Accidental Readers, Connected Learners, Curators

I made a couple of short car journeys last weekend.
Long enough, though, to catch some delightful snippets from ABC Radio National.
On Saturday I listened to Geraldine Doog’s conversation with Hugh Mackay on Digital Tribes.
They were discussing the place of reading newspapers in our everyday life and the changes that are occurring in our lifestyles.

Is the switch to a more visual medium just an aesthetic shift or is it part of a broader trend of simplifying our knowledge base? And how do these differences feed into the broader debate about politics, democracy, and generational wisdom?

A podcast of the conversation can be found here.
On Sunday I caught Mimi Ito on a Future Tense discussion of Creativity. In the transcript of the program Mimi observes that:

I think that we are starting to see a shift in what people think of as creative activity, creative work. I think that you’re seeing that even within the domain of commercial media where you’re seeing forms of media that are about remix, that are riffing on earlier media, that are referencing other media, that these forms of expression are becoming much more visible and part of our common idiom.
At more of the populist or amateur layer, I think the positive dynamic is that we are seeing production, media production, curation, circulation really becoming something that people do on an everyday basis, it’s not just the domains of experts and professionals. So we’re seeing a broadening of the base of what people think of as their everyday creativity.
I think it does mean letting go of some of these cherished notions of individual authorship and lone brilliance and creativity that have animated a lot of our imagination about what creativity means. So in the balance I think there are things both gained and lost, but I see a lot of positive potential, especially from the point of view of young people’s creative expression and what the new digital media has to offer.

From Mimi’s contribution I followed a lead to Connected Learning. I think the design principles for Connected Learning make an interesting link between accidental readers and connected learning:

  1. Production-centered
  2. Openly networked
  3. Shared purpose

… and from there I followed up on a link from Stephen Downes to Beth Kanter’s post The Unanticipated Benefits of Content Curation: Reducing Information Overload. I ended up this journey with a visit to Robin Good’s visualisation of content creation tools.
I like the possibility that this is riffing on a variety of media.
Photo Credit
Riffing on a theme – lost mitten
untitled (riffing)

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here