The first day of the semester! Anxious to meet all the students and start the semester. Looking forward to re-framing the class using the design activism as a lens to look at digital literacy.Re-read Doug's Curate or Be Curated: Why Our Information Environment is Crucial to a Flourishing Democracy Civil Society. I think this will be an excellent first article to read together in class. The article highlights the importance of being aware that social networks are not neutral spaces. It is critical to understand who funds these networks? As with many sites, if you are getting something for free, are you really? Or is your information being used for profit? For the most part these sites are publicly traded corporations with boards and shareholders who are looking for returns on their investments. This is a similar situation with LMSs (think Blackboard, WebCT, Desire2Learn), they are mostly owned by venture capitalist firms with profits to earn. Creating educational environments that really support learning is not their main mission. These LMSs and social networks help to silo information and curate what we do read. Google, Amazon all use algorithms to determine what should appears on our screen--what Eli Pariser calls the "filter bubble". It is becoming increasingly more important to draw our information from multiple sources, and understand who controls those sources. I want to explore the search engine DuckDuckGo--which does not track your history unlike Google. The importance of listening to many voices is a theme that we will focus on this semester.
