Rheingold speaks at TED 2008

"Howard Rheingold talks about the coming world of collaboration, participatory media and collective action -- and how Wikipedia is really an outgrowth of our natural human instinct to work as a group. As he points out, humans have been banding together to work collectively since our days of hunting mastodons." - abstract from TED 2008

A background introduction of the evolution of media and communication, together with collective social action. I like the point about how concepts of fairness is influenced by social institutions and is not innate. This is related to collaboration and how prisoner dilemmas can be escaped through collective action. Ideas of symbiosis are possible in human institutions. We just need the required design principles.

"A certain kind of sharing can be in [our] self-interest." Not altruism but for enriching themselves to practice sharing and cooperation, i.e. open-source

One of the interesting examples is ThinkCycle which have developing countries post up problems for design students in developed countries to solve and with successful results.

He is calling for somewhat a change of perspective by understanding more from what we can achieve through cooperation. Yet another suggestion for paradigm shift. I am definitely going to start compiling a list of alternative paradigms to consider possible merits. What will be the next dominant paradigm in our world?

Mandatory First Post

Last week, the ramblinglibrarian asked on the Media Socialist group about suggestions for a blogging workshop for kids that he was invited to conduct.

The resultant correspondence led me to the realization of this blog. Having been thinking academically about social media and environmental education as a user, practitioner and teacher, this blog will serve to record and share with others thoughts and practicalities.

I am definitely no expert but I am definitely more inclined towards a group blog model. In general the structure would be to have a repository of reflections as well as links to other useful articles and resources.