English Education Professor

The Billion Dollar Gram | Information Is Beautiful.

Homophily: Birds of a Feather

Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people’s personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people’s social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localized positions) within social space. We argue for more research on: (a) the basic ecological processes that link organizations, associations, cultural communities, social movements, and many other social forms; (b) the impact of multiplex ties on the patterns of homophily; and (c) the dynamics of network change over time through which networks and other social entities co-evolve.

via Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks – Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1):415 – Abstract.

The rhetorical public sphere has several primary features:

1. it is discourse-based, rather than class-based.

2. the critical norms are derived from actual discursive practices. Taking a universal reasonableness out of the picture, arguments are judged by how well they resonate with the population that is discussing the issue.

3. intermediate bracketing of discursive exchanges. Rather than a conversation that goes on across a population as a whole, the public sphere is composed of many intermediate dialogs that merge later on in the discussion.[39]

The rhetorical public sphere was characterized by five rhetorical norms from which it can be gauged and criticized. How well the public sphere adheres to these norms determine the effectiveness of the public sphere under the rhetorical model. Those norms are:

1. permeable boundaries: Although a public sphere may have a specific membership as with any social movement or deliberative assembly, people outside the group can participate in the discussion.

2. activity: Publics are active rather than passive. They do not just hear the issue and applaud, but rather they actively engage the issue and the publics surrounding the issue.

3. contextualized language: They require that participants adhere to the rhetorical norm of contextualized language to render their respective experiences intelligible to one another.

4. believable appearance: The public sphere must appear to be believable to each other and the outside public.

5. tolerance: In order to maintain a vibrant discourse, others opinions need to be allowed to enter within the arena.[40]

via Public sphere – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In short, the difference between the two has to do with the brokering of status. With Facebook, the dominant norm is about people at a similar level of status interacting. On Twitter, theres all sorts of complicated ways in which status is brokered. People are following others that they respect or worship and theres a kind of fandom at all levels. This is what Terri Senft has long called “micro-celebrity.” Alice Marwick has been extending Terris ideas to think about how audience is brokered on Twitter paper coming soon. But I think that theyre really critical. What makes Twitter work differently than Facebook has to do with the ways in which people can navigate status and power, follow people who dont follow them, at-reply strangers and begin conversations that are fundamentally about two individuals owning their outreach as part of who they are. Its not about entering anothers more private sphere e.g., their Facebook profile. Its about speaking in public with a targeted audience explicitly stated.As you can see, Im not quite there with my words on this just yet, but I feel the need to push back against the tendency to collapse both practices into one. How audience and status is brokered really matters and differentiates these two sites and the way people see and navigate this.

via apophenia: Some thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates.

Internet capitalization conventions are the practices of various publishers regarding the capitalization of “Internet” or “internet”, when referring to the Internet/internet, as distinct from generic internets or internetworks.In formal usage, the noun for the Internet has traditionally been treated as a proper noun and written with an initial capital letter, that is, a majuscule or upper-case “I”. Since the widespread deployment of the Internet Protocol Suite in the early 1980s, the Internet standards-setting bodies and other related organizations, such as the Internet Society, the Internet Engineering Task Force IETF, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ICANN, the World Wide Web Consortium, use this convention in their publications. In English grammar, proper nouns are capitalized.However, critics argue that some things that are unique yet distributed, such as “the power grid”, “the telephone network”, and even “the sky”, are not considered proper nouns, and are thus not capitalized. Since at least 2002 it has been theorized that Internet has been changing from a proper noun to a generic term.[1] Words for new technologies, such as Phonograph in the 19th century, are sometimes capitalized at first, later becoming uncapitalized.[1] It was suggested as early as 1999 that Internet might, like some other commonly used proper nouns, lose its capital letter.[2]Capitalization of the word as an adjective also varies. Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized as a noun but not capitalized as an adjective, eg, “internet resources”.[3][4]

via Internet capitalization conventions – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

I agree with Fallows, a writer for The Atlantic Monthly, that Homeland Security is a knee-jerk response 9/11, a response that frankly reminds me of the German expression.  His short piece made me look of Teutono. The definition from the OED follows this snippet:

Yet sometimes undoing a mistake is more disruptive than helpful. We probably can’t get rid of the department. So, two ways to mitigate the damage: change the offensive, antirepublican, Teutono-Soviet name Homeland to Civil, as in Department of Civil Security. And make civil-security spending what national-security spending was in the Eisenhower era, when interstate-highway-building and language-teaching were all part of “national defense”: an umbrella for investments in new energy and water supplies, public health, basic research, and other efforts that will actually make us more secure.

via Civilize Homeland Security – The Atlantic July/August 2009.

Teutono:    2. A German; in extended ethnic sense, any member of the races or peoples speaking a Germanic or Teutonic language; in Great Britain and its colonies, and the United States, often used like ‘Saxon’ in opposition to ‘Celt’, and in avoidance of ‘German’ in its modern political sense.

Van Gogh’s Letters.

“What was the sensible thing to do? There was no Piggy to talk sense.”
- William Golding, Lord of the Flies, Chapter 12

William Golding’s Lord of The Flies illustrated edition. Sam Weber.

I love this resource. It pushes us to think of annotation as far more collaborative AND invites students to think more critically about various subjects. Genius

Consider introducing the following shared annotation roles to your students before they begin using Diigo for reading together. Doing so will ensure that shared annotation experiences result in the kinds of high-level thinking that you expect:

Captain Cannonball: Good conversations only begin with participants who are willing and able to find interesting ideas to talk about. That is Captain Cannonball’s role in a shared annotation group. With a critical eye and an understanding of a group’s interests and responsibilities, Captain Cannonball should find four or five key points in a shared reading to highlight and craft initial questions for other readers to consider. Captain Cannonball’s choices are important. The success of a shared reading often depends on the quality of the first comments and questions added.

The Provocateur: Think about the best conversations that you’ve ever been involved in. They’ve always included a bit of passion, didn’t they? Disagreements are really nothing more than evidence of deep thinking, as participants work to defend, explain, revise or refine their personal beliefs. Sadly, these opportunities for learning are few and far between in many conversations because everyone “plays nice,” not wanting to “make waves” or to “rock the boat.” The Provocateur’s role in a shared annotation group is to stir things up a bit, challenging the thinking of peers in the conversation. Directly responding to comments made by others, the Provocateur works to remind everyone that there are two sides to every story.

The Middle Man: Just as important to successful conversations are participants who are skilled at finding the common ground between different positions. Pointing out the overlap between two seemingly contradictory positions helps all members of a group to remain connected to one another and can help to highlight areas for continued study. The Middle Man’s role in a shared annotation group is to carefully consider the different viewpoints being shared in a conversation looking for connections. Middle Men are often the glue that holds contentious conversations together.

The Author’s Worst Nightmare: Shared annotation tools like Diigo allow groups to do something that was once unheard of: With a few digital clicks, users can challenge statements and ideas made by any author. No longer are readers required to simply accept that authors are experts who have the final word on topics being studied. Instead, readers can publicly push back at the assertions and ideas of authors—and that’s the role of the Author’s Worst Nighmare in a shared annotation group. Bringing a healthy dose of skepticism to the conversation, the Author’s Worst Nightmare looks to question statements made and conclusions drawn throughout a shared reading. While groups may eventually decide that an author’s assertions are spot-on, the Author’s Worst Nightmare’s responsibility is to make sure that every point is put through the fires of shared reflection.

The Repo Man: Shared conversations are only successful if groups walk away with a collection of shared ideas that can be used in future work. That’s where the Repo Man comes in. The Repo Man’s role in a shared annotation group is to carefully monitor conversations, looking for summary points that define exactly what it is that a group learned together during the course of a collective reading. While the Repo Man’s real work begins as a conversation is ending, he or she must stay “in tune” with the thoughts and ideas being shared as a conversation develops in order to identify important “takeaways” that a group can learn from.

via Digitally Speaking / Social Bookmarking and Annotating.

This is one of the more definitive resources for cartoon generation:

Cartoon Generators.