I’ve written about Dr. Michael Wesch a number of times in the past. For those of you not familiar, Dr. Wesch is a professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University and heads the Digital Ethnography Working Group, a team of cultural anthropology undergraduates exploring the impact of digital technology on human interaction and human interaction on digital technology.

Wesch, dubbed the Explainer by Wired Magazine has created and produced videos on technology, education, and information have been viewed over seven million times and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. He is perhaps most known for his videos that concisely but accurately describing the fundamental concepts surrounding the Web 2.0 phenomenon (Web 2.0… The Machine Is Us/ing Us). He recently did a public presentation on June 17, 2008 at the University of Manitoba where he described his own attempts to integrate Facebook, Netvibes, Diigo, Google Apps, Jott, Twitter, and other emerging technologies to create an education portal of the future.

“It’s basically an ongoing experiment to create a portal for me and my students to work online,” he explains. “We tried every social media application you can think of. Some worked, some didn’t.”

Image by University of Manitoba

The video I am linking to above on the University of Manitoba website is all about media literacy and how he engages his students at Kansas State University. This 66 minute video provides some insight into how he tries to make students knowledge-able (able to create and critique knowledge) rather than knowledgeable (mind dump education). The 66 minute video is lengthy but well worth the time if you are involved in education or professional development or are interested in what is really possible and how it can be done using collaborative technologies to engage and interact with learners.

A thought provoking article written by the venerable Nicholas Carr in July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly explores how the Internet and by connection Google is changing human cognition:

The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

After reading the article I know exactly what he is talking about. While I consider myself a true netizen and advocate for all of the positive aspects of the net, I am also an scholar, educator and parent and can’t help but wonder what the long term implications of the cognitive rewiring that’s going on. It seems innocent enough; it begins with adapting the way we read which in turn impacts the way we think. Over a long enough period of time this could have pretty significant consequences. I’m not about to give up the medium that I have grown so dependent on and proficient with, but it really makes you wonder if we are really programming the Internet or if it actually programming us. Something to think about.

Read the whole article here: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I am sitting in my hotel room in Malta trying to catch-up with email that I have gotten over the past few days. I get many invites a week, some of which I attend others that I don’t. Normally I keep them to myself because I don’t like to promote vendor specific events, webinars, etc., but this one looks like it could be cool, fun and informative. Watch as 3 industry experts compete in a live game of Jeopardy to see who will be known as the Business Social Software Champion. If nothing else you may walk away knowing a bit more about social software than you initially did, even if you do know it all you can see how much the experts actually know. It’s a very intriguing format and something that I am looking forward to attending. The details are below:

Business Social Software Jeopardy!
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
10:00am PDT / 1:00pm EDT
Register Online: Click Here

Does your company leverage social software to engage customers, partners, and employees? More and more industry-leading companies are building online communities as a means of attracting and retaining customers, growing sales from existing customers, supporting users more effectively, gathering feedback to develop better products and services, and building a stronger brand.

But, what is hype and what is real, when web 2.0 technologies get implemented in the enterprise? We’re putting industry experts to the test, in a live game of Jeopardy, to see if they can properly solve the clues about how companies are successfully — or not — scaling up user communities. You’ll get to hear from some of the field’s leading thinkers, and have the chance to ask them questions during a Q&A session after the game.

The Contestants

• Bill Johnston: Chief Community Officer at | Bill’s Blog
• Laura Ramos: Vice President and Pricipal Analyst at Forrester Research, focusing on B2B marketing
• Jeremiah Owyang: Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, focusing on Social Computing | Jeremiah’s Blog

The Categories

• Industry Stats: What does aggregate market data tell us?
• Best Practices: Which strategies actually work in real life? Which don’t?
• ROI: What are some approaches to measuring the effectiveness of your investments?

Webcast Details

• Your Host: Sam Lawrence, Chief Marketing Officer at Jive Software
• Date/Time: Wednesday, May 28th at 10:00am PDT / 1:00pm EDT
• Registration: RSVP online to secure your spot — space is limited

In the meantime you can RSVP on the Jive Software website. I am not sure what the capacity for the event is, but considering the players and the topic I suspect it may fill-up fast.