notes from Lankshear & Knobel

Lankshear, C. and Knobel, M. (2003). Planning pedagogy for i-mode: From flogging to blogging via wi-fi. IFTE Conference, Melbourne, July. Available http://www.geocities.com/c.lankshear/ifte2003.html. Accessed 2-08.

It does not follow that because some practice is widely engaged in outside of school that it should be addressed, or even taken account of, within school. -par. 2

Young people's out-of-school practices in developed countries are increasingly mediated by wearable, communication and information technologies. This in turns means that social practices for young people are becoming less and less "land locked" in the sense that they are always "plugged in" to the internet and/or other communication systems in ways that are highly portable, mobile and flexible. This has profound implications for schools in terms of decisions to be made about new technology investments for students, the integration of new technologies into classroom practices, professional development for teachers, and so on. -par. 29

As more and more people come together in cooperative, yet distributed, collective action around popular causes (e.g., voting in government elections), affinity groups (e.g., tracking celebrities in New York City), and a range of social needs and services (e.g., offering a relative stranger a ride to work), they will need to rely more and more on being able to make character evaluations on the run. As Rheingold succinctly puts it, "[r]eputation marks the spot where technology and cooperation converge" (Rheingold 2002: 114). The often temporary nature of collective action--such as the short-term relationship between buyers and sellers on eBay, or between news item and comment posters and readers on Plastic--means there is little time for establishing trust via traditional methods that in the past have included observing someone's actions and interactions over time. Instead, other people's collective feedback on the quality of interaction with someone or the integrity or usefulness of a point of view espoused by a person will become the principal means by which to judge whether or not a person, or what they have to say, is trustworthy or not. -par. 53

People interested in "being (thoroughly) digital" will need to know how to participate efficaciously in reputation systems as these systems become more and more integral to online and ad hoc i-mode communities. This will include tacit agreements to participate actively in the system, taking responsibility for leaving a rating score and feedback comment following each successful transaction or engagement, knowing when to cut one's losses in order to protect one's positive reputation scores, and so on. -par. 58

Being literate in reading reputation systems includes being alert to instances of reputation cheating and fraud. -par. 59

Given the epistemic potential of blogs, it is not difficult to imagine how blogging could become a potent dimension of school-based learning. This would require getting beyond the kinds of "pretend" research activities (classroom "projects") that typically prevail in school curriculum work, and beginning from significant problems that call for serious data collection and analysis. In such contexts blogging could be made into a highly sophisticated form of learning that engages directly with systematicity in searching for noteworthy or useful information. This would include being able to differentiate among types of data--such as well-used, quirky but useful, outdated, misleading, etc. Blogging as learning/Learning as blogging could also become an integral component of processes involved in developing point of view in relation to new topics, events and issues, of auditing this development in ways that are visible to the user and relevant others, and of generally pursuing meaningful purposes characteristic of expert-like research. -par. 77

Consequently, if school weblogs were approached from the standpoint of providing potential audit trails of knowledge built up over a period of time, they could contribute powerfully to promoting knowledge production, as well as enabling reflection upon and evaluation of how this knowledge was arrived at. A blog that records links, commentaries, and informed analysis, and that is open to being read by and commented upon by interested others, can become an objective artifact of collegial activity: one that is mediated by experts and learners in mutually beneficial ways. Blogs have much potential for promoting reflection on one's knowledge trails across the internet. Understanding where one went in an online search and why one went there thus becomes a key component of a blog, in ways that are not so evident and are not necessarily available in 5-part essay writing. Interested others could suggest to the blogger alternative trails or routes through a knowledge structure built around an interest in a particular topic, field or issue. This kind of engagement defaults to encouraging the blogger to regularly update and evaluate his or her point of view on a topic or issue when feedback or comments from others challenge the blogger to produce persuasive arguments, crisp analyses, and so on. At the same time, these interested others could also feed alternative angles and perspectives into the mix that can then be followed up on by the blogger. In these and other ways research as blogging, and blogging as research, could potentially become potent pedagogical approaches to writing. -par. 79

from references:

Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. Atlantic Monthly. July. http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm. (accessed 2-08

Doctorow, C. (2001). My blog, my outboard brain. Blogged 31 May 2002. http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/01/01/cory.html. (accessed 2-08).

Ito, M. (2003). A new set of social rules for a newly wireless society. Japan Media Review. March 13. 1-4. http://www.ojr.org/japan/wireless/1043770650.php. (accessed 2-08).