james-greenwood.com » society

Link roundup: March

James — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 21:37:35 +0000

Our World: Cracking Walls

The Iranian elections fast became a trending topic on Twitter last summer as Internet-savvy Iranians protested the inevitable re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. This is the first documentary I’ve seen that looks at the impact the Internet is having in the Middle East. From the blurb: “BBC reporter Jiyar Gol travels across Iraq to discover the extraordinary impact the internet is having politically and socially in the country.” Posted on the BBC iPlayer today, so it should be available for a month – well worth watching.

Making Sense of Privacy & Publicity – Danah Boyd

Danah Boyd gave an excellent keynote speech about privacy & publicity at SXSW earlier this month, discussing people’s perceptions of personal privacy in the context of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Well worth a read for anyone interested in the impact of ICT on society.

Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love – Ken Fisher, Ars Technica

It’s something we tend not to think about – certainly something we don’t feel bad about – but in this age of the freemium business model reigning supreme, using ad blocking software comes with a real cost to popular websites that don’t charge for their content.

The Myth of the Techno-Utopia – Evgeny Morozov, Wall Street Journal

A fascinating essay on the issue of freedom vs censorship online.

News roundup

Link roundup: September

Moral issues in ICT: handout resource

James — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:20:30 +0000

This is an event – the first resource to be posted born of collaboration! Debbie Jones – @teach_ict – of Teach-ICT fame very kindly put together two of the handouts in this set covering the moral issues in ICT.

The social & moral implications of ICT are something we both have a passion for, yet I remember being taught about them when I was a student in a desperately dry, detached way. These handouts are designed to generate discussion – I’ll be using them with my OCR Unit 8 groups, splitting in to groups of 3 for discussion, then opening the floor up to the class after they describe their scenario. Subjects covered:

File sharing
Plagiarism
Snooping
Web addiction
Censorship
Web medicine

I hope they’re useful – we had fun making them!

Download handouts (PDF – 3mb)

Dotcom millionaires visualisation

James — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:21:08 +0000

Here’s another very simple visualisation showing a breakdown of the top 10 dotcom millionaires under the age of 30. The original list was here – I thought I’d put a poster together to answer the moans and groans from the “ICT isn’t useful” camp of naysayers. Free to download, and hopefully I’ll be able to put up links to a printing company who have offered to sell high quality prints of my posters soon. Until then, enjoy:

Update: 10/08/09

My friend Elliot says you’re all fools. So am I, if it makes you feel any better, but still… I was showing off my latest creation and he looked at it askance before saying, “RBS made a profit of $20k and this douchebag earns $700m? Does he live in a mountain somewhere?”

That’s right, folks… Zuckerberg’s net worth isn’t quite $700m. Facebook’s turnover is.

To those of you who have already printed this, I apologise, and Elliot says “hahaaaaa!”

Oh, and yes… I was listening to Marley when I made it.

The blog was misleading!

Download A1-sized poster (30mb)

ICT quotes posters

James — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:06:59 +0000

It’s freebie time again! Inspired by Will Lion’s excellent “mind bites” series of desktop wallpapers, I started putting together a series of A3 size posters for my classroom wall. These posters include quotes, facts & figures relating to the impact of ICT on society so should make for good display fodder in computer suites.

If there is no citation for images, it’s because they’re from licensed stock collections, or they’re mine. The entire collection (of 17 posters at the time of writing) weighs in at around 145mb with each file being 300 DPI A3 size. I haven’t finished yet, and I’m more than happy to hear suggestions for posters you’d like to see – just add them in the comments at the bottom of the post.

Examples:

Download them individually from here, or download the entire collection as a zip file (192mb).

Update (22/08/09): Thanks to Chris who kindly let me know that box.net impose bandwidth restrictions on their free users. The posters are now available to download from james-greenwood.com as well as box.net. I’m uploading a zip file of the entire collection as I write this.