Rise of the digital information age

In 2002, digital data storage surpassed non-digital for the first time. By 2007, 94 percent of all information on the planet was in digital form. These were among the conclusions of researchers at the University of Southern California who tried to quantify the amount of data in the world.

Tweeting teens can handle public life | Alice Marwick and Danah Boyd | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

What all this means is that “public or private” is more complicated than it seems. Twitter and its ilk aren’t going away, and the answer to responsible use isn’t to shut teens out of public life. Many teens are indeed more visible today than ever before, but, through experience, they’re also developing skills to manage privacy in public. What matters is not whether or not teens are speaking in public, but how we support them as they try to learn how to responsibly navigate the networked public spaces that are central to contemporary life.

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons

—Worth reading and thinking about.

The sheer quantity of information now permeating our environment is astounding, but more importantly, networked digital information is also qualitatively different than information in other forms. It has the potential to be created, managed, read, critiqued, and organized very differently than information on paper and to take forms that we have not yet even imagined. To understand the true potentials of this “information revolution” on higher education, we need to look beyond the framework of “information.”