Category Archives: Uncategorized

pasta and vinegar reports on the uselessness of robotic pets.

Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning reports on a virtual version of The Milgram Experiment.

This conference would be of your interest since it is going to be held in Vancouver, the deadline is too soon though.

Internet Researcher 8.0: Let’s play
October 17 – 20, 2007

The annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers is one of the premier opportunities for scholars and researchers of all things Internet, as well as related new media technologies and practices. It is a forum to meet, present research, network and share ideas in a cooperative, multidisciplinary environment.

Let’s Play, the 8th annual Internet Research meeting, will be held this October in Vancouver, Canada.

for more information… 

Does anyone else think that this came out of nowhere?

In the face of techno-doomsday punditry, Sherry Turkle has long been a proponent of the positive. In her books, “The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit” and “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet,” Turkle has explored the relationship between human and machine and found much to ponder and even praise.

But now the director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self has a confession: “I have finally met technology that upsets and concerns me.”

For more information, check out the MIT news office report (which mentions AIBO) and Dr. Turkle’s article, A Nascent Robotics Culture: New Complicities for Companionship.

From International Herald Tribune:

Life and love in the age of artificial intelligence

Marvin Minsky, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known for feats that range from inventing the ultrahigh-resolution confocal microscope to helping found the field of artificial intelligence, which aims to create computers that mimic the human mind.

After 20 years of publishing silence, he has just come out with a new book. Called “The Emotion Machine,” it argues that, contrary to popular conception, emotions aren’t distinct from rational thought; rather, they are simply another way of thinking, one that computers could perform. He spoke with Carey Goldberg, a reporter for the Boston Globe.

CENTRE FOR WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES

2006 LECTURE SERIES
presents:
Wednesday, Nov 15, 2006 12:00 pm
Centre for Women’s and Gender Studies
1896 East Mall

Mary Bryson
Associate Professor and Director, Graduate Programs
ECPS, Faculty of Education, UBC

When Jill Jacks In…: Homing Devices, Mobility, and Un/Belongings

This talk features research that counters and complicates decontextualized, celebratory accounts of queer subjects and cyberspace and situates media practices in the quotidian locations of everyday life. The author explores the significance of communicative media for queer women, with a particular focus on the negotiation of complex identifications, communities, social networks, and knowledge practices. Arguments concerning queer virtualities attend to: (im)mobilities across multiple offline and online contexts, complex geographies of un/belonging, a paradoxical relation of intense suturing to, and disavowal of, mediation, as well as the problematic of a politics of recognition, and of visibility, at work in all sites of subjectification and sociality.

BIOGRAPHY:

Mary Bryson is Associate Professor and Director, Graduate Programs, ECPS, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. Her primary interest is in sociocultural scholarship concerning technology, equity, and pedagogically transgressive uses of digital tools. Mary has numerous publications on theoretical treatments of gender and technology, queer theory, and equity in education, including “Radical Inventions” (SUNY Press). In 2000, Bryson was a recipient of the Canadian Pioneer in New Technologies and Media award. Mary’s current SSHRC research, Queer Women on the Net, is focused on new media, identity, and discursive
employments of network formation, community and agency. (http://www.queerville.ca).

Daniel Lyons from Forbes weighs in on GPLv3 in this article. The article also includes colorful descriptions of Stallman, such as:

But then, Richard Stallman rarely is pragmatic–and in some ways he is downright bizarre. He is corpulent and slovenly, with long, scraggly hair, strands of which he has been known to pluck out and toss into a bowl of soup he is eating.

http://www.nmc.org/events/2006fall_online_conf/index.shtml
This online conference is informed by the MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning, a two-year project in which the NMC is helping to explore the impact of digital media on our lives in a variety of ways, and encouraging dialog among experts, visionaries, and thought leaders from around the globe. This unique event will expand that dialog beyond the project and reach out to an international audience.

The conference is designed to extend the examination of this phenomenon now underway among leading writers and researchers in the MacArthur-sponsored project to a broader audience, and further explore both the positive and negative aspects of technology on learning, social interaction, self-expression, and more.

Digital media, for this event, is interpreted broadly as anything from the traditional uses of the medium for creating and sharing rich content to the explosion of blogs for self expression, and increasingly, real time interpretation of news and breaking events. Also included is the notion of shared content via sites like Flickr, YouTube, and blip.tv, social sites like FaceBook and MySpace, and more powerful content and media search tools.

The October-November 2006 issue of Innovate focuses on the potential of open source software and related trends to transform educational practice.

Continue reading →

Scarfe 310 | 09192006

Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education
                         International Conference

March 26-30, 2007  *  San Antonio, Texas

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

** Submissions Due: Oct. 25, 2006 **

http://site.aace.org/conf/call.htm