TED Talk: Global Voices

I'll frame this post around a personal example illustrating part of Zuckerman's main point.  I am a member of a community at reddit.com.  Reddit (read it...get it?) is a social news aggregator where users can post news stories from around the world.  Users can upvote or downvote articles, and the more recent and interesting articles make their way to the top.  The site can be browsed by sub-reddits.  These are arranged by interest: international news, technology, bicycling, crochet, and even funny pictures of cats with captions underneath.

reddit's mascot

When I discovered this site, I started reading the comment threads and I found that there were a lot of different types of users on the site.  Many were engineers, there were professors from around the world, fry cooks, all types.  When I get on the Internet without a particular focus and I want to find some new and interesting information, I start from reddit.

Over time, I found that a lot of the same links and themes were repeated.  I took another look at the user base and found that although there were some users in outlier demographics, most users were just like me: educated white males in their 20s, English-speaking, and mostly living in America.  My views were the same as most of the views I heard repeated over and over.  I realized that what I liked about reddit was that for the most part, the "hive mind" conformed with my views and I was continually receiving support for my biases.



tl;dr: I thought I was in a worldwide information sharing community and learning lots of new things, but it turned out I was just perpetuating my own biases.

ePals

The ePals website has four different features.

ePals Platform
--This is something like an operating system in that it provides the basis for the other ePals features.

ePals Learning Space
--This is a system that incorporates email, filesharing and browsing.  It would be used on a school-wide or district-wide level.  It has the advantage of allowing access and collaboration from teachers, students, administrators, and parents.

ePals School Mail
--This is a system for student email accounts.  It allows instant translation, spam filters and some other features.  The most useful feature for the classroom, especially if a teacher is conducting a pen pals project, is the monitoring option.

ePals Global Community
--This is a collaborative network that allows teachers to match their classrooms with other classrooms around the world for cooperative projects.  It is supplemented with graphics from National Geographic.

In2Reading
--This is a website that matches students in grades 3-5 with adults who read the same books they are reading.  The adults become mentors and pen pals, and interactions can be monitored by the teacher.  This would be useful to me as a teacher if I knew who the adults were.  For example, if I knew that they all came from a local community center or were parents of older students in the district.

What seems most immediately useful to me is the selection of unit projects provided toward the bottom of the main page.  I will be working with ESL students, so the Holidays and Celebrations project will be particularly applicable.  A complete package is provided, and I could focus any of the activities around whatever language feature I wanted to highlight.

Flickr Post #2 (Mod 9)

This was created using Bubblr.  Something like this could be used for ESL students learning different American gestures such as the thumbs up and thumbs down signals.  Students could fill in the speech bubbles, using vocabulary from their own level and/or vocabulary connected to class discussions.

Flickr Post #1 (Mod 9)

There are several types of creative commons licensing setups on Flickr.

Attribution means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work - and derivative works based upon it - but only if they give you credit.

Noncommercial means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work - and derivative works based upon it - but for noncommercial purposes only.

No Derivative Works means:
You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Share Alike means:
You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

The different combinations of these parameters are

Attribution License 

Attribution-NoDerivs License

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License

Attribution-NonCommercial License

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License 

 Attribution-ShareAlike License

Photo by Stephane Mignon