April 06, 2003
Site Re-Launch
: This site has been re-launched at a new domain.
Set your bookmarks to:
I'll be working on getting the archives ported to the new weblog (powered by Movable Type, not Blogger).
Posted April 6, 2003 08:51 PM | Permalink
April 04, 2003
I'm back!
Hello folks. Don't know if anybody still checks this site occasionally or is still subscribed to the RSS feed, but I'm about to re-launch this weblog in a new and improved version.
After a six month hiatus "to get a life" I have succeeded (to a certain extent) in doing so -- getting a life, that is. Doing so gives me a little time and headspace to get back into this game we call weblogs.
More information to come, hopefully later this weekend or early next week.
Posted April 4, 2003 07:16 PM | Permalink
October 18, 2002
Hiatus:
In case it actually matters to anyone, I'm taking a break from blogging to get a life. May return in the future.
Posted October 18, 2002 04:42 AM | Permalink
October 04, 2002
Stand up and applaud:
This actually happened over a month ago (Sept. 1), but the meme seems to be picking up steam. I first saw it on Bazima. It's a meme well worth propagating:
"Laquetta Shepard, a diminutive 24-year-old black woman from Louisville with tears in her eyes, stepped into the middle of a group of about five Ku Klux Klan supporters," according to the Louisville (Kentucky) Courier-Journal. " 'They have the freedom to stand there and say what they want, and I have the freedom to walk where I want to walk,' Shepard said. 'They told me I was standing in the wrong place.' "
Laquetta Shepard has a website. No surprise, she wants to be a teacher. "I would be a good teacher," she says on her home page.
Scratch that, Laquetta. You are a good teacher.
(Note: There used to be a picture accompanying this post of the incident described above. I removed it because I realized (a) I was stealing bandwidth from SF Gate by directly linking to it in the IMG tag, but (b) copying it to my site would have been a copyright violation. You can still see the picture by following the link to the story in the Louisville paper.)
Posted October 4, 2002 07:32 AM | Permalink
October 02, 2002
MIT's Open CourseWare goes live:
The MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) project released pilots of its first courses this week.
This is a great initiative. MIT is making content generated by its faculty (lectures, exams, reading lists, etc.) available for free for use by the educational community.
I was surprised that everything was PDF & HTML, but looking at their timeline, I see that formatting situation is part of the current pilot phase. The official "launch" -- with XML-formatted, metadata-tagged, searchable content -- is still a year away.
Posted October 2, 2002 09:57 AM | Permalink
New search Blogger crapping out:
Trying out Google, since Atomz, frankly, gives crappy results. See the search tool on the right.
Scratch that. Sigh. For the second day in a row, Blogger won't update my template.
Posted October 2, 2002 08:40 AM | Permalink
Ethical File-Sharing (or not):
Evan said that Kazaa, the peer-to-peer file-sharing software, is "software...designed to steal things." Meg objected. Ev rebutted. Jason commented that "If it is truly designed to steal, Kazaa should function much like Amazon with recommendations, top 10/25/whatever lists, and collaborative filtering, except with a 'Steal now with 1-Click' button in place of the 'Buy now with 1-Click' one."
Regarding Jason's comment, I think that's like saying the Mafia isn't designed as a criminal organization because they don't advertise under "Crime, Organized" in the Yellow Pages.
An activity that was explicitly designed to circumvent the law in the way he described would likely fail because it would lack the "plausible deniability" that Napster and now Kazaa have tried to maintain.
I believe Ev is expressing that while there are legitimate, legal uses for Kazaa technology, no reasonable person would assume that the majority -- or even a significant minority -- of Kazaa file transfers are legal according to copyright, nor would any reasonable developer create such a tool with the expectation that its usage would be legal. I would say that Kazaa and similar tools perhaps are not "designed to steal," but are designed with the full knowledge that their primary usage will not be legal, given current laws.
I don't have an ethical problem with file sharing per se & think the recording industry is really ignorant of the opportunity they're missing. However, when you look at the practices of Kazaa (including realizing they are making and profiting from software used for illegal activities, sticking spyware in their product, hijacking affiliate program revenue from other sites, etc.), this doesn't strike me as an ethical company.
Posted October 2, 2002 08:38 AM | Permalink
September 30, 2002
Pet Peeve #438:
People who use style sheets to set fixed pixel sizes for their fonts. Gee, that 11 pixel high font might look great on your 800x600 CRT screen, but I can barely see it on my 1400x1050 LCD screen. Making it gray doesn't help -- gray fonts on a white background frequently just disappear on a backlit LCD display, unless you're at the right angle.
I picked on Missy, but I could have pointed out a bazillion other sites with the same problem, especially weblogs. C'mon, people --- fixed font sizes are so 1999. If you use relative sizes, I can enlarge (or shrink) the fonts to something that's comfortable in my computing environment.
Had I know that an LCD panel is tied to a specific resolution, I wouldn't have gotten the high end screen. Sure DVD's look nifty, but most text is tiny tiny tiny. It hurts my eyes.
Posted September 30, 2002 06:48 AM | Permalink
September 29, 2002
How can you oppose auto-discovery? By calling it something else.
Ray Ozzie and John Robb have argued against the need for pingback auto-discovery. Robb: "If I wanted to host a discussion group, that is what I would have instead of a weblog." Ozzie: "So, how long before someone implements a blog UI that resembles a standard topic/response outline/tree discussion format?" (Uh, Ozzie, ever heard of Slashdot and all it's clones? Sheesh.)
Two incorrect assumptions by these guys:
1. "Auto-discovery = discussion." If your blog posting auto-discovers other blog posts that reference it, one outcome could be discussion. But it's still up to you whether you respond or not.
2. "Auto-discovery is for the blog author." Even if the author isn't interested in engaging the referring blogs, auto-discovery providers the *readers* with an opportunity to explore the various other thoughts on the blog posting.
Posted September 29, 2002 01:49 PM | Permalink
What webloggers are reading:
Paul Bausch of OnFocus created this nifty web service called, Book Watch. Basically, it scans the Weblogs.com list of recently updated weblogs, visits those weblogs, and scrapes out the links to books listed on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Powells. It collects that data, then lists the most-linked-to books.
Mockerybird has taken it a step further. Grabbing the OnFocus list, he uses the Google API to do a Google search on each of those books and retrieve the top five news items for each book. Cool!
Posted September 29, 2002 07:20 AM | Permalink
Great idea. Doesn't scale.
The CD Mix of the Month Club is a great idea. Send this guy a mix CD you've burned this month and he'll send you a copy of his. [link via Molly]
Great idea, that is, until he got some free publicity. Now the poor guy is gonna spend all month burning CD's. If he starts to get 250+ CDs a month, he won't even have time to listen to all of them while he burns 250+ copies of his own mix.
There needs to be a peer-to-peer method (or chain letter method?) to manage this, so that it's not one guy sitting by himself in his apartment copying the same mix CD over and over and over again all month. That's kinda sad.
Posted September 29, 2002 06:32 AM | Permalink
Who needs the web?
Just start a doorlog. [link via Jill/txt]
Posted September 29, 2002 06:05 AM | Permalink
September 27, 2002
Now things might get interesting:
According to MSNBC, the first AOL computer is hitting the market. It's a low-cost box from Microtel powered by a Cyrix C3 processor and comes installed with the Lindows OS, a Linux distribution designed to look and work as much like Windows as possible (so much so that Microsoft (unsuccessfully) sued them). Lindows uses WINE, a Windows emulator, to allow it to run many Microsoft Windows applications. The default browser is Netscape 7, and AOL is creating a version of AOL 7.0 (the application for accessing the proprietary AOL networks) for Lindows. I presume this must mean that AOL is re-coding their application to use Netscape's Gecko rendering engine as the browser instead of Internet Explorer's.
I've long been a skeptic about Linux on the desktop. Linux's strenth -- diversity and customizability -- is precisely what makes it a poor choice for the average consumer who buys their computer at Sears. It will take:
- standardization* of a GUI interface ,
- an easy migration path from Windows applications to Linux applications, and
- a big pot of corporate money to assume the risk of taking on Microsoft.
* By "standardization" I don't mean "adherence to open standards," I mean "everything the same." This is the sticky issue that open source zealots don't understand. Consumers aren't interested in source code and, for the most part, they aren't interested in choice either. Consumers are interested in sameness. It's an ugly fact, but it's true. Choice -- difference -- complicates purchasing decisions. The more complicated the decision, the less likely a consumer is to purchase it. When we're talking about operating systems, this means that they want an interface that's the same as everyone else's. Consumer's don't care about the code; 99.98% of humans don't understand it and don't want to understand it. Nor do they want to make decisions between KDE, Gnome, tvm, or the command line. They just want what their neighbor has.
Posted September 27, 2002 10:50 AM | Permalink
Mobilization for Useless Justice:
I have to drive out of Washington, DC, this morning. I'm not driving a limousine. I'm not on my way to impose oppressive loan repayment terms on impoverished African nations. I'm not stopping at a Starbucks, although I might get a bagel at the local Whatsabagel. But some people in black bandanas apparently want to stop me. They don't appear at all interested in telling me why they want to make it difficult for me to get out of town, for other people to get to work. It apparently alternately has something to do with this week'sWorld Bank meeting, Starbucks, the IMF, the upcoming war on Iraq, McDonald's, oil companies, the Gap, Dick Cheney, capitalism, neoliberals (whatever that means), violence against women, George W. Bush, and bad art.
Now, let's be straight -- if I sat down and had a discussion with some of the more intelligent members of the so-called "anti-globalization movement," I'm fairly certain I'd find myself in agreement, at least in principle, with more of their views than the average American. I'm not an anarcho-syndicalist, but I'm closer to their end of the spectrum than to, say, a Fox News commentator. And I know some of this gang. One of the leaders of Mobilization for Global Justice, the DC activist group that organized much of this weeks activities, used to hang out at my house (my ex-housemate and he are friends). I even spent New Year's 1998 at a party at his apartment. He's really bright and not a bad guy. But his "movement" is a pile of crap.
The ideology has its merits; the activist practices, though, are muddled, ineffective, and do more to generate misinformation and misguided anger than to educate and focus the issue. Few DC residents understand what they're protesting. No one has explained to the public why they are marching on the World Bank, but threatening to ransack Gap stores as well. Too many targets of protest are rolled into one. The ideas are never communicated effectively; instead we see predominantly young and white (a point that should not be quickly dismissed) protestors with puppets, effigies, and vague posterboard messages. Their manipulation and use of the media is pathetic (Newscasters on the local Fox station are There are no charismatic leaders to provide a voice to the ideology and communicate it to the less politicized masses. There is none of the dignity or seriousness of the civil rights movement or even the anti-Vietnam protests of decades past. Instead, this batch of wannabes only succeed in looking like a bunch of privileged college students toying with activism.
Posted September 27, 2002 09:10 AM | Permalink
September 25, 2002
Pingback take two:
Ray Ozzie on the idea of pingback:
"I don't have a 'discuss' link on this blog for a reason: I think that it's a Good Thing that this blog medium is different than a traditional electronic discussion medium - relying on human mechanisms to 'spread the word' about interesting referrals, rather than technical mechanisms."A purely anecdotal observation: it seems to me that the bloggers who are so enamored of weblogging's ability to speak without the "hindrance" of actual response or discussion are those already in positions of prestige and arguably power, whether in journalism (Andrew Sullivan) or technology (Ray Ozzie, Dave Winer).
Posted September 25, 2002 04:43 PM | Permalink
Working toward AutoDiscovery for weblogs:
A couple of weeks back I wrote:
"Because weblogs are decentralized..., without an effective means to discover the other components to the conversation..., the the original blogger writes in isolation and only includes other voices as he/she sees fit. Sound like any traditional media you know?" (read the whole post)It looks like some other people have been thinking about how to solve the problem. [link via Scripting News]
Posted September 25, 2002 07:32 AM | Permalink
September 23, 2002
Imagine what the French Revolution would have been like with cell phones...
SmartMobs.com is the companion site for Howard Rheingold's upcoming book, Smart Mobs.
What's a Smart Mob? Imagine hundreds of Japanese teenage girls dispersed throughout Tokyo, all in near-instant contact with each other via wireless technology. When one of them spots their favorite teen idol (say, me, for example) browsing the latest anime at a newstand, she can message the others, allowing them to triangulate in on my position. Within minutes I'm surrounded by hundreds of my screaming teenage fans.
Okay, so that example got a little twisted, but you get the picture. That's a smart mob -- an emergent cooperative phenomena brought about by near-instant communication in the hands of dispersed, unrelated individuals. I'm eagerly awaiting Rheingold's book.
Posted September 23, 2002 07:49 AM | Permalink
September 22, 2002
More Lessig Mania:
Wired has a good profile of Lessig that summarizes the Eldred v. Ashcroft case well.
Posted September 22, 2002 11:12 PM | Permalink
Well, it's not ten, but it's still pretty cool:
Posted September 22, 2002 11:11 PM | Permalink
September 20, 2002
My New Favorite Google Search Referrer:
Today someone found their way to this blog by searching for "reasons why not to send email to a guy when it was meant for a girl."
Man, there's gotta be a story behind that.
Posted September 20, 2002 05:28 PM | Permalink
September 15, 2002
Scamming the scammers
You know those Nigerian email scams floating around? Where you can "earn" millions of dollars by flying to Holland to retrieve the hidden money of the wife of the former Nigerian president? This guy is scamming the scammers. Oh, he sent them the requested photocopy of his passport. Of course, his passport says he's Capt. James Tiberius Kirk.
This scam saga has been going on for over two weeks now, and is coming to a head...the scammer is supposed to meet their mark in Dam Square in Amsterdam. They are to dress all in yellow and hop on one foot to be recognized.
Priceless.
Posted September 15, 2002 02:56 PM | Permalink
September 14, 2002
One Reason Why Disney and Microsoft are Evil:
"The whole purpose of the clause in the Constitution that says that Congress's power is to "promote the Progress of Science" is to induce a spread of new learning. If the government is going to be handing out monopolies to authors and inventors, and expending significant state resources to enforce their monopolies, then a bit of learning, 7 or 14 years later, is not a terrible price to pay.", Lawrence Lessig.
By training, I'm a writer. There was actually a point where I made a living writing. A lousy living, but I paid rent. So, trust me, I believe in copyright. But there's just no reason that copyright -- which in most media is acquired by a corporation and not even owned by the original creator -- should last for over a century. And there's lots of good reasons it shouldn't.
Posted September 14, 2002 10:16 AM | Permalink
Dude, You're Getting...
Clearly I'm in major gadget buying mode. Earlier this week the new DVD player arrived in the mail. Yesterday evening I came home from work to receive my new Dell Inspiron 8200.
I'm scared of it.
I mean, damn, this is a big, fancy, powerful machine. 1.8 Ghz?!? Good gravy. I'm not sure what to do with that. And it's friggin' big -- it's got a 15" display at 1400 x 1050 resolution, for crying out loud. I've had smaller CRT monitors. There so much screen real estate I could rent some of it to a small third world nation.
It's sitting here on my desk next to the last laptop I bought, a Gateway2000 Solo purchased refurbished back in 1996. (Of course, since 1997 or so, I've always had an IBM Thinkpad provided by work.) It makes the old Gateway look like one of those toy computers you buy for your four-year old niece. Tell the truth, some of those toy computers probably have more power than the ol' Gateway (90 Mhz Pentium, 16 MB RAM). Hell, the video card in this new Dell has four times the RAM of the entire Gateway.
And then there's Windows XP -- all blue and bubbly and 3-D. And it wants to be my friend. Really badly.
Posted September 14, 2002 09:12 AM | Permalink
September 12, 2002
New Love:
I finally bought a DVD player. Now I'm addicted. I think the commentary on the This Is Spinal Tap DVD may be the funniest thing on the planet.
Posted September 12, 2002 10:01 PM | Permalink
September 04, 2002
Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?
Slate is hosting a conversation between journalist Kurt Anderson and Andrew Sullivan (of Andrewsullivan.com weblogging fame. Yesterday's posts (which are bizarrely framed as emails -- wouldn't a blog tool have been more appropriate) frame the discussion, which has continued today (and presumably will continue the rest of the week).
Today, Sullivan said:
Blogger NZBear weighs in as well, in a meta-meta-blog on this meta-blog. He writes: "Slate should have provided a counterweight to his journablogging heavyweight status. Picking a non-journalist, lesser known blogger to complete a trifecta with Andersen and Sullivan would have made the discussion deeply more interesting." But here's another piece of blogging's genius. We just did that! You can rectify editorial choices in real time all the time. If this conversation takes off, we can even continue it without Slate at all!This is remarkably similar in attitude, if not in phrasing, to Ray Ozzie's essaylet of a few weeks ago about the "rebirth of public discussion."
I have the same problem with Sullivan's response as I have with Ozzie. Weblogs may be public, but "public" does not necessarily translate to inclusive. In contrast to Sullivan and Ozzie, I would argue that the "individualism" of weblogs, technologically represented in the lack of a standard way to discover and reference other weblogs that are commenting upon a post, replicates -- or at least has the potential to replicate -- the exclusiveness of traditional media.
Because weblogs are decentralized (as opposed to, for example, threaded discussion forums), without an effective means to discover the other components to the conversation (i.e. other blogger's posts), the the original blogger writes in isolation and only includes other voices as he/she sees fit. Sound like any traditional media you know?
Sullivan apparently revels in this. He says:,
"The one wonderful thing about blogging from your laptop is that you don't have to deal with other people. You can broadcast alienated, disembodied, disassociated murmurings into a people-free void. You don't have to run something past an editor, or frame your argument to an established group of subscribers. You just say what the hell you want.What I read in that, though, is "I don't have to be accountable." Sure, a bevy of other bloggers might correct him -- or agree with him. However, like with traditional media, there is no mechanism (short of including a comments feature in your blog, which Sullivan doesn't) for those bloggers to "insert" their responses, or even hypertextual references to their responses, into the conversation in a way that Sullivan's readers can view the whole discussion.
NZBear's point was that Sullivan and Anderson excluded any other voices from the conversation other than their own . . . and in pointing that out, NZBear gave Sullivan the opportunity to illustrate the exclusion. Sullivan implies that by quoting NZBear, they've provided a "counterweight." But he doesn't point out that it's a counterweight that he hand-selected. What about the rest of the responses to Sullivan & Anderson that either haven't been discovered by the authors . . . or have been purposefully excluded.
Big deal, you say. But as with traditional media, this exclusivity has the potential to result in propaganda.
The solution? I'm not sure there is a perfect one yet. I think weblogging technology needs to evolve to a point where it includes a mechanism for automated discovery of other referencing weblog posts that's better than referral logs, Blogdex, DayPop, and TrackBack. (TrackBack seems to be coming close.) The web itself may have to evolve to allow for that, but perhaps weblogs can be the driver for that change.
Posted September 4, 2002 05:52 PM | Permalink
Ask Slashdot: Software for Online Courses:
Normally Slashdot is a pretty good resource for technical information on just about any thing, but I'm pretty disappointed at the quality of the commentary on this Ask Slashdot article from last week.
Posted September 4, 2002 05:03 PM | Permalink
For the Corporate Educators among you:
A new magazine, Chief Learning Officer Magazine, launched this week. Clearly it's geared at the corporate learning market.
I know a lot of ed tech specialists in higher ed and K-12 who think that there is no relationship at the nitty-gritty practical level (as opposed to the hoity-toity theoretical level) between corporate education and primary, secondary, and even post-secondary education.
However, think about this quote from one of the articles in CLO Magazine's first issue: "The enterprise-learning market is 37 percent larger than the U.S. motion picture industry—and more than twice as large as the burgeoning video-game industry."
That's a lot of weight and a lot of resources being thrown around -- and a lot of opportunity to piggy-back off work being done in that area.
Posted September 4, 2002 12:53 PM | Permalink
Weblogs in Education:
A good overview of various essays & articles on (duh) weblogs in education.
Posted September 4, 2002 12:47 PM | Permalink
Apple Toying With an Intel-based version of Mac OS X:
According to this article, Apple has a functioning internal development version of MacOS X (release 10.2) running on Intel CPUs.
Ferpetesake, let's all hope Steve Jobs wakes up and finally realizes that putting MacOS on Intel platforms could give Microsoft a run for their money. I have never understood the motivation behind the proprietary hardware model. Anyone want to enlighten me on what advantage it has gotten them other than translucent plastic in the color "blueberry"?
Posted September 4, 2002 12:44 PM | Permalink
August 30, 2002
Crazy CSS or Gecko Stuff?
Ever since I re-did this page in CSS, none of the images on the page are showing up in Netscape 7.0 or Mozilla 1.0 except the Blogger image at the bottom. It's not like there are many images on this page anyway & most of them are "third-party" -- the Blogger image, the BlogHop rating images, and the web tracker images from SiteMeter and eXtremeTracker. They all show up in IE, so I know the images, hosted on the third-party servers, are good. Of course, I almost never looked at the page in Netscape or Mozilla before CSS, so maybe this was happening all along. Grrrrrrr.
Posted August 30, 2002 07:32 AM | Permalink
August 29, 2002
Open Course:
David Wiley, a professor at Utah State University, author of a book about learning objects, as well as other educational technology research, has opened his doctoral seminar, "Foundations of Sustainable Education," up to the public. [link via Raymond Yee]
Posted August 29, 2002 01:46 PM | Permalink
Jones Knowledge frees the source to it's course management system:
Hoover's Online is reporting that Jones Knowledge is "donating its baseline Jones e-education online course delivery and management platform to the schools and students of the world. This unprecedented move opens the doors to the source code for this highly acclaimed software, making it freely available." No indication as to whether it will be released under GPL or some other open source license.
Posted August 29, 2002 11:38 AM | Permalink
August 28, 2002
Weblog Ethics:
Rebecca Blood (author of The Weblog Handbook has posted an excerpt about ethics in weblogs. She hits the nail on the head, particularly #4: "Write each entry as if it could not be changed; add to, but do not rewrite or delete, any entry." I've expounded on this premise before as well.
Posted August 28, 2002 10:50 AM | Permalink
August 27, 2002
Lessig Strikes Again:
Great response by Lessig to some critics. Lessig's argument: software copyright should be limited to ten years. He presents it beautifully; his philosophical opponents suffer from the inability to logically articulate their arguments beyond a bunch of virtual hand-waving and pounding of fists into palms.
Posted August 27, 2002 03:12 PM | Permalink
August 26, 2002
It ain't about the technology, part deux:
Continuing on the post below, let's look at some of the common Luddite objections to technology in the classroom, as represented in the Red Herring article that got me all irked.
Technology is expensive. Yes. It is. So are buildings, but we don't hold classes in log cabins. Let's cut to the chase: money is not the issue. Return on investment is. If people felt like the money being spent on technology was well spent, there wouldn't be a peep about it. So we're faced with an issue of performance . . . or, as I will argue, an issue of expectation of performance. I'll come back to some of the dollar issues, but let's look at the bones of contention that generate these skewed perception.
It's not real education. Take a look at the example in the first paragraph of the Red Herring article. It of course centers on PowerPoint, the favorite scapegoat of ed tech Luddites (c.f. Clifford Stoll's High Tech Heretic, his follow-up to Silicon Snake Oil -- this guy makes a career out of being a contrarian). The article says, "They are learning how to use PowerPoint, but they have no idea what the content means."
This is a telling comment because it exhibits a couple of prevalent misconceptions about technology in education, namely "technology in education is about 'computer literacy' " and "technology in education is always some mode of self-directed learning that is supposed to replace the teacher."
"Computer literacy" was a hiccup in the history of ed tech. There was this tiny window of time from the mid-80s to the early-90s where a few teachers actually new more about technology than the students. I went to high school just before that window; not long after I graduated in the mid-80s all high school students in my system were required to take a semester of "Computer Science" where they learned a few lines of BASIC on an Apple IIe. The assumption was that in The Future everyone would need to be able to program their computer. Well, we know where that went. I'm sure "computer literacy" is still taught in some schools -- curriculum is notoriously slow to change -- but for the most part the vast majority of students are more computer literate than their teachers, so this is practically a non-issue these days. The presumtion is that the students were "learning PowerPoint." In fact, I expect the objective of the students in the example was not to learn how to create presentations in PowerPoint; they were creating presentations in service of some other learning objective.
The implicit assumption in this example is that the teacher is absent from this PowerPoint activity, and that the students are being "taught" (or, rather, not taught) by PowerPoint. Most Luddite screeds against ed tech always provide examples with absent teachers. In fact, very little educational software -- especially at the primary and secondary levels -- is meant to be used in the absence of a teacher guiding and providing context. You may find this more frequently in higher education and quite frequently in "lifelong learning" (e.g. corporate training, professional development, etc.) because the learners are presumably more mature and capable of self-direction at these levels (although that's often a leap of faith). Most educational technology is intended to be used in the appropriate context with the guidance of a teacher.
When presenting their anti-tech screeds the Luddites always leave out the teacher. So let's put him/her back into this scene. We have a pair of students working on an assignment -- apparently not one they understand well -- and not succeeding in the goal, "to learning about the human liver."
One quick aside that I can't let pass: the article author mentions "After spending 20 minutes just designing the introduction page, the students still can't answer the most basic question: What does the liver do?" How many adults could spend 20 minutes surfing medical web sites and come up with a satisfactory answer to that question? Learning rarely happens in 20 minutes, ferpetesake. An activity like the one described would be only a small part of an overall lesson, perhaps just an exercise to get them engaged with and thinking about the questions, how to find the answers to the questions, or how to formulate and communicate those answers.
Anyway, as an educator, my first question in this situation is not "Why are they using PowerPoint?" but "Where's the damn teacher?" The Luddite assumption is that the technology is the obstacle, but we haven't examined the assignment. Is it well-framed? Are the objectives clear? Do the learners understand it? Is it within their skill levels?). Nor have we examined the teacher's involvement What assistance is teh teacher giving? What feedback? At what point in the process? (Sometimes it's best to let the students struggle awhile before bailing them out.)
In fact this example -- like most anecdotal evidence offered in these screeds -- is misleading. Education is about the teaching, not about the tools used to teach. That deserves pull-quote status:
EDUCATION IS ABOUT THE TEACHING, NOT ABOUT THE TOOLS USED TO TEACH.Take a high-tech classroom with a room full of well-prepared, affluent students who have all the current textbooks. Put a crappy teacher at the front of the class, and those students still won't learn. Take a decrepit inner-city classroom with nothing but a chalkboard and 14-year old textbooks and fill it with troubled, under-prepared students. Stick an excellent teacher at the front of the room, and those students will learn. Please don't take that as an indicate that we should do away with technology, affluence, or air-conditioned classrooms. The reality is that while both of those extreme examples are true, education exists on a spectrum between those extremes; it's not that simple.
However, technology is a tool, and like any tool, it's effectiveness depends upon the appropriateness of the tool to the task, the skill of the person using it, and the matching of the tool to the skills. I've provided training on using technology in education to over 2000 faculty and teachers at close to 150 institutions since 1996. At every workshop, I always cautioned the participants, "Don't try to hammer a nail with a banana." Just because technology is there, doesn't mean you have to use it, especially if it doesn't fit your learning objective. Likewise, you could put the best hammer in my hands, but I'd still build a lopsided house with a leaky roof. I've never learned to use that tool appropriately, so I'm not going to be successful with it. Not only do you need the right tool for the job, but you the person who knows how to use the tool. Likewise, the best carpenter in town might be pretty handy with a hammer, but put a swell pair of knitting needles and the finest yarn in her hands, and she won't be able to knit you a napkin. Just because you're experienced and professional with one set of tools, doesn't mean those skills transfer over to another set of tools.
I'm going to stop there for now. There is yet more to come. Oh man, I'm just getting started! Next post(s), I'm going to delve step a little further into the "technology is a tool" idea and talk about teaching teachers about technology (my specialty). I'll get into the myth of the "technology should make education better" expectation (I've got a doozy of a story to share there). I'll probably ramble about some other stuff, but I plan to end up talking about what I see as the real strengths of technology in education. Join in the fray -- post your thoughts in the comments area.
Posted August 26, 2002 10:07 PM | Permalink
It ain't about the technology, it's about what you do with it:
This article, "Is our children learning?" from Red Herring offers the usual Luddite screeds about technology in the classroom not living up to the potential predicted by its evangelists. Sigh. It's the same old story. Lots of hand-waving about the millions spent on computers but Johnny still can't read. Lots of blustery, accusatory rhetoric about tech companies providing training but Johnny still can't read.
Look, people, the idea that techology is a panacea is so 1997. I don't know anybody in education (or educational technology providers) who still really believes that. Everybody knows that the technology doesn't solve education's problems and, in fact, presents some entirely new ones. Everybody except the media, that is.
The article's concluding paragraph says "Schools need more substantial proof that their investment in technology has made learning better--not just cheaper or faster." But here's the scoop folks:
TECHNOLOGY DOESN'T MAKE EDUCATION "BETTER." IT JUST MAKES EDUCATION DIFFERENT.What are we going to do? Keep technology out of education? You can't do that, people. Computers are here to stay. The Internet is here to stay. Do we just ignore it in our schools?!?
I have a lot more to say on this topic, but it will have to wait until later. Maybe I'll have cooled off by then, too. ;-)
Posted August 26, 2002 11:56 AM | Permalink
August 25, 2002
Speaking of Movie Recommendations:
Molly points me toward MovieLens. Hallelujah! I've been bummed ever since MovieCritic.com went kaput. MovieLens is the same deal -- rate movies that you've seen, and MovieLens will recommend other movies for you to see. It takes your ratings patterns and bases its suggestions on the recommendations of other users with similar rating patterns.
Posted August 25, 2002 10:12 PM | Permalink
Just Another Manic Sunday:
After spending all day yesterday inside nursing a sore back, I was grateful to get out of the apartment today. Of course, getting out of bed was the bigger challenge -- my back had pretty much locked up overnight. I wish someone had filmed me this morning. It would have been a work of comic genius to see me rolling out of the sack and attempting to maneuver into an upright position without turning, bending, or otherwise firing any muscle fiber between the base of my skull and my coccyx.When I did finally get in motion a handful of Advil, a thirty-minute hot shower, and good old Icy Hot managed to allow me to move with more fluidity and grace than, at least, Frankenstein.
Mission One for Sunday: coffee. Since Mission Two (see below) required crossing the Potomac into the wilds of the Virgina suburbs, I decided to drop in on my favorite DC area coffee shop, St. Elmo's Coffee Pub in the Del Rey area of Alexandria. This is what coffee houses should be. Comfy couches, nice people working the counter, lots of books and games laying around to entertain the patrons, bulletin boards with photos of the regulars, and a fireplace in the corner (which is cozier in December than in August). It's a crime that the District itself has nothing comparable. We're stuck with Starbucks, Cosi/Xando, and the occasional Foster Brothers. Very few local, non-chain coffee shops, and none as cool and neighborhoody as St. Elmo's. Tell you the truth, if I could find an affordable place to buy in Del Rey, I'd move there just because of St. Elmo's. The morning brought bad news though -- I didn't realize Atticus Books, which used to be right next door to St. Elmo's (after they moved out of their U. Street digs in the District), had closed up shop. They're still around as an online store, but Atticus was one of the quality used bookstores in the metro area. Bummer.
Mission Two: buy an ironing board. Mine broke a week or two ago. This entails an outing to Target. Big mistake. Here's a tip for you: stay the hell away from Target on the weekend before the college semester starts. Holy mother of god. Disneyworld doesn't have lines that long. I mean, normally I'm not adverse to a warehouse-size building full of co-eds, but, geez, I just wanted to get an ironing board. Looks like the remainder of August will continue to be rumpled.
Mission Two having been squashed by unforeseen freshman hordes, I figured since I'm in Alexandria and I'm clearly going to be rumpled for the near future, I might as well also be a fat pig. Furthering this goal entails a trip to Mecca, otherwise known as Five Guys Burgers & Fries. The Washington Post described Five Guys as "the Willy Wonkas of burger craft." Five Guys sells four things: burgers, fries, sodas, and hot dogs (though I've never actually seen anyone order a dog there). Let me tell you -- I'm a pretty serious burger aficionado. I've had burgers around the globe, literally. And Five Guys is the best. Oh, sure, there are some "gourmet" burgers with fru-fru funky cheeses and ciabatta bread and whatnot. Those probably make restaurant critics happy. But nothing beats a Five Guys burgers. It's all about fresh. The beef is ground daily on premises, the bread comes from a local bakery daily, and they buy their potatoes direct -- the chalkboard tells you what farm in which state today's taters came from. Bacon & cheese are extra; all the other toppings are standard. I like mine with bacon, cheese, fried onions, sauteed mushrooms, and mustard. The boardwalk fries are brown and soft inside, and you gotta put malt vinegar on 'em. Yum.
Tooling around Old Town a bit, trying to digest the forty-six pounds or so of fried food I just ate, I stumbled across a used book store called Book Bank. It's no Atticus, but I did walk out of there with a free book (I chose Dicken's David Copperfield, which I haven't read believe it or not) because I could answer the daily trivia question: identify the author and text of these lines: "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper." (Look it up if you don't know.) That's a good deal. I'm going to have to go back and try to get some more free books.
Wound up the afternoon, by going to see The Bourne Identity. I admit to having a weak spot for Robert Ludlum novels. Many a gentle summer afternoon was spent swinging in the hammock on the front porch of the house I rented in Richmond while I was teaching, a Ludlum novel giving me sweet respite from nine months of freshman essays. I admit to having read The Bourne Identity (the novel), so long ago that the plot was still a surprise to me (or maybe they changed it?). Enjoyable summer action flick, although the ending seemed a little pat. Luckily Ludlum wrote two more Bourne novels, so Matt Damon won't be out of work for awhile.
What a good Sunday.
Posted August 25, 2002 09:57 PM | Permalink
The Problem With Metro:
Ah, a fellow professional commuter! The DC Tourism Board should give out free passes to keep the tourists off Metro and on those red-buses-masquerading-as-trolleys where they belong.
Posted August 25, 2002 10:07 AM | Permalink
Like, we're all cascading and stuff:
Stayed in tonight because I threw my back out this morning. Still hurts, more than 12 hours later. ugh. Took the opportunity to re-design the site with all CSS. Haven't gotten to the Archives, About, Rants, and Search pages yet, though. They're next. Tough part's over.
I based it on the three-column liquid CSS template from Saila.com. Although it's supposed to degrade well, it really looks like crap in Netscape 4.x. Yikes! Oh, well, that's what you deserve if you're still using Netscape 4.x. It looks fine in IE 6, Netscape 7 PR1, Mozilla 1, and Opera 6.2, though.
Grrr...it doesn't validate though. Has something to do with the BlogRolling.com code. Blogger itself may be mucking with the XHMTL validation. And the YACCS commenting code makes HomeSite choke. Sheesh.
[Update: just noticed the syndicated DC Bloggers list isn't appearing in anything but IE. Has it always been like that?]
Posted August 25, 2002 12:18 AM | Permalink
August 24, 2002
What happens when you put a wireless camera on a cat?"
KittyBrain. [link via Allura]
Posted August 24, 2002 08:57 AM | Permalink
August 23, 2002
It's official: Internet Radio = Increased Audio CD Sales:
Arbitron (the radio ratings people) announced that their research shows people who listen to Internet radio buy more audio CDs -- more than 1.5 times as many as other consumers. [link from Mary Wehmeier]
Maybe this will spur the RIAA to stop the Library of Congress from killing Internet radio . . . but I doubt it.
I listen to Spinner at the office frequently -- it's a great way to discover new bands that don't get played on commercial radio.
Posted August 23, 2002 06:32 PM | Permalink
Stupid Linking Policies:
A surprising number of websites demand that other web pages not link to their page. File this under "People who don't have a clue what they're doing."
None of the arguments against "deep linking" wash. In the end, the real reason is always "I don't know how to build a better website that protects-my-content/maintains-my-branding/simplifies-navigation/etc, so I'm going to demand you not link to it."
Don't Link to Us is a weblog that links to all these stupid sites that demand you don't link to them. Great way to use the medium to stick it to the nimrods!
Posted August 23, 2002 01:09 PM | Permalink
August 22, 2002
Fray Day 6 DC:
Fray day fray day fray day.
Posted August 22, 2002 08:25 PM | Permalink
Geektivism and the Way DC Really Works:
For a couple of days, Scripting News has been harping on Lawrence Lessig, author of the pro-Internet books, Code and The Future of Ideas. I blogged about Lessig earlier this week and many times in the past.
Basically, Winer is upset because Lessig implied in the OSCON speech that the approaches of the technology geeks don't have any impact on the policy wonks. In Lessig's response to Winer, he re-iterates this eloquently.
Lessig has written two of the most coherent, well thought-out books on the Internet's impact on freedom and intellectual property. Lessig is taking on the horrendous Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in the the Eldred v. Ashcroft case which he's arguing in front of the Supreme Court of the United States ferpetesake.
What's Winer done? He's written some blog software, proposed to raise money to defeat Berman in the elections even though he's running unopposed (duh!), and is backing the Libertarian candidate against Coble (honorable but impractical -- I hate to tell ya, but North Carolina doesn't elect Libertarians).
I'll take Lessig's cogent strategy over Winer's well-intentioned arm-waving any day.
Posted August 22, 2002 08:48 AM | Permalink
Architecture Matters: the Death of Inclusive Discussion
I told you in the last post I had a response in mind to Ray Ozzie. ;-)
Last weekend, Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove and creator of Lotus Notes, VisiCalc, and other archetypal software packages, posted an interesting take on blogging called Architecture Matters: The Rebirth of Public Discussion. In this he writes:
"[B]logs accomplish public discussion through a far different architectural design pattern. In the Well's terminology, taken to its extreme, you own your own words. If someone on a blog 'posts a topic,' others can respond, but generally do so in their own blogs, hyperlinked back to the topic's permalink."I read this and my first reaction was "That's a pretty dead-on description of the difference." And, in fact, I still believe that. It is a good description of the difference. Where I depart with the Oz is in the conclusion arising from this difference. Ozzie says
"[B]logs represent a radical new approach to public discussion - one that, in essence, completely and naturally 'solves' the signal:noise problem, and does so through creative exploitation of a unique architecture based upon decentralized representation of discussion threads."The alleged "signal:noise problem" that Ozzie refers to is more commonly thought of as flaming, bickering, sniping, ad hominem attacks and the other low-level rhetorical tactics that people use when intelligent engagement of ideas fail.
Basically, Ozzie is saying that because the only way to respond to a blog (absent a commenting feature on the blog entries) is to post a response to your own blog. The discussion participants can hyperlink each others permalinks, and readers can leap back and forth between web pages to follow the discussion.
The implication is that this process revives, in some sense, the art of discussion that has been killed off by flaming and "noise." I have to say I'm surprised that Ray Ozzie, of all people, would take this approach. The man basically singlehandedly invented the idea of groupware and generated not one, but two companies around collaborative tools.
Ozzie only obliquely mentions the negative aspects of this blog-centric means of discussion:
"The downside? Well, part of why people like getting together is that unintended consequences can be quite rewarding. And there's a danger that the self-selecting environment of a given blogging community might limit unintended outcomes."I would argue that the potential problems are more significant than Ozzie's two-sentence evaluation indicates because "public blog discussions" (for lack of a better term) are inherently exclusive. This exclusivity has two faces: incidental and intentional.
Incidental exclusivity arises simply from the fact that it's harder to find out who is responding to you. In a centralized discussion forum, the replies are "attached" to the initial message -- the idea of a "thread." As long as the original author revisits the forum, the replies will not be missed (although they may not be read!). However, in a public blog discussion, there are only several methods to discover that someone is attempting to engage you in conversation. Your respondent might notify you themselves (via email for example). You might discover responses through referrer logs or through services like Blogdex or Daypop or Movable Type's TrackBack. Perhaps someone else notifies you.
In any event, the threshold for response discovery is much higher. It's harder to find out if someone has responded to you. For example, this weblog is not very highly read. I doubt Ray Ozzie will ever even know about this response. (Feel free to click on the link to his article in the first paragraph a few times -- maybe he'll notice it in his referrer logs. ;-)
Intentional exclusivity is potentially more sinister. Unlike a discussion forum, the author of the initial message can actively inhibit his/her reader's threshold for response discovery. You just choose not to link to your respondents; you act as a filter. This is what Ozzie was talking about -- the ability to filter out the noise. The danger is what is considered "noise." I would argue that some, if not most, weblog authors filter out a lot of the posts that are critical of them. They just don't link to the people who are taking them apart piece by piece. They are managing their own threshold for inclusion. By not linking -- raising the inclusion threshold -- they are raising the discovery threshold for their readers.
Most discussion forums are either entirely open or open once you have passed another threshold -- a community membership threshold, such as subscribing to a listserv, joining the WELL, creating an account on Slashdot, etc. In many, if not most, cases these community membership thresholds are fairly low. While public blog discussions typically have no community membership thresholds, they replace these with inclusion and discovery thresholds.
The key, important difference is that control of inclusion and discovery thresholds in public blog discussions reside with the original blog post author. The reader and/or respondent have very little power in this relationship. On the other hand, in discussion forums, once the community membership threshold has been passed, the inclusion and discover thresholds are basically non-existent. The power in the relationship resides with the reader/respondent.
So then. I think what we are talking about when we talk about public blog discussions is an architecture that creates "discussions" that are decentralized, but are therefore also self-selecting and exclusive. Unlike Ozzie, I wouldn't consider this a rebirth. Is USENET annoying because of the spams and flames? Sure. So are lots of other centralized discussion forums. Some communities stagnate if not cared for, just like in the physical world (see The Natural Life Cycle of Mailing Lists which also applies to other online forums).
Blogs have their uses. I wouldn't be posting here if I didn't think so. But do they offer an improvement over discussion forums? Unless you're talking about a blog with an embedded comments/discussion feature, I tend not to think so.
Posted August 22, 2002 08:16 AM | Permalink
August 19, 2002
Interesting words from Ozzie (not Osbourne):
Over the weekend, Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove and creator of Lotus Notes, VisiCalc, and other apocryphal software packages, posted an interesting take on blogging called Architecture Matters: The Rebirth of Public Discussion. In this he writes:
"[B]logs accomplish public discussion through a far different architectural design pattern. In the Well's terminology, taken to its extreme, you own your own words. If someone on a blog 'posts a topic,' others can respond, but generally do so in their own blogs, hyperlinked back to the topic's permalink."I had an interesting response here regarding this idea, but Blogger choked while posting and I lost it. Dammit.
Posted August 19, 2002 06:01 PM | Permalink
August 18, 2002
Hey, I own the "ten" meme:
On A List Apart, you will find these Ten Tips on Writing the Living Web. Good stuff.
I like #5, "Find good enemies" best. That's what I need -- a nemesis. Applications for nemesis being taken now. :-)
Posted August 18, 2002 09:14 PM | Permalink
Free Culture:
If you haven't already, you really should take the time (and unfortunately the bandwidth) to listen to Free Culture, the Open Source Convention 2002 speech by Lawrence Lessig. (It's only available in Flash, MP3, and PowerPoint formats. I'm sure someone has transcribed it, but I just don't have a link to a text version.)
I think it's a seminal presentation, cutting to the quick of the issues surrounding the current -- and, more importantly, the upcoming -- battle around intellectual property. And while you're at it, read Code, Lessig's book on how the Internet can and cannot be regulated (which I've recently read.) Now, Lessig is an open source zealot I can get behind.
Posted August 18, 2002 06:45 PM | Permalink
Things I hate #732 through #734:
(732) People who say interesting things 65% of the time and things that piss me off 35% of the time. Any lower ratio intelligent to stupid statements and I have no problem jettisoning them. Somewhat higher and they're bearable. But that 1/3 of the time idiocy really bugs me. Too annoying to enjoy, too smart to dismiss. (733) Political candidates for local offices who want to shake my hand and talk me up while I'm trying to get into the Metro station. Geez, just get the hell outta my way! Making me late for work is the best way to lose my vote. (734) Doing laundry.
Posted August 18, 2002 04:20 PM | Permalink
August 16, 2002
One of the Funniest Things I Ever Said:
I was digging through my old blog, and I came across this post from the day after the 2000 Presidential elections:
"Last night, Florida made me feel like I was being pulled over by a cop -- it just kept flashing red and blue and red and blue and red and blue . . .I slay me. :-)Now I know how Dubya felt when he got busted for drunk-driving."
Posted August 16, 2002 06:32 PM | Permalink
My Only Elvis Story:
If you've been living in an igloo with poor tv reception for the past several days, you may have missed out on the fact that it's Elvis Week, the annual Memphis celebration of the Death of the King. I guess this year it's a slightly larger hoopla than usual because today is the 25th anniversary of his kickin' the bucket, and we silly people have affinity for anniversaries that are multiples of the number of fingers on our left hands.
I was heading to Memphis on business. Unfortunately, it was only a one-day meeting, the client's offices are only a mile from the airport, and I was staying at the Holiday Inn Select directly across the street from the client's offices. So I fly in at 8pm, shuttle one mile to the hotel, sleep, work with the client the next day, and fly out in the early evening. Twenty-four hours in Memphis and I wasn't going to get more than a mile from the airport.
Kind of disappointing....but never fear. It's Memphis after all, and the King is always around the corner.
After checking in at the hotel, I stand waiting for the elevator. The doors open, I start to board . . . and run into Elvis. And Elvis. And Elvis.
Three -- count 'em, three -- Elvis impersonators (two Young Elvises, one Old Elvis, all in full Elvis regalia) are getting off the elevator. I'm suddenly surrounded by Elvises. Young Elvis #1 brushes past me. Old Elvis bumps into me. "'Scuse me," he says. He sounds like Elvis! Young Elvis 2 steps around me.
I've just passed through a mob of Elvises.
Unbeknownst to me it was Elvis Week 2001. Apparently there were several hundred Elvis impersonators in Memphis this week, many of them staying at this airport Holiday Inn. Had I known it was Elvis week, I could have made plans to go downtown and attend "Elvis: The Concert" which "reunites Elvis, via state-of-the-art video, with his original bandmates live on stage" -- basically the band plays while a video of Elvis sings. Creepy! And I just missed the candlelight vigil at Graceland.
But as I checked out the following afternoon, the hotel was having an Elvis Sing-off -- about a half-dozen dueling Elvis impersonators vying for the best rendition of various Elvis standards.
It's not the best Elvis story ever. But, hey -- it's mine.
Posted August 16, 2002 06:09 PM | Permalink
August 12, 2002
Landmark Moment:
I'm not a very social blogger. That's probably why this is the first time (to my knowledge) that my social life has been blogged (by someone other than me, duh!). Heh heh. For the record, I know squat about Slovak participation in WWII. I was trying to steer the conversation toward the funny haircut of the former Sassiest Boy in America.
Posted August 12, 2002 06:58 AM | Permalink
August 02, 2002
Today's Windows Complaint:
I wish I could select the order in which the launch buttons for my applications appear in the Windows Taskbar. I'm one of those people who typically has umpteen gazillion applications and documents open at once. The Taskbar defaults to the ordering the the application launch buttons left to right in the order the application or document was launched. I'd like to be able to drag them to difference positions on the Taskbar (like you can with the icons on the Quick Launch toolbar) to make managing it easier.
Posted August 2, 2002 10:43 AM | Permalink
July 29, 2002
Music News (You Heard It Here First):
So I was browsing the audio CD's at Barnes and Noble yesterday . . . no, no, I don't usually do my music shopping at Barnes & Noble, but I went there to get Lawrence Lessig's book, Code, because I couldn't find it at my local independent bookseller, Politics & Prose. Typically I buy my CDs at DC CD in Adams Morgan. Hipster cred established? All right, moving on...
So, Barnes & Noble has this new thing where you run the UPC code of any CD under a scanner at the listening station, allowing you to listen to any clip of any CD in the place. Which, by God, I have to admit is pretty cool. Is there someone who's job is to rip every CD in the Barnes & Noble inventory? The only catch is you only get to here a 15-20 seconds or so of each track, but at least they don't necessarily start with the first 15-20 seconds.
Like I was trying to figure out the name of the infectious Weezer song I heard the other day, and the clip I received was the chorus allowing me to confirm the buzz-jangle goodness of Weezer's "Keep Fishin' " . . . the video [Real format] to which, for the record, stars the Muppets. I love that Rivers Cuomo can't keep that "I'm-singing-with-Kermit" grin off his face during the video. Who could?!?
Posted July 29, 2002 07:01 AM | Permalink
July 25, 2002
EduNuke:
The EduNuke.com project [link via Kairosnews] is extending PostNuke for educational purposes. PostNuke is an open-source clone of the already open-source Slashcode, the content management system originally designed for Slashdot. (There's a half-dozen other Slashcode clones, like PHP-Nuke, PHPSlash, Squishdot, Geeklog, Drupal, Scoop, and others.
All of those news-oriented content management tools are open source, and almost all of them have nearly identical features and interfaces, so I'm curious why PostNuke was selected over any of the others.
Posted July 25, 2002 09:46 AM | Permalink
July 24, 2002
Speaking of "Super" Reading....
Apparently someone at the University of Virginia's has put scans of the entire Action Comics #1 online. Action Comics #1, for those of you who are not afficionados, was the 1938 debut of Superman. He also has Quicktime audio files of old Superman radio shows.
Something tells me the copyright can't have run out on this stuff. Methinks this guy will be hearing from DC Comics lawyers fairly soon.
Posted July 24, 2002 07:16 PM | Permalink
Everyone Read This:
Dive Into Mark's great series on accessibility has been turned into a great online book, Dive Into Accessibility. Super reading.
Posted July 24, 2002 07:12 PM | Permalink
Writing in Public, Take Two (or Blogging Ethics):
After reading more comments by Dave Winer of Scripting News about "editing" (aka "deleting") blog posts in this thread on Paolo Valdemarin's blog, I really got irked.
Winer carps a lot about webloggers being journalists. However, journalists are expected to be accountable for their words. Winer doesn't expect webloggers (or at least himself) to take the same responsibility even though he calls himself a journalist (the comments about "writing with integrity" in that last link are particularly hypocritical).
What Winer does is not editing -- tweaking, clarifying, correcting. What Winer does is delete or "un-publish" his previously public comments. He speaks publicly, changes his mind, and attempts to make it appear as if the comments never existed. The ability to "un-publish" is fairly unique; it's only possible if the "journalist" controls the distribution media as well, as in blogging. Print & TV journalists don't have the personal luxury of deleting their article, column, or commentary after it has been made public; their only recourse is a public retraction. Winer undermines the credibility of weblogging as a journalistic medium by deleting inflammatory comments he makes in public, instead of posting a retraction, then attempting to whitewash his disingenous "un-publishing" as "editing."
His argument against it? "There's no 'rule' against it and this is how I want to do it; if you don't like it you can take your ball and go home." Lame. There is a "rule" against it -- it's called ethics. Maybe Dave should review the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics, particularly the statements in the last section (titled "Be Accountable") such as "Admit mistakes and correct them promptly."
Posted July 24, 2002 08:11 AM | Permalink
July 23, 2002
Writing In Public:
When you make comments in public -- especially inflammatory ones -- you should take responsibility for them. If you "change your mind" then you should publicly clarify that your position has changed or that you mis-spoke or whatever.
What you should not do is cover up your previously public comments under the auspices of "editing." Like Nixon was just "editing" the Watergate tapes. Bottom line: it's disingenous, dishonest, and cowardly.
Posted July 23, 2002 09:14 PM | Permalink
July 19, 2002
"Yahoo!" or "Oh damn!"?
Yahoo! has a new look and feel, but I may never go there again because my free Yahoo! Mail account has gotten to the point where it's unusable. Yes, I did catch Yahoo's sneaky policy shift a few months back and clamped down on that. Even with their Spamguard service, my account fills up -- literally, the entire 6 MB quota -- with spam in the "Bulk Mail" folder so quickly that unless I clean it out weekly, it's useless. And Spamguard still lets about 10-15% of the spam through into my Inbox.
I'm at the point, where I'm going to have to scrap my Yahoo! account that I've had for around five years and start fresh with a new username.
UPDATE (07/23/02): In one week my Yahoo! account received 236 spam emails (230 filtered successfully to Bulk Mail, 6 that slipped through), consuming 37% of my account quota. Ridiculous.
Posted July 19, 2002 04:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Google Labs Does It Again:
Google Keyboard Shortcuts. Search Google without a mouse. This will certainly have some accessibility applications for people with motor disabilities as well.
Posted July 19, 2002 02:53 PM | Permalink
Facets, Not Outlines:
A while back I wrote about why hierarchies are bad for organizing information. A found a good expression of that idea in an article titled "After the Dot-Bomb" in a recent issue of First Monday (another quality online pub I forgot about; where's my head these days?!?):
"When classifications are used in Internet databases, it is hierarchical classifications that are almost invariably used. These are in the conventional 'tree' shape, a broad area subdivided, then subdivided again and again, with each possible category contained within the one above. Librarians invented a better kind of classification decades ago, that is called faceted classification. It is too involved to explain in this brief article, but a good analogy is to say that faceted classification is to hierarchical classification as relational databases are to hierarchical databases. Most system designers would not dream of using hierarchical files these days, so why are hierarchical classifications of information content still being used?"Bingo. That's why I'm so puzzled over the Userland crowd's orgasmic devotion to outliners. I use them as a writing tool, but hierarchical information architecture pales in comparison to relational architectures. That's why Google is so much better than the Yahoo or DMOZ directories.
My opinion on this has only solidifed since I've been playing with ZWiki, a Zope-based WikiWikiWeb, on a local machine. It's fun and mirrors the thought process (mine at least) way better than the linearity of blogs or the hiearchical nature of outlines. Next area of investigation: the blending of Wiki and weblog.
Posted July 19, 2002 11:44 AM | Permalink
July 18, 2002
Finally, Congress Does Something Right About Copyright:
This article in the Chronicle reports that "The House Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the bill, the Technology Harmonization and Education Act (S 487), on a voice vote without debate. It is identical to a bill the Senate approved in June 2001." (FYI, in that quote I fixed the Chronicle's link, which just pointed to Thomas instead of the actual text of S 487.)
This is a pretty good bill that will make it easier for teachers to use digital works in online education. It's been 16 months getting it pushed through Congress. The Senate acted on it pretty speedily, but the House sat on it for over a year. Criminy!
Posted July 18, 2002 05:35 PM | Permalink
Oh great, just when I was getting used to expecting dumb mobs:
Howard Rheingold, old school Internet visionary, writes about smart mobs in the current edition of the Edge (which I'm sorry I had forgotten about; it's good):
"Combine wearable computing, wireless communications, and peer-to-peer resource sharing, and all the people in a building or a crowd walking down the street can join into ad-hoc networks.
Posted July 18, 2002 03:25 PM | Permalink
You Have To Wonder. . .
whether, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) chose the logo for the Information Awareness Office (IAO) [link via BoingBoing], they knew it was also considered the symbol for an international 200-year old conspiracy.
Okay, granted the pyramid-with-eye is on the dollar bill because it's the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States (which of course feeds the conspiracy theorists). However, IAO's mission is (and I quote) to "imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption; national security warning; and national security decision making." (Translation: "We use computers to snoop.")
I can't imagine that it's good PR for an organization whose mission is to collect information on "shadowy networks" to choose as their symbol an image that probably has more pop culture ties to conspiracy theorists, than to the Great Seal's original genesis. . . that is, if that genesis wasn't all part of the conspiracy!!! (uh...read that last link at your own risk; why do conspiracy theorist seem incapable of practicing reasonable web design?)
Posted July 18, 2002 08:06 AM | Permalink
July 17, 2002
Point. Click. Think?
From the Washington Post:
"Welcome to the world of Net thinking, a form of reasoning that characterizes many students who are growing up with the Internet as their primary, and in some cases, sole source of research. . . .On the good side, Net thinkers are said to generate work quickly and make connections easily. . . . But they also value information-gathering over deliberation, breadth over depth, and other people's arguments over their own. This has educators worried."Not sure how I feel about this. The article seems to be taking the angle that "My Goodness! They're getting information from the Web instead of the library so it must be bad!" The value of a library is in the organization, the availability of reference librarians (one of the most underrated jobs in the universe), and to a certain extent the filtering that takes place by the collection manager.
But by no means is information valid or do students use that information well just because it comes from a non-digital source. Trust me -- I taught Freshman Composition in pre-WWW days. Your average freshman can't write worth a damn no matter where they're plagiarizing from.
The problem here is not the source of the material, but that the prevalence of a vast repository of unfiltered information has uncovered a long-standing problem in education: we don't -- and never have -- done a very good job of teaching our students how to make effective use of information. Too many teachers, especially outside the language arts, just check the footnote, and if the source is a "respected" journal, then it gets the imprimatur of acceptance.
Students are taught how to write academic papers for specific academic purposes under abstract, inconsequential academic guidelines, little of which has any actual real-world application outside of a life in academia. And remember -- this is coming from a former English professor. I was an important cog in this academic machine. It was my job -- literally in my job description! -- to teach students how to write within the academic environment.
That microcosm-oriented skill falls to pieces, though, in the face of an onslaught of non-academic information. The academic skills that are too frequently taught (how to be an effective student in academia so you can get an 'A') have little relation or relevance to real-world information-processing and -presentation skills (how to evaluate information, how to synthesize information from multiple disparate sources, how to present information from a disparate sources coherently, etc.).
You see this tendency to re-inforce the status quo and fear anything outside it reflected in this article by comments like "We should be encouraging kids to research the difficult truth. ...But do school systems really want students using the same tools to question current proprieties and conventional wisdom? Teach kids to be critical thinkers and they'll be sending it right back at the teacher in the classroom.There is much to worry about."
Good god. How did we get to the point where teaching kids to be critical thinkers is something to worry about?
Posted July 17, 2002 04:27 PM | Permalink
July 16, 2002
Yum:
I made a pot roast in the crockpot overnight. I love cooking in my sleep. :-)
Posted July 16, 2002 06:58 AM | Permalink
Free Zope Hosting
: New Information Paradigms provides an introductory free account powered by Zope, which I've been interested in for awhile.
I have had Zope installed on a local Windows 2000 machine to play around with, but it's always been hinky. The Zope hosting seems to work well, but because it's free you're pretty limited in what Zope "products" you can use (basically, only those that are installed, which are fairly many). Apparently, can't add accounts either. Understandable -- the provide it for free as a sandbox to learn
Posted July 16, 2002 06:57 AM | Permalink
July 13, 2002
I am the Attack Banana:
I hate online quizzes. You know -- stuff like "Which Lord of the Rings character are you?" or "What flavor of Ben and Jerry's are you?" Except this one. It's pretty good. I like being the Attack Banana. I feel like an Attack Banana. I certainly don't identify with the Lovesick Green Dolphin Covered With Postage Stamps although I feel a certain affinity for the Angry Spork-Flinging Plaid Wildebeest. Maybe someday I'll marry an Angry Spork-Flinging Plaid Wildebeest.
I would also be amenable to a "Which postmodern theorist are you?" quiz. I'm pretty sure I'm either a Jean-Francois Lyotard or a Stanley Fish. ;-)
Posted July 13, 2002 08:35 AM | Permalink
July 10, 2002
Rick Boucher For President:
I've said it before and before and I'll say it again: Boucher (who used to be my Congressman from '85-'89 when I lived in southwest Virginia) is the best representative in Congress. He's introducing legislature to restrict the recording industry from selling copy-protected CDs. It'll never pass (yes, I'm that cynical), but, dammit, Go Rick Boucher!
Posted July 10, 2002 02:35 PM | Permalink
A Field Guide to Learning Objects:
This white paper [PDF format only] is a collaboration of ASTD (American Society for Training and Development) and Smartforce, a content provider focusing on business and technology learning objects. Interesting overview.
Posted July 10, 2002 02:06 PM | Permalink
Moodle:
Moodle is an open source system for "producing internet-based courses and web sites." It's a PHP-based system. Nice. [link via SiT]
Posted July 10, 2002 01:18 PM | Permalink
Two Reasons Why....
.....DC sucks in the summer:
- Humidity.
- Tourists.
Posted July 10, 2002 09:41 AM | Permalink
Books on the run:
I like the idea behind Bookcrossing.com. It's kind of like 1000journals crossed with geocaching. Basically, you take a book you've read, register it with Bookcrossing, place a label on it, and leave it in a public place. The idea is that the next person to pick it up can log into Bookcrossing, comment on it, then pass the book on. I'm gonna do it. If nothing else, it's a good way to whittle down my bookshelf. :-)
Addendum: FreeWords is something similar, but not as collaborative or reader-driven. It's more of a cutesy art "happening" kind of thing.
Posted July 10, 2002 07:42 AM | Permalink
Dilemma:
International Blog Meet-up Day is the same day as Mom's birthday.
Posted July 10, 2002 06:53 AM | Permalink
July 04, 2002
Free Books!
This article, "The Internet Debacle - An Alternative View," makes a meandering, under-researched, and sometimes facile case against the recording industry's stance on downloadable music. Don't get me wrong; I think the recording industry is being silly . . . I just don't understand how this article got to #3 on Blogdex; it's not that good.
But...it did point me to the Baen Free Library from Baen Books, a science fiction publisher. Now, I'm a much larger book afficionado than music afficionado, so this is the stuff I geek out on. More importantly, the introduction to the Baen Free Library (by Eric Flint) is a stellar argument for how a publishing industry (book, in this instance, but could arguably be music as well) can benefit from free downloading of material.
Granted, books are different -- unless you have a scanner and a lot of spare time, digitizing your favorite author to share online isn't that easy. Hopefully, as initiatives like the Baen Free Library take off, It will be interesting to see if those digital versions of books get traded online outside of the "official" publisher's library.
Posted July 4, 2002 06:24 AM | Permalink
June 28, 2002
Just Like Old Times:
Back in my former life as an English prof, I worked with many of the people who edit (or edited) Kairos, a quality peer-reviewed online journal "exploring the intersections of rhetoric, technology, and pedagogy." Now they've launched Kairosnews, "a news site and online community for discussing [surprise] rhetoric, technology and pedagogy. Sadly, I don't recognize any of the names associated with Kairos anymore, except Mick Doherty. Been out of the rhetoric biz too long, apparently. [link via SiT]
Posted June 28, 2002 06:41 PM | Permalink
June 27, 2002
On the metablogging front...
The "blog about blogs," Blogging News (from the same people who put out MicroContent News) is pretty good about pulling together all the daily news references to blogging.
Similarly, Blogroots, from uber-bloggers Meg and Matt seems to be attempting something similar, but not as thorough. (It's also tied to promoting a book.)
Posted June 27, 2002 07:18 AM | Permalink
June 25, 2002
Nahhh.
Dave Winer (CEO of Userland) asks "So this leads me to the next question -- does my software ever save anyone's life?" And concludes "There's no doubt that weblog software and news aggregators can save lives. . . while it may seem grandiose to think of software as life-saving, it isn't really a huge stretch." His rationale? If the FBI, CIA, et al used Userland's weblogging tools to improve information sharing (which itself is an imaginary result with questionable support), then the software would be "saving lives." That's faulty logic of the most absurd sort -- might as well attribute the success to Windows because they couldn't run the Userland software without the OS. Let's give Gates a medal!!
He's wrong. It is grandiose and is a huge stretch. Cripes. I mean sorry you've been sick, Dave, but having a heart condition doesn't make you a national hero. I really oughtta stop reading Winer's blog, but he does frequently come up with good links to excellent resources that sometimes make all the hyperbole and self-promotion bearable. Sometimes.
Thank god for Winerlog, though. Everyone ought to have someone parodying them. :-)
Posted June 25, 2002 01:08 PM | Permalink
June 24, 2002
Google Competition:
WebReference provides analysis of AlltheWeb's claim that their index is bigger than Google's. So what? Even if AlltheWeb's claim is true, the size of the index doesn't matter much without effective search algorithms. I haven't found that AlltheWeb or Teoma generate results that are more on-target than Google. They are comparable for most things, but Google still helps me more when I need to get down to the nitty-gritty.
I'm glad that someone is going after Google, though; competition is necessary to keep a good company on their toes.
Posted June 24, 2002 01:08 PM | Permalink
Why stop at an alphabet?
The previous post made me remember that 15 years or so ago, when I was briefly studying linguistics, I got all jazzed about the very Tolkienish idea of making up a language. Never did it though. But wouldn't you know it -- a lot of other people have. Plus, there's software for generating languages (not web-based, unfortunately). Pair that with the Alphabet Synthesis Machine -- and, hell, with the Hero Machine! -- and you're ready to create a super-hero from the planet Ojibalos and his spooky alien language and alphabet. kaa xeadhjei krhtiur mu-repu! (Word making is fun!)
Posted June 24, 2002 07:39 AM | Permalink
ABCDEvolution:
The The Alphabet Synthesis Machine (Introduction) takes an initial glyph that you provide and evolves a graphically coherent set of symbols around that glyph. You control lots of parameters of the evolution (weight, line, segments, crossover, etc). The result -- "the possible writing system of your own imaginary civilization." Best of all -- you can save your imaginary alphabet as a TrueType font. Use it in all your business correspondence! [link via xBlog]
Posted June 24, 2002 07:20 AM | Permalink
June 23, 2002
Ridiculous Amounts of Time-Wasting Fun:
Okay, I'm a geek. It's official. The Hero Machine takes me back to those 11-year old winter afternoons when I would spend an entire day making up super-heroes, super-villians, and complex histories for them.
Crap. I wish I'd grown up to be a comic-book writer.
Posted June 23, 2002 11:38 AM | Permalink
June 20, 2002
Course Management Systems, Open Source, and the Interest Horizon:
homoLudens ponders, "[I]t's about what CMS shore you first land on. Problem is that so many are getting shipwrecked on high-priced, user-infantilizing Microsoft / Blackboard / webCT coastlines. I still don't get why there's no major educational foundation funding development of open source (or cheap source, a la Manila or p-Machine or whatever) for schools. [link via SiT]
Pat makes the erroneous "CMS leap" -- while Manila is a content management system (CMS), Blackboard and WebCT are course management systems (also, confusingly, CMS) .... which by the way are not the same thing as an LMS (learning management system) or LCMS (learning content management system). Too many acronyms in the industry. Course management includes content management, but vice versa is not true.
In any event, there is one obvious shining example to PatD's question about open source alternatives: MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative. But the obvious example (or, more appropriately, exception) of MIT aside, the reasons educational institutions don't take on open source development of CMS's are fairly simple and straightforward. (Caveat: I work for Blackboard, one of PatD's examples, so while these comments are my own personal ideas and don't necessarily represent my employer's position, they may be biased. Salt to taste.)
- As online teaching and learning becomes more important to the mission of educational institutions, the insitutions want scabable, secure, cross-platform, usable, enterprise-class software. When you have potentially tens of thousands of users (or more, in some cases) relying on a mission-critical system, it doesn't make sense to rely on v0.94b of Joe's Online Course System that you pulled off SourceForge last night just because it's open source. (Note: before you get your or Richard Stallman's knickers in a twist, this statement isn't meant to imply that open source software can't be scabable, secure, cross-platform, usable, or enterprise-class. Just that there aren't any open source course management systems (yet) that meet those criteria.)
- Scalable, secure, cross-platform, usable, enterprise-class course management systems are notoriously resource-intensive to develop. This ain't a three-man job. It either takes an organization with existing knowledge and resources of an MIT or a big, honking chunk of cash to pay for those resources. (Note: again, before your free software panties start bunching, this is not meant to imply that the open source approach can't generate scalable, secure, cross-platform, usable, enterprise-class software because of resource constraints. E.g. witness Apache. However, let's not forget that the resources that go into open source projects are not free-as-in-free-beer -- they are donated, either out of someone's personal time or out of an employee's time -- so there is a cost associated. That's important to the next point.)
- Educators are interested in course management systems; open source developers, in general, are not. I believe the massive failure of open source software to compete effectively in user-facing markets is due to lack interest from open source developers, not lack of skills. "User-facing markets" are those markets where the user of product is a typical consumer, e.g GUI operating system interfaces, office suites, browsers, and, yes, course management systems. Most open source software depends on developers wanting to "scratch their own itch" -- e.g. they have to be self-motivated, because no one pays them to do it (because no one has found an effective way to make revenue off open source yet!). E.g. see Kottke's comments regarding Mozilla, the open-source progenitor of Netscape 6.
This is what Clay Shirky has called the "interest horizon." (Yours truly also ranted about this.) Commercial software projects have a "resource horizon" -- a time or money limit by which the development is no longer economically feasible for the company. Open source software has an "interest horizon" -- since it's frequently volunteer work, the development is limited by the developers' interest in the project. Put simply: if it bores them, they're not going to code it. That's why we have great open source operating systems, compilers, databases, etc -- those tools interest the geek set who programs them. Spreadsheets and virtual classrooms don't.
So to summarize: there are no scalable, secure, cross-platform, usable, enterprise-class course management systems because it's (1)complex, (2)expensive, (3)not of interest to the vast majority of unpaid open source developers. :-/
Posted June 20, 2002 08:04 AM | Permalink
June 14, 2002
Finally! Somebody Got It Right! Whew.
After the many, many articles about blogging, Meg Hourihan of Megnut finally gets one published that makes sense:
"If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share -- the format. The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging. Without it, there is no differentiation between the myriad content produced for the Web."Now if only the other people writing about blogs will read Meg's article first. [link via Blogroots]
Posted June 14, 2002 06:59 AM | Permalink
June 13, 2002
52 projects:
I wish I came up with things like this. More importantly, I wish I actually did things like this. [link via Listen Missy]
Posted June 13, 2002 06:42 AM | Permalink
June 12, 2002
Deep Link This, Ya Bums:
eSchool News is reporting online publishers are threatening educators for "deep linking," a term for linking to content within a website without going through the site's home page.
Crikey. Don't publishers have better things to do? Apparently not: the American Library Association has put together this list of articles about deep linking and challenges to the practice.
Posted June 12, 2002 05:42 PM | Permalink
Directories, Wikis, and Dave
Dave Winer, of Scripting News is going on about directories again. Now this is one of my favorite topics, too, but I've been underwhelmed by Dave's hierarchical, OPML approach to a solution.
He elaborated more today, but I still think he's off the mark. However, it struck me that what he described today -- "No one owns a category anymore than there is a single place to go for information on a single topic on the Web. We thrive on triangulation, multiple ways to view each subject." -- already exists. It's called a Wiki. (There are also many Wiki clones.)
A Wiki is kind of a collaboratively-authored, very loose content management system, that is typically used to build a heavily hyperlinked collaborative text, but it also has a categorization feature that effectively turns the WikiWeb into a directory of resources.
This isn't a ringing endorsement for Wikis. In fact, I think they suffer from at least one of the same problems that I previously suggested Dave's approach suffers from -- categorized directories of information without someone acting in the role of taxonomist and/or editor tend to suck for actually finding information.
Creating effective taxonomies and providing effective filtering is a skill that very few people have (hence the role of an editor/information architect/librarian/etc). Distributing that responsibility creates something different, and arguably something more "open" . . . but very rarely does it create something more effective. I'll take effective over open.
Posted June 12, 2002 04:32 PM | Permalink
June 11, 2002
Dive Into Accessibility:
The weblog, Dive Into Mark, is running a series called 30 days to a more accessible weblog. A different accessibility story each day. Way to go!
Posted June 11, 2002 12:48 PM | Permalink
LCMS FYI:
This article, "What's Important in a Learning Content Management System," has been linked several places. I haven't read the whole thing, but I realized if I didn't blog it, I'd forget about it! (Bookmarks, just don't do me any good anymore, since I have six or seven thousand of them. Sigh. I'm still waiting for someone to build my Dream Bookmark Manager Tool. Basically I need my own knowledge base.)
Posted June 11, 2002 11:32 AM | Permalink
Free Online Scholarship Blog:
Peter Suber is cool. Not only did he create the nifty and cerebral game, Nomic, but, as I've written about before, he is spearheading a free online scholarship (FOS) movement that argues scholarly writing should be free (as in "free beer" and "free speech"). Now he has put upFOS News, a free online scholarship blog. [link via SiT]
Posted June 11, 2002 11:21 AM | Permalink
June 10, 2002
Krispy Kreme Will Crush Us
Krispy Kreme Will Crush Us All: Ahhh, another convert to that Old Time Religion. All hail the doughnut! The doughnut is mighty and good! And sugary!
[link via Saltire]
Posted June 10, 2002 05:57 PM | Permalink
"It's not butter, it's annoying."
According to this New York Post article Parkay has embarked upon interactive packaging. Tubs of Parkay margarine (remember the talking Parkay tubs commercials?) soon will use motion detection to wiggle and say "Butter" as customers walk past them in the supermarket.
Packaging that talks: this is my nightmare. The entire supermarket will be a chattering white noise of margarine tubs ("Butter!"), ketchup bottles ("Anticipation..."), and styrofoam meat packaging ("Where's the beef? Right here!") shouting for my attention.
The good news is that it will probably resurrect the flailing web-based grocery shopping-and-delivery services. No one will want to go to a supermarket ever again.
Posted June 10, 2002 04:37 PM | Permalink
June 05, 2002
Actual Quotes, recorded for posterity on my office whiteboard:
"I am being sitting here shocked"
"But a chicken is a mammal." (Follow up quote: "Oh. I thought my only choices were a 'mammal' or a 'fish.' ")
"I was asked to hold the puppet, so I'm holding the puppet."
"If you're going to misplace your pants, it's best to be prepared."
Names have been withheld to protect the innocent.
Posted June 5, 2002 08:08 AM | Permalink
June 04, 2002
The Basket-Weaving of the 21st Century:
University of California--Berkeley is offering a journalism course on weblogs. [link via Metafilter]
Posted June 4, 2002 08:07 AM | Permalink
Darkness and Light:
Great rememberance of September 11 from Bazima.
I keep meaning to write something about that morning here in DC, but haven't found the heart of it. It's not just September 11 -- my world has been akilter since then. I knew -- not "knew well", but "friend-of-friend" knew, two people in the World Trade Center, one of whom didn't make it out. Two months later a close friend of mine was murdered in her sleep by an unknown assailant (still at large). The following month one of my former students and her two children were murdered by her husband. The following month I changed careers. The following month my father had a major stroke and twice nearly died.
They're all unrelated events, but most days I can't seem to separate them. It's all part of an ugly, sad tapestry.
Posted June 4, 2002 07:47 AM | Permalink
June 03, 2002
Mind-dud
Opposite of a mind-bomb. So, okay, this one has a little sizzle, so maybe I would classify it as a mind-firecracker instead of a mind-bomb. Dave Winer of (Scripting News fame talks about the DaveNet : Googlish way to do directories. That's davespeak for saying he's suggesting an "open, fair, and smart" way to do internet directories (a la Yahoo or the Open Directory Project). His suggestion: use OPML (Outliner Processor Markup Language, an XML DTD to represent hierarchical outline information) to allow people to create their own directories. (OPML is Winer's creation, so no surprise there.) He gives Soapware as an example. Winer even suggests that "Now, instead of having two or three all-encompassing directories, anyone with an outliner and some server space can compete to be the authority on any subject. That's how Web directories become Googlish."
Now I'm a longtime advocate of some kind of tool that allows for the creation of Yahoo-like directories. I've been looking for that tool for nearly four years now, and haven't found an freeware/open-source solution that fits my (fairly simple) needs. But I'm certain of one thing: OPML isn't it. There are two issues, one technical and one...oh, let's call it "philosophical" that relates to the Winer quote above (and really isn't specific to OPML, but more to Winer's vision of open, collaborative director