MOTU

Posted by Richard at September 22nd, 2007

Old news this late in the week, yes, but I finally took time to play with the clip feature from Google’s book search:

Fifty-one Tales by Lord Dunsany

Granted, Google Books is still incomplete and it’s not yet properly tagged books that are in the public domain (for instance, you can’t clip this collection of John Keats poetry), much less anthologies that contain both public domain and copyrighted work. Still, it’s a nice tool to see emerge.

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Posted by Richard at September 22nd, 2007

So, twice this week, perhaps because of the occurence of International Talk Like a Pirate Day, I’ve seen more stories pop up in blogs on real-life piracy: as in, armed robbery by gangs in international waters. Despite our cultural romance with piracy, it’s worth remembering that most pirates, in addition to the robbery thing, engaged in in things like murder, destruction of property, torture, rape, and slave-taking. My point isn’t the cultural conditions that lead and still lead to piracy a life choice. It’s that, like “stealing,” piracy is a poor metaphor for the unlicensed digital reproduction of purely intellectual property, over-dramatizing the consequences in such a way that it makes serious conversation difficult. So the question is, can we come up with a good name for unlicensed reproduction of digital IP (URDIP?) that treats the issue seriously? It’s not stealing and it’s sure as hell not piracy. But it does threaten to seriously reduce the return on digital IP for those who create and distribute it. While a new economy, such as the credibility-based ecnomony that Cory Doctorow imagined in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom may revamp this system, such a radical overhaul currently won’t pay the bills.

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Posted by Richard at September 22nd, 2007

National Post: The emoticon turns 25

While the The Times of London used the occasion to cast passive-aggressive aspersions on its heritage and functionality, I just completely missed the boat when the emoticon turned 25 this past week. Happy belated birthday, little buddy. You’ve not been nearly as fun since all the chat services started animating you, but some of still remember your elegant, minimalist, free-form beginnings.

In honor of your birthday, I offer my own failed entry into the emoticon Zeitgeist, the hip disdain-icon, first offered as part of a GEnie emoticon discussion back in 1993 (which could explain it’s failure to attract attention):

8-{|>

For those of you who can no longer read “raw emoticon”:

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Posted by Richard at September 22nd, 2007

Native Mac OS X version of OpenOffice.org coming in 2008.

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Posted by Richard at September 22nd, 2007

For all of us pinko-green commies who also get the warm-fuzzies from open-source software, Download Squad has been rife with good news for the past month or so. The latest happy story is that Intel is pushing low-power Linux development for laptops. This is on top of Nokia developing versatile, rich hand-held Internet-ready devices that run Linux.

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Posted by Richard at September 20th, 2007

Escape Pod, the podcast SF/Fantasy magazine that recently beat the venerable standouts like Asimov’s and Analog for total number of subscribers (and which runs, and consistently pays its authors, solely from donations) has it’s fair share of SF stories that deal with the implications of a post-scarcity economy on the larger culture. I’ve linked to three of them, all completely free for the downloading, below.

Printcrime by Cory Doctorow looks at the implications of easy reproduction on a scarcity economy and the lengths to which society goes to ensure scarcity. And it’s written by Cory Doctorow (yeah, that Cory Doctorow).

Nano Comes to Clifford Falls by Nancy Kress examines what happens when easy, reliable replication comes to a small town.

Conversations With and About My Electric Toothbrush by Derek Zumsteg considers artificially intelligent, situationally aware devices (Spimes?).

Of course, Cory Doctorow’s (free downloadable) novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom deals with much the same scarcity theme and comes to a radically more optimitic/romantic conclusion than Kress does.

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Posted by Richard at September 16th, 2007

Yes, the first page of my all-time favorite “episode” (issue) of Warren Ellis’s late series Global Frequency. You can get the extended premise at Wikipedia (where else?), but the basic concept is that Byronic heroine makes her dough and does some good in the world by bringing together the time, talents, and brains of 1000 people she has on-call throughout the world. The major players in each episode/issue are the generic action stars, but behind the scenes are hundreds of people across the globe who are constantly using their expertise to analyze data, make recommendations, and design solutions. In one episode, an Anglo-Indian traceur is linked via mobile phone to a criminal interegator and infectious disease experts. You get the idea. Think Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, but designed to save the world from terrorists, supervillains, death metal fans, and other shady characters.

So this is my proposal, in short, which occurred to me as I was attending a volunteer orientation for a community group and regretting that I didn’t really have a large block of time each week to dedicate to helping them with the office work they really needed help with.

What if volunteer coordinators at various not-for-profits could enter tasks and times that occur in the regular life of almost any non-profit short on volunteers. A few “use cases”:

Volunteer Tasks for Anyone: A small community library (or charity book sale) gets a large delivery of books from a donor. The books need to get an initial, non-expert sorting and a quick evaluation of their condition, something no one on staff has time to do. A volunteer coordinator enters the details (location, hours, how many people are needed, basic qualifications, etc.). Potential volunteers in the area are notified by email, text, and possibly even an open note on the Web site. If you have 30 minutes over lunch, you could show up, sort a few books. If you’re off that morning, you could donate a few hours. Volunteers might require minimal supervision.
Volunteer Tasks Requiring Specific Qualifications: A mother’s day out program might have one volunteer call in sick or need to leave for two hours. The volunteer coordinator logs into a Web app, specifies the time and task, and then decides what credentials are required and what networks/groups the call should be distributed to. Depending on user preferences, qualifying potential volunteers in the area might get a text message or email with contact information.

Volunteer Virtual Tasks: The organization needs proofreaders to review the annual report. Instead of having one person come in for 8 hours to read and markup the text, the volunteer coordinator breaks the task into several pieces. All credentialed volunteers in that agency’s area or network are notified about the task. Additionally, the coordinator can choose to post an open call for potential volunteers to contact her/him about getting being approved to work on the project.

I’m still contemplating the specifics, but essentially I’m looking for ways to bring “artificial artificial intelligence” to the volunteer world.

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Tags: week4assignment, idia612

Posted by Richard at September 16th, 2007

Here are my fairly scattered notes from last week. Our discussions are in curly brackets and my own random thoughts/questions in square brackets.

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Tags: lecturenotes

Posted by Richard at September 12th, 2007

About a year ago, I was pulling my hair out with my job at a large, nameless proprietary university. I was an instructional designer and was getting increasingly frustrated by the inflexibility (not to mention the inanity) of most LCMS (learning course management systems) I’d worked with.

The chief culprit was one of the usual suspects in higher education: eCollege, but it was aided and abetted by a number of experiences with other systems. I’d used WebTycho when taking some online courses at UMUC. I’d experienced Sakai while doing some courses at Indiana. I’d even briefly played around with Moodle. What struck me was that most of these systems spent a lot of energy trying to complicate a system that was essentially quite simple: higher education is, fundamentally, about relationships.

This came back to me pretty strongly while I’ve been getting acquainted with Facebook and Ning, which are social networking sites with multiple tiers of user-user and user-group relationships.

Borrowing from a model that seems to work alright for corporate training, most LCMSs for the higher education market focus on the management of courses, which they treat like meta-objects - containers of content and other types of small objects.

At the end of the day, though, my experience in higher education indicates that the focus of the “college experience” isn’t access to a meta-object, but participation in a meta-relationship. Courses aren’t containers for content to which users are granted access. They are a complex set of one-to-one and one-to-many relationships that entail access to objects that are given over to the group’s access. These are power-laden relationships, of course: all users are not created equal, but they are primarily relationships.

I’ll admit my biases: as a former e-learning student at two large public univerisities and a former administrator at a large, proprietary e-learning university, I think e-learning is a wonderful opportunity that is being slowly crushed beneath soulless, needlessly bloated communication systems that downplay collegial and mentoring relationships and emphasize courses as commodities. If the social media/Web 2.0 idea might revolutionize education in any way, it could be to replace object/container-focused LCMSs with relationship-centered learning management systems.

Now if I could just figure out what this might look like…

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Posted by Richard at September 8th, 2007

I orginally started thinking about this idea when having lunch with two designer friends who both confessed to Web exhaustion while I was discussing Facebook and (as I see it) the looming death of MySpace. This isn’t anything particularly unusual, of course. Lots of people are left in a state of shock by the rapid pace of change on the Internet. The surprising thing was that both these friends are rising stars in the design world, use the Web to market their work, and teach at top design schools, and are on the younger side of Generation X. What’s more, another friend who was with us (who has his own Webcomic, has done his share of writing about Webcomics, and is curating an exhibit on Webcomics) agreed. All four of us were Gen Xers who don’t remember William Gibson inventing the word “cyberspace,” we just knew it was an omnipresent force for us since college. (I was the only one old enough to remember when being on the Internet and being online weren’t synonymous.)

Thus, it was especially interesting to see Wired but not Web 2.0? That’s normal, study says.

So here’s what I’m thinking in broad terms: a coordinated hypertext/podcast featuring library research on Gen X and their continuing relationships with technology in conjunction with personal interviews with Gen X members about their own Web use. This is still very broad and could use some whittling, but it’s a starting place.

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