abject learning

It’s like sausage being made…

Posted on January 26, 2004 by Brian

I’m presenting tomorrow for the NLII Annual Meeting here in San Diego. To the surprise of nobody, I am still well away from finishing my presentation… in fact I am certain I will be working well into the wee hours pecking away on my hotel dial-up connection… and a sleepless night should ensure that manic, completely incoherent state of mind on which I thrive.

If you happen to be in San Diego, and want to see a full-on public meltdown, then the Westin Hotel really is the place to be.

Though things are still a mess, I’m going to post my current working draft, in part because I am building my presentation in a wiki, and if anybody would like to add a link, or offer feedback, I would be grateful for any contribution. Oh, would I ever be grateful…

The presentation is divided into three sections: a) “insurgence”, which highlights the disruptions digital media is making to our practices; “emergence”, which will focus on the development of social networks enabled by personal tools and protocols like RSS; and “convergence” is meant to point to examples of how existing institutions and industries are evolving to take advantage of the properties of online culture.

As of now, only the “insurgence” section is in any kind of proper shape… the other ones will need to be fleshed out and structured. As of now “emergence” and “convergence” are just dumps of some articles I find interesting. If you think I have missed something critical, feel free to add whatever you wish to the site… You can pop in to any section of the presentation wiki, and if you are worried about screwing up my flow (you really shouldn’t be) then you can add whatever you like in the FeedbackLoop.

I present tomorrow at 2:00 PST, so please don’t make changes around that time. Unless you are a total jerk, in which case that would be the perfect moment to mess with my fragile psyche.

Posted in Abject Learning | 1 Comment

Personal publishing as punk rock, redux…

Posted on January 22, 2004 by Brian

The amazing Anne Galloway calls this spirited rant the best story about weblogs she has ever read. That’s enough for me to take a look… I do groove on the perspective:

Weblogs are a party, damn it, and sometimes they’re publications too, or instead, and sometimes they’re diaries, sometimes they’re pieces of art, sometimes they’re tools for self-promotion, sometimes they’re money-maknig ventures, sometimes they’re monuments to ego, sometimes they’re massive wanks, sometimes they’re public services, sometimes they’re dedications of faith, sometimes they’re communities. Always, they are a public face, one chosen and crafted to varying degrees, of the people who write them. They are avatars, masks, or revelations of our deepest selves. They are political or philosophical, merrily inebriate or sententiously sober. Do not listen to those who would tell you what they are not.

These people will destroy your soul. Classification is for insects.

My name’s wonderchicken, and I am a wild party.

It is the rising current of feeling that weblogs aren’t a party (or aren’t journalism, or aren’t a floor wax, or aren’t a dessert topping), that they’re something important and serious, that is seriously harshing my buzz. “Let’s all take this more seriously”, is the message I get from far too many these days, “because then, well, what I do must be Serious Stuff, right? We’re all adults here, aren’t we?”

Stop it, you bastards.

Your $500 blog conferences, your NeckFlex For President consultancies, your sad tawdry whoredances with the old media moronocracy devil, your repetitive linkery to the same tired wanna-be self-declared pundits you met at the last convention, your careful management of a media face that is, in the end, marketable, it makes me want to puke. It kills the spirit of this thing that I was so in love with, and turns it, as avarice and self-regard always does, to shit.

I’m not actually saying stop it, when I say stop it, of course.

LOTS more where that came from, at emptybottle.org

Posted in Webloggia | 1 Comment

Good news, and weird news…

Posted on January 22, 2004 by Brian

After a few days off the net due to some manner of server meltdown, Abject Learning is back, and ready to do some serious damage to our collective intelligence.

The weird part is that my previous postings seem to have melted into a shapeless mass of text. I suspect it’s because the Textile plug-in that had been in use has disappeared.

I kind of like the new amorphous layout of words. It resists the tyrannies of structure and readability — which is in keeping with the philosophy and conceptual work that lies beneath this site.

In any event I’m far too lazy to go through all my postings and rework them unless absolutely required. So apologies for the mess, hopefully it’s a passing fad.

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My essay.

Posted on January 21, 2004 by Brian

This is my essay.

Download file

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Picture test

Posted on January 21, 2004 by Brian

Text underneath

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Workshop test

Posted on January 21, 2004 by Brian

The entry body. The whole one.hlsdhjl;ewrjgp;erjgpoejjvpoerjbproegj[oprt

Posted in tech/tools/standards | 1 Comment

Wikis: Hypertext on Steroids

Posted on January 15, 2004 by Brian

Well. It’s been a long time, been a long time, been a lonely lonely lonely lonely lonely time. I’ve just completed a rough draft of my latest article for UBC’s e-Strategy Newsletter. This month, I try to communicate the concept of wikis to a general audience, most of whom could probably care less:

Wikis: Hypertext on Steroids

Before we get too deep into why wikis are the easiest method of publishing to the web, their amazing power to support collaborative work, and the way they fundamentally reshape the relationship between online author and reader, let

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Big-time publishing fun with metadata…

Posted on December 18, 2003 by Brian

Harper’s Magazine’s website has had a major reworking courtesy of Paul Ford, the mastermind behind Ftrain. A fairly groovy application of XML is outlined in Ford’s announcement:

Harper’s is built upon a Semantic Web framework — albeit a primitive one. I’ve written about what the Semantic Web is, and why it matters before, if you’re curious, so I won’t rehash that here.

Using this framework, Harper’s is divided into two parts: narrative content, like the Features and the Weekly Review, and a taxonomy (or ontology, depending on your preferred term), called Connections.

The taxonomy is a big list of interconnected topics — examples are Dolly the Sheep, Monkeys, and Satan.

The Weekly Review, which is narrative content, is description of the events of the past week, published every Tuesday (see an example).

We cut up the Weekly Review into individual events (6000 of them, going back to the year 2000), and tagged them by date, using XML and a bit of programming. We did the same with the Harper’s Index, except instead of events, we marked things up as “facts.”

Then we added links inside the events and facts to items in the taxonomy. Magic occured: on the Satan page, for instance, is a list of all the events and facts related to Satan, sorted by time. Where do these facts come from? From the Weekly Review and the Index. On the opposite side, as you read the Weekly Review in its narrative form, all of the links in the site’s content take you to timelines. Take a look at a recent Harper’s Index and click around a bit — you’ll see what I mean.

The best way to think about this is as a remix: the taxonomy is an automated remix of the narrative content on the site, except instead of chopping up a ballad to turn it into house music, we’re turning narrative content into an annotated timeline. The content doesn’t change, just the way it’s presented.

Via net.narrative environments.

Posted in XML/RSS | 4 Comments

Lost in delirium…

Posted on December 15, 2003 by Brian

Back from Asia, and though I hope to post some more photos of a most enjoyable trip, the demands of a seriously overloaded inbox are more than my jet-lagged cerebral cortex can handle right now. If you are one of the people waiting on me for something, please accept my apologies along with assurances that the cheque is in the mail…

In the meantime, I leave you with the thought du jour from the Globe and Mail’s Social Studies page:

“During my 87 years, I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.” — Bernard Baruch

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A clueless Canuck in Hong Kong

Posted on December 4, 2003 by Brian

My hotel is in there somewhere

One of the glorious things about UBC is its strong international dimension. I’m humbled and grateful to be representing my university at a set of meetings in Hong Kong for the Universitas 21 Learning Resource Catalogue, which despite is name has been evolving into a community-based collaborative work tool in addition to its metadata repository functions.

This is my first trip to Asia. Initial thoughts: man that flight is loooooooong. I wasn’t able to sleep, and towards the end of the journey I definitely entered into an alternate state of consciousness, fuelled by the novelty of the environment and by a deep, deep sleep deprivation hole. I barely remember arriving and checking in.

Perhaps the weirdest point of the voyage came during a stopover in Seoul, when I was approached by a young woman who asked me, “you’re Brian Lamb, right?” My first thought was that this was a reality TV prank, but it turns out she’s a PhD student in Ed Tech at UBC who had attended a recent weblogging workshop, and was returning to Seoul for the holidays. (Should have recognised her, but like I said, I was seriously trippin’… sorry Juyun!) To make the coincidence weirder, she’s done a fair bit of work with online learning in Korea, and her area of expertise there was learning objects.

Like an idiot, I’m spending most of my first day holed up in my hotel room, working on a few unfinished tasks and preparing for tomorrow’s meeting. But I couldn’t resist taking a walkaround this morning. Hong Kong is a great introduction to the continent for a newbie: overwhelming, yet clean, safe, and with its colonial history a very high level of English usage amongst the population. Damned friendly people too… I had to be careful where I looked at my map, lest I prompt a passerby to stop and ask gently, “you’re not lost are you?”

More photos below.

A city that has everything, in a geographically compact space…

…results in a seriously vertical orientation

One way to keep the streets clean

The main island of Hong Kong has a couple pretty sizable peaks on it, so the downtown is essentially built on the side of a mountain. You can just make out one foggy peak in the distance in the photo above.

The slopes could make walking quite a chore. Thankfully, those clever city planners have installed escalators and walkways to scoot you back uphill. Remember all those futuristic scenarios of moving urban sidewalks? In Hong Kong, in so many ways, the future is now.