Christian Sandvig has given me permission to reblog his marvelous post on quantitative methodology with the perfect punchline:  "Statistical significance does not equal substantive significance."  He delivers a pointed critique here of traditional research methods in quantitative social sciences---and I hasten to add that I believe the same kind of pointed critique has to be extended to qualitative ones too. 

Mark Dixon's scheduled instrumental performances, for the
coming months for Invisible. Note:at both SECCA's and
NC Museum of Art's times occur at their new grand 
re-openings! Big doings, fun events for all.

Relentless optimism has served me well as practice and as a politics.  I'm reminded of this, yet again, by this nice comment by Kevin Smith in his blog on our new Open Access policy at Duke:  "One thing that librarians often believe is that faculty will only be motivated for open access by their own self-interest — impact, citation and the like.  But yesterday Cathy Davidson made an eloquent plea for greater access for people around the world who are blocked by high subscriptions costs and other “toll-access” policies.  All round the room, heads were nodding as she spoke.  I was reminded that most faculty members genuinely do care about the overall welfare of scholarship and learning." 

HASTAC's mission since 2002 has been a systems approach to understanding and creating technology in the world.   Our colleague Mandy is just back from SXSWi and was cheered by how many people appreciate our systems approach to technology.   When there has been a massive change to behavior and social organization, you need to understand how it all changes at once, how each part of the process influences the other.   That's why we believe you can't create without critiquing, you cannot create brilliant new worlds without understanding the systemic impact in the world.

This is brilliant, and even moving.  You have to watch it all to the end.  Finally some respect for the much-maligned "digital natives" (a term I do not like as it oversimplifies a generation as complex as any other).  Check this out, with thanks to Scholarly Kitchen.

Durham, NC -- To promote broader use of research and further the university’s strategic priority of knowledge in the service of society, Duke is looking to create an open access digital archive of faculty members’ scholarly articles.

What bad poetry did you have to memorize in grade school? I'm teaching about teaching today and thinking about the exercise, still required in schools, of memorizing thumping verse.   Why?  What is the educational philosophy motivating this (rote memorization but also bad poetry)?  What does this kind of teaching and thinking have to do with preparing students for the digital age?

To find out more about digitalculturebooks, please see our available titles and read about our digital publishing methods. For more information about our imprint, please contact digital-culture@umich.edu.

This is a brilliant, sane, and on the mark outcry against standardization.  As I blogged yesterday, "standards" are not "standardized."   That is the LAST thing we need in our interactive, global, customizing, creative Information Age.  What are we doing to our children, people?   Alfie Kohn, one of our most visionary educational thinkers, makes this case powerful.  Read this and pass it on.  If you include the copyright information at the bottom of this reblog, you are allowed to repost it to your blog without permisison even, but let him know when you do.  This has to be a movement!

THE SCHEDULE FOR FUTUREWEB is nearly finalized, and dozens of Web experts, including leaders from Google, NTIA, Microsoft, IBM, EPIC, Red Hat, Lulu and more, will meet there to discuss the likely evolution of the Web and what it will mean for our social, political and economic future.

FutureWeb takes place April 28-30 in conjunction with the global WWW2010 conference at the Raleigh Convention Center. Attendees of FutureWeb are also allowed access to the 9 a.m. WWW2010 keynotes by Vint Cerf, danah boyd and Carl Malamud April 28-30. Three-day passes for FutureWeb range are priced at $195, $95 and $60 for those who register prior to March 25. For details, see http://futureweb2010.wordpress.com/register/