This is a continuation of yesterday's post entitled: Always connected. “We are all digital now” claims Paul Longley of University College London, in a research report (BBC News, 2006). In so doing, he identifies a global digital tribe. Taking into account the fact that much of the world’s population is more than a day’s walking distance from a fixed line telephone, and even allowing for the growing trend toward mobile phone usage in developing countries, or the paucity of computers in the thi... Read Full Story

This is a continuation of yesterday's post entitled: The digital tribe and the network nation.It was Howard Rheingold (2002) who coined the term ‘smart mobs’ (a play on the word 'mobile' or mobile phone) to describe individuals who work collectively and intelligently toward a mutual goal without necessarily having met. Unlike their more feral counterparts, smart mobs tend to act intelligently and with a purpose. They are distributed beings (Curtis, 2004), carrying devices that have immense co... Read Full Story

This is a continuation from yesterday's blogpost entitled: Digital Tribal IdentityI will argue here that within the present information age, where digital communication technologies have fractured the tyranny of distance beyond repair, and where computers have become pervasive and ubiquitous, identification through digital mediation has become the new cultural capital (Bordieu & Passeron, 1990). Cultural capital is the set of ‘invisible bonds that tie a community together’ (Curtis, 2004, ... Read Full Story

Earlier this year I published an edited volume entitled 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures' which was a compendium of papers written by leading theorists and practitioners in the field of learning technology. Over the next few days I will present an abridged, bite size series of exerpts from one of my chapters which was entitled: 'Digital Tribes, Virtual Clans'. I hope you enjoy it and look forward to reading your comments.Tribes use common culture to construct group identity and will employ... Read Full Story

I'm an invited speaker at the Learning Technologies Conference at London's Olympia in January. It promises to be quite an interesting two days in the capital with keynotes from Lord David Puttnam (remember Chariots of Fire?) and Stephen Heppell, as well as a host of other social media experts including my Twitter buddies Jane Hart, Donald Clark, Barry Sampson and Mark Oehlert. My own presentation is scheduled for Day two, where I will tackle the subject of 'New Smart Devices for Learning'. He... Read Full Story

Socrates once said: 'I cannot teach anyone anything, all I can do is make them think'. And then there was Andrew Carnegie who said: 'People who can't motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.' Some teachers struggle to motivate their students, and some students find it hard to concentrate for long enough to learn anything. So what is this slippery, elusive thing we call motivation? We certainly need it to do anything, anything at all. B... Read Full Story

I'm not completely certain what people will use the new Twitter lists service for, but I can of course speak for me. Personally, I inted to use it as a kind of filtering tool, so that I can click on my specific list and hopefully see tweets that are grouped around a particular community of interest of practice. In creating this app, Twitter are merely doing what other services have already done quite successfully, including TweepML and Listorious. The only difference is that Twitter has integ... Read Full Story

I have just been through an extremely busy two weeks, with seemingly endless bus, taxi and car journeys, 10 air flights and I don't know how many miles travelled. In 17 days I have been to Cork, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Heidelburg, Darmstadt, Weinheim, Worms, London and Leeds. Thankfully, my trekking is over (at least for a while) and I can now sit back and reflect on what I have learnt from my 'research'.... Experimental research: Firstly, I have discovered that students enjoy wine tasting, but... Read Full Story

So here is the evidence you need. It's a picture of the langoustine and mussels paella I helped create for the hungry 30 or so participants of the 2nd Open Edtech Summit in Barcelona earlier this week. We were all invited to a workshop in the evening where we cooked our own 3 course Catalonian dinner. This paella was one I made as a member of a small group which included Mark Bullen and others. We had a great time cooking it, and an even better time eating it afterwards. Other dishes created ... Read Full Story

The invited participants at Open Ed Tech enjoyed a very interesting opening Tech Talk yesterday from a young researcher based at Strathmore Research Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. Jessica Colaço is the principal researcher at Strathmore Research and Consultancy Centre (SRCC) and is a Mobile Technology Evangelist. Earlier this year, the magazine 'Business Daily' named her as one of the top 40, under 40 years of age women in Kenya's business scene. She has already spoken at prestigious events such a... Read Full Story