Using ICTs in Entraintment-Education

The disappearance of TV

In the Age of TiVo and Web Video, What Is Prime

Time?

This is a chronic of how TV is slowing fading down. This age is the celebration of mobile media. The Net brings together, the Tv isolates and is huge source of income for advertisers and private companies. Through away your Television Now!

What do this Jew, Christian and Muslim have in common?

Make a guess and participate in this AUDIO GAME clicking here!

Then find the answer watching the following video!

Virtual Guantanamo

Web Sites

BBC’s Africa Media Development Initiative research reports

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/trust/researchlearning/story/2006/12/061212_amdi_index.shtml

Change Makers-The social use of games

http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/node/1871
Lab of social activist games.

http://www.tiltfactor.org/

HIV Cellphone game India

http://www.freedomhivaids.in/

Really good articles in English at the bottom of the page about the uses of ICTs
http://www.deza.ch/index.php?navID=21410

From PANOS site – “Louder Voices: Strengthening developing country participation in international ICT decision-making”By Don MacLean, David Souter, James Deane, Sarah Lilley (June 2002, English, 28 pages)

http://www.panos.org.uk/images/books/Louder%20Voices.pdf

Questions?

Questions about using Alternative Media to Create Interaction in Edutainment

What are the possible uses of Icts in the implementation of educational entreating programs in Africa and India?

What type of media design can be useful for the implementation of Edutainment radio programs in Ghana, to create process of interactions with the audience that are natural and meaningful?

Media Ecology

“The conflict between the two paradigms of the corporate media concept of media convergence and the grassroots based concept of participatory culture - will determine the long term cultural consequences of our current moment of media transition”. Jenkins Henry-Quentin Tarantino’s Star Wars 

Discussion Topic

•    Understanding systems of meaning having into account presumptive universals vs. autoethography: Think about this two different quotes.

“I think it is easy to lose sight of the special issues that arise when you study things that are really real but only exist from a subjective, historical, or cultural point of view. The real and tantalizing difference between quantitative and qualitative lies elsewhere. It has more to do with the nature of subject-dependent realities versus objective realties and not so much on procedures”. (Richard A Shweder P. 162)

“Authoetnography is an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layer of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural. Back and forth autoethnographer gaze, first through an ethnographic wide angle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience, then they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through refract, and resist cultural interpretation. As they zoom backward and forward, inward and outward, distinctions between the personal and cultural become blurred, sometimes beyond distinct recognition. (Authoetnography, personal Narrative, reflexivity P. 739)

2L Autoethnography: Frida

The starting and broadest questions that this exercise of creating my Avatar rises is, for the multiple ways how technology is transforming and redefining the ways we interact with each in real time, but also in the near past and future. There are many layers that compound the type of connections that we are establishing with each other through technology today. Technology is creating the possibility of multiple spaces of socialization that at the same time that replace the direct interaction of the bodies, open the possibility to reciprocal action or influences that otherwise would not be possible. In other words technology of an interactive Internet site like Second Life allows persons to be intimate from a distance. The combination of 3d images, sounds and interaction in real time erases barriers of time and space, so that the viability of meeting others depends no more on “propinquity” than it does on being sing in at the same time.

Today in second life, I was in a store trying to get some new clothes and I decided I wanted to check a different place, I am still learning how the whole application works, but today I had my first interaction with another Avatar. I end up going to this weird store and I was getting close enough to some people that a woman was calling me a “tree” because I was no moving. Out of the sudden a guy appeared and start talking to me. Why are you here, are you new? I was ready to go for a walk so I invited him to check the place out. I asked him why he was in the store, and he responded that he came looking for new clothes but that instead he found a new friend, his words intrigue me. After a while of checking the store out and not finding anything interesting I told him to go somewhere else, he told me just to pick a place, I said lets go to New York, he was not pretty familiar with the place that I was bringing him, and I would tell that he does not life in NYC. And these are the types of contacts that I am talking about. Technology is opening different spaces where reciprocal action or influences do not depend on how close we are, but what type of technology we are using to short those distances.

The point is that virtual interactions in real time technology are replacing the contact of flesh with flesh, for something else that I am not completely sure what it is, and this is something I will be learning as the class develops. The Second life experience is going to help reshape the broad question of how technology is changing, the ways we are interacting with each other and its is going to be a question that in part is going to be answered form my own experience as Frida Tachiwakana

This is going to be one exercise where I will be u sing the self to learn about the other and viceversa, form participant observation to the “observation of participation”. And whatever the answers are going to be, they are going to be stories, narratives of us as citizens and Avatars who live in an uncertain world where the financial crisis of our financial system is also causing the close of banks 2L, where according to the magazine the economist, a “a dozen banks in 2L had to close the door on a dozen banks that refused to pay out high returns of avatars’ deposits”. This type of relationship that are interwoven between these “virtual worlds” and our first life, and that are transforming how we interact with each other are they type of media designs questions that interest me.

Its Only When I Loose Myself

In the Surprise of Ethnography Richard A. Sheweder, discusses the process of discovery that ethnography implies as a research tool in social science.  At the same time the author inquires into the influences or bias that “presumptive universals” can create in the research of family life practices, emotions, moral development, and representations of the life cycle.

This paper sheds some light on how the different methodologies use by different social sciences on a particular research, and their different levels of   collective assumptions are usually left unexamined by the researcher(s) determine that some of the results of x or y research are just extensions of the predefined analytical frame. This basically means that many “social scientists” go to the field, laboratory or experiment, some how “knowing” or presupposing what they are going to find, and forget that research is an engaging process of discovery.

Ethnography “is about entering the field without totally predefining the domain of interest and without presuming that you already know what is universal, because most of the time those presumptive universals are generated out of one’s own perspective - dependent, context dependent, and hence local world”. (Richard A. Sheweder)

The engaging process that ethnography evolves can allow us to see how different realities and ultimately different aspects of psychological, and sociological functioning are attached to meaning systems that have their own logic and explanations only at the interior of the communities that fully understand them. One very interesting example of these are the Nacirema (Horace Mitchell Miner, 1956), whose fundamental believe is that the human body is ugly and that its natural tendency is to debility and disease. This is why they invest a large part of their time and effort into ritual activities of purification that according to their system of meaning purifies them, and make them more attractive to friends, and lovers. But analyzing any of the Nacirema’s practices according to our western categories and disciplines of the body, they all could be classified as irrational conducts that deteriorate health and causes pain. If their practices are analyzed according to our categories of health and beauty, it would be very difficult to understand the system of meanings that support these practices.

The Nacirema’s ceremony in which the holy-mouth-man opens or enlarges any holes which decay may have created in the teeth and put magical materials into these holes, are extremely sacred and traditional that the natives return to the holy-mouth-men year after year, despite the fact that their teeth continue to decay. Borrowing Malinowski’s words (1948 Magic) according to any of our western categories of dental health, any of these practices are completely irrational, but for them those practices of magic have represented power and guidance that have helped them to master their practical difficulties.

Going into the field without a previous examination of this type of universal and preconceived categories, are going to hinder the awakening of “dormant or unknown emotional and cognitive structures within oneself” that could drive us to deeper levels of understanding, of the other  and of ourselves. This conclusion reminds me of  the Depeche Mode song that says  “It only when I loose my self in someone else that I found my self”, check the video out.