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The Facebook Eye. Like photography before it, social media changes the way we perceive the world Emile Zola famously stated back in 1901, "In my view, you cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it.

The Facebook Eye

" Today, some make a similar joke: "it did not happen unless it is posted on Facebook. " For those who use Facebook, whose friends are on the site and logging in many times a day, we have come to experience the world differently. We are increasingly aware of how our lives will look as a Facebook photo, status update or check-in. As I type this in a coffee shop, I can "check-in" on Foursquare, I can "tweet" a funny one-liner overheard from the table next to me and I can take an 'interesting' photo of the perfectly-formed foam on top of my cappuccino. Simply, I have been trained to see the world in terms of what I can post to the Internet. Atlantic editor Alexis Madrigal wrote about how technology changes consciousness. Generation Why? by Zadie Smith. The Social Network a film directed by David Fincher, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier Knopf, 209 pp., $24.95 How long is a generation these days?

Generation Why? by Zadie Smith

At the time, though, I felt distant from Zuckerberg and all the kids at Harvard. In The Social Network Generation Facebook gets a movie almost worthy of them, and this fact, being so unexpected, makes the film feel more delightful than it probably, objectively, is. But something is not right with this young man: his eye contact is patchy; he doesn’t seem to understand common turns of phrase or ambiguities of language; he is literal to the point of offense, pedantic to the point of aggression.

ERICA: I have to go study. MARK: You don’t have to study. ERICA: How do you know I don’t have to study?! MARK: Because you go to B.U.! Simply put, he is a computer nerd, a social “autistic”: a type as recognizable to Fincher’s audience as the cynical newshound was to Howard Hawks’s. With rucksack, naturally. Connected Learning: A New Research-Driven Initiative. Connected Learning, a new research-driven initiative, was introduced at the Digital Media and Learning Conference 2012.

Connected Learning: A New Research-Driven Initiative

We see a growing gap between the learning mediums with which young people engage in-school and out-of-school. New social media enables young people to have greater choice and autonomy in pursuing their interests—whether academic, creative, or social—in domains outside of formal learning institutions. While engagement with culture and knowledge outside the classroom has changed markedly in the past decade, schools have been slower to adapt to digital and networked media. This gap between the more engaging social learning environments young people encounter outside of school, and the top-down and standardized curriculum that they encounter in most classrooms, is the source of a troubling and growing generation gap that is leading to academic disengagement for many young people.

The historical roots for this current research agenda is grounded in two pieces of work: