Blog Posts

everything is a remix

via Daring Fireball comes this video by Kirby Ferguson. Remixing isn’t new, and attribution is a shifting thing.

Everything is a Remix from kirby1 on Vimeo.

how to be alone

via Jason Kottke’s fantastic blog, this great, intimate video by Andrea Dorfman and Tanya Davis, on being alone.

puppetmaster

This was sent to me by a few people who know my fondness for crafting tin foil hats to protect myself from the all-seeing eye of Google.

> !One Password to Rule Them All

The full comic is worth a read as well. It’s possibly true that the puppetmaster has no evil intentions, but that doesn’t mean that we should continue to give anyone power over all of our online presences.

Priority Inbox without GMail

GMail’s new Priority Inbox sounds interesting - a special inbox with just the messages that are important to you, likely from people you care about. There’s likely some magic special sauce in the Priority algorithm, but a simple facsimile can be created using a Smart Mailbox in a standard email app.

I have a group in my address book:

It currently has 96 people in it. People that I would stop what I’m doing to read a message from.

Unlimited Magazine: The Wild World of Massively Open Online Courses

Unlimited Magazine just ran an article by Emily Senger on the massively open online course experience. It’s a good overview of open online learning, and is definitely worth reading - if only for the 6 paragraphs featuring yours truly… They also spent some of the article talking with people that actually taught the course.

> George Siemens, along with colleague Stephen Downes, tried out the open course concept in fall 2008 through the University of Manitoba in a course called Connectivism and Connective Knowledge, or CCK08 for short. The course would allow 25 students to register, pay and receive credit for the course. All of the course content, including discussion boards, course readings, podcasts and any other teaching materials, was open to anyone who had an internet connection and created a user profile.

William Gibson - Google's Earth

From William Gibson’s Op-Ed Contributor article - Google’s Earth - NYTimes.com:

Google is not ours. Which feels confusing, because we are its unpaid content-providers, in one way or another. We generate product for Google, our every search a minuscule contribution. Google is made of us, a sort of coral reef of human minds and their products. And still we balk at Mr. Schmidt’s claim that we want Google to tell us what to do next. Is he saying that when we search for dinner recommendations, Google might recommend a movie instead? If our genie recommended the movie, I imagine we’d go, intrigued. If Google did that, I imagine, we’d bridle, then begin our next search.

Read More

Bruce Schneier on privacy, security, control, and google

Bruce Schneier speaks at the 2010 EWI Cybersecurity Summit.

Granular explicit control over privacy is unnatural…

Electronic commerce produces data. Everything we do produces data. (in ways traditional cash-based commerce did not)

Businesses and governments are forcibly changing social norms. Who gets to make the rules?

We are not Google’s customer. We are actually Google’s product, that they sell to their customer.

Data is the pollution problem of the 21st century.

Video: Sticky Concepts (introduction to) eLearning

I just found this introduction to eLearning and blended learning video, produced by the United Nations University Vice Rectorate in Europe (UNU-ViE). It’s very basic, but that’s the point of the video. Could come in handy in talking with faculty members - sometimes they have interesting concepts of what eLearning is (and isn’t)…

Sticky Concepts on E-learning from UNU-ViE on Vimeo.

on expensive canadian cell phone plans

I recently signed up for a cell phone plan. The cheapest deal I could manage was $50/month, plus taxes and fees, and involved a 3 year contract commitment. That’s $1800 over the term of the contract. And I got to pay a substantial chunk of the price of the phone, as well.

If I let myself be talked into the various bells and whistles offered as add-ons to the monthly plan, I’d be paying nearly $100/month. For a phone.

Openness and Corporate Paywalls

George posted a quick note about how an interview he gave for an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education was published. Behind a paywall. The Chronicle took an interview, freely given by everyone (except, I assume, for the paid interviewer and editor?), on the topic of openness in education, and decided to lock it behind a mechanism constructed to block access to it.

I’m not going to link to The Chronicle article (or, more accurately, anything on The Chronicle, ever), so here’s a screenshot of the short snippet of the article that they publish “openly” - I love how they cut it off in mid-sentence… Taking the what? I must know! Here’s my credit card number! Please! Take it!

And just suppose you had no grade...

A physicist and a biochemist have a conversation about grades, decide that grades are dumb.

>We were talking (and surprisingly agreeing) that grades were dumb. What would happen if we stopped grading? Wouldn’t that be awesome?
>
>So, what would happen if there were no grades? Here are some thoughts.

Read the post for some of their thoughts. What’s interesting to me is that these aren’t long-haired lefty liberal hippies calling for The End of Education. They are scientists and educators, realizing that grades don’t do what we think they do, and how that negatively effects the education experience.

Jasper

We drove up to Jasper National Park for a few days of relaxation in the mountains. I played around with shooting video on the iPhone, and wound up with this (shot on the iPhone, and edited in Mobile iMovie):