Learning Through Digital Media

Hi, Katherine. You may want to contact the editor directly about this question, though I’d love to have that discussion take place here! –K.

Could you say a little more about why the open review essays were removed? I’m disappointed not to find the process archived here — for the purposes of future discussions of open review modes. I assume the reasons for doing this were substantive and strong or the essays would not have been removed.

Thanks,

Katherine

I agree completely, Michael; alas, this was the editor’s choice. Perhaps with enough support from other authors we might be able to make the drafts public again…?

It is too bad that all of the chapters are no longer online, as the process is so much part of the product. You should consider making them back available.

I was also one of the “What is this for?” people on Wave. I tried it in a number of creative/collaborative ways, and it just got… muddled. We thought a simple wiki, forum, or listserve might work just as well. In theory, Wave promised to serve all of these functions in one handy application, but it was a bit overwhelming and the learning curve was steep.
Of course now after reading your article, I realize Wave would have been the perfect platform for similar ideas I’d had for tech-incorporating pedagogy! As a Teaching Assistant, I’m trying to think of ways to, well, assist. My supervising professor is a bit of a technophobe and my students are digital natives – a collaborative note-taking and discussion forum is exactly the kind of thing I’d hoped to create.
I wonder though how effective this project would be on a larger scale (our survey class has 90 students) and without the technology accessible to every student. I wouldn’t want to create a situation where lazy students could simply piggyback on the hard work of other students (any more than they do already!)
Either way, very informative and enlightening article! Maybe now I can start to look for other avenues of creating a similar environment…

The interesting thing too is that YouTube’s actual police force is compiled in three ways. The first, there computer system is able to play almost instantly the media which you have uploaded and run it against auditory/video matches/etc. to police whether copyright infringement has occurred, second it has actual people filtering and monitoring un/flagged content and comments, and finally the mob like factor of the audience is objectionable because it can, referable to its social biases, flag/object to videos they don’t like. For example, there was several years back a series of anti-semitism carried out by Islamic online groups through YouTube — they would flag news Jewish news videos/hand operated camera videos that had been uploaded depicting the aftermath of a terrorist bombing. The monitors would take the video off, even when it expressly didn’t show any inappropriate content. Either CNN or BBC had mentioned it briefly, but the determining factor on WHO polices YouTube the most (the mob) was never fully brought up.

This is interesting because the activism present within a YouTube Paradigm likely reflects the same capitalist activism seen in day to day, “reality,” life.