A little bit of culture

I am really pleased that I was able to finish off the final editing and proof reading for the new book 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures' which has now gone to press. A whole host of people have contributed toward the 17 chapters in the volume. The publishers, Information Age, who are based in the USA, Greenwich, Connecticut, are already publicising it on their website, and I have seen some of the cover artwork, so publication is imminent. Here's the blurb (wot I wrote meself):

As the title indicates, this book highlights the shifting and emergent features that represent life online, specifically in and around the territory of e-learning. Cybercultures in themselves are complex conglomerations of ideas, philosophies, concepts, and theories, some of which are fiercely contradictory. As a construct, "cyberculture" is a result of sustained attempts by diverse groups of people to make sense of multifarious activities, linguistic codes, and practices in complicated and ever-changing settings. It is an impossibly convoluted field. Any valid understanding of cyberculture can only be gained from living within it, and as Bell suggests, it is "made up of people, machines and stories in everyday life." Although this book contains a mix of perspectives, as the chapters progress, readers should detect some common threads. Technology-mediated activities are featured throughout, each evoking its particular cultural nuances and, as Derrick de Kerckhove (1997) has eloquently argued, technology acts as the skin of culture. All the authors are passionate about their subjects, every one engages critically with his or her topics, and each is fully committed to the belief that e-learning is a vitally important component in the future of education. All of the authors believe that digital learning environments will contribute massively to the success of the information society we now inhabit. Each is intent on exploration of the touchstone of "any time, any place" learning where temporal and spatial contexts cease to become barriers to learning, and where the boundaries are blurring between the formal and informal.

And here's a taste of the contents:

Foreword, Howard Rheingold. Introduction, Steve Wheeler. PART I: DIGITAL SUBCULTURES. Learning in Collaborative Spaces: Encouraging a Culture of Sharing, Steve Wheeler. Mobile Subcultures, John Traxler. Podcasting: A Listening Culture, Palitha Edirisingha. The Emergence of Ubiquitous and Pervasive Learning Cultures, Mark A. M. Kramer. PART II: ROLES AND IDENTITIES. Identity in Cyberspace, Hugh Miller and Jill Arnold. Digital Tribes, Virtual Clans, Steve Wheeler. Gaming and the Network Generation, Nicola Whitton. Creating an Online Course Generational Community, Leon James. The Social Impact of Personal Learning Environments, Graham Attwell. PART III: CYBER PERSPECTIVES. Emerging Online Practices: An Endo-Aesthetic Approach to E-tutoring and E-learning, Viv Tucker. Cyberculture and Poststructural Approaches, Ken Gale. Cyborg Theory and Learning, Vasi van Deventer. Transfer Through Learning Flexibility and Hypertextuality, Gorg Mallia. PART IV: NARRATIVES AND CASE STUDIES. Cybercrime in Society, Steven Furnell. Language Evolution in Txting Environments, Tim Shortis. The Cultural Impact of E-learning and Intranets on Corporate Employees, David Guralnick and Deb Larson. Imagined Worlds, Emerging Cultures, Steve Wheeler and Helen Keegan. Author Biographies. Index.

...Connected Cultures

This is the fourth and final part of the Introduction for the forthcoming book 'Connected Minds, Emerging Cultures', which will be published later this year. It is an edited volume with contributions from a number of leading practitioners and thinkers in the field. The Foreword is by Howard Rheingold.

In the final section of this volume, Part 4, we present four case studies drawn from contrasting training and learning cultures, examining the cultures of corporate e-learning, cybercriminality, language evolution and social networking.

David Guralnick and Deb Larson represent the corporate training sector view in chapter 14. They write from the perspective of the company employee and explore the cultural basis of corporate e-learning. Guralnick and Larson describe the current state of employee cyberculture and propose that companies would be far better off using a strategic design approach to e-learning and corporate intranets, one based on helping employees and engaging them in their work. By doing so, companies will be able to integrate technology into employees' work lives in a way that improves their performance and boosts their morale and commitment.

Steven Furnell’s chapter ‘Cybercrime in Society’ presents a disturbing account of the current risks and threats to e-learners, and society in general from a number of criminal activities, including malware (viruses), hacking, and identity theft. There is a suggestion throughout that a criminal culture exists alongside other cultures within online life, waiting for the opportunity to transgress by exploiting network weaknesses. Through this chapter, Furnell provides a timely wake-up call for any user of the Internet who believes themselves to be safe, and suggests ways in which we can all protect ourselves from the more unsavoury elements of the online culture.

The penultimate chapter by Tim Shortis offers an explanatory framework for the re-spellings associated with new technology text formats such as email, internet chat, SMS text messaging and instant messaging. He considers some of the features and patterns of British adolescents’ uses of such writing and technology enabled semiotics. Shortis argues that technology has encouraged an extended set of orthographies which users draw upon to inflect their purposes and project their identities. He holds that such re-spelling is not a new phenomenon. Shortis goes on to consider the contextual pressures which act on users’ choices and argues that technology has re-regulated what counts as spelling, which challenges the official educational discourses of literacy, particularly where they apply to orthography.

The final chapter in this volume is entitled ‘Imagined Worlds, Emerging Cultures’. It was written as a collaborative project between Steve Wheeler and Helen Keegan who used Google docs to write together across the distance. In this chapter they present perspectives on cyber cultures as ‘imagined worlds’ in education and focus on how emerging online social spaces impact upon individual perceptions and practices. Wheeler and Keegan pay particular attention to the social networking and multi-user virtual environment cultures, where imagination is unleashed, but where friendship can be superficial. They focus upon old and new media cultures and the shift in perception over issues such as ownership, intellectual property, copyright, personal identity and privacy. The chapter examines cultural values such as privacy, identity and ownership and highlight two 'digital clan' cultures – FaceBookers and Flickrites. They analyse some similarities and differences in an attempt to explore how tribal cultures develop around and through imagined worlds.

Such a spectrum of perspectives on cyberculture must hold something for everyone. It is our hope that readers will find the ideas contained within the book challenging and inspiring. Ultimately, we hope that teachers and lecturers and indeed all those involved in education will be able to take at least some of these ideas and apply them to their own professional practice. The result, we trust, will be a better understanding of the practices and processes that are inherent in online life, and that this better understanding will ultimately encourage better teaching and learning.