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I blog less often here than I used to... This is exclusively UBC-related stuff now. For other items, you are welcome to drop by abject.ca 
In-Flux- Science, Technology and Innovation - The Idea of Innovation"...the project on the idea of innovation looks at innovation as a category and its historical development since Antiquity. It identifies the concepts that have defined novelty through history and that have led to innovation as a central category of modern society." […]
- The Perils of Perfection - Evgeny Morozov"Whenever technology companies complain that our broken world must be fixed, our initial impulse should be to ask: how do we know our world is broken in exactly the same way that Silicon Valley claims it is? What if the engineers are wrong and frustration, inconsistency, forgetting, perhaps even partisanship, are the very features that allow us to morph […]
- An Institution Is Not an Invention: Heretical Thoughts on Mitra « Mike Caulfield"He urges us to destroy a system that he has not made the slightest effort to understand. He sees math added at a particular time in educational history, makes some broad claims about why that might be, and associates the utility of math in the current curriculum with a series of decisions made by thousands of individual administrators nearly two centur […]
- DRM Chair only works 8 times"all the joints of the chair are cast in wax with a piece of nichrome wire embedded in the wax. An Arduino with a small switch keeps track of how many times the chair has been used, while a solenoid taps out how many uses are left in the chair every time the user gets up. When the internal counter reaches zero, a relay sends power through the nichrome w […]
- Thom Yorke: 'If I can't enjoy this now, when do I start?' | Music | The Observer"We were so into the net around the time of Kid A," he says. "Really thought it might be an amazing way of connecting and communicating. And then very quickly we started having meetings where people started talking about what we did as 'content'. They would show us letters from big media companies offering us millions in some mobile […]
- Facebook Is Recycling Your Likes To Promote Stories You've Never Seen To All Your Friends - Forbes"Facebook is now recycling users Likes and using them to promote “Related Posts” in the news feeds of the user’s friends. And one more thing, the users themselves have possibly never seen the story, liked the story or even know that it is being promoted in their name." […]
- Briefing on MOOCs for the Board of Governors"Comparatively few of the nation’s more than 4,000 degree-granting American colleges or universities …. have the personnel, instructional and technological infrastructure, reputation (brand), and available cash to invest in launching their own MOOCs" […]
- Learning Through Digital Media » Crowdmapping the Classroom with UshahidiVia Scott Leslie: "Returning to our opening example of Blackboard’s interaction design, we can see how verisimilitude to the classroom has been deliberately created to maximize the more efficient management academic labor in order to cut administrative costs and cater to the exploding market within higher education for distance learning. Developing a di […]
- UbuWeb Sound - History of Electronic / Electroacoustic MusicThis is from a 62 CD set called "The History of Electroacoustic Music" that was floating around as a torrent, reputedly curated by a Brazilian student. It's sketchy. The torrent vanished and the collection has long been unavailable. […]
- Making sense of things: A PhD by Published WorkJoss Winn "think about hacking as both learning and as labour and tried to articulate this in a couple of blog posts about learning a craft and the university as a hackerspace. At that time, I thought that one intervention that I might make at Lincoln in trying to get students to challenge and re-produce ‘the university’ as an idea as well as a living i […]
- Science, Technology and Innovation - The Idea of Innovation
Monthly Archives: March 2003
The karass, the granfalloon, and emergent technology…
Steven Johnson’s recent column gets off to a great start, citing Vonnegut’s classic novel Cat’s Cradle, in which the author… … explains how the world is divided into two types of social organizations: the karass and the granfalloon. A karass … Continue reading
David Wiley @ UBC
<img src=”http://www.learningobjects.ubc.ca/wiley.jpg” David Wiley was here on Monday — not only giving a great presentation, but also leading a couple of small-group sessions for those of us at UBC struggling to get a grip on what’s involved with storing, reusing … Continue reading
Towards Structured Blogging
Another novel idea from S
Searching the BlogSphere
A quote from the article by Micah Alpern: Until the semantic web arrives the best method we have to understand a users point of view is to examine the RSS feeds they subscribe to. I currently read RSS feeds from … Continue reading
CJLT: Special Issue on Learning Objects
Last fall the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology published a special issue on Learning Objects, edited by Griff Richards. The contents: Forward Jamie Rossiter, Canarie Inc. Editorial: The challenges of the learning object paradigm Griff Richards Organic Aggregation of … Continue reading
Posted in Administrivia, Higher Ed, Objects
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Weblog as developer’s tool and feedback mechanism…
I came across CAREO programmer D’Arcy Norman’s weblog a couple weeks ago. UBC is in the process of installing an instance of the repository, and it’s fascinating to watch how features that get mentioned in conference calls (such as the … Continue reading
Free and Open Source — Part 1: History and Philosophies
A backgrounder on Free and Open Source Movements, another interesting piece of work by George Siemens of elearnspaceblog… Apparently this is setting the stage for Part II next week, a modest proposal for “a similar revolution in the field of … Continue reading
Posted in Emergence
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Weblogs in BC’s Post-Secondary Education Community (?)
I enjoyed getting to know Scott Leslie from C2T2 at last week’s meetings… he seems to be wrestling with a lot of the same issues that I am, and is excited by many of the same possibilities. Even better, he … Continue reading
The Reusability Paradox
Scott points at an interesting online document from Utah State’s Reusability, Collaboration, and Learning Troupe, on an issue troubling lots of folks trying to implement LOs here at UBC, and hones in on the key insight… (emphases mine) The purpose … Continue reading
Wow! RSS and Learning Objects dressed casual
I’ve been pe y mode when we stumble upon a tool that solves some of our problems and can too easily waste our energies championing a tool at the expense of an ideal, be it Blogging, SharePoint, WebCT, or whatever. … Continue reading
