Jul 06 2010
Recently I finished a remarkably useful book: Mizuko Ito, et al. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning With New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). It has some common ancestry with ours, since the first authors of both Hanging Out and Digital Habitats were at the Institute for Research on [...]
Jun 18 2010
From my perspective we wrote Digital Habitats as a call to action (and reflection) more than anything else. So it’s a bit ironic to see it used as a textbook, at least for me, being so skeptical about exactly what kind of learning is going on in schools. But actually it’s pretty cool. Of course [...]
May 21 2010
Kathy Milhauser mentioned that she assigned Digital Habitats to students in a course on globally distributed project teams. That got me thinking about the difference between a project team and a community as far as their digital habitat is concerned. Of course there are many project teams that have spawned communities and many communities that [...]
Mar 14 2010
You probably already know that Skype is a great tool – especially for community leaders. If you are a technology steward, you’ve got to know how to use it and talk about it, too. To really talk about how to use a tool we’ve got to talk about all the buttons and about the user’s [...]
Oct 14 2009
Last week at the KM4Dev conference in Brussels, I struck up a conversation with Joseph Sikeku, who talked about community leadership and technology stewardship in a radically different setting: a radio station in Tanzania. Sikeku’s project uses an interesting mix of technologies: 5,000 Watt FADECO radio station Small blue “sensor” or integrated circuit audio recorder [...]
Sep 24 2009
Last May’s CHIFOO presentation was a great talk about reading by Cathy Marshall. Here are Marshall’s slides from which I’ve borrowed some images to talk about her work in this post. Marshall read (out loud, from the slide on the screen) that: “Nothing is more commonplace than the experience of reading, and yet nothing is [...]
Sep 09 2009
Here’s an 8-minute interview with Nancy White, where I ask her several questions about what’s important about Digital Habitats, how the book came to be, and what’s left out. You can tell that I’ve edited out about 10 minutes of discussion. This could have been a very long conversation since we both feel the topic [...]
Aug 04 2009
After more than 5 years working on it, Digital Habitats (the book I wrote with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White) is here. (At least a couple proof copies have arrived in the mail. Copies for sale are on their way.) It has been really fun. What’s next? Stay tuned. Share:
Jun 25 2009
For a couple of years it wasn’t “a book” but just “an update”. After our ideas started getting more interesting and more useful, I took to taunting my co-conspirators Etienne Wenger and Nancy White that what is now Digital Habitats “is actually a book.” Later, when we all admitted that it was indeed a book, [...]
Dec 15 2006
Finally, Nancy White, Etienne Wenger and I agreed on a simple definition of the term “technology steward”: Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs, and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs. Stewardship typically includes selecting and configuring technology, as [...]
