"The researchers were surprised by the results. They had expected that the intensive multitaskers would have gained some unique mental advantages from all their on-screen juggling. But that wasn't the case. In fact, the heavy multitaskers weren't even good at multitasking. They were considerably less adept at switching between tasks than the more infrequent multitaskers. "Everything distracts them," observed Clifford Nass, the professor who heads the Stanford lab."

What do you say to an educator or parent who feels that making music remix videos, say, has nothing to do with literacy? In what senses are you describing such forms of expression as literacy practices?

What we do online is something quite different: we curate our private lives for public exposure....

...Jarvis rightly points out is that there is something profoundly selfish in not sharing.

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I read the whole article, saw that it was good, and decided to share it, and only THEN did I discover that it was by none other than Steven Johnson. Figures. :-)

a starting point for five commons...

POSS == Public Open Source Services
... or User Powered Self-sustaining Cloud-based Services of Open Source Software
 
Infrastructure. Tools. Code that runs as a service over the web that is useful.