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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: November 2005
A battle of wills, a triumph of the human spirit…
Photo by Kris Krug Seven walk into a room. They won’t leave until a long list of astonishing submissions are vetted, debated, and slotted into something like a schedule. Yes, it’s planning day for the Northern Voice organizing group, hosted … Continue reading
Ready for prime-time players? On the reliability of tagging…
I posted last week about a distributed, tool-agnostic, tag-based framework for online discourse. It’s a key component for one of my looming grant applications — in terms of dollars requested it likely won’t be too big, but in terms of … Continue reading
What’s my fallacy this time? Or, spinning my wheels…
Vancouver got hit with what passes for a blizzard here (the rest of you Canadians can keep your snickering to yourselves) — only a few centimetres, but enough to wreak havoc with unpracticed drivers, and to remind me why Vancouver … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning
2 Comments
Leigh Blackall shows how it’s done…
I was an admirer of Sean FitzGerald and Leigh Blackall’s Knowledge Sharing, so it’s a groove and a gas to see the Flickrfied Networked Learning emerge as a follow-up. The images are amazing, the audio compelling — this raises the … Continue reading
Podcast yummies
Just subscribed to this very promising course on Understanding Computers and the Internet from Harvard. Looks like lots of great stuff that could be useful in a whole lot of online contexts — hey, wasn’t this what learning objects were … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning
2 Comments
Small pieces more loosely joined… musings from the fog
I suppose it’s a form of pathetic fallacy to link the five days of fog we in Vancouver are experiencing with the hazy state of my cognition lately. One of the things I’ve been batting around in my so-called mind … Continue reading
Posted in Emergence
4 Comments
Google Love, Oh Google Love
I’ve noted the odd honours that Google algorithms occasionally bestow on this weblog before. As a Neil Young fan, snagging the top two spots for one of his most famous lyrics is a hit. (Screengrab here.) A fleeting triumph, alas. … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning
1 Comment
Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean They ain’t after you…
I know I can wobble off the rationality rail sometimes, using apocalyptic and politicized language about restrictions placed by The Man on self-publishing spaces. But what to make of James Farmer’s edublogs.org being blocked from schools by some faceless, perhaps … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning
2 Comments
Grabbag o’ goodness for your computer screen…
My buddy, co-conspirator and guru Jeff Miller, who assures me he will be publicly blogging soon, is in Dubrovnik (lucky bastard), giving what I’m sure was a smashing wikified presentation on emerging technologies for the CARNet Users’ Conference (worth checking … Continue reading
Posted in Abject Learning
2 Comments
Special guest post – Rheostatics do the Tarlek
Herb Tarlek is still ready to sell, but only to the Rheostatics. “Frank Bonner appears as his character, Herb Tarlek, from the sit-com WKRP in Cincinatti that ran from 1978 to 1982. Mr. Bonner apparently gets similar requests all the … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
7 Comments
