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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: December 2007
No good options, and I got no good advice…
RIP Eduspaces, some good commentary from Tony Hirst, Brian Kelly and Graham Attwell (and as usual from Stephen Downes), and I can’t add too much. It’s always dangerous to take a single instance and extrapolate too broadly, every story has … Continue reading
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You didn’t ask for more, in fact you asked for less, but here’s yet another piece of uninformed music industry bloggery…
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } DRM- it makes things inaccessable., originally uploaded by vrogy. I’ve recently namechecked both the Lefsetz Letter … Continue reading
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The obligatory Northern Voice planning day post
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } 14122007592, originally uploaded by roland. It might be my favorite meeting of the year. Not that … Continue reading
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Sound is touch at a distance
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } 04-4-06 Radio Waves to the moon…., originally uploaded by Picture_taking_fool. I can’t believe I’ve yet to … Continue reading
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Convenience, Hubris, Content, Context
There are two reasons I’ve been writing more than usual about music lately. One, I’m trying to follow my own advice to fledgling bloggers, which is to write about the stuff that you are genuinely most interested in, and not … Continue reading
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Adventures in euphemism
The recent normalization of torture in our public discourse has offered up some wonderful perversions of the language, as our journalists, perhaps out of a sense of propriety and good manners, can’t quite bring themselves to use the “T” word. … Continue reading
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Everything new is old again
levon helm in central park, originally uploaded by daniel arnold!. One of things I find most valuable and satisfying about blogging is throwing together some half-baked thoughts on whatever is on my mind, and then watching as people come in … Continue reading
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Like a lead balloon…
There was a time in my life when the prospect of Led Zeppelin reuniting would have been a ticket to rock and roll heaven for me, and while that time has past I hope for everyone concerned that tonight’s show … Continue reading
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Facebook privacy basics…
[Image above taken from one of many misguided initiatives as social networking enters its cash-in cycle...] Nothing I intend to post here will be news to people who have been following the Facebook privacy saga. Facebook’s behaviour could be described … Continue reading
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Because I love you, abject reader…
…here’s some tunage from a group that effortlessly sounds both traditional and cutting-edge all at once, Big Blood: Video via echoplanar productions. More on Big Blood via Scott Williams on the WFMU blog. The post also includes two tracks that … Continue reading
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