Blogs
Cnn.com posted an interesting item today about the increasing use of twitter and smartphones in farming. Aside from using the phones to monitor weather, pesticide application, soil moisture, etc. (with an increasing number of apps in the works; cool!), what is particularly exciting to me are the implications this has for the local/sustainable food movements:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/02/twitter.farmer/index.html
Beth Canter, the social media networking consultant, is a blogger who not only writes smart things but has a talent for finding other smart bloggers and reblogging them. What I love about her work (including the re-work) is that she is a pro. As in p-r-o. She has experience and so she doesn't just invent things (i.e. (i.e. the wheel) and assume that no one else has, no one else knows what it will do, and no one else knows how it works. No, as with all forms of media, new media also operate by certain kinds of tacit community rules, expectations, and norms. And people like Beth have huge first-hand experience assessing those needs. She doesn't just make it up. This is a breath of fresh air in the world of new media insights, which come fast and furious and often don't hold any water or have any traction or whatever metaphor you want to use: they just don't do it.
One reason I was abashed when the plagiarism accusations (justified, owned, apologized for, and, I hope, corrected) came out about Chris Anderson's new book FREE is that I find him terrifically interesting and unusually thoughtful, even if his contribution is chiefly in raising timely questions, not answering them. Fortunately, his unacknowledged borrowings from Wikipedia have not swamped the fact that we all urgently want a conversation on what is or isn't free and whether being free is or isn't good for us.
Emily Thompson is one of the best thinkers out there on how we hear and the relationship between aurality and culture. Her lecture on "The Soundscape of Modernity" is now available on video from MIT Press which also published her book, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933.
"Our goal is to ensure that they leave with a better sense that they
can make things when they leave as when they arrived . . .and kids
learn that all things go awry, and every step in a project is closer to
success or gleeful calamity. . . . Failures are celebrated and
analyzed." --Gever Tulley, at TED.
All education should be like this!!! Watch the TED talk by Gever Tulley.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/gever_tulley_s_tinkering_school_in_action.htmlLAWRENCE — The University of Kansas has become the nation’s first public university to adopt an “open access” policy that makes its faculty’s scholarly journal articles available for free online.
The move aligns KU with Harvard and Stanford universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which have similar policies in place.
Scholarly articles — the method by which a professor presents original research results — normally are published in peer-reviewed journals and available only through paid subscriptions. Under the new faculty-initiated policy approved by Chancellor Robert Hemenway, digital copies of all articles produced by the university’s professors will be housed in KU ScholarWorks, an existing digital repository for scholarly work created by KU faculty and staff in 2005. KU ScholarWorks houses more than 4,400 articles submitted in digital formats that assure their long-term preservation.
It was 2002 when David Theo Goldberg and I left a meeting where there was an awful lot of handwringing about the crisis in the humanities and a lot of grousing about how "technology" was destroying the humanities, and said, "Hey! It's the Information Age. This is our age. . . " By early 2003, we had called together about a hundred people at UCHRI and had a meeting to think about a new way of thinking, where "the crisis of the humanities" was irrelevant because we had, from such a crisis, an opportunity to rethink it all. What is education? What is learning? What is individuality, specialization, collaboration, interaction? What are institutions? What are networks? What about an organization whose cost of membership is participation?
