If Machiavelli and Montaigne Grew Mushrooms; Knowledge 3.0

"If Machiavelli and Montaigne Grew Mushrooms" - Dave Cormier

This story/talk will look at how thinking, being social and making stuff has changed and might change in the future. It looks at the creative process of Machiavelli and Montaigne, locked in their libraries, and compares it to working in the social spaces of today. They drew on a discussion with history, sifted through the stories, and found a path forward for living. We are having live conversations with each other, communicating in almost real time, in a state of constant re-iteration. Or, at least, we could be.

Frost saw two roads diverging in the wood... I see a rhizome, rooting out in all directions...

How can we choose between an indefinite set of paths that haven't even been formed yet?

Well... we can do it together.

----

"Knowledge 3.0", Jon Beasley-Murray

This presentation examines the relations between social media and an emerging twenty-first century politics of knowledge, focusing particularly on the role of the university in this new configuration.

It is by now clear that social media present profound challenges, as well as perhaps some inspiring opportunities, to the institutions traditionally charged with the production, arbitration, and dissemination of knowledge.

There has been much discussion, for instance, of the way in which the Web 2.0 transforms the reporting and circulation of news, and the impact of these changes on the newspaper industry.

There has been much less in the way of coherent and connected discussion of the consequences of social media for other knowledge industries, such as the academy.

Particular elements of the impact on scholarly knowledge have been subject to debate--the rise of "e-learning," the use of social media in the classroom, the proliferation of academic blogs and tweet=streams, or the increase in open-access publishing of both journals and books--but these individual aspects have seldom been discussed together.

Moreover, analysis of the technical changes in scholarly knowledge production is seldom contextualized in terms of the broader changes that give us an increasingly "neoliberal" university characterized by a temporary labor force, quantifiable targets constantly subject to review, and a blurred boundaries between state provision and market priorities.

This presentation, therefore, attempts an overview of "knowledge 3.0" as it affects all of us, not simply those who happen to study or work within educational institutions.
 

 

BIOS:

Dave Cormier is a web projects lead at the University of Prince Edward Island, cofounder of Edtechtalk, and president of Edactive Technologies, a social software consulting firm. He teaches academic courses in writing, emerging tech and culture. His major research interests include the placing educational technology in a 'postdigital' context, the examination of planned and unplanned communities, rhizomes as a model for knowledge creation, and open-source multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs).

Cormier is a member of several research communities and has participated several web based research projects including the Open Habitat project and the Living Archives project. He has produced, designed, or participated in over 300 online webcasts in the past four years and speaks regularly at conferences on topics including rhizomatics, effective use of new technologies, and educational project management and design.

Jon Beasley-Murray is a Professor in Latin American Studies at UBC.  He has long experience using social media for research and teaching, including: involvement in a collective that ran a series of academic mailing lists for more than a decade: writing several personal research blogs over a period of more than five years; contributing to numerous group blogs; using blogs in the classroom for most of his courses; running several successful Wikipedia projects with student input; using Twitter and following other social media.  He has also talked widely about the use of technology in education.