We often hear about how technology doesn’t change the brain. Or, at least that technology doesn’t impact how we think in the short term. Evolution, we are told, takes much, much longer. This argument then forms the basis for treating technology only as a tool - something that we use and select for particular tasks (

Does the internet - social media in particular - act as a unifier? Apparently not, according to several researchers. Instead, social media amplifies existing social structures. Or, as danah boyd states, “pervasive social stratification is being reified in a new era”. Technology doesn’t (immediately) alter human nature. It provides new views (

Sometime this morning, while I was riding to work, someone viewed a photo of mine on Flickr, rolling the “total views” odometer over 1 million. That’s a lot of views. There aren’t many other venues where I could put my photos on display and have them seen a million times. Granted, there’s no “unique viewers” stat – so it could be 10 people

Researchers are in the early stages of understanding the dynamics of the human brain. Discoveries (interesting word - how do constructivists respond to the notion of discovery?) to date are causing shifts in views in fields like law and the legal code. If I commit a crime, and it is due to a brain lesion or a developmental disability,

Trends can build and develop for long periods of time without significantly impacting status quo. Periodically, the trends coalesce and offer an expression of the nature of change. YouTube, for example, has had moments where it exerts its growing influence on existing political discourse (US presidential elections) and entertainment (

Yesterday, Dave Cormier and I delivered the first monthly session of Social Media: Trends and Implications for Learning (if you’re interested the recording is available here). The first 10 minutes of the session were focused on describing our approach, how to interact, tag (SMTI), etc. I was quite surprised at the response - almost 300

ignore this post. I’m playing with a plugin, to see if I can add geotagging of posts and pages. It appears to work perfectly under standalone WP, but seems to fall over under WPMU (or, perhaps, under Multi-DB?)

Alan Levine reflects on his experience attending an online seminar: “I recently felt like this wistful gal during a recent online seminar- isolated, lonely, and wishing to go outside and play. With nose-diving budgets and more work moving online, it’s time to raise the bar on how we run online events. Like a horrendously designed PowerPoint,

The Google and Microsoft competition is escalating: Google announces new operating system. The operating system is expected to run on netbooks shipping in 2010. Google already has Android for mobile phones, so the move to PC-based system is an obvious direct challenge to Microsoft. With the exception of Bing, over the last several years,