Juha Suoranta, Tere Vadén: Wikiworld (2008/2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, collaboration, economy, education, learning, political economy, politics, socialist media, web 2.0
Wikiworld explores a revolution in the world of education. The way we learn is changing: institutionalised learning is transforming into new forms of critical learning and open collaboration. This book offers a historical and political framework to think about the future of learning and educational media.
The authors provide an overview of the use of new technologies and learning practices, and assess how the changing nature of education can lead to a more socially just future. At the same time, they place their analysis of education within a wider social and economic framework of contemporary capitalism.
Publisher Pluto Press, 2010
ISBN 0745328911, 9780745328911
176 pages
PDF (2010 version)
PDF (2008 version, copyleft)
John Thackara: In the Bubble. Designing in a Complex World (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · design, information society, interaction design, internet, learning, smart mobs, technology, telerobotics
We’re filling up the world with technology and devices, but we’ve lost sight of an important question: What is this stuff for? What value does it add to our lives? So asks author John Thackara in his new book, In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World.
These are tough questions for the pushers of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered on technology, so it would be no small matter if “tech” ceased to be an end-in-itself in our daily lives.
Technology is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the end it will serve is before we deploy it, not after. We need to ask what purpose will be served by the broadband communications, smart materials, wearable computing, and connected appliances that we’re unleashing upon the world. We need to ask what impact all this stuff will have on our daily lives. Who will look after it, and how?
In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now—not in a remote science fiction future; it’s not about, as he puts it, “the schlock of the new” but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can’t. In the Bubble describes services designed to help people carry out daily activities in new ways. Many of these services involve technology—ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems play a supporting role in a people-centered world. The design focus is on services, not things. And new principles—above all, lightness—inform the way these services are designed and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.
Publisher MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 0262201577, 9780262201575
321 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-11-23)
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