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Our guest for this episode is Howard Rheingold, a critic, writer, and teacher who specializes in the cultural, social, and political implications of modern communication media. Howard wrote about the earliest personal computers at Xerox PARC, and he was also one of the early users of the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or The WELL, an influential early online community. In 1994, he was hired as the founding executive director of HotWired. He is the author of several books, including The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, and Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. In this conversation, Howard talks about transitioning from typewriters to computers and the potentials of virtual communities – to both serve as think tanks and form personal connections. He talks about recognizing “signals” of what was to come with telephones and computers and the early collective action that the smartphone encouraged. Finally, he describes five media literacies that everyone should master if they want to use social media well. Click here for this episode's transcript, and here for this episode's show notes.
Howard wrote his first article studying virtual communities 1987. Yes, 1987. That's before the official internet and long before anything that resembled what we know of today as social media. In 2012 he authored the book, Net Smart; How to Thrive Online, which laid out 5 essential literacies for users of digital communication and networks. He’s got a ton of great insights and perspectives on our current situation with Facebook and Google and Youtube. He’s hopeful it seems, and he doesn’t bash the tech itself. Rather, he tries to empower its users to see it for what it is, and to make the most of it. Find Howard’s work online at www.rheingold.com and on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/howardrheingold Please support this show by sharing, subscribing and by leaving a review! It helps! Support by donating! 100% listener supported show. www.paypal.me/ariintheair Thanks to everyone who has listened, shared, donated and encouraged me on this podcast. It means a lot to me, I’m so grateful. So much good stuff coming up. Stay tuned! The About Section from Howard’s Website reads as follows “I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension in 1981, then plugged my computer into my telephone in 1983 and got sucked into the net. In earlier years, my interest in the powers of the human mind led to Higher Creativity (1984), written with Willis Harman, Talking Tech(1982) and The Cognitive Connection (1986) with Howard Levine, Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind: A Book of Memes (1988),Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1990), with Stephen LaBerge, and They Have A Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases.(1988). I ventured further into the territory where minds meet technology through the subject of computers as mind-amplifiers and wrote Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Amplifiers (1984). Next, Virtual Reality (1991)chronicled my odyssey in the world of artificial experience, from simulated battlefields in Hawaii to robotics laboratories in Tokyo, garage inventors in Great Britain, and simulation engineers in the south of France. In 1994, I was one of the principal architects and the first Executive Editor of HotWired. I quit after launch, because I wanted something more like a jam session than a magazine. In 1996, I founded and, with the help of a crew of 15, launched Electric Minds. Electric Minds was named one of the ten best web sites of 1996 by Time magazine and was acquired by Durand Communications in 1997. My 2002 book, Smart Mobs, was acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. In 2005, I taught a course at Stanford University on A Literacy of Cooperation, part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action that I have undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future. The Cooperation Commons is the site of our ongoing investigation of cooperation and collective action.The TED talk I delivered about “Way New Collaboration” has been viewed more than 265,000 times. In 2008, I was a winner in MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning competition and used my award to work with a developer to create a free and open source social media classroom. I have a YouTube channel that covers a range of subjects. Most recently, I’ve been concentrating on learning and teaching 21st Century literacies. I’ve blogged about this subject for SFGate, have been interviewed, and have presented talks on the subject. I was invited to deliver the 2012 Regents’ Lecture at University of California, Berkeley. I also teach online courses through Rheingold U. My latest book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, published in 2012, was reviewed in Science.”
And we have a new one for you How Do You Like it So Far? crew! This week Henry and Colin are joined by Howard Rheingold, author of Tools for Thought, Smart Mobs, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, and who is credited with creating the term the “virtual community” in his 1993 book, and Patricia Lange, an author of Thanks for Watching: An Anthropological Study of Video Sharing on YouTube and Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies and an anthropologist and associate professor of critical studies and visual and critical studies at California College of the Arts. They discuss their experiences in the online world from the 1980s to today. Through their research, they dive deep into the early world of the Internet and how the idea of community was forged through bulletin board systems from the dial-up era. They also discuss how early YouTubers were marginalized for their work which spurred their involvement in community-creation on the Web. Listen in as Rheingold and Lange discuss their hopes for the future of Internet public spaces.
Howard Rheingold is a self described communicator and artist. He is also the author of Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution and Net Smart: How to Thrive Online . The podcast explores the theme of digital literacy. Figures like Doug Engelbart and Vannevar Bush are also discussed. Other books discussed include Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution and Anne Blair’s Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Open hardware like Raspberry Pi Model B+ (B PLUS) 512MB Computer Board and Arduino Uno Ultimate Starter Kit — Includes 72 page Instruction Book are also touched upon. RIP website: remotely-interested.com RIP facebook: https://www.facebook.com/remotely.interested/ RIP twitter: https://twitter.com/ThatInterested
This week is our back to school special. Our guest is Colette Mondor, an educator in Canada. We talk using devices, app stores and security with students. Further discussion includes the importance of teaching empathy, and the value of ensuring that your children know how to find trustworthy information online. Get Montreal Sauce: The Wearable! For the next week we have a t-shit for sale. Get it now, it will no longer be available after the week. Recently, on our Twitter account we asked what fans would like to be called. Welcome Sausages! Colette recently presented at the GAFE Summit in Calgary. G.A.F.E. stands for Google Apps for Education. Colette owns a brand new Chromebook with an Intel Core i3 chip. Gamification is a big movement in education to get students more engaged. Therefore, the EdTech Team chose to gamify the summit. Read & Write for Google helps students who have a difficulty reading. Colette suggests using this extension for math story problems for those students. Colette believes one of the things that often gets missed when teaching with technology is digital citizenship. Of course, we all agree that many adults could use that same lesson. Many schools are going one to one with devices, assigning students iPads or tablets from kindergarten on. Using tablets and iPads as shared devices, with multiple classes/students, is difficult because they are meant for individuals. Schools can secure Google tablets & with Google Apps Device Policy but added security becomes troublesome with younger students. Android tablets do have multiple users but backing up user apps & data is difficult and doesn’t work well at all. Chris talks about volunteering in the classroom, and Colette corrects him by inventing a great new word. Chris is voluntold to go to school and help. Chris and guest Colette slip into their old podcast, The Sexy Back Tour while discussing this summer’s travels. Chris went to many weddings this summer including one featured on national news because it was on ice. The hockey wedding (more pics if you are one of those wedding lovers) took place in Michigan, not Canada. WAIT. WHAT? During the road trip to multiple weddings Chris went to the ER. He was the lucky winner of Bell’s palsy. Also, Chris wants a summer home in Nelson, B.C. Paul shares theories on digital identities from Jeff Jarvis who can be found on This Week in Google podcast. Chris adds that he recently finished a book by Howard Rheingold called Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. We learned why “zee” replaced “zed” in America English thanks to masteraramil in the chatroom. We get into the metric system vs. the Imperial units. Fahrenheit vs. Celsius vs. Kelvin. Don’t forget about the Montreal Sauce tee available for a limited time! Thanks to our friend at nocturnal for the suggestion of Cotton Bureau. Support Montreal Sauce on Patreon
Author of Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, on Sedge Thomson's West Coast Live
Join us for a discussion with author Howard Rheingold. In his new book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, Rheingold asks, how can we use digital media so that they help us become empowered participants rather than passive consumers; grounded, well-rounded people rather than multitasking neurotics? In Net Smart, he demonstrates how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and, above all, mindfully. Mindful use of digital media means thinking about what we are doing, cultivating an ongoing inner inquiry into how we want to spend our time. Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or "crap detection"), and network smarts. He explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; he examines how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; and he presents a lesson on networks and network building. There is a bigger social issue at work in digital literacy, one that goes beyond personal empowerment. If we combine our individual efforts wisely, it could produce a more thoughtful society: countless small acts like publishing a Web page or sharing a link could add up to a public good that enriches everybody.