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Showing posts with the label Clifford Geertz

Should Big Brother Always Be Watching?

creative commons licensed (BY) flickr photo by ell brown: http://flickr.com/photos/ell-r-brown/4421119738 Obviously I am just too nice, because  Derrick rang back on Friday. I brushed him off last week, telling him I was too busy, but clearly he wasn't going to accept the same excuse twice. So today I decided to listen. Basically, he was trying to sell me an audio visual set-up where two cameras and a microphone would be installed in a classroom. The premise behind this was that it would take out the requirement for another teacher to sit in and interrupt the learning experience by physically recording the lesson. This would also transfer the ownership of the experience to the teacher, rather than the responsibility of a coach, to support the improvement of teaching and instruction. We all have ideals , but in my opinion they are always something different in reality. My first concern is with the notion that installing cameras gives some sort of objectivity. Here I am r...

Common Sense That Is Not Always So Common - A Review of Danah Boyd's It's Complicated

creative commons licensed (BY-SA) flickr photo by mrkrndvs: http://flickr.com/photos/113562593@N07/13904832413 Voltaire once suggested that, "common sense is not so common." So to can +danah boyd 's  It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens  be seen as an attempt to reposition the debate about teenagers and the supposed scurvy of life in an online world. Boyd sets out to dispel many of the negative and dystopian views that so often fill the news. As she moves from one case study to another, I was left with many aha moments, particular while reading about fear and privacy. Having grown up with the practise of placing the desktop computer in a public space, it had never really occurred to me some of the deeper consequences of such actions. That is not to say that such approaches are wrong, but like every choice, everything comes with a cost. At its heart, the book puts forward many of the issues and arguments that are too often overlooked ...