Cathy Davidson's HASTAC blog on the interface of anything.
For a few years now, I've been joining with others, both in HASTAC and at the MacArthur Foundation, to think about the implications of this digital world we live in. And I mean "we." Even those who for any number of reasons--poverty, social unrest or repression, personal preference, or incapacity--are seemingly outside the digital are, in fact, driven by a range of forces powered by digital means. It's here. To stay. So what we've all been trying to understand is if the digital changes one's way of thinking. Is Web 2.0 a cognitive as well as a social phenomenon? Do we think differently when we think not just about our own ideas but about incremental changes to the ideas of others who then edit our work? What happens to the linear models of mind when kids, for example, early on learn to participate in many-to-many ways of thinking, such as in massively online games? Do you expect other kinds of entertaimment, other art forms, when you live in the branching and customizing narratives of games or virtual environments? And what is the relationship between play and work, creativity on line and in the office, on line and in school? Digital learning uses the "digital" as a means to learning but it also respects the formal characteristics of digitality and asks if those characteristics change how we know, what we know, how we learn, what we learn, how we imagine, what we imagine, how we dream----and what we dream of dreaming better.
Bookmark/Search this post with:
Delicious
Digg
Technorati
| 
| 
| 
| 
| 
http://gridskipper.com/travel/political-geography/thinking-globally-2900...
This comment is actually a re-blog from GridSkipper which is a re-blog from the NY Times and a really thought-provoking and interesting piece on a famous Italian globe-maker who has to respond to the politics of those buying the globes in his representation of the world. You may not think that relates to digital thinking . . . but it does!
Thinking Globally
Nifty article in the New York Times about Italian globe-maker Novo Rico. The innaresting part concerns how certain globular orders have obvious political agendas. Some of these are less surprising, such as Arab globes with no Israel, or Turkish globes that show a divided Cyprus. Others are a little more odd, such as Saddam Hussein's specially ordered globes with all Arab countries in orange, and the rest of the world in yellow. Or globes that alternately deed certain parts of Antarctica to Argentina or Chile, depending on who's buying. Still, the globemakers have standards. ""No one ever asked us to make their country bigger," says one proudly. Let us be the first! I want a globe with nothing on it but the USA, enlarged to wrap fully around the Earth such that Maine is a quick canoe trip from Washington State.
In Italy, Creating Worlds Takes Precision, Yes, and Politics [NYT]