasure – there is a new form of intimacy which is shaped, designed, experienced, and lived through interfaces.</p>
<p>The digital interfaces become polymorphous sites of affection, love, desire, aspiration, seduction, transgression and stability. The interface is growing so integral to our everyday lives, that we start thinking of them as metaphors through which we understand ourselves and the world that we connect to. We talk about ourselves as systems that need to be ‘upgraded’ or ‘connected’. We think of the world as a network through which we ‘recycle’ our lives and ‘connect’ to our ‘peers’. The interfaces, are simultaneously opaque and transparent – They allow us to connect to the digital other, crossing boundaries of geography and time, and they also deny us access to the actually mechanics which bring the interfaces to life.</p>
<p><em>Interface Intimacies</em> is a research cluster that is interested in digging deep into interfaces, to examine peoples’ relationships with the digital interfaces around them. What are the affective relationships that people have with their interfaces? What goes into anthropomorphising an interface? What are the larger politics of labour, performance and ownership that surround interface design? What are the ways in which people simulate presence and connections through their interfaces? How is the human presumed in Computer-Human interface design? What aesthetic and political moves are we witnessing with the rise of interface mediated publics? What and who is made opaque when interfaces become transparent? When interfaces get distributed, what are the possibilities and potential for art, theory and practice to move into new forms of politics?</p>
<p>These are the kind of questions that this research cluster seeks to address with a special focus on Asia. The intention is to build a knowledge network of researchers from different disciplines – Art, Architecture, Computer Human Interaction Design, Digital Humanities, New Media Theory, Urban Planning, Public Infrastructure Design, Software Studies, Interface Design etc. – to enter into a dialogue around Interfaces and how they define contemporary conditions of life in their contexts.</p>
<p>The project hopes to organise a workshop exploring these ideas leading to an edited anthology and a special journal issue of peer-reviewed academic scholarship. The project hopes to kick off in February 2012 and take about 18 months till completion.</p>
<p>Collaborators: Audrey Yue (Melbourne University), Namita Malhotra (ALF)</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/interface-intimacies/interface-intimacies'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/interface-intimacies/interface-intimacies</a>
</p>
No publisherAudrey Yue and Namita A MalhotraInterface IntimaciesNet CulturesResearchers at WorkResearch2015-10-24T13:40:18ZBlog EntryLocating the Mobile: An Ethnographic Investigation into Locative Media in Melbourne, Bangalore and Shanghai
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/locating-mobile/locating-the-mobile
<b>From Google maps, geoweb, GPS (Global Positioning System), geotagging, Foursquare and Jie Pang, locative media is becoming an integral part of the smartphone (and shanzhai or copy) phenomenon. For a growing generation of users, locative media is already an everyday practice. </b>
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<p>The transition from the analogue to the digital, from dial-up to
broadband internet access was dramatic in how it changed our notions of
space, catalysing new ways of thought and practice. In the case of
locative media the uptake is more accelerated with it already engaging
more than ten times those involved in the analogue-digital transition.
The spread and usage of locative media is fast and promises to produce
an even more dramatic transformation as the net becomes portable and
pervasive.</p>
<p>As yet we know little about the impact locative media is having, and
will have upon people’s livelihoods and identity, or on public policy
around privacy, identity, security and cultural production. Discourse in
the field has opened up questions of art, innovation and
experimentation (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009; Hjorth 2010, 2011).
However, there remains a dearth of nuanced research on locative media
that provides in-depth, contextual accounts of its socio-cultural and
political dimensions. Little work has been conducted into locative media
as it migrates from art and into the ‘messy’ (Dourish & Bell 2011)
area of the everyday.</p>
<p><em>Locating the Mobile</em> seeks to address this knowledge gap by
undertaking close studies of locative media in three
locations—Bangalore, Melbourne and Shanghai. We aim to capture and
analyse the multiplicities of locative media practice emerging in both
developed and developing contexts. </p>
<p>These three locations have relatively high smartphones (or copies
like shanzhai) usage and are indicative of twenty-first century
migration, diaspora and transnational practices. As one of the leading
regions for mobile media innovation (Hjorth 2009; Bell 2005; Miller
& Horst 2005), the various contested localities in the Asia-Pacific
provide a rich and complex case study for mobile media as it moves into
locative media. The three locations also show how the presence of
digital and internet technologies is ‘flattening’ the globalised
landscape and bringing about dramatic changes in the ways in which these
cities shape and develop (Shah 2010). We consider how place informs
locative media practices and how, in turn, these practices are shaping
new narratives of place. </p>
<p><em>Locating the Mobile</em> seeks to collect and analyse some of the
emergent, tacit, innovative and ‘making-do’ practices informing the
rise, and resistance to, locative media. Drawing on pertinent issues for
the present and future of locative media, Locating the Mobile aims to:</p>
<ol><li>Pioneer and develop models and templates for comprehending the implications of locative media.</li><li>Develop a nuanced and situated understanding of locative media as part of cultural practice.</li><li>Provide, through multi-site analysis, new insights into the impact of locative media upon narratives of place and belonging.</li><li>Develop socio-cultural understandings of the role locative media plays in notions of intimacy and privacy.</li></ol>
<p>By
bringing together an expert team that represent a commitment to probing
the social, cultural and community dimensions of technological
innovation, Locating the Mobile will develop methodologies that capture
the dynamic and mundane features of this emergent media practice. By
doing so, Locating the Mobile will move beyond binary debates about
surveillance and privacy or ‘parachute’ case studies of locative art
towards <strong>nuanced and complex understandings of locative media and its implication for future cultural practices</strong>.</p>
<h3>Significance and Innovation</h3>
<p>The nascent field of locative media is impacting upon cultural
practice, place-making and policy in ways we can only imagine. While
much analysis has been conducted in mobile media (Goggin & Hjorth
2009) and experimental forms of locative media/art (de Souza e Silva
& Sutko 2009), the increased ubiquity of locative media through
devices such as the smartphone will undoubtedly transform the way in
which place and mobility is articulated. Locating the Mobile seeks to
substantially expand and contextualise upon the burgeoning area of
locative media through a variety of innovative and significant ways.</p>
<p><em>Locating the Mobile</em> is<strong> original </strong>in its <strong>topic</strong>, <strong>method</strong>, <strong>outcomes</strong> and <strong>industry collaboration</strong>. <strong>Firstly</strong>,
it is significant in that it brings depth and innovation to the
emergent area of locative media, and its impact upon discourses around
mobile media in ideas of mobility and place-making. In the face of
parachute nature of many locative art research (de Souza e Silva &
Sutko 2009), Locating the Mobile is one of the first studies
internationally to explore locative media over time in specific
locations. <strong>Secondly</strong>, it deploys a variety of methods
(such as surveys, focus groups, interviews and diaries for scenario of
use, overlaid with data-mining) across different devices (mobile phone,
iPad) and platforms (Foursquare, Jie Pang) to analyse the local and
socio-cultural dimensions of use. With its team of experts in mobile
media (Hjorth, Bell and Horst), communication for development (C4D)
(Tacchi and Shah), gaming (Hjorth), social networking (Shah, Zhou and
Hjorth) as well as a range of methodologies, this three-year study will
investigate and contextualise locative media in Bangalore, Melbourne and
Shanghai. Despite its ubiquity in many locations in the Asia-Pacific
region, much of the locative media literature remains Anglophonic or
Eurocentric in focus.<strong> Thirdly</strong>, through multi-site
analysis of locative media practices we will provide innovative ways in
which to reflect upon narratives of place, belonging and
transnationalism. <strong>Fourthly</strong>, by pioneering the first
multi-site analysis of locative media over time, Locating the Mobile
will develop the much missing socio-cultural understandings of locative
media and how it impacts upon intimacy and privacy upon individual,
group and policy levels. We will now detail these four key areas of
significance and innovation. <strong>We will pioneer and develop models and templates for comprehending the implications of locative media</strong>.
In these models we actively address locative media in the transnational
context of contemporary feelings about belonging, possession, mobility,
migration, and dislocation. As locative media becomes more pervasive,
the power of its banality needs further understanding beyond ‘global’
generalisations (see www.pleaserobme.com). Like the rise of mobile media
that was accompanied by the ‘subversive user’ (Hjorth 2009), we need to
figure out the digital subject who is shaped—both historically and
socio-culturally—through the pervasive spread of locative media. As
Gabriella Coleman (2010) observes in her review of ethnographic
approaches to digital media, there are three main overlapping
categories: research on the relationship between digital media and the
cultural politics of media; the vernacular cultures of digital media;
the prosaics of digital media (and this attention to the commonplace,
the unromantic, the quotidian). In the case of locative media,
ethnographic approaches—emphasising the situated, vernacular and
prosaic—are needed in order to understand the relocations of mobility
across a variety notions: technological, electronic and psychological to
name a few. Moreover, given the relatively high proportion of Indian
and Chinese migrants in Melbourne—and migration in Bangalore and
Shanghai—exploring locative media can <strong>provide new models for conceptualising the impact of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism on place</strong>.</p>
<p><strong>We will develop a nuanced and situated understanding of locative media as part of cultural practice</strong>
through methods that deploy both qualitative (ethnographic) and
quantitative (datamining) approaches such as ‘ethno-mining’ (Anderson et
al. 2009). With the emergence of ethnomining approaches—that is,
data-based mining combined with ethnography—new models for analysing
media and mobility can be found. Locating the Mobile addresses this need
for innovative methodologies that capture the dynamic nature of
locative media by situating it within three legacies: social, cultural
and historical mediatisation. Further, Locating the Mobile seeks to
frame locative media as evolving through the cultural precepts informing
mobile media and urbanity LP120200829 (Submitted to RO) Dr Larissa
Hjorth PDF Created: 16/11/2011 Page 8 of 123 discourses. Drawing upon
case studies from a region renowned for divergent and innovative use of
mobile media (Hjorth 2009) and gaming (Hjorth & Chan 2009)—the
Asia-Pacific—Locating the Mobile seeks to understand the lived and local
dimensions of locative media and how it can inform emergent and older
forms of place-making, belonging and migration. By focusing upon this
nascent but burgeoning area in global mobile media practice—locative
media—Locating the Mobile not only places Australia as a forerunner in
innovative, original, and challenging methodologies for new media, but
also, by bringing together key industry partners, Intel, CIS and Fudan
University,<em><br /></em></p>
<p><em>Locating the Mobile</em> seeks to contextualise the research in
terms of industry and community outcomes. In this sense, Locating the
Mobile clearly addresses the National Priority 3, Frontier Technologies
(see below for more details).</p>
<p><strong>We will provide, through multi-site analysis, new insights
into the impact of locative media upon narratives of place and belonging</strong>
through our three case study locations—Melbourne, Bangalore and
Shanghai. Locative media can provide new models for conceptualising the
impact of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism on place. Although
place has always mattered to mobile media (Ito 2003; Bell 2005; Hjorth
2003), locative media both amplify, redirect and redefine practices
around place, community and a sense of belonging—phenomenon that impacts
upon cultural policy and media regulation (Goggin 2011). Along with the
digital interfaces that overlay our physical experiences as we enter
into a state of augmented reality (AR), the presence of these
cartographic, geospatial locative platforms also changes the ways in
which the cities and how we navigate with them (Shah 2010). With the
rise of locative media like Google maps we are seeing new ways to frame
and narrate a sense of place through various technological lenses
overlaying the social with the informational. This phenomenon is
especially the case with smartphones and their plethora of applications
(apps) drawing heavily upon locative media—even most photo apps come
with locative media. With locative media we see the arrival of increased
accessibility to augmented<br />reality (AR). Instead of replacing the
analogue with the digital, the physical with the virtual, they open up
‘hybrid realities’ (a term used by de Souza e Silva to describe AR
mobile games) that need new conceptual tools and located frameworks to
unravel the dynamics. We are no longer looking at just the technology
mediated hypervisual digitality but also exploring what these locative
media augment and simulate in everyday practices.</p>
<p><strong>We will develop socio-cultural understandings of the role locative media plays in notions of intimacy and privacy</strong>
and how we might comprehend locative media’s implications on individual
and cultural practices, and regulation. In the second generation of
locative media that sees it move increasingly into the mainstream,
questions about security, privacy and identity—and how these are shaped
by the local—come into focus (Dourish & Anderson 2006). For Dourish
and Anderson (2006) locative media can been viewed as a form of
‘Collective Information Practice’ that have social and cultural
implications upon how privacy and security are conceptualised. For
others such as Siva Vaidhyanathan (2011) locative media like Google maps
and street views are about a corporate surveillance. As a burgeoning
field of media practice intersecting daily life, there is a need for
in-depth situated accounts into locative media and their
cultural-economic dimensions to understand the impact they will have on
intimacy, privacy, identity and place-making. In Locating the Mobile, by
developing and implementing new hybrid models for analysing locative
media (Anderson et al. 2009), we consider the role locative media plays
in how place shapes, and is shaped by, these practices and the future
implications around cultural policy. The comparative dimension brings a
rich data-set to bear on our understanding of locative media and the
questions it may pose in the future. The outputs are significant not
only for Australian mobile communication, gaming and internet studies—by
providing a regional context for evaluating the socio-technologies—but
also demonstrates internationally Australia’s lead in ground-breaking
research into locative media (Priority 3, ‘frontier technologies’) in
arguably the most significant sites for global ICTs production and
consumption, the Asia-Pacific.</p>
<p><strong>National Research Priorities</strong>: With the rise of
smartphones becoming ubiquitous, location-based services have burgeoned.
And yet, little is known about this area and its impact upon
individuals, LP120200829 (Submitted to RO) Dr Larissa Hjorth PDF
Created: 16/11/2011 Page 9 of 123 organisations and governments. Given
this phenomenon, a comprehensive understanding of the impact upon
locative media upon notions of privacy, identity and place-making is
needed. In the twenty-first century, locative media will become an
increasingly important part of everyday life—for individuals,
communities, businesses and government agencies. Thus it is imperative
that we have a robust comparative understanding of locative media in
Australia and across the region. By conceptualising this impact within
the context of the region, Locating the Mobile ensures Australia is at
the frontier of new technologies and their impact upon future
technological practices and policies. Such an understanding is
fundamental to Australia’s technology and cultural sectors, thus
contributing to National Research Priority 3 through one of the
strongest currencies in twenty-first century global market, mobile
media, as well as contributing to the broader long-term project of
locating Australia in the region. By drawing on qualitative,
cross-cultural longitudinal research into locative media, Locating the
Mobile will document, analysis and provide future recommendations for
how locative media is impacting upon people’s experience of place and
identity. A study like this is important as it is innovative for not
only pioneering methodologies to evaluate this media phenomenon but also
to understand some of its long-term implications on how mobile media
intervenes and even reconfigures experiences and perceptions of place
which, in turn, impact upon cultural policy.</p>
<p>Collaborators: Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University, Melbourne), Genevieve Bell (Intel, Shanghai)</p>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/locating-mobile/locating-the-mobile'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/locating-mobile/locating-the-mobile</a>
</p>
No publisherLarissa Hjorth and Genevieve BellNet CulturesResearchers at WorkResearch2015-10-24T13:41:47ZBlog EntryWe, the Cyborgs: Challenges for the Future of being Human
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/we-cyborgs/challenges-for-future-of-human
<b>The Cyborg - a cybernetique organism which is a combination of the biological and the technological – has been at the centre of discourse around digital technologies. Especially with wearable computing and ubiquitous access to the digital world, there has been an increased concern that very ways in which we understand questions of life, human body and the presence and role of technologies in our worlds, are changing. In just the last few years, we have seen extraordinary measures – the successful production of synthetic bacteria, artificial intelligence that can be programmed to simulate human conditions like empathy and temperament, and massive mobilisation of people around the world, to fight against the injustices and inequities of their immediate environments. </b>
<p><strong>Rationale</strong></p>
<p>All of these, in some way or the other, hint at new models of
cyborgification which we need to unpack in order to understand a few
questions which have been at the helm of all philosophical inquiry and
practical design around Internet and Society:</p>
<ul><li>How do we understand ourselves as human? What are the technologies that define being human?</li><li>How
do conceptualise the technological beyond prosthetic imaginations? How
do we understand technology (especially the digital) as a condition?</li><li>What are the new challenges we shall face in law, ethics, life and social sciences as we increasingly live in Cyborg societies?<br /></li></ul>
<em>We , the Cyborgs</em>, is a first of its kind research inquiry that
locates these questions in a quickly digitising India to see the
challenges of being human in the time of technological futures. In her
seminal body of work on Cyborgs, Donna Haraway had posited the cyborg as
a creature of fiction and ironies; a monster, a trickster, a boundary
creature that is irreducible to the existing binaries of
human-technology, technology-nature, nature-regulation.
In imagining the cyborg as simultaneously fictitious and embodied in
practices of care and labour, Haraway was further hinting at a set of
questions that have never really entered discourse on cyborgs: Who are
we when we become cyborgs? What do we do with the cyborgs we have
produced? What are the other kinds of cyborgs? What are the new places
them? What are the other ways of understanding cyborgs? Asha Achuthan in
her monograph Re:Wiring Bodies, maps these questions along the axes of
Presence, Access, Inclusion and Resistance to understand ‘attitudes to
technology’.
Achuthan talks about a moment of elision where technology is separated
from the human body in the space of policy and critique. In those
moments of separation, there is the production of a cyborg body that is
suddenly vulnerable because it does not have the support of the
technological which was an essential part of its bodily experience. How
does this body get assimilated in our technology practices? What are the
axes of discrimination and inequity that are attributed to these bodies
in the process of cyborg making? Who are the actors that play a part in
designing these cyborg bodies and selves? In the Indian context, where
there has been a legacy of being technosocial subjects and cyborg
citizens in the nation’s own technoscience imagination of itself, we
need to locate the cyborg in new sites and contexts to see what the
regulation of technology and its integration in everyday life.
<strong><br /><br />Methodology</strong>
<p>Building upon her work, We, The Cyborgs, seeks to locate the cyborg
in India, on 3 interdisciplinary but connected sites to examine how
bodies, in their interaction with the design and practice of different
processes of regulation and control, are in the process of becoming
cyborgs. The inquiry locates the cyborg at intersections of Health Care,
Planning and Gender, to start unpacking the different futures of the
body-technology relationships that have been posited in terms like
post-human, techno-social, simulated bodies, bodies as traffic, etc. In
the process, it hopes to unravel the questions of methods, frameworks,
ethics and practices of bodies in conditions of technology.
<em>We, The Cyborgs</em>, aims to bring together a wide range of
researchers and practitioners from different disciplinary locations
including but not limited to – Art, Anthropology, Law, Planning,
Architecture and Design, Gender and Sexuality studies, Cultural Studies,
Life Sciences, Medicine, New Media Studies, etc. – to start a debate
around some of the key issues around cyborgs and cyborg-making in their
fields.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/we-cyborgs/challenges-for-future-of-human'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/we-cyborgs/challenges-for-future-of-human</a>
</p>
No publisherashaCyborgsNet CulturesResearchers at WorkResearch2015-10-24T13:42:16ZBlog EntryThe Digital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/digital-classroom/digital-classroom-in-time-of-wikipedia
<b>The digital turn in education comes across a wide range of initiatives and processes. The Wikipedia which is the largest user generated content website stands as a figurehead of such a digital turn, writes Nishant Shah.</b>
<h2>Context</h2>
<p>The digital turn in education has been described across a wide range of initiatives and processes. These include the introduction of digital tools and gadgets as a part of the learning environment, building digital archives and repositories of learning and curriculum building, facilitating remote access to education through information and communications technologies infrastructure, improving quality of access to education and learning resources, building diverse and customised syllabi to accommodate for alternative and contesting perspectives, building peer knowledge communities of information and knowledge production, and including non-canonical material and experiences into formal institutions of education. Different locations, contexts, geo-political circumstances, socio-economic factors, and cultural differences influence the spread, rise and integration of digital technologies in mainstream education. Much academic, policy and implementation attention has been given to these processes and several models of new learning environments and infrastructure have been postulated over the last two decades. The democratising promise of internet technologies has been largely if not exclusively about education, learning, literacy and production of knowledge from different parts of the world.</p>
Wikipedia, one of the first and possibly the largest user generated content websites, that aims to put together the ‘sum total of all human knowledge’ in an open encyclopaedia, stands as the figurehead of such a digital turn. It questions and subverts the traditional analogue forms of knowledge production and relationships. The much discussed experiment conducted by Nature (Giles, 2005 and Orlowski, 2006) that established Wikipedia as an almost equal (if not more) reliable source of information to the fountainhead of print-based knowledge <em>Encyclopaedia Britannica</em>, has become the touchstone by which digital collaborative knowledge structures seek their validity within mainstream classroom pedagogy and learning.
Wikipedia itself has emerged as an object of deep scrutiny and contestation, with warring factions going strong about its strengths and weaknesses. The supporters look at how this collaborative peer-to-peer structure has changed knowledge relationships that defined consumers, producers and mediators of knowledge. They see in the rise of Wikipedia, and other such wiki-based structures and user generated content sites that remix, reuse and share knowledge within the digital realm, the potentials and possibilities of changing the futures of knowledge ecologies and economies. The detractors of Wikipedia make a strong case for specialised and expert curatorial practices of knowledge, without which the information explosion of the digital world would collapse all distinctions between speculative writing and rigorous accountable research.
<h2>Concerns</h2>
<p>In the seemingly unbridgeable differences of these two contesting positions, there is however, a set of common presumptions which remained unquestioned and unchallenged. The example of Wikipedia accordingly serves to throw in sharp relief these more general questions regarding digitally produced knowledge and digitally enabled learning practices.</p>
<h3><strong>Design of Trust</strong></h3>
<h3></h3>
<p>The first among them is the concern around Authority and Authorship (Liang, 2010). Increasingly, as Wikipedia becomes a de facto global reference site available in different languages, there is a growing dependence on the authority of information available on Wikipedia. Given that the number of users of Wikipedia is exponentially higher than the number of editors on Wikipedia, there are many users who never confront the structures of participation, processes of editing, and questioning the source of information (Harouni, 2009, Broughton, 2002) found on the site. This is not a problem exclusive to Wikipedia. Given the explosion of user generated sites which often gloss over the problems of authority and authorship, misdirected or misguided information, there is a need for digital criticality which can help people sift through different kinds of information and develop the capacity for effective critical judgment regarding both truth or falsity and rhetorical persuasiveness or manipulation. Especially within the context of scholarly and academic research and learning, classroom teaching and pedagogy, there is a need to define new parameters by which information introduced in the classroom or learning environment needs to stand deeper scrutiny regarding reliability (over authority).</p>
<h3>Flattened Politics</h3>
<p>The second concern has to do with the depoliticized perception of participation, collaboration and knowledge production on Wikipedia (Graham, 2010). Not only are geographical counters, experiential knowledges and non-standard forms of citation (Prabhala, 2010) ignored on Wikipedia, but they are also rendered redundant under the guise of objectivity. The essentially viral nature of information online and conditions of easy replicability that allow for copy and paste cultures often means that the information gets de-contextualised and de-politicized from its original intentions and circuits of production/distribution.</p>
<p>In many ways, Wikipedia’s adherence to an encyclopaedic model, promotes the idea that there is universal, objective knowledge which can be produced and understood without engaging with the politics of context, language, translation, evidence, etc. This adoption of an older model of aggregating knowledge becomes problematic in the light of new perspectives and theories of reading and writing, which establish knowledge as a contested terrain rather than the benign site that can be mediated through protocols, bots and procedures (Miller, 2007 and Rosenzweig, 2006). In classrooms, students and teachers are both faced with problems when they encounter the simultaneously authoritative and collaborative, definite and tentative nature of information on Wikipedia. The flattened structure of information further complicates our engagement with the larger contexts it refers to and often hinders the learner’s ability to go beyond the self contained universe of Wikipedia, unable to engage with that which has been omitted or left-out and only concentrating on that what has been written and represented.</p>
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<h3>Technology as Tool</h3>
<p>The third concern marks a larger anxiety with the Web 2.0 technologies
and their integration with formal structures of education and learning.
It has to do with new configurations of power, recalibrated hierarchies
of learning and teaching, and distributed communities of learning which
might not often be cohesive and concurrent. With the unqualified
emphasis on digital gadgets – OLPC, Smart Boards, iPads – and ubiquitous
connectivity, there is often a danger to reducing these structures to
sheer functionality. There have been experiments where pedagogues have
merely introduced user generated sites as reference material and ways of
accessing information without actually looking at how they posit
questions to existing education systems. The larger trend of distrusting
non-academic spaces continues.</p>
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<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/DC.jpg/image_preview" title="Digital Technology" height="270" width="363" alt="Digital Technology" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
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<p>A lecture on the problems of Wikipedia
is immediately followed by a ban on or “policing” of the use of
Wikipedia as a reliable resource, trying to create a false and divisive
distinction between offline and online learning tools (Davidson, 2007).
With the increased focus on ‘Digital Natives’ within education policy
and everyday classroom pedagogy, there is a call for changing the
existing classroom and replacing it with a digital classroom – a classroom that challenges the teacher-student relationships, the
authority of the prescribed curricula, and the form of learning and
teaching within college and university structures. The Digital Classroom
is often mistaken to be a virtualisation of the contemporary classroom,
where virtual presences and cloud-based resources of learning structure
the syllabi and the methods of learning. However, the larger anxieties
are about rendering the physical classroom digital by establishing new
relationships and structures at the levels of curricula design,
teaching, learning and evaluation. The need is to look beyond the social
media as a tool, and start unpacking the transparency of the digital
interface and the perceived non-hierarchical nature of information
filtering (Geiger, 2010) on Wikipedia and other such user generated
content portals.</p>
<h3>Quality of Access</h3>
<p>The fourth concern draws from digital internet rhetoric of Do It Yourself. There is a heavy promotion of howthe only thing that stops a student (or anybody who is a learner) from being an intelligent and engaged student is lack of resources. This rhetoric finds bolstering in other political movements like FLOSS and A2K (Willinsky, 2006). There is a presumption that the teacher is merely a proxy for the paucity of resources and that once the students have unlimited access to the ‘sum total of all human knowledge’, they will be able to Learn everything on their own. The DIY University models, the proposition of phasing out teachers and investing in digital infrastructure instead, the idea that the digital native student has instinctive abilities to navigate through knowledge systems (like a fish does to water), all obfuscate not only the traditional learning processes but also reduce all learning to Access.</p>
<p>There is no debate about the quality of access. Even when factual errors are spotted, it is celebrated as an opportunity to improve so that information on Wikipedia is by definition flawed and always potentially in the process of being improved. There is little theorisation of both the role of a teacher in a classroom and the relationship with information access and learning. The presumption that the only gating factor to better education is lack of resources glosses over questions of social and economic disadvantage, political contexts, age, language, race, gender, sexuality, social support, etc., that come into play when designing inclusive education systems. Instead, there is a promotion of fact-based skill-oriented learning that fits the larger neo-liberal agenda of producing workforces who necessarily should not have to be critical in their everyday labours (Achterman, 2005). Universities and colleges are finding increasing pressure to produce students who work within such flat knowledge horizons towards market expansion and promotion of information capitalism rather than a critical learner who is able to deploy lessons learned from education in order to question and change the reality of the conditions within which s/he lives.</p>
<h2>Rationale<br /></h2>
<p>Given these dramatic measures and accelerated changes happening in academia and within the university systems across the worlds, it is necessary to dwell on what a digital college classroom and learning environment looks like in the time of Wikipedia. A synthesis of perspectives from different stakeholders in varied disciplines, engaging with knowledge production, consumption, distribution and access is necessary to understand what the futures and contours of the university system and classroom pedagogy are. The ambition is to look at Wikipedia as a symptom of our times rather than a site of analyses.</p>
<h2>Call for Proposals</h2>
<p>This is a call for proposals towards a special Reader, from people who are interested in producing historical and contemporary accounts of relationships between education, technology, learning, and pedagogy in order to map existing crises and questions of our present times. We take the classroom as the unit where different processes and flows of the education system meet. In this context, we invite researchers, academic practitioners, students, artists, new media theorists, education policy actors and historians of knowledge to look at the <em>Digital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia</em> as an opportunity to question global trends in education and ways by which Wikipedia (and other such structures) can be fruitfully integrated in formal education towards better learning. Proposals can be for producing theoretical accounts, critical analyses, case-studies from one’s practice, review of information and knowledge, narratives of art and activist interventions, regional and local snap-shots, and other innovative forms by which the diverse and complex questions can be elaborated.</p>
<h2>Key Questions</h2>
<p>Proposals can be inspired by but not limited to some of the questions listed below that we identify as beginning points for engaging with the area:</p>
<ol><li>What does a digital classroom look like? If we had to think beyond just integration of digital tools into the classroom, what are the new models and structures of classrooms (physical, pedagogical, or otherwise) that we are looking at?</li><li>What are the new relationships that we are mapping in the time of Wikipedia – student-teacher, teacher-curriculum, student-classroom, student-student, technology-education, pedagogy-learning? How do we account for the shifts and map the transitions?</li><li>How do we understand the changing nature and function of the university and education with the rise of the internet? What are the policy and practice visions of the University of the Future?</li><li>What does the integration of Wikipedia and similar structures in everyday classroom practice lead to? What does it change and for whom?</li><li>What is the role of the teacher in the age of ubiquitous information access? How do we restructure our ideas of pedagogy, learning and evaluation?</li><li>What are the historical tensions between technology and education that are being replayed with the rise of the digital?</li><li>What does the rise of Wikipedia mean for our traditional understandings of data repositories? What are the politics and implications of Wikimedia’s other projects on Alternative Citation, Wikipictures, GLAM, etc. on the larger knowledge ecology and industry?</li></ol>
<hr />
<p><strong>References</strong>:</p>
<ol><li>Achterman, D. (2005). “Surviving Wikipedia: Improving student search habits through information literacy and teacher collaboration”, <em>Knowledge Quest</em>, 33(5), 38−40.</li><li>Davidson, C. (2007). “We can’t ignore the influence of digital technologies”,<em> Education Digest</em>, 73(1), 15−18.</li><li>Geiger, S. (2011). “The Lives of Bots”, <em>Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader</em> (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.</li><li>Giles, J. (2005). “Internet encyclopedias go head to head”, <em>Nature</em>, 438(7070), 900−901.</li><li>Graham, M. (2011). “Wiki Space: Palimpsests and the Politics of Exclusion”, <em>Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader</em> (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.</li><li>Harouni, H. (2009). “High School Research and Critical Literacy: Social Studies with and Despite Wikipedia”, <em>Harvard Educational Review</em>, 79 (3), 473-494.</li><li>Liang, L. (2011). “A brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century”, <em>Critical Point of View A Wikipedia Reader</em> (Eds.) Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Institute of Network Cultures : Amsterdam.</li><li>Miller, N. (2007). “Wikipedia revisited” <em>ETC: A Review of General Semantics</em>, 64(2), 147−150.</li><li>Orlowski, A. (2006, March 26). Nature mag cooked Wikipedia study, <em>The Register</em>. Retrieved December 17, 2011, from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_problem/">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/18/wikipedia_quality_problem/</a></li><li>Prabhala, A. (2011). <em>People Are Knowledge</em>. Documentary retrieved from December 17, 2011 from <a class="external-link" href="http://vimeo.com/26469276">http://vimeo.com/26469276</a>.</li><li>Rosenzweig, R. (2006). “Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the future of the past” <em>Journal of American History</em>, 93(1), 117–146.</li><li>Willinsky, J. (2006). <em>The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship</em>. MIT Press :Massachusetts.
<hr /><strong>Collaborators</strong>: Dr. David Theo Goldberg, <em>University of California
Humanities Research Institute</em> and Claudia Sullivan, <em>Digital Media and
Learning Initiative, HASTAC</em>.<br /><strong>Photo source</strong>: <a class="external-link" href="http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=digital+classrooms&l=1">Flickr</a> (Creative Commons-licensed content for noncommercial use requiring attribution and share alike distribution).<br /></li></ol>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/digital-classroom/digital-classroom-in-time-of-wikipedia'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/digital-classroom/digital-classroom-in-time-of-wikipedia</a>
</p>
No publishernishantWikipediaResearchers at WorkLearningDigital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia2015-10-05T14:53:30ZBlog EntryWe Have the Answer for You. So, what's the Question?
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/answer-for-you-what-is-the-question
<b>The Everyday Digital Native Video Contest invited everyone to send in videos that answered the question: who's the everyday digital native? Participants from all parts of the globe now have the answers. </b>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/vote-for-digital-natives/video-contest" class="external-link">Click here</a> to view the videos and vote for your favorite! Voting ends March 31, 2012.</p>
<h2>Video<br /></h2>
<hr />
<iframe src="http://blip.tv/play/AYLwvSQA.html?p=1" frameborder="0" height="270" width="320"></iframe><embed style="display:none" src="http://a.blip.tv/api.swf#AYLwvSQA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/answer-for-you-what-is-the-question'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/answer-for-you-what-is-the-question</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-08T12:30:51ZBlog EntryVote for the Everyday Digital Native Video Contest!
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/vote-for-digital-natives
<b>The Centre for Internet & Society and Hivos are super excited to present the final videos in the Everyday Digital Native Video Contest. We invite readers to vote for the TOP 5 Videos. The finalists will each win EUR500! Voting closes March 31, 2012</b>
<h2>Who’s the Everyday Digital Native? This global video contest has the answer</h2>
<p><em>They effect social change through social media, place their
communities on the global map, and share a spiritual connection with the
digital world - Meet the Everyday Digital Native</em></p>
<p>The Everyday Digital Native video contest has got its pulse on what
makes youths from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds connect with one
another in the global community – it’s an affinity for digital
technologies and Web 2.0-mediated platforms coupled with a drive to
spearhead social change. The contest invited people from around the
world to make a video that would answer the question, ‘Who is the
Everyday Digital Native?’. Following a jury-based selection process, the
final videos are now online and open for public voting.</p>
<p>Run by the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society (CIS)
with the support of Dutch NGO HIVOS, the contest will see the top five
videos with the most votes declared winners on April 1, 2012. The 12
finalists in the video, who come from different parts of the globe, are
each vying for the top prize of USD 500 and a chance to have their
shorts screened in a film screening and panel discussion hosted by CIS. <br /><br />Referring
to the theme of the contest, Dr Nishant Shah, Director of Research and
Co-founder of the Centre, says that the contest aims at highlighting the
alternative users of digital technologies. These are people who are
often not accounted for either in mainstream discourses of changemakers
or in academic biopics on digital natives. “The 12 video proposals show
that the everyday digital native does not wake up in the morning and
think, ‘hmmm today I will change the world’. And yet, in their everyday
lives, when they see the possibility of producing a change in their
immediate environments, they turn to the digital to find networks that
can start a change”, says Shah. <br /><br />Apart from the top five public
selections, the jury members will be instrumental in picking their two
favorites among the finalists. Talking about the range of ideas that
participants sent in jury member Leon Tan, a media-art historian,
cultural theorist and psychoanalyst based in Gothenburg, Sweden, says,
“The contest is an exciting project as it has the potential to portray
the lives of digital natives from different corners of the world. The
generosity of the contestants in creating video proposals is commendable
as is the range of ideas suggested. The ideas address both the
opportunities and risks of what we might call digital life.” <br /><br />Adds
Shashwati Talukdar, a filmmaker and jury member from India, “It was
really interesting to see how different all the proposals were. Some of
them were taking the notion of digital native as a personal one and some
were very clearly political and sought an intervention in the real
world. Dutch digital media artist and jury member Jeroen van Loon refers
to a proposal from the USA where the participant wanted to explore the
possibility of unplugging from his digital life. “It’s very interesting
how digital natives question their own world. The proposals are good
examples of how technology and culture constantly change each other. We
can learn a lot from the global digital natives.” </p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest" class="external-link">Profiles of the finalists and their videos can be viewed here</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/vote-for-digital-natives'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/vote-for-digital-natives</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaVideoFeaturedResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-08T12:32:00ZBlog EntryPinning the Badge
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/pinning-the-badge
<b>In a world of competition, badging provides a holistic way of grading and learning, where individual talents are realised and the knowledge of the group is used.</b>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/pinning-the-badge/925167/0">The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on March 18, 2012</a>.</p>
<p>I write this column fresh out of being a judge at the Digital Media and Learning contest on “Badging for Life-long Learning” in San Francisco. While the contest focused largely on the American education system and its future, the idea of badging that each person brings a set of skills to a study or workplace is useful to think about, in connection with India. We have now spent some time, in India, hearing about how education in the country has been ruined. There is a constant narrative of the university in shambles, where we seem to lack competent teachers, engaged students, and the resources to build efficient infrastructure for learning. This argument also positions employment as the only aim of education, reducing our humanist and social sciences legacies to skill-based information transmission.</p>
<p>Digital technologies emerge as a cure for the problems that contemporary education seems to be facing. The availability of resources at affordable costs for anybody online, has been one of the biggest promises of the internet, and it hopes to build a better learning environment and better learners. The condition of being connected to a much larger network of educators and learners, also offers us the possibilities of producing better and innovative knowledge structures. There is also an inherent ambition that the introduction of new digital competencies and skills will encourage both students and teachers to integrate their learning and pedagogy with their lived reality, producing responsible people and citizens. However, in all these expectations around the role of the digital technology in transforming learning, the idea of grading and evaluation remains unquestioned.</p>
<p>Even in the most radical restructuring of education systems, grades remain an absolute form of quantifying and measuring skills that the student is supposed to demonstrate. Grading might take up different forms — numbers, letters, percentile, etc — or it might take up different methods — continuous grading, take-home exams — but it eventually becomes the only badge that the student takes into the “real world”.</p>
<p>The idea of a badge as an alternative to this particular kind of quantification oriented learning that sees the grade as a final evaluation and in some ways, a termination of the learning process, opens up huge possibilities for how we understand learning. The badge is not imagined as yet another kind of grading, but instead it is recognition of certain skills and competences that we bring to and build in classrooms with our peers. A badge allows the students to recognise their own investment in the learning process, enabling them to realise their particular skills on the way to learning. In any learning environment, students play many roles. Some are good as connectors, some serve as conduits of information, some are good in specific areas and need help with others, some are mentors, some are translators of knowledge, some help in creating new forms of knowledge. Unfortunately, most of our grading patterns refuse to acknowledge and credit these skills which are crucial for surviving the academic world. The ability of the students to badge themselves, and others in their peer groups, acknowledging their contributions to their collective learning, might be the motivation and encouragement that we are looking for.</p>
<p>A peer-2-peer system of badging, which enables learners to be critically aware not only of their own interaction with knowledge, but also recognises the ways in which larger communities of knowledge — including the peers and teachers — opens up an extraordinary way of thinking about education. It disrupts the competitive modes of cut-throat modes of education systems we are building and allows us to re-think the function of education and the role of learners in educational environments. The digital systems of social networking and reputation management, already perform some of these tasks, which is why, a student who might not do well in class might be a YouTube sensation, finding thousands of followers worldwide. Or a student who might not show research aptitude in class might be editing complex Wikipedia entries on subjects that high-level researchers are engaging with. All these digital systems acknowledge the roles that people play in learning and knowledge production, and in that reward of recognition, provide incentives for learners to re-examine their role within knowledge systems.</p>
<p>Such a system of badging, that exceeds the static classroom, allows for students to become stakeholders in their own education, building connected communities of learning. It hints at what the future of education is going to look like. More importantly, it offers a new way of thinking about technology and its role in redesigning education, which is not merely about introducing technologies into classrooms and continuing with the traditional modes of learning through new technology skills. Instead, we have a model for what learning means, how we interact with conditions of knowledge consumption and production, and how, we can form global communities of learning which might find an anchor in the classrooms but also transcend the brick-and-mortar institutions of learning as we understand them.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/pinning-the-badge'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/pinning-the-badge</a>
</p>
No publishernishantHigher EducationResearchers at Workdigital pluralismDigital Natives2015-05-08T12:34:23ZBlog EntryDigital Natives Video Contest
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/digital-natives-contest
<b>The Everyday Digital Native Video Contest has its top five winners through public voting.</b>
<p>
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</object></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>A Day in the Life of a Digital Native: </strong>Story scripted, shot and edited by Leandra (Cole) Flor. The video is an extension of Cole's photo essay "Mirror Exercises" conceptualized for 'Digital AlterNatives with a Cause' Book 1 <em>To Be</em>. <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook1/at_download/file">Download the book.</a></p>
<table class="listing">
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<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/MarieJudeBendiolaWinner.jpg" alt="null" title="" width="103" height="142" /></th>
<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/TJKMwinner.jpg" alt="null" title="" width="103" height="142" /></th>
<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/TJBurkswinner.jpg" alt="null" title="" width="103" height="142" /></th>
<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/JohnMusilaKiberawinner.jpg" alt="null" title="" width="103" height="142" /></th>
<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/mj.png/@@images/f52feb88-f69d-4482-b019-881fdf8af7c3.png" title="mj" height="138" width="102" alt="null" class="image-inline" /><br /></th>
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</tbody>
</table>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Top 5 winners of the Digital Native video contest selected through public votes. From left to right: Marie Jude Bendiola, T.J. KM, Thomas Burks, John Musila and MJ.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>The Jury Prize for Two Best Videos goes to John Musila (Kenya) and Marie Jude Bendiola (Singapore)! Congratulations to all winners. The Top 5 winners win the grand prize of EUR 500 each!</strong></p>
<h3><strong>Our Top 10 contestants: Click on their profile to watch their videos<br /></strong></h3>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
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<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/MarieJudeBendiolaWinner.jpg" alt="null" title="" width="103" height="142" /><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Marie Jude Bendiola</strong><br />I come from a third world country where technology seemed to be hard to reach back in the 90s; especially by the not-so-privileged. As we progressed, technology has not only become ubiquitous (in malls, various institutions and technological hubs) but also, it has come to be used by the common man. My video will answer how technology bridges the gap between dreams and reality. It will be a fusion of documentary and re-enactment of real life events and dramas.<br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/connecting-souls-bridging-dreams" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
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<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/cijoaj2003.jpg/image_preview" title="Cijo" height="142" width="103" alt="Cijo" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Cijo Abraham Mani</strong><br />The power of digital media will be presented to audience with the help of showing tweet-a-thon panel discussions, blood aid tweets getting spread, etc. <br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/digital-media-dance" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
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<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/TJKMwinner.jpg" title="" height="142" width="103" alt="null" class="image-inline" /><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>TJ K.M.</strong><br />My video explores the spiritual aspect of digital technology and how rather than getting in the way of our spiritual expression, it is actually bringing us face to face with it, if only we choose to look. The video will be a mixture of live action and stop motion animation/puppetry where digital devices take on a transcendent character similar to nature spirits in various cultures. I plan to investigate the tendency to exclude digital devices and technology from being categorized alongside nature as if it is somehow exempt from or superior to this category. Using symbolism and motifs from various cultures such as the Native American Hopi, Balinese Hinduism and Japanese Shintoism, my video will create a world where the technology we use daily is viewed not just as a means for socio-cultural exchange and communication but is available for the nurturing of our souls if we so choose.<br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/with-no-distinction" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
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<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/TJBurkswinner.jpg" title="" height="142" width="103" alt="null" class="image-inline" /><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Thomas Burks<br /></strong>We have a small production company in Birmingham, Alabama. I was hired on a year ago to do film and commercials for them as they expand into advertising and video coverage of events. We only have about 3 employees including myself, working out of our homes. We recently acquired a space to open a studio and retail location downtown where we live. We use Facebook, blogs, and viral marketing all the time to get our name out there. Our account executive is constantly monitoring our Facebook for client orders and bookings. We are beginning to use twitter to provide information more fluidly to people. We believe this might be a year of growth for our small company, as we are becoming able to provide much higher quality content. We're fully digital; constantly updating our websites and blogs, and I believe we would be able to tell a great digital story. We submit numerous small films and skits; we cover awesome concerts, and rely so heavily on the digital world to show our content. That will be the gist of our video.<a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/alternate-visions-accessing-leisure-through-interfaces" class="external-link"></a><br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/digital-natives-video-contest/entries/digital-coverage-in-a-digital-world" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
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<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/winners-pictures/JohnMusilaKiberawinner.jpg" title="" height="142" width="103" alt="null" class="image-inline" /><br /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>John Musila<br /></strong>Map Kibera Trust is an organization based in Kenya’s Kibera slums. Using digital gadgets and technology, they have transformed the community by placing it on the map as it was only seen as forest when viewed on a map. They also film stories around the community and share them with the world on their YouTube channel and other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Through this they have been able to highlight and raise awareness about the challenges the community faces. Our video would show Kibera’s role in bringing about change.<a href="https://cis-india.org/author/kiberanewsnetwork" class="external-link"></a><br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/from-the-wild-into-the-digital-world" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Andres.jpg/image_preview" title="Andres" height="142" width="103" alt="Andres" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Andrés Felipe Arias Palma<br /></strong>I think many people are digital natives unknowingly. Being a digital native is a relationship with activism and society, not as they initially thought. It was a condition of being born in specific times and external factors. In the video, I will interview people about who and what is a digital native? How to use the Internet? What are the advantages and disadvantages for society where everything is run with the power of the Internet?<br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/who-is-a-digital-native" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/martingpotter.jpg/image_preview" title="Martin" height="142" width="103" alt="Martin" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Martin Potter<br /></strong>Over a period of nearly four years, moving across small towns in Australia and South East Asia, I have seen the most extraordinary innovations at a local community level. My video will focus on these local stories with global impact. I am pursuing a PhD in participatory media and this will lend a uniquely academic perspective on the concept of collaboration, community life and innovation.<br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/big-stories-small-towns" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/rajasekaran.jpg/image_preview" title="Rajasekaran" height="142" width="103" alt="Rajasekaran" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>E. James Rajasekaran</strong><br />I live in the temple town of Madurai in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. I am a social worker and the plight of people living in slims is something that my NGO is closely associated with. My video will bring out the efforts of the people who live in the slums of Madurai.<br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/life-in-the-city-slums" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/anan.jpg/image_preview" title="Anand" height="142" width="103" alt="Anand" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Anand Jha<br /></strong>Bangalore is home to a lot of technology start-ups. A lot of geeks, who find it limiting to work for corporations, are driving a very open source-oriented, frugally-built and extremely demanding culture. While their products are standing at the bleeding edge of technology, their personal lives too are constantly driven on the edge, every launch being a make or break day for them. The project would aim at capturing their stories, their frustration and motivation, looking at the possibilities of Indian software scene moving beyond the services and back-end office culture into a more risk prone but more passionate business of technology.<br /><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/deployed" class="external-link">Read More</a><br /></td>
</tr>
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<td align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/mj.png/@@images/f52feb88-f69d-4482-b019-881fdf8af7c3.png" title="mj" height="138" width="102" alt="null" class="image-inline" /></td>
<td>
<dl>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>MJ</strong><br />As a digital native living in a developing country, I have carried out a series of both online and offline projects, which have always striven to benefit Zimbabweans in a number of ways since 2000. These projects have greatly increased my interactions with computers. I might say, I got married to a computer in 2000 when I bought my first PC; in a way, my relationship with my computer is intimate. Even though this computer I bought is an old 386 machine made obsolete by the faster Pentium III models, this did not change my love for the computer. My video will focus on a dream-like moment of my digital life.</p>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/i-am-a-ghetto-digital-native" class="internal-link">Read more</a></p>
</dl>
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</tbody>
</table>
<h3>Jury Members</h3>
<table class="listing">
<tbody>
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<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Shashwati Talukdar</strong><br /> Shashwati Talukdar grew up in India where her engagement with theatre and sculpture led to filmmaking, and a Masters degree from the AJ Kidwai Mass Communication Research Center in Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She developed an interest in American Avant-Garde film and eventually got an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, Philadelphia (1999). Her work covers a wide range of forms, including documentary, narrative and experimental. Her work has shown at venues including the Margaret Mead Festival, Berlin, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Kiasma Museum of Art and the Whitney Biennial. She has been supported by entities including the Asian Cine Fund in Busan, the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts among others.</td>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/ShashwatiTalukdar.jpg/image_preview" style="float: right;" title="Shashwati" height="115" width="98" alt="Shashwati" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
</tr>
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<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Leon Tan</strong><br /> Leon Tan, PhD, is a media-art historian, cultural theorist and psychoanalyst based in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has written on art, media, globalization and copyright in journals such as CTheory and Ephemera, and curated media-art projects and art symposia in international sites such as KHOJ International Artists’ Association (New Delhi, 2011), ISEA (Singapore, 2008) and Digital Arts Week (Zurich, 2007). He is currently researching media-art practices in India, and networked museums as an expanded field of cultural memory making.</td>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/LeonTan.jpg/image_preview" style="float: right;" title="Leon Tan" height="142" width="103" alt="Leon Tan" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
</tr>
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<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Jeroen van Loon</strong><br /> Jeroen, digital media artist, investigates the (non-) impact of digital technology on our lives. For two months he went analogue, refrained from connecting to the World Wide Web, and communicated through his Analogue Blog. He is currently working on Life Needs Internet in which he travels around the world and collects people's personal handwritten internet stories.</td>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/JeroenvanLoon.jpg/image_preview" style="float: right;" title="Jeroen" height="128" width="106" alt="Jeroen" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
</tr>
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<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Becky Band Jain</strong><br /> Becky Band Jain is a non-profit communications specialist and blogs on everything from technology to psychology and culture. She spent the last five years living in India and she’s now based in New York. She’s a dedicated yoga and meditation practitioner and is passionate about ICTD and new media.</td>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/BeckyBandJain.jpg/image_preview" style="float: right;" title="Becky" height="134" width="107" alt="Becky" class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
</tr>
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<td style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Namita A. Malhotra</strong><br /> Namita A. Malhotra is a legal researcher and media practitioner and a core member of Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, India. Her areas of interest are image, technology, media and law, and her work takes the form of interdisciplinary research, video and film making and exploring possibilities of recombining material, practice and discipline. She is also a founder member of Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) which is a densely annotated online video archive.</td>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/NamitaMalhotra.jpg/image_preview" style="float: right;" title="Namita" height="156" width="104" alt="null" /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
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<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/digital-natives-contest'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/digital-natives-contest</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaVideoFeaturedResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-08T12:35:27ZBlog EntryThe Digital Classroom: Social Justice and Pedagogy
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop
<b>What happens when we look at the classroom as a space of social justice? What are the ways in which students can be engaged in learning beyond rote memorisation? What innovative methods can be evolved to make students stakeholders in their learning process? These were some of the questions that were thrown up and discussed at the 2 day Faculty Training workshop for participant from colleges included in the Pathways to Higher Education programme, supported by Ford Foundation and collaboratively executed by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Application and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.</b>
<p></p>
<p>The workshop focused on 3 chief challenges in contemporary
pedagogy and teaching in higher education in India as identified by <a class="external-link" href="http://heira.in/">HEIRA</a>: The need for innovative
curricula, challenges to social justice in education, and possibilities offered
by the intersection of digital and internet technologies with classroom
teaching and evaluation. In the open discussions, the participating faculty
members used their multidisciplinary skills and teaching experience to look at possibilities that we might implement in our classrooms to create a more
inclusive and participatory environment. The conversations were varied, and
through 3 blog entries I want to capture the focus points of the workshop. In
this first post, I focus specifically on the changing nature of student
engagement with education and innovative ways by which we can learn from the
digital platforms of learning and knowledge production and implement certain
innovations in pedagogy that might better help create inclusive and just learning
environments in the undergraduate classroom in India.</p>
<p><strong>Peer 2 Peer:</strong> One of the observations that was made
unanimously by all the faculty members was that students respond better, learn
faster, engage more deeply with their syllabus when the instructor has a
personal rapport with them. Traditionally, the teachers who have established
human contact which goes beyond the call of duty are also the teachers that
have become catalysts and inspirations for the students. Especially with the
digital aesthetics of non-hierarchical information interaction, this has become
the call of the day.</p>
<p>Establishing the teacher as a peer within the classroom,
rather than the fountainhead of information flow, is an experiment worth
conducting. Like on other digital platforms, can we think of the classroom as a
space where the interlocutors each bring their life experience and learning to
start an information exchange and dialogue that would make them stakeholders in
the process of learning? This would mean that the teacher would be a <em>facilitator</em> who builds conditions of
knowledge production and dissemination, thus also changing his/her relationship
with the idea of curriculum and teaching.</p>
<p><strong>Reciprocal evaluation</strong>: It was pointed out that the grade
oriented academic system often leads to students disengaging with innovative
and meaningful learning practices. With the pressure of completing the
curriculum, the students’ instrumental relationship with their classroom
learning and the highly conservative structures of higher education that do not
offer enough space to experiment with the teaching methods, it often becomes
difficult to initiate innovative pedagogic practices. Learning from the
differently hierarchised digital spaces, it was suggested that one of the ways
by which this could be countered is by introducing reciprocal evaluation
patterns which might not directly be associated with the grades but would
recognise and appreciate the skills that students bring to their learning.</p>
<p>Inspired by the Badges contest at <a class="external-link" href="http://hastac.org/tag/badges">HASTAC</a>,
it was suggested that evaluation has to take into account, more than grades.
Different students bring different skills, experiences, personalities and
behaviours to bear upon the syllabus. They work individually and in clusters to
understand and analyse the curriculum. Recognising these skills and the roles
that they play in their learning environments is essential. Getting students to
offer different badges to each other as well as to the teachers involved, helps
them understand their own learning process and engages them in new ways of
learning.</p>
<p><strong>Role based learning: </strong>Within the Web 2.0 there is a peculiar
condition where individuals are recognised simultaneously as experts and
novices. They bring certain knowledges and experiences to the table which make
them credible sources of information and analysis in those areas. At the same
time, they are often beginner learners in certain other areas and they harness
the power of the web to learn. Such a distributed imagination of a student as
not equally proficient in all areas, but diversely equipped to deal with
different disciplines is missing from our understanding of the higher education
classroom.</p>
<p>We discussed the possibility of making the student responsible not
only for his/her own learning but also the learning of the peers in the
classroom. Making the student aware of what s/he is good at and where s/he is
lacking allows them to gain confidence and also realise that everybody has
differential strengths and aptitudes. Such a classroom might look different
because the students don’t have to be pitched in stressful competition with
each other but instead work collaboratively to learn, research and produce
knowledge in a nurturing and supportive learning environment.</p>
<p>These initial discussions look at the possibility of
innovative classroom teaching that can accommodate for the skills and
differences of the students in higher education in India. The conversations
opened up the idea that the classroom can be reshaped so that it becomes a more
inclusive space where the quality of students’ access to education can be
improved. It also ties in with the larger imagination of classrooms as spaces
where principles of social justice can be invoked so that students who are
disadvantaged in language, learning skills, socio-economic backgrounds, are not
just looked at as either ‘beyond help’ or ‘victims of a system’. Instead, it
encourages to look at the students as differential learners who need to be made
stakeholders in their own processes of learning and education.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop</a>
</p>
No publishernishantHigher EducationAccess to KnowledgeDigital NativesFeaturedNew PedagogiesResearchers at WorkDigital Pluralism2015-05-08T12:36:29ZBlog EntryThe Digital Other
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/the-digital-other
<b>Based on my research on young people in the Global South, I want to explore new ways of thinking about the Digital Native. One of the binaries posited as the Digital ‘Other’ -- ie, a non-Digital Native -- is that of a Digital Immigrant or Settler.</b>
<p>I am not comfortable with these terms and they probably need heavy unpacking if not complete abandonment. Standard caricatures of Digital Others show them as awkward in their new digital ecologies, unable to navigate through this brave new world on their own. They may actually have helped produce digital technology and tools but they are not ‘born digital’ and hence are presumed to always have an outsider’s perspective on the digital world order.</p>
<p>As I’ve interacted with young people in the Global South, one thing suddenly started emerging in dramatic fashion -- that many of the youth working extensively with digital technologies in emerging ICT contexts often shared characteristics of the Digital Other. In countries like India, where the digital realm became accessible and affordable to certain sections of the society as late as 2003, there is a learning curve among youth that does not necessarily match the global thinking on Digital Natives. Even though these young people might be considered Digital Natives, because they are at the center of the digital revolution in their own countries, there is no doubt they are also Digital Others relative to Global North and West conceptions of young people in digital networks.<br /><br />There is a very popular tweet that was making the rounds recently, which suggested that Digital Natives don’t have an account of the digital just like fish don’t have a theory of water -- they take to the digital as fish take to water. In this analogy lies a very important distinction between Digital Others and Digital Natives. Out of necessity, Digital Others have a relationship of production, control and design with the technologies they work with. They have a critical engagement with technology, as they code, hack, design, and create protocols and digital environments to suit their needs and resources. Digital Natives, on the other hand, have a purely consumption based interaction with the technology they use.<br /><br />I want to repeat that. The Digital Natives I’ve observed have a purely consumption based interaction with the technologies they use. I know this sounds weird in the face of widespread perceptions that Digital Natives have participatory, engaged, intuitive relationships with technology. We are supposed to be living in prosumer times, where the user on the Infobahn is a consumer and producer of information. But Web 2.0 entities like Facebook have created a business where the user is not just consuming but indeed the user is the consumed. While Facebook and Twitter revolutions are interesting in how users have been able to ‘abuse’ information censorship and create new communities of political protest, we still have to remember that the technologies that supported these revolutions were closed, proprietary, and coercive -- often even putting users in danger.<br /><br />From my perspective and my research, we have conflated access to information with access to technology, and we have misread this increased access as a sign of intimate relationship with digital technology and the Internet. However, for many youth, media production and information sharing are actually merely forms of consumption.<br /><br />What is most alarming to me is that the individual’s relationship with original production and design of technology is on the decline. More and more, technology platforms and apps that Digital Natives interact with are closed hardware and software systems. Private corporations produce and shape the tools of interaction, producing seductive interfaces and information engagement choices that make opaque the actual working of the technologies we use. I am concerned that, increasingly, Digital Natives are acting as pure consumers of technology and gadgets, and seem willing to do so.</p>
<p>Banner image credit: World Bank Photo Collection <a class="external-link" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldbank/3492673512/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldbank/3492673512/</a></p>
<p>Nishant wrote the original blog post in DML Central. Read it <a class="external-link" href="http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/digital-other">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/the-digital-other'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/the-digital-other</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital subjectivitiesResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-14T12:07:42ZBlog EntryThe Last Cultural Mile
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old
<b>Ashish’s monograph follows the career of a priori contradiction, one that only mandates a state mechanism to perform an act of delivery, and then disqualifies the state from performing that very act effectively. This contradiction which he names as the Last Mile problem is a conceptual hurdle, not a physical one and when put one way, the Last Mile is unbridgeable, when put another, it is being bridged all the time.</b>
<p>This monograph provides a set of four case studies of the Indian State. The case studies address four technologies, television, telecommunications, networked higher education and the Unique Identity project. It also looks at Wireless-in-Local Loop (or WLL) technology that constituted the first revolution in telecommunications in the early 1990s, the arrival of satellite television also in the 1990s, the low-end IT ‘device’ with which the Ministry of HRD plans to use digitized distance education to increase enrolment of Indian students by five per cent of the overall population, and the celebrated Aadhaar.</p>
<p><strong>Download the Monograph <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/last-cultural-mile.pdf" class="internal-link"><span class="external-link"><span class="external-link">here</span></span></a></strong></p>
<div><br /> <br />
<blockquote class="pullquote"></blockquote>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/the-last-cultural-mile-blog-old</a>
</p>
No publisherkaeruDigital GovernanceInternet HistoriesHistories of InternetResearchers at WorkPublications2015-04-03T10:59:23ZCollection (Old)Technology, Social Justice and Higher Education
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education
<b>Since the last two years, we at the Centre for Internet and Society, have been working with the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, on a project called Pathways to Higher Education, supported by the Ford Foundation. </b>
<p>The main aim of the project is to research the state of social diversity and justice in undergraduate colleges in India and encourage students to articulate the axes of discrimination and exclusion which might keep them from interacting and engaging with educational resources and systems in their college environments.</p>
<h3>Peer-to-Peer Technologies<br /></h3>
<p>The entry point into these debates was digital technologies, where
through an introduction to peer-to-peer technologies, digital story
telling through various web based platforms, and a collaborative thought
environment mediated by internet and digital technologies, we
facilitated the students to identify, articulate and address questions
of discrimination, change and the possibility of engaging with these
critically in order to build a better learning environment for
themselves (and their peers) in their own colleges.</p>
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr class="even">
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/sies.jpg/image_preview" title="sies " height="266" width="400" alt="sies " class="image-inline image-inline" /></td>
<td>
<div align="left">Each workshop was designed not only to be sensitive to
the specificities of the locations of the colleges, but also to
accommodate for the needs, desires and aspirations of the students
involved. The participants looked at their own personal, family and
community histories, their everyday experiences, their affective modes
of aspiration and desire, and their own circumstances which often
circumscribe them, in order to come up with certain themes that they
thought were relevant and crucial in their own contexts.</div>
<br />
<div align="left"> </div>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>As a follow-up on the workshops, the students developed specific
projects and activities that will help them strengthen their hypotheses
by looking beyond the personal and finding ways by which they can engage
with the larger communities, spreading awareness, building histories
and acquiring skills to successfully bolster their classroom interaction
and learning.</p>
<p><em>The following is a bird’s eye view of the key themes that have emerged in the workshops:</em></p>
<h3>The Costs of Belonging</h3>
<p>Almost unanimously, though articulating it in different ways, the
students looked at different costs of belonging to a space. Sometimes it
was the space of the web, sometimes of the larger educational
institution, sometimes to distinct language groups which do not treat
English as the lingua franca, and sometimes to communities and friend
circles within the college environment.</p>
<p> </p>
<p align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/problem.jpg/image_preview" title="problems" height="365" width="548" alt="problems" class="image-inline image-inline" /></p>
<div align="left">It was particularly insightful for us to understand
that granting access, providing infrastructure or equipping
‘underprivileged’ students with skills is not enough. In fact, it became
apparent that there is a certain policy driven, post-Mandal affirmative
action that has already bridged the infrastructural and access gap in
the educational institutions. The easy availability of computers,
internet access, the ubiquitous cell phone, were all indicators that for
most of the students, it wasn’t a question of affording access. Even
when we were dealing with economically disadvantaged students, there
were a plethora of technology devices they had access to and familiarity
with. Shared resources, public access to digital technologies, and
institutional support towards promoting digital familiarity all played a
significant role in demystifying the digital for them. In many ways,
these students were digital natives if defined through access, because
they had Facebook accounts and browsed Google to find everything they
wanted. Their phone was an extension of their selves and they used it in
creative ways to communicate and connect with their peers.<br /><br />Based
on this, the students are now prepared to work on documenting,
exploring and raising awareness about these questions, to see what the
gating factors are that disallow people with access to still feel
excluded from the power of the digital.<br /><br /></div>
<h3>The Need for Diversity<br /></h3>
<div align="left"><br />
<table class="plain">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/others.jpg/image_preview" alt="others" class="image-inline image-inline" title="others" /></td>
<td>It is a telling sign about the state of the Internet in India that every
student presumed that the only way to be really fluent with the digital
web is to be fluent in English. The equation of English being
synonymous with being online was both fascinating and troubling to us.
Of course, a lot of it has to do with India’s own preoccupations, marked
by a postcolonial subjectivity, with English as the language of
modernity and privilege. But it also has to do with the fact that almost
all things digital in India, lack localisation. The digital
technologies and platforms remain almost exclusively in English,
fostered by the fact that input devices (keyboards, for example) and
display interfaces favour English as the language of computing.<br /><br /><br /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
<p>Such an idea might also help in
reducing the distance between those who can fluently navigate the web
through its own language, and those who, through various reasons, find
themselves tentative and intimidated online.</p>
<p>The breakthrough that the
participants had, when they realised that they don’t have to be ‘proper
in English’ while being online – the ability to find local language
resources, fonts, translation machines, and the possibility of
transliterating their local language in the Roman script was a learning
lesson for us.</p>
<h3>Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Learning</h3>
<div align="left">As a part of their orientation to the world of the
digital, especially with the methodologies of the workshops, the
students literally had an overnight epiphany where they could see the
possibilities and potentials of P2P learning. The recognition that they
are not merely recipients of knowledge but also bearers of experience
and contexts which are rich and replete with knowledge, gave them new
insights on how to approach learning and education. Through digital
storytelling, the workshops demonstrated how, in our own stories and
accounts of life, there are many indicators and factors which can help
us engage with the realities of exclusion and injustice.<br /><br />Working
together in groups, not only to excavate knowledge from the outside, as
it were, but also to unearth the knowledge, experience, stories,
emotions that we all carry with ourselves and can serve as valuable
tools to bring to the classroom, is a lesson that all the groups
learned. The idea of a peer also led them to question the established
hierarchies within formal education. What was particularly interesting
was that they did not – as is often the case – translate P2P into DIY
education. They recognised that there are certain knowledge and skill
gaps that they would like experts to address and have incorporated
special trainings with different experts in areas of language,
communication, ethnography, interviews, film making, etc. However, the
methods for these trainings are going to emphasise a more P2P structure
that is different from the regular classroom learning.<br /><br />What would
happen if a teacher is looked at as a peer rather than a superior? How
would they navigate curricula if the scope of their learning was greater
than the curricula? How could they work together to learn from each
other, different ways of learning and understanding? These are some of
the questions that get reflected in their proposed campus activities,
where they are trying to now produce knowledge about their communities,
cities, families, groups and experiences, by conducting surveys,
ethnographies, historical archive work, etc. The digital helps them in
not only disseminating the information they are collecting but also in
re-establishing their relationship with learning and knowledge.<br /><br /><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/workshop.jpg/image_preview" title="classroom" height="337" width="509" alt="classroom" class="image-inline image-inline" /><br />
<div align="center"><br />
<div align="left">Ideas like open space dialogues, collaborative
story-telling, mobilising resources for knowledge production, creating
awareness campaigns and interacting with a larger audience through the
digital platforms are now a part of their proposals and promise to show
some creative, innovative and interesting uses of these technologies.
How the teachers would react to such an imagination of the students as
peers within the formal education system, remains to be seen as we
organise a faculty training workshop later in December. <br /><br />These
three large themes find different articulations, interpretations and
executions in different locations. However, they seem to be emerging as
the new forms of social exclusion that we need to take into account. It
is apparent that the role of technologies – both at the level of usage
and of imagination – is crucial in shaping these forms of social
inequities. But the technologies can also facilitate negotiations and
engagements with these concerns by providing new forms of knowledge
production and pedagogy, which can help the students in developing
better learning environments and processes. The Pathways to Higher
Education remains committed to not only documenting these learnings but
also to see how they might be upscaled and integrated into mainstream
learning within higher education in India.</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/higher-education</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaFeaturedHigher EducationResearchers at WorkDigital Knowledge2015-03-30T14:54:21ZBlog EntryLearn it Yourself
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it
<b>The peer-to-peer world of online learning encourages conversations and reciprocal learning, writes Nishant Shah in an article published in the Indian Express on 30 October 2011. </b>
<p>Technologies and learning have always had a close link. In the past,
distance learning programmes of higher education through the postal
service, remote education programmes using satellite TV and interactive
learning projects using information and communication infrastructure,
have all been deployed with varied results in promoting literacy and
higher education. In the last two decades, the internet has also joined
this technology ecology in trying to provide quality and affordable
education to remotely located areas through “citizen service centres”
envisioned to reach 6,40,000 Indian villages in the future.</p>
<p>These technology-based information outreach programmes expand the
ability of traditional formal learning centres like universities, to
cater to the needs of those who might not have access to learning
resources. This vision of networked education relies on existing systems
of centralised syllabus making, teacher-to-student information
transfer, grade-based evaluation and accreditation systems, and a
degree-centred approach to learning.</p>
<p>I was in New York last week, at an international summit on the future
of learning, Mobility Shifts, organised by the New School, where more
than 260 speakers from 21 countries discussed the possibility of
learning beyond the bounds of the school and university system. Many
discussions were around the declining public education system (with huge
disinvestment moves from the government), privatisation of education,
increasing tuition and fees, and the non-relevance of current education.
However, along with this digital expansion of the traditional education
system is an emerging trend that challenges the ways in which we
understand education and learning – DIY Learning or Do It Yourself
Learning.</p>
<p>DIY Learning is a product of the networked condition. It recognises
that as more people get onto digital information networks, there is a
possibility of producing peer-to-peer learning conditions, which do not
have to follow our accepted models of learning and education.</p>
<p>We have seen the rise of various decentralised and democratised
knowledge repositories like Wikipedia. The search based algorithms of
search engines also take into consideration the idea that knowledge is
personal. User generated content sites like eHow.com show that the
individual learner is not merely a recipient of information and
knowledge. Information seeking spaces like Quora have shown that
knowledge-sharing communities can incite new conditions of learning. Our
contexts, experiences, everyday practices, aspirations etc. equip us
with valuable information, which not only shape how we learn but also
what we find relevant to learn for ourselves. DIY Learning picks up on
the idea that the infrastructure of education is not necessarily
designed towards learning. Learning often happens outside the
classrooms, in informal conversations.</p>
<p>Thus DIY Learning offers a new model of learning. It destabilises the
established hierarchy of knowledge production and pedagogy and creates
an each-one-teach-one model with a twist. Instead of a centralised board
of curriculum designer who shape syllabi for the “average” student, you
have the possibility of customised, highly individual, interest-based
learning curricula where the student is a part of deciding what s/he
wants to learn. DIY Learning doesn’t recognise the distinctions between
teachers and students, but recognises them as “peers” within a network,
encouraging conversations and reciprocal learning rather than
information transfer based classroom models. Instead of mass-produced
education that caters only to an imagined average, the DIY Learning
model recognises that within the same student group, there are different
rates and scales of learning, thus offering environments suited to the
aptitude of the students.</p>
<p>Within the DIY Learning model, aspects of education, from the design
of curriculum and learning methods, to grading and evaluation are geared
towards individual preferences and aspirations.</p>
<p>Many people think of DIY Learning as an alternative to mainstream
learning processes and structures. However, it is perhaps more fruitful
to think of DIY Learning as a way of figuring out the problems that
beset our traditional educational system. It allows us to rethink the
relationships between learning, education, teaching and technologies. It
recalibrates the space of the classroom and reconfigures the role of
the teacher and the student.</p>
<p>DIY Learning emphasises that merely building schools and universities
is not enough to assure that learning happens. Learning happens through
experiences, practice, conversations, internalisations and through
making mistakes. DIY Learning offers these possibilities in an education
universe that is constantly refusing to take risks, innovate and adapt
to the needs of the present. By itself it might not be able to take on
the roles and functions of the existing education systems. But it does
warn us that we are preparing our students for our pasts rather than
their futures. And the time to change is now.</p>
<p>The original story was published in the Indian Express, it can be read <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/learn-it-yourself/867069/">here</a></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it</a>
</p>
No publishernishantHigher EducationResearchers at WorkDigital Knowledge2015-05-14T12:08:32ZBlog EntryIn Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/in-search-of-the-other-decoding-digital-natives
<b>This is the first post of a research inquiry that questions the ways in which we have understood the Youth-Technology-Change relationship in the contemporary digital world, especially through the identity of ‘Digital Native’. Drawing from three years of research and current engagements in the field, the post begins a critique of how we need to look at the outliers, the people on the fringes in order to unravel the otherwise celebratory nature of discourse about how the digital is changing the world.</b>
<p>In this first post, I chart the trajectories of our research at the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and Hivos (The Hague, The Netherlands) to see how alternative models of understanding these relationships can be built.</p>
<p>The Digital Native has many different imaginations. From the short hand understanding of ‘anybody who is born after the 1980s’ (Prensky, 2001) to more nuanced definitions of populations who are ‘born digital’ (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008), the digital native has firmly been ensconced in our visions of technology futures. From DIY decentralized learning environments to viral and networked forms of engagements that span from the Arab Spring to Occupy Together, the Digital Native – somebody who has grown up with digital technologies (and the skills to negotiate with them) as the default mode of being – has become central to how we see usage and proliferation of new digital tools and technologies.</p>
<p>Three years ago, when the identity Digital Native was already in currency but before the overwhelming examples that are now so easily available in the post MENA (Middle East-North Africa) world, we asked ourselves the question: “What does a Digital Native look like?” When we started sifting through the literature (published and grey), practice-based discourse and policy, we started spotting certain patterns: Digital Natives were almost always young, white, (largely male) middle class, affluent, English speaking populations who could afford education and were located in developed Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) contexts of ubiquitous connectivity. These users of technology were treated as the proto-type around which digital natives in the ‘rest of the world’ were imagined. The ‘rest of the world’ was not necessarily an exotic geography elsewhere, but often was a person whose relationships with the digital were impeded by class, education, gender, sexuality, literacy etc.</p>
<p>Moreover, we found that the accounts of Digital Natives that were being discussed across the board were accounts of super stars. They either heralded the digital native as the young messiah who is drastically changing the world, overthrowing governments and building collaborative and participatory structures of openness. Or they feared the digital native as an unthinking, self contained, dysfunctional person who pirates and plagiarizes and needs to be rehabilitated into becoming a civic individual. Very little was said about Everyday Digital Natives – users who, through the presence of digital technologies, were changing their lives on an everyday basis.</p>
<h3>Other Digital Natives</h3>
<p>Based on this, we began the quest for the Other Digital Natives – people who did not necessarily fit the existing models of being digital but who often had to strive to ‘Become Digital’ and in the process produce possibilities and potentials for social change and political participation in their immediate environments. This was the first step to discover what being a digital native would be in emerging ICT contexts, where connectivity, access, usage, affordability, geo-political regulation, and questions of the biological and of living would give us new understandings of what a digital native is. This quest for the Other inspired us to work across Asia, Africa and Latin America, to talk to some of the most strident voices in the region who claimed to be digital natives, expressed discomfort with being called digital natives, refused to be called digital natives, and sought to provide critique of the existing expectations of digital nativity. The proceedings from these conversations in the Global South have been consolidated in the book Digital AlterNatives With a Cause? available for free download.</p>
<p>For this post, I want to look at some of the presumptions in existing understanding of Digital Natives and how we can contest them to build Digital AlterNative identities.</p>
<h3>Presumption 1: Digital Natives are always young</h3>
<p>Even if we go by Mark Prensky’s problematic definition that everybody born after the 1980s is a digital native, we must realize that there is a large chunk of digital native users who are now in their thirties. They are in universities, work forces, governments and offices. They have not only grown older with technologies but they have also radically changed the technologies and tech platforms that they inhabit.</p>
<p>It is time to let go of the Peter-Pan imagination of a Digital Native as always perpetually young. Moreover, we must realize that digital natives existed even before the name ‘Digital Native’ came into existence. There were people who built internets, who might not have been young but were still native to the digital environments that they were a part of.</p>
<p>Instead of looking at a youth-centric, age-based exclusive definition of a digital native, it is more fruitful to say that people who natively interact with digital technologies – people who are able to inhabit the remix, reuse, share cultures that digitality produces, might be marked as digital AlterNatives.</p>
<h3>Presumption 2: Digital Natives are born digital</h3>
<p>It does sound nice – the idea that there were people who were born as preconfigured cyborgs, interacting with interfaces from the minute they were born. And yet, we know that people are taught to interact with technologies. True, technologies often define our own conceptions of who we are and how we perceive the world around us, but there is still a learning curve that is endemic to human technology relationships.</p>
<p>Because of the ubiquitous and pervasive nature of certain kinds of technology mediated interaction, it is sometimes difficult to look at our habits of technology as learned interactions. Recognizing that there is a thrust, an effort and an incentive produced for people to Become Digital, is also to recognize that there are different actors, players, promoters and teachers who help young people enter into relationships with technologies, which can often be greater than the first interactions.</p>
<h3>Presumption 3: Digital Natives live digital lives</h3>
<p>This is a concern voiced by many people who talk about digital natives. They are posited as slacktivists – removed from their material realities and apathetic to the physical world around them. They are painted as dysfunctional screenagers who are unable to sustain the fabric of social interaction and community formation outside of social networking systems. They are discussed as a teenage mutant nightmare that unfolds almost entirely in the domains of the digital.</p>
<p>But these kinds of imaginations forget that a digital native is not primarily a digital native, or at least, not exclusively digital. Being a digital native is one of many identities these users appropriate. The digital often serves as a lens that informs all their other socio-cultural and political interactions, but it is not an all-containing system. The bodies that click on ‘Like’ buttons on Facebook are also often the bodies that fill up the streets to fight for their rights. The division between Physical Reality and Virtual Reality needs to be dismissed to build more comprehensive accounts of digital native practices.</p>
<h3>Presumption 4: Connectivity is digitality</h3>
<p>This is often an easy conflation. It is presumed that once one has constant connectivity, one will automatically become a digital native. Especially in policy and development based approaches, connectivity and access have become the buzzwords by which the digital divide can be breached. However, we have now learned that this one-size, fits-all solution actually fits nobody. Being connected – by building infrastructure and affording gadgets – does not make somebody a digital native.</p>
<p>The digital native identity needs to be more than mere access to the digital. It involves agency, choice, critical literacy and fluency with the digital media that we live with. So instead of thinking of anybody who is connected as a digital native, we are looking at people who are strategically able to harness the powers of the digital to produce a change in their immediate environments. These changes can range from making personal collections of media to mobilising large numbers of people for political protests. To be digital is to be intimately connected with the technologies so that they can augment and amplify the ways in which we respond to the world around us.</p>
<p>I offer these as the building blocks of looking at the ‘Other’ of the Digital Natives as we have discursively produced them. From hereon, in my subsequent posts, I hope to drill deeper to locate nuances and differences, concepts and frameworks that we need to map in order to build a digital native model that is inclusive, differential and context based.</p>
<p>Banner image credit: AFSC Photos <a class="external-link" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/afscphotos/6266795673/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/afscphotos/6266795673/</a></p>
<p>This blog post by Nishant Shah was published in <a class="external-link" href="http://dmlcentral.net/blog/nishant-shah/search-other-decoding-digital-natives">DML central on 24 October 2011</a>.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/in-search-of-the-other-decoding-digital-natives'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/in-search-of-the-other-decoding-digital-natives</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital subjectivitiesResearchers at WorkDigital Natives2015-05-14T12:12:24ZBlog Entry