James G. R. Cronin

…The Web is linking people…Web 2.0 is linking people...people sharing, trading and collaborating...We’ll need to rethink a few things...copyright; authorship; identity; ethics; aesthetics; rhetorics; governance; privacy; commerce; love; family ourselves. Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us A rhizomic Web American media mogul, Tim O’Reilly, is popularly credited with defining the term Web 2.0. It is now used as an umbrella term referring to the Internet as a communal platform for information exchange. In the United States, the pioneers of Web 2.0, dubbed Digital Utopians by some commentators, inspired by the idealism of 1960s Counterculture, envisaged the Web as a tool to counter globalisation and promote digital democracy (Turner, 2008; Žižek, 2003). Every day millions of users log on to access social networking sites like MySpace, online encyclopedias l...

[click on the title bar] This year’s Shock of the Old symposium on digital literacy hosted by Oxford University Computing at the Saïd Business School, was attempting to engage with issues around understandings of the term “digital literacy” and user experiences. The symposium responded to the EDUCAUSE Horizon Report, 2009 . The report has identified six emerging technologies over the next five years—mobile devices, cloud computing, geotagging, the personal web, semantic-aware applications, and smart objects. Difficulties in defining "digitial literacy" Regarding the term “digital literacy” there was no agreement because the term is still evolving. Dr.Tabetha Newman, Timmus Ltd, presented an interesting literature review. Arising from this session, digital literacy now appears to be understood as an umbrella term currently used to describe knowledge of digital tools, critical thinking skills and social awareness (or the representation of self online). Interestingly, the socia...

My recent visits to Cambridge last September and to Oxford in April set me thinking about the role space plays in shaping teaching and learning. Gaston Bachelard , Michel Foucault , Paul Virilio and Alain De Botton have written about the ways buildings create and hold spatial "memory" and this "memory" serves as a cultural imprint. Architectural space as institutional "memory" Buildings are marked by "memories" of their performance and their making. Spaces affect perception. Alain De Botton succinctly expresses this as follows: “political and ethical ideas can be written into window frames and door handles” (De Botton, 2007, p. 93). Paul Virilio used the term "archaeology" to reveal a phenomenon of architectural space. For Michel Foucault, perceptions of space conditioned the discourse of postmodernity. This marked a clear departure from nineteenth century thought where concern lay in representation of time and history (Smethurst, ...