I’m tweeting the bits of two days of workshops about the ethics of the Web and the Internet that I find contentious and interesting, and will transpose my thoughts in another post after. First is the British Library’s and Web Science Trust’s Ethics and the Web. The second is the Oxford Internet Institute and Royal Academy of Engineering’s Internet and Ethics seminar.
academic
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[British Library, Oxford Internet Institute & Web Science Trust] Ethics and the Web
Thursday December 02, 2010 @ 11:44 AM (UTC) -
[British Library] Workshop on Ethics and the World Wide Web
Tuesday November 16, 2010 @ 02:54 PM (UTC)Numbers are limited! Please register your interest with webscience-admin + at + ecs.soton.ac.uk
2nd December, 2010, 9.30-17.30
British Library, Euston Road, London
Co-sponsored by:
The Web Science Trust
The British Library in conjunction with the exhibition Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research -
[Oxford Internet Institute] The Information Revolution
Wednesday October 13, 2010 @ 08:19 AM (UTC)I gave a lecture for the Oxford Internet Institute‘s Undergraduate series on Monday and, with a whopping hour and a half to fill, I talked (and waved my arms around) about whether the Information Revolution that we are currently experiencing because of the social changes brought about by the World-Wide Web is hype or reality. As the target audience was undergraduates (but several post-grads and members of the public turned up too), I took a contrary approach by looking for the uniqueness that the Web offers in the context of two information innovations that have come before: the printing press and the telegraph. Here’s the abstract:
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[LSE Polis Media Dialogues] What is Media For? Networking
Monday October 11, 2010 @ 08:28 AM (UTC)I had the opportunity to open the LSE Polis Media Dialogues on Tuesday, a series of lectures for postgrads that aim to stimulate debate around topics of interest to the leaders, spin doctors, editors and bigwigs of the future. A daunting task.
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[The Times] Machinating Machines
Thursday October 07, 2010 @ 10:35 AM (UTC)Times Higher Education, 7 October 2010.
Computers can auto-generate processes, so can we really use them for scientific research if we can’t control them? asks Aleks Krotoski
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[Nature] Serious fun with computer games
Friday September 17, 2010 @ 11:47 AM (UTC)One of my proudest accomplishments to date has been to contribute an article to Nature magazine. My parents are both hard scientists, and I grew up with an acute awareness of its great value to the scientific community. Never expecting to be part of it (as a psychologist, I’m a so-called “soft” scientist you see…), I was over the moon when I was asked to write about the real-world applications of computer games mechanics for serious hard science questions.
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[RSA Journal] Linked Out
Friday September 17, 2010 @ 11:12 AM (UTC)In this article, published this month in the RSA Journal, I grapple with the (in)ability of online social networks to support and produce real-world social action. I spent a lot of time on the arguments in this article, as it translated so much of my theoretical thinking to a more public audience: how can online social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn contribute to offline social capital? Does the online capital accrued through actions and identity development actually mean anything? How might the diffusion of responsibility, click-activism and social posturing found in online social networks thanks to their perpetuity, their first-person narratives of identity and their articulated friendship trees actually diffuse social action rather than facilitate it?
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[Science Online 2010] Who are you? The little details to remember when gathering information about the people behind the screens
Thursday September 16, 2010 @ 10:00 AM (UTC)I was delighted to be asked to give a keynote at Science Online at the British Library on Saturday 4 September 2010. Despite nursing a lurgy, I managed to talk with the attendees about about the implications of online social science research questions, and about the British Library’s forthcoming Growing Knowledge exhibition (for which I’m Researcher-in-Residence – for some coverage of that, see JISC’s Digital Content Quarterly (interactive .pdf version) and Times Higher).
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[Publications] Learning, Media & Technology special issue: Learning and Virtual Worlds (Ed.)
Thursday September 16, 2010 @ 08:59 AM (UTC)Jeremy Hunsinger and I have published our guest edited special issue of Learning, Media and Technology on learning and researching in virtual worlds. It’s now available (behind paywall, I’m afraid) here.
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[Academic] Missing out on meat-space: Ubiquitous computing and the human experience of 'being online'
Friday July 16, 2010 @ 12:58 PM (UTC)I gave the after-dinner talk at the recent Horizon Doctoral Training Centre’s Summer School at the University of Nottingham to a roomful of extraordinarily inspirational PhD students who are doing their research in the field of Ubiquitous Computing and the Digital Economy. In it, I focus on what it is that computing cannot (currently?) capture about the human experience when online (accurate readings of friendship, social capital, trust, reputation and identity), but how applications like Twitter are helping populate the empty spaces that binary digits are unable to represent.
This is a first stab at the synthesis of these topics based on my research and reading in this area with the aim of turning it into a chapter/chapters in a book, and I was pleased to receive feedback and comments from the audience. For example, is it possible to quantify social capital in some way and then use that as the basis of a game to influence attitudes and behaviours? When I re-posed this question on Twitter, Matt Locke at Channel 4 Education (a publishing hero that has an award-winning stable of games for change) was adamant that, “games may create social capital, but it’s not a game in itself… It’s dangerous to think of social capital as an asset that can be measured or created… social capital is a story, not data.” I’d love your take on it too.
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