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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: August 2005
“Who knows, perhaps this could become a party game.”
I’ve been letting a lot of noteworthy stuff slide this week, but this post on gaming by Bryan Alexander is too juicy to pass up. He’s roused to indignation by a dismissive essay by Christine Rosen in the New Atlantis, … Continue reading
Posted in Emergence
2 Comments
Get me a brain transfusion, STAT!
In the course of one of those meetings that makes me feel so damn lucky to be working at a university, I got turned on to txtkit. Checking out the site itself induced a case of cognitive vertigo, spinning more … Continue reading
Posted in Textuality
6 Comments
If you don’t build it, they’ll build their own…
I was pleasantly surprised when a friend sent me a link to a Livejournal site run by UBC students. Websnob that I am, I’ve never spent much time with Livejournal, but judging by the activity on the site it’s more … Continue reading
Posted in Webloggia
4 Comments
Could this be possible? A successful weblog migration and upgrade.
I’m sure that we’ll be finding some small bugs over the next week or so, but based on my initial pass the transition to new system and server seems to have gone better than I could have hoped. A long, … Continue reading
Server Upgrade (and Service Interruption) for Webloggers@UBC
This post is for people who use the Weblogs@UBC service. Hello again, UBC bloggers! This is a reminder for the upgrade to MT3.1 scheduled on August 19th/20th. Starting at 10pm PST on Friday, Aug. 19th, you will NOT be able … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning, Administrivia, Webloggia
Comments Off
I am not worthy
Some fairly pedestrian posts have prompted some amazing comments. I find myself unable to offer these welcome visitors the appropriate hospitality (in part due to other pressures, mostly because I’m not quite sure how to respond adequately), but I wanted … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning, XML/RSS
2 Comments
A wee bit more on ‘the new digital divide’…
A quick follow-up to yesterday’s meandering post… Jeff McClurken commented that it’s a bit too easy to posit all students as comfortable with social software, when an apparent majority of them are not embracing these technologies. My experience with students … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning, Emergence, Higher Ed, Webloggia
6 Comments
The Conversation
A throwaway line in one of yesterday’s posts (“There’s an unmistakable energy out in the community right now, and I feel sorry for the people in our field who have yet to jack into it”), prompted a couple of comments … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning, Emergence, Higher Ed, tech/tools/standards, Textuality, Webloggia, XML/RSS
5 Comments
Diving back into text technologies
One of the best pieces of personal news I received over the past month was re-appointment as instructor for Text Technologies: The Changing Spaces of Reading and Writing, a course offered as part of UBC’s Master of Educational Technology program. … Continue reading
Posted in Higher Ed, Textuality
3 Comments
Edublog Hero
Gotta give some serious kudos to James Farmer for his stellar work with the edublogs.org project. Open source goodness, community-based support, and an ongoing conversation among educators. It only takes a few seconds to be up and blogging with a … Continue reading
Posted in Webloggia
6 Comments
Brian