Tere Vadén

Digital Nominalism. Notes on the Ethics of Information Society in View of the Ontology of the Digital

The commodification of code demands two preconditions: a belief if the existence of code and a system of ownership for the code. An examination of these preconditions is helpful for resisting the further widening of digital divides. The ontological belief in the relatively independent existence of code is dependent on our understanding of what the “digital” is. Here it is claimed that the digital is not a natural kind, but a concept that is relative to our practices of interpretation. An interpretative system that sees code as something that can or should always be owned implies an increase of social control and threatens vital processes of knowledge creation that are necessary for an open and egalitarian information society. The ontological belief in “digital code” thus provides the backdrop for an ethical view of the information society. Consequently, if we see digital code as an interpretative notion (in the nominalist way), the ethical questions appear in a different light.

Free Software Philosophy and Open Source

This article introduces and explains some of the most relevant features of the free software philosophy formulated by Richard M. Stallman in the 1980s. The free software philosophy and the free software movement built on it historically preceded the open source movement by a decade and provided some of the key technological, legal and ideological foundations of the open source movement. Thus, in order to study the ideology of open source and its differences with regard to other modes of software production, it is important to understand the reasoning and the presuppositions included in Stallmans free software philosophy.

Experiences of Wiki use in Finnish companies

The objective of our study was two-fold. The first and most important objective was to gather experiences on the use of wiki software in Finnish companies. The second objective was to study the frequency of the use of wikis among Finlands 50 biggest companies. Twenty answers on wiki use experiences were received, the responses were divided fairly evenly into different sized companies which operate within different branches. The following questions were surveyed: reasons for the introduction of wikis, purposes of use, motivation methods, introduction processes, present purposes of use, integration of wiki applications to other operating systems, experienced problems and advantages, and tailoring of wiki applications.

Fire Next Time: Or Revisioning Higher Education in the Context of Digital Social Creativity.

This article presents an idea of ‘digital social creativity’ as part of social media and examines an approach emphasising openness and experimentation and collaborative learning in the world of information and communication technologies. Wikipedia and similar digital tools provide both challenges to and possibilities for building learning sites in higher education and other forms of education and socialisation that recognise various forms of information and knowledge creation. The dialogical nature of knowledge and the emphasis on social interaction create a tremendous opportunity for education, but at the same time form new hegemonic battlegrounds in terms of various uses of social media.

Open source hardware through volunteer community: a case study of eCars -- now!

The development model of Open Source Software (OSS) has been widely recognized as resilient and productive. Consequently, high hopes have been placed on projects that try to adapt the OSS model into material production, in projects that can be called Open Source Hardware (OSH). While OSS development has received increasing scholarly attention, the research on OSH is still in its early stages. Here, based on a survey done in 2010, we describe the demographic and motivational structure of one OSH community and compare it to OSS communities. The community analysis will be accompanied with a short discussion of what we see as bottlenecks in OSH development, i.e., features that may disable some of the beneficial dynamics of OSS development, and consequently merit further study.

A definition and criticism of cybercommunism

When Žižek (2002b) defines his idea of cybercommunism using an adaptation of the Leninist formula ‘Socialism = free access to internet + the power of the soviets’, he omits the crucial part about electricity. The cybercommunist idea that the information society is more ‘spectral’ and ‘malleable’ than were the previous ‘crudely’ economical societies conceals the question of what types of communities it favours. The political economy of cybercommunism also demands an analysis of the material conditions of cyber-freedom that can be conceptualised, for instance, in terms of levels of decreasing alienation.

Breaking Radical Monopolies: Towards Political Economy of Digital Literacy.

In this article, the authors argue for a leap from a ‘weak’ digital literacy (skills of interpretation and strategies of reception) to strong digital literacy (authorship and autonomous skills and capacities). Strong digital literacy implies politico-structural analysis of the information societies to come. Given the current forms of economic production and corporate markets, the liberating and democratic potential of digital information is counteracted by the concentration of media ownership, as well as by policy, legislation, and the development of propriety forms of technology. The authors apply the concept of radical monopoly in analysing the possibilities of strong digital literacy in two contexts: education and computer software. In these, as in other areas, digital technology promises abundance, but only if the formal vision of the information society in the singular is overcome. This would not only mean interaction and authorship, but breaking the preconfigured bubble of racially monopolised information.

Qualifying Qualia Through the Skyhook Test

If we are to preserve qualia, one possibility is to take the current academic, philosophical, and theoretical notion less seriously and current natural science and some pre-theoretical intuitions about qualia more seriously. Dennett (1997) is instrumental in showing how ideas of the intrinsicalness and privacy of qualia are misguided and those of ineffability and immediacy misinterpreted. However, by combining ideas of non-mechanicalness used in contemporary natural science with the pre-theoretical idea that qualia are special because they are unique, we get a notion of qualia that is acceptable to naturalistic philosophy. The notion of unique qualia is not opposed to the idea that some of the characterizations of qualia have to be qualified. It is the folk-philosophical, academic, notions of theoreticity and conceptuality that have to be modified.

Tepidity of the Majority and Participatory Creativity

Tere Vaden: It seems to me that the possibilities of participating are real, and that they are having an effect. Just think of something like Wikipedia. For Scandinavians with a good tradition of libraries Wikipedia is easily less impressive than it should be. But this really is the first free encyclopedia. Thousands of people daily contribute to a common epistemological project; this is bound to have effects similar to or on the scale of the “scientific revolution” some centuries back.

Book Review: Using Technology Wisely: The Keys to Success in Schools, the Uses of Blogs, a New Literacies Sampler

In Using Technology Wisely, Harold Wenglinsky sets out to study the worth or value of digital technology in education. He begins by discussing two opposing views of pedagogy: a didactic view (a traditional pedagogical approach whereby the teacher is viewed as ‘the sage on the stage’ transferring all knowledge to the students), and a constructivist view (a pedagogical approach whereby the teacher is viewed as ‘a guide on the side’ providing opportunities to facilitate the construction of knowledge in the student). Wenglinsky uses qualitative research findings to exemplify both approaches to technology use (i.e. didactic versus constructivist). Wenglinsky comes down squarely on the constructivists’ side, and this orientation frames the remainder of his analyses. Wenglinsky’s view of the constructivist approach to teaching revolves around the fact that learning is not linear, as viewed by practitioners of the didactic pedagogical approach (i.e. first x must be learned before y can be learned). That is, learning is a dynamic process whereby the learner is encouraged to engage in the analysis and synthesis of knowledge. Teachers practising a constructivist pedagogy are encouraged to customise their teaching in order to facilitate – rather than direct – students’ construction of knowledge. As part of this process, teachers ‘reframe’ concepts to assist each learner to see things from different perspectives in the search for knowledge. In contrast, within a didactic pedagogical approach, teachers merely present the ‘truth’ to students and count that as ‘learning’. If a learner ‘doesn’t get it’, the teacher merely repeats the facts until they are learned. In short, the student is not active in his/her learning. Wenglinsky emphasises that constructivist pedagogy acknowledges how students should think abstractly while at the same time be exposed to concrete examples from various relevant contexts. From this perspective, all learners will gain knowledge once the concept is ‘framed’ in a manner that is understood by each individual learner. It is up to the teacher to utilise the necessary tools (e.g. organise field trips, conduct experiments, create a slide show on computers, etc.) and provide the necessary contexts within which to solidify concepts being taught. In short, where the didactic approach merely hands facts and established ideas to students, the constructivist approach allows the students to do most of the work – mistakes included – in order to meet with success and go beyond basic understanding of concepts. The focus of the book centres on three key areas: • Issues to do with digital technology in the school system (primarily within the USA) • The manner in which technology is used by teachers in the classroom (pedagogy) • The subsequent results of student learning with the technology in schools