Rivals band to fight Google books

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8200624.stm
Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library.......

Forget digital natives/immigrants. We need a better metaphor

My esteemed colleague Doug Clow has just posted a very thoughtful blog post about the glib terminology we use to describe different degrees of familiarity with technology.

I think we should stop talking about “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” altogether. It’s unhelpful and unclear. A better distinction might be between “digital residents” and “digital tourists”.

I’ve never liked the terms “digital native” and “digital immigrant”, as introduced/popularised by Prensky, and the “born digital” idea as applied to people (rather than, say, media artefacts) is profoundly problematic. I’m not the first or only person to raise this – lots of people have criticised it. (And with very flaky Internet access at the moment, I can’t link to or cite to them … which is a bit annoying but saves me the bother – good job this isn’t a proper academic paper.)

He cites four reasons for disliking the 'native/immigrant' dichotomy:

1. Moral issues in "appropriating language about indigenous people and human migration".
2. The fact that the categories are not fixed in generational terms: "as is widely attested, there are plenty of retired-age people who have great facility with digital technologies, and spent large amounts of time online, and plenty of teenagers who struggle with them and find them overwhelming and alienating".
3. The fact that the 'native/immigrant' terminology "attributes inherent, unchangability to one’s approach and use of technology. One cannot aspire or attempt to become a digital native: one either is or one isn’t. There are plenty of people who come to digital fluency at a later stage in life than infancy."
4. It sets up "an insurmountable barrier of incomprehension between teachers (by definition digital immigrants) and learners (by definition digital natives)".

I'm with him on #2 through #4. #1 seems a bit, well, wet somehow.

Doug suggests that we think in terms of 'digital residents' and 'digital tourists'. I think that's much more insightful and productive. In fact, having just come back from Provence, a part of the world I love but in which I never participate fully because of my limited linguistic and cultural knowledge, I can see exactly why some people feel uncertain and unsure of themselves in cyberspace. They're tourists in that space, whereas I'm a resident.

Elsevier catches up with this web, hypertext thingy

Press release says:

Amsterdam, 20 July 2009 – Elsevier, the leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announces the ‘Article of the Future’ project, an ongoing collaboration with the scientific community to redefine how a scientific article is presented online. The project takes full advantage of online capabilities, allowing readers individualized entry points and routes through content, while exploiting the latest advances in visualization techniques.

The Article of the Future launches its first prototypes this week, revealing a new approach to presenting scientific research online. The key feature of the prototypes is a hierarchical presentation of text and figures so that readers can elect to drill down through the layers based on their current task in the scientific workflow and their level of expertise and interest. This organizational structure is a significant departure from the linear-based organization of a traditional print-based article in incorporating the core text and supplemental material within a single unified structure.

A second key feature of the prototypes is bulleted article highlights and a graphical abstract. This allows readers to quickly gain an understanding of the paper’s main ‘take home’ message and serves as a navigation mechanism to directly access specific sub-sections of the results and figures. The graphical abstract is intended to encourage browsing, promote interdisciplinary scholarship and help readers identify more quickly which papers are most relevant to their research interests.

Can't see why this is a big deal. What I'd really like to see is progress on open access.

Leicester Tester

from twitterer AJCann Using Mobile Devices and Microblogging http://bit.ly/u2rm3

What Bruce Sterling really said about Web 2.0

Terrific rant. Sample:

Web 2.0 theory is a web. It’s not philosophy, it’s not ideology like a political platform, it’s not even a set of esthetic tenets like an art movement. The diagram for Web 2.0 is a little model network. You can mash up all the bubbles to the other bubbles. They carry out subroutines on one another. You can flowchart it if you want. There’s a native genius here. I truly admire it.

This chart is five years old now, which is 35 years old in Internet years, but intellectually speaking, it’s still new in the world. It’s alarming how hard it is to say anything constructive about this from any previous cultural framework.

The things that are particularly stimulating and exciting about Web 2.0 are the bits that are just flat-out contradictions in terms. Those are my personal favorites, the utter violations of previous common sense: the frank oxymorons. Like “the web as platform.”

That’s the key Web 2.0 insight: “the web as a platform.”

Okay, “webs” are not “platforms.” I know you’re used to that idea after five years, but consider taking the word “web” out, and using the newer sexy term, “cloud.” “The cloud as platform.” That is insanely great. Right? You can’t build a “platform” on a “cloud!” That is a wildly mixed metaphor! A cloud is insubstantial, while a platform is a solid foundation! The platform falls through the cloud and is smashed to earth like a plummeting stock price!

Worth reading in full.

How teenagers use media

Hilarious report by a teenager who worked as an intern in Morgan Stanley. The Guardian carried it today.

It's a great read -- and largely accurate if my teenage kids are anything to go by. It closes thus:

What is hot?

• Anything with a touch screen is desirable.

• Mobile phones with large capacities for music.

• Portable devices that can connect to the internet (iPhones)

• Really big tellies

What is not?

• Anything with wires

• Phones with black and white screens

• Clunky 'brick' phones

• Devices with less than ten-hour battery life

Benefits of hindsight - 10 years from Napster

On the BBC website today, Geoff Taylor, head of the BPI reflects on the past 10 years of the music industry:

Many critics have argued that the music industry could have avoided some of the problems it faces today if we had embraced Napster rather than fighting it.

That's probably true, and I, for one, regret that we weren't faster in figuring out how to create a sustainable model for music on the internet.

But this view also overlooks the formidable hurdles we faced in 1999.

To make music fully and legally available on the internet meant clearing the rights in millions of tracks for a huge number of countries, agreeing how the revenue should be shared, implementing workable DRM (which everyone considered fundamental at the time), developing technology to track all the downloads for royalty purposes, as well as creating quality user experience people would pay for.

This is an interesting opinion. He is effectively arguing that the shift in paradigm to digital distribution of music was only possible via an illegal back door protoyping, that side stepped the complex IPR laws surrounding recording.

He notes that he sees other creative sectors going through similar changes. Publishing, and in particular academic publishing is one, and illegal filesharing is certianly something of an issue, be it a pheripheral one.

He also notes the change in attitude to DRM, which on-line music vendors have effectively now abandoned.