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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- Shapeways"Ideas made real with 3D printing." […]
- Yelling it like it is | Alchemical MusingsHer interviews with [Eben Moglen] should have started with these talks as a baseline, not require him to rehash privacy 101 for the umpteenth time. […]
- Soundmachines"Three units, which are resembling standard record players, translate concentric visual patterns into control signals for further processing in any music software. The rotation of the discs, each holding three tracks, can be synced to a sequencer." […]
- Apache considered harmfulGitHub is truly a system of anarchism, in the most classic sense of the term. It is a system of communication and contribution that is without a central organization or institution of governance. Sure, it is hosted, developed, and maintained by someone but they do not enforce any set of governance or process over the users of the system. […]
- Should you boycott academic publishers?"Elsevier has committed too many sins to give an exhaustive list: they have created fake academic journals so that pharmaceutical corporations could claim that certain facts appeared in a journal, they have sponsored evil regulations, and they have restrictive views on what constitutes fair use. Unbelievably, they were also involved in arms trade. They […]
- Why Education Publishing Is Big Business"The biggest publishers in the world today are education publishers." […]
- Scripting News: Why apps are not the future"The great thing about the web is linking. I don't care how ugly it looks and how pretty your app is, if I can't link in and out of your world, it's not even close to a replacement for the web. It would be as silly as saying that you don't need oceans because you have a bathtub. How nice your bathtub is. Try building a continent arou […]
- "Commons in a Box" & the Importance of Open Academic Networks"...open source versus proprietary technology isn't the only thing at stake. Nor is it simply that Commons in a Box supports an open ecosystem versus a "walled garden." It is that latter piece that seems particularly noteworthy, however, as the project is part of a larger movement on campuses to open up academic scholarship itself -- not […]
- Access? Copyright! | Ariel Katz" The already dire situation of Canada’s school libraries should serve as a good reminder. Moreover, in post-secondary education, it has been well documented that the consolidation of the academic publishing industry over the last few decades and the licensing practices of the major commercial academic publishers has led to an escalation in the price of […]
- No Copyright Intended"For most people, sharing and remixing with attribution and no commercial intent is instinctually a-okay." […]
- Shapeways
Monthly Archives: May 2005
We interrupt this pleasant silence to make a series of tiresome excuses…
My silence is not indicative of a lack of interest in the weblog world… nah, there’s much going on worthy of attention, and some of my favorite bloggers have been on fire lately. But ever since I got back from … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning
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Tags (and Northern Voice) get some love from a Hogtown rag
How cool… Vancouver-based supergenius Alexandra Samuel (I gotta meet this person!) has published a piece intended to render the “tagging phenomenon both accessible and meaningful to a general audience” in one of Canada’s biggest newspapers (free registration may be required). … Continue reading
Posted in Textuality
1 Comment
Feedback loop: a podcast resource weblog…
As a cumulative assessment project for one of my Office’s co-op work-placement students, I asked Frank Pan to develop a weblog/resource to support personal audio production and podcasting. As usual, I was pretty vague in my instructions to him (in … Continue reading
Posted in Webloggia
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No reflection please…
I’ve been back for four days now, and I’m still enjoying the rush I got attending the Faculty Academy at the University of Mary Washington. I need to post something to at least briefly capture some of the observations and … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning
3 Comments
On the futility of (me) conference blogging…
[Reporting semi-live from the UMW Faculty Academy...] I am a terrible conference blogger. But textual silence is not indicative of a lack of interest on my part… quite the opposite. I’ve been having a blast through most of the sessions, … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning
3 Comments
They blew my mind at the In-N-Out
My great deficiency as a weblogger is that I never write the posts I really want to write. If I feel genuinely engaged with a topic, I defer the actual writing of it endlessly — mulling it over, adding elements, … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning
7 Comments
Linkchecking Software – Yes, it’s another cry for help…
I’m working with a unit on campus who have some stimulating challenges ahead of them. UBC’s Careers Online is [one of] the university’s most visited website[s] (about 1,000 distinct visits per day from students). Most of the visitors who log … Continue reading
Posted in tech/tools/standards
5 Comments
They report, they don’t always decide
I’m becoming increasingly fascinated by the friction points between weblogs and traditional journalism. This commentary by the NPR Ombudsman points to a recent episode: NPR’s Vicky O’Hara reported on a Defense Department document, which exonerated U.S. military personnel [in the … Continue reading
Posted in Textuality
2 Comments
What do universities need to support weblogs?
A rare and welcome victory on the professional front. A project proposal submitted with partners at BCIT and UVic Distance Ed was awarded with significant funding from BCCampus’ Online Program Development Fund. (We should also have a private sector partner … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning, Webloggia, wikis
10 Comments
Brian