Archive for the 'Book' Category

Call for Book Reviewers

Published on October 28, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: .

Common Ground Publishing is seeking distinguished peer reviewers to evaluate book manuscripts submitted to the Technology and Society Book Series.

As part of our commitment to intellectual excellence and a rigorous review process, Common Ground sends book manuscripts that have received initial editorial approval to peer reviewers to further evaluate and provide constructive feedback. The comments and guidance that these reviewers supply is invaluable to our authors and an essential part of the publication process.

Common Ground recognizes the important role of referees by acknowledging book reviewers as members of the Technology and Society Book Series Editorial Review Board for a period of at least one year. The list of members of the Editorial Review Board will be posted on our website. In addition, Common Ground also offers a US$200 voucher for each completed review which meets the standards set out by the Commissioning Editor at the commencement of assignment. Vouchers may be used in the Common Ground Bookstore or for registration at one of our international conferences.

If you would like to referee book manuscripts submitted to Technology and Society please email:

  1. a brief description of your professional credentials
  2. a list of your areas of interest and expertise
  3. a copy of your CV with current contact details

If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for manuscripts within your purview, we will contact you.

Pedagogy Leads Technology

Published on October 22, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Pedagogy Leads Technology: Online Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: New Technologies, New Pedagogies edited by Arianne Jennifer Rourke and Kathryn Sara Coleman is now available as part of the Technology and Society series.

This book highlights research and practice where pedagogy effectively utilises as well as leads the technology in teaching, learning and assessment in higher education. The examples provided, not only highlight how teaching practice can become research, an important focus for 21st century academics, but also provides exemplary case studies and theoretical perspectives on the importance of a student-centred approach to adopting technology for teaching and learning.

This book presents leading research from around the world, grouped into the following four themes:

  1. Interactive Technologies for Learning
  2. Learning through Online Communities
  3. Online Collaborative Learning
  4. Reflecting on Reflective Practice

 

Technology Community Member Marcus Breen Reviewed in tripleC

Published on October 14, 2011 in Book, News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Christian Fuchs, tripleC

Marcus Breen’s book Uprising. The Internet’s unintended consequences is about proletarianization in the age of the Internet. Cultural Studies, Political Economy and Critical Theory inform Breen’s approach. His book is a work in the field of Critical Media and Communication Studies. Breen draws on the approaches of thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Edward P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Oskar Negt & Alexander Kluge, Thorstein Veblen, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or Raymond Williams.

In chapters 1 and 2, the notion of proletarianization is explained and defined in a cultural context. Breen connects the concept of proletarians to the subaltern, the underclass, the lack of means of subsistence, irrationality, the abject and transgressive knowledge on the Internet. Internet proletarians are consequence of the negative dialectic of the Enlightenment in the age of the Internet. Due to the Internet, proletarian subculture would today become more visible. The context of proletarianization today would be neoliberal capitalism.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 explain that the (up)rising of the underclass on the Internet is an unintended consequence of capitalism and the Internet. This development is the other, negative side and consequence of bourgeois life in capitalist society. Chapter 6 connects Internet proletarianization to the concepts of rationality and irrationality. The notion of unbounded irrationality is introduced. Chapter 7 discusses US IT policy as context of proletarianization.

Chapters 8 and 9 outline specific examples of Internet proletarianization – online pornography and online Jihadism. Political studies of the Internet tend to focus on movements that nicely fit into the liberal worldview, that researchers positively identify with and that fit the picture of a liberal civil society and a pluralistic public sphere. Typical examples are the ecological movement, the movement for democratic globalization, the feminist movement, the human rights movement, or the anti-war movement. The darker side of movements, like fascist movements’ or religious fundamentalists’ use of the Internet, has been much less analyzed by Internet Research, which tells us more about the state of Internet Research than about the state of society.  One of the reasons might be that these groups do not allow easy identification for liberals. Ignoring them allows to optimistically focus on stressing the participatory and democratic potentials of the Internet and absolves Internet researcher of having to think about alternatives to capitalism.  Breen’s two examples are well chosen because they give attention to phenomena that have thusfar not been much studied.

To Read More…

Learn More About Uprising by Marcus Breen

Pedagogy Leads Technology: Online Learning and Teaching in Higher Education

Published on September 20, 2011 in Book, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

 

Pedagogy Leads Technology: Online Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: New Technologies, New Pedagogies edited by Arianne Jennifer Rourke and Kathryn Sara Coleman is now available as part of the Technology and Society series.

This book highlights research and practice where pedagogy effectively utilises as well as leads the technology in teaching, learning and assessment in higher education. The examples provided, not only highlight how teaching practice can become research, an important focus for 21st century academics, but also provides exemplary case studies and theoretical perspectives on the importance of a student-centred approach to adopting technology for teaching and learning.

This book presents leading research from around the world, grouped into the following four themes:

  1. Interactive Technologies for Learning
    Deborah West; Linda E. Robinson, Robert D. Hannafin & David R. Parker; Peter Mark Jansson; Kate Thomson, Boon-Kiang Tan & Christopher Brook.
  2. Learning through Online Communities
    Carmen Pérez Basanta; Mark Mabrito; Marlo Ransdell; Trevor Nesbit.
  3. Online Collaborative Learning
    Jason Black & Lois W. Hawkes; Arianne Rourke & Kathryn Coleman; James A West.
  4. Reflecting on Reflective Practice
    Arianne Rourke & Kathryn Coleman.

 

Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences

Published on July 17, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences by Marcus Breen is now available from the Technology and Society series.

The Internet has transformed the social relations that were once managed by the powers that be. As a rapidly maturing communications technology, the Internet has brought people together even while it has reinforced privatism. The desktop computer, the laptop, the cellular and mobile phone, the Global Positoning System, the pilotless drone aircraft, video games and Government documents courtesy of Wikileaks, all are connected on the network of networks. Together these converged elements of a global socio-technical system offer wonderful possibilities for human emancipation, even while those ideas collide with established ideas of civility and decency.

Utilizing a transdisciplinary approach, Uprising examines the way transgressive knowledge circulates in places and spaces where communication regulation has been removed. In doing so, the book offers a new approach to proletarianization. It is based on the theory that the deregulation of the digital infrastructure allows transgressive knowledge to be mobilized in ways that remake political economy. The current moment sees the Internet opening up questions about social organization, power and democracy. The unintended consequences that are attached to this analysis of the Internet are discussed in research about pornography and jihad. These case studies show how proletarianization can be used to understand the Internet, culture and society.

Marcus Breen is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, Boston.

Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences

Published on June 17, 2011 in Book, Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences by Marcus Breen is now available from the Technology and Society imprint.

The Internet has transformed the social relations that were once managed by the powers that be. As a rapidly maturing communications technology, the Internet has brought people together even while it has reinforced privatism. The desktop computer, the laptop, the cellular and mobile phone, the Global Positoning System, the pilotless drone aircraft, video games and Government documents courtesy of Wikileaks, all are connected on the network of networks. Together these converged elements of a global socio-technical system offer wonderful possibilities for human emancipation, even while those ideas collide with established ideas of civility and decency.

Utilizing a transdisciplinary approach, Uprising examines the way transgressive knowledge circulates in places and spaces where communication regulation has been removed. In doing so, the book offers a new approach to proletarianization. It is based on the theory that the deregulation of the digital infrastructure allows transgressive knowledge to be mobilized in ways that remake political economy. The current moment sees the Internet opening up questions about social organization, power and democracy. The unintended consequences that are attached to this analysis of the Internet are discussed in research about pornography and jihad. These case studies show how proletarianization can be used to understand the Internet, culture and society.

Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences

Published on May 25, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences by Marcus Breen is now available from the Technology and Society imprint.

The Internet has transformed the social relations that were once managed by the powers that be. As a rapidly maturing communications technology, the Internet has brought people together even while it has reinforced privatism. The desktop computer, the laptop, the cellular and mobile phone, the Global Positoning System, the pilotless drone aircraft, video games and Government documents courtesy of Wikileaks, all are connected on the network of networks. Together these converged elements of a global socio-technical system offer wonderful possibilities for human emancipation, even while those ideas collide with established ideas of civility and decency.

Utilizing a transdisciplinary approach, Uprising examines the way transgressive knowledge circulates in places and spaces where communication regulation has been removed. In doing so, the book offers a new approach to proletarianization. It is based on the theory that the deregulation of the digital infrastructure allows transgressive knowledge to be mobilized in ways that remake political economy. The current moment sees the Internet opening up questions about social organization, power and democracy. The unintended consequences that are attached to this analysis of the Internet are discussed in research about pornography and jihad. These case studies show how proletarianization can be used to understand the Internet, culture and society.

Solar Power from the Moon

Published on May 18, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Reaction to the LUNA RING among space experts whom The Futurist contacted was optimism tempered by skepticism. This article by Patrick Tucker included feedback from John Hickman:

John Hickman, a member of the board of advisors of the MarsDrive project and author of Reopening the Space Frontier (Common Ground Publishing, 2010), is known as a space-policy realist. He’s argued that the problem with most super-large space projects is that they require too much from potential investors: too much up-front capital, too much patience, and too much faith.

“If attracting capital for projects using proven technologies like communications satellites remains difficult, imagine the difficulty of attracting sufficient capital to construct a mining facility on the Moon or terraforming Mars or Venus,” he wrote in his 1999 essay, “The Political Economy of Very Large Space Projects,” a critical analysis of why mega-scale space schemes almost never get off the ground.

Hickman says that the LUNA RING boasts a few advantages over other similar projects. It could provide returns within a reasonable time frame, but would probably make for a better investment if ownership of lunar real estate were part of the deal. He suggests that Shimizu obtain legal title to the land on which it plans to build. “Unfortunately, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty made the Moon an international commons. That means that Shimizu would be constructing the LUNA RING on land ‘owned’ by all of the states on Earth,” he wrote in an email. But Japan could withdraw from the treaty and “claim the lunar equator as its sovereign national territory.”

Hickman is curious about what funding streams the company may draw upon but thinks the LUNA RING would probably need a large public investment to be economically viable.

Read the complete article, Solar Power from the Moon by Patrick Tucker here.

Review: Reopening the Space Frontier

Published on March 4, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

John Faust in The Space Review:

One of the most pervasive—and disappointing—metaphors associated with space exploration is that of the frontier. It’s pervasive in that it’s hard to escape the concept, at least in the United States, that space is a frontier to be pioneered, an idea that has found root in everything from the names of organizations (the Space Frontier Foundation) to one of the most famous opening lines of a television show (“Space: the final frontier” of Star Trek fame). Even this publication references that “final frontier” meme when it comes to spaceflight. But the concept of space as a frontier, final or otherwise, is also disappointing to many in that, nearly 50 years after the first humans ventured into space, we have done little to open that frontier as a place where people can live and work. After a burst of activity in the early years of the Space Age, culminating with the Apollo lunar landings, human activity in space has been literally going in circles, confined to Earth orbit, as proposals for exploration beyond have time and again fallen by the wayside. Why that might be the case, and what can be done to change is, is the subject of a provocative new book by John Hickman, Reopening the Space Frontier.

Read the full review here.

Reopening the Space Frontier by John Hickman is now available from theTechnology and Society imprint.

Reopening the Space Frontier

Published on November 25, 2010 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Reopening the Space Frontier by John Hickman is now available from theTechnology and Society imprint.

Reopening the Space Frontier escapes the usual arc of space policy analysis focused on technological choice and instead explains the international legal and political economic barriers to the renewed exploration, development and settlement of celestial bodies like the Moon and Mars. The science and engineering of the mid-twentieth century were sufficient for human landings on the Moon. Yet today the human adventure in space is limited to visits by small numbers of astronauts to a single space station in Earth orbit. As the author explains, using the institutions that opened terrestrial geographic frontiers in the past provides the effective means for reopening the space frontier. Along the way he demolishes the wishful thinking that has shackled popular thinking about space policy. International competition rather than international cooperation motivated states to open terrestrial frontiers for centuries, and that motivation will have to be harnessed again for our species to permanently occupy other worlds of the solar system.