DLTQ.org

Brainwidth = Our brain’s bandwidth.

Attention.

I read somewhere lately (lost the link) how the internet is making it more difficult for us to process longer texts today. What does that mean?

I have been thinking about some of the questions in my last post, as well as earlier posts on DLTQ. For instance, there was the April 2005 entry “Let’s Hack the Attention Hierarchy!” and my follow-up “Hacking the attention hierarchy” from later that year.

I then thought about Chris Anderson’s talk with Charlie Rose about ‘Free’. And I thought about Gary Vaynerchuk’s talk from a few days ago where he also referred to ‘freemiums’.

This all reflects to my earlier visual experiments with fast-moving text and images. Here is one example of a video I made in 2005: 135 frames

Requires QuickTime

Our brains are - to a more or less successful degree - adapting to our media consumption. Some people are better than others. Some people can have 1000 RSS feeds in front of them within an RSS reader and they can then within an amazingly short time extract nuggets, re-publish extracts, or simply add meta-data to items for further reflection - the tag “toblog” comes to mind. They are navigating the field like experienced ice-hockey players.

I am interested in this behaviour, and how we can share experiences with navigating such huge data-sets. And - well - it’s not just data.

Now, re-watch the last part of this video by Wesch which I have been returning to again and again the last months.

How does the disintegration of data STREAMS into bits and pieces scattered all over the place affect our abilities to gather these pieces again? To gather them into stories and new narratives.

This leads me to the bloggers and particularly the journalists. When there is so much freely available information out there, from a firehose of different sources - how do they keep track? Also: What differences are there in the way the online journalist scourges the interwebs for information today compared to 8 years ago?

This genuinely interests me, and it also has a lot to do with my more practical questions of how to teach people videoblogging in a better manner.

This will be an ongoing topic here on DLTQ. Stay tuned.

Here I am again, preparing a workshop. I have been thinking about this workshop since I was asked by the client (SILBA, a Danish organization that does seminars, workshops, election observations and other activities in several ex-USSR countries) if I wanted to do this quite a while ago, and I have been writing on my Powerpoint Presentation for it for a few weeks now, on/off.

My thoughts have gone to - among other things - my experiences holding talks about videoblogging/new media in Sarajevo in 2005, and my seminar about New Media in Georgia this last summer.

Since I started getting involved at my university during my study years in 1998 I have attended or organized quite a few seminars, workshops, meetings, trainings. My frustration has been pretty constant with all of these. ‘Where is the follow-up?’. ‘What are the results?’ ‘How do we connect the dots from here?’.

I intend to make this workshop in Vilnius different. I don’t have high hopes, but I will make a more conscious attempt at it.

I feel that workshops should evolve along with the way we consume media has evolved. In a time of Facebook, Youtube, LiveJournal and Twitter - how can we let the workshop model draw more on the strengths of these media outlets while keeping its own identity as an individual ‘event’? I mean: The workshop is supposed to be the arena for most of the learning, but surrounding that ‘media’ there are to be clusters. One of those clusters could be the dissemination of the material from the workshop. In my case: The final powerpoint presentation. Supporting material.

But there is also the question of participatory learning, which I have been thinking about a lot the last days, since I learned about this competition.

I don’t have any answers or conclusions yet, but I am working on this as we speak and I will finish the .ppt tomorrow friday or at the latest this weekend.

What do you think is happening to the workshop model these days? Is it evolving?

Edit:

My questions here are really:

* How does our learning change as our media consumption changes?
* How do you teach videoblogging for someone who lives in a very different political climate? My temporary conclusion is that the human story is to be at the centre. Storytelling.

Yesterday I was notified via Beth Kanter on Facebook about a report on foundations and their use of Web 2.0 tools entitled “Come On In. The Water‘s Fine. An Exploration of Web 2.0 Technology And Its Emerging Impact on Foundation Communications” (pdf)

Written by David Brotherton and Cynthia Scheiderer from Brotherton Strategies, this 45-page read is excellent so far - I have only read half of it but will give a fuller review/response to it when I am done.

I will end of this recommendation of the report by giving you a quote:

Funders need to understand that communities of practice and open spaces for innovation are essential where ideas and alliances can emerge—
emerge from unexpected corners, places, and people.

– Katrin Verclas, MobileActive.org