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November 19, 2008
I gave a lecture at my alma mater, the University of Toronto, a few weeks ago, at the Faculty of Information. The video is here. (Nit: The slides have the wrong font.)
November 12, 2008
AKMA points to two snippets from Stephen Fry on grammatical purity. The second snippet is classic Laurie and Fry.
AKMA expresses his usual admirable inclusiveness: He thinks grammatical correctness is worth striving for, but also acknowledges that language can usefully overflow its bounds. I’m with him. I was disappointed to hear Obama use the phrase “between her and meI,” and at his recent press conference to use “between” instead of “among” when referring to relationships of three or more. But I’m not a stickler. Why, I’ve recently become willing to blatantly split an infinitive or two.
When it comes to the sanctity of the rules of language, doesn’t everyone have the same position? While we think people ought to follow the grammatical rules that matter, we graciously condescend to permit others to make fools of themselves in public, unless they break rules the violation of which force a “Tut tut” from our lips. The difference is only over which particular rules we think are worth following, ignoring, or tut-tutting.
Or, to complete Henry Higgins’ thought: “Oh, why cahn’t the English … learn … to … speak … like me.” Pardon me: “…as I do.”
November 1, 2008
Harvard is rescinding Google’s permission to scan its libraries’ books because Harvard thinks the settlement deal between Google and the publishers (which I blogged about enthusiastically here) is too restrictive. According to the Chronicle of Higher Ed, Harvard’s library guy, Robert Darnton, said:
“the settlement provides no assurance that the prices charged for access will be reasonable, especially since the subscription services will have no real competitors [and] the scope of access to the digitized books is in various ways both limited and uncertain.” He also expressed concern about the quality of the scanned books, which “in many cases will be missing photographs, illustrations, and other pictorial works, which will reduce their utility for research.”
October 22, 2008
From the FreeCulture movement has emerged the Open University Campaign based on the new Wheeler Declaration:
An open university is one in which
1. The research the university produces is open access.
2. The course materials are open educational resources.
3. The university embraces free software and open standards.
4. If the university holds patents, it readily licenses them for free software, essential medicines, and the public good.
5. The university network reflects the open nature of the internet.where “university” includes all parts of the community: students, faculty, administration.
As we used to say: Right on.
September 30, 2008
Academia.edu lets you add yourself to its gigantic Tree of University Departments. It’s a slick, slidey, Ajaxy UI, and there seem to be only benefits to adding your name to it, even though it will forever be incomplete.
The question is whether it’s easier and more beneficial to count on participants to centralize their contact info at Academia.edu or to hope that universities somehow might agree on a metadata standard — a microformat — for how they list faculty members on their own sites. Since the latter isn’t happening, the former becomes appealing. (Thanks to John Palfrey for the link.)
September 28, 2008
Matt Pasiewicz at Educause has created a word cloud out of 1,000 university home pages. Nothing too surprising, but interesting nonetheless.
September 23, 2008
John Palfrey and Urs Gasser are giving a talk to launch their new book, Born Digital, to be followed by a party . [I’m live blogging, getting things wrong, omitting important points, losing track, not spell checking…]
Urs begins by talking about the questions they’ve been asked as they’ve given interviews about the book. “Why did you write this book?” 1. “We’re researchers.” They’re interested in how the Internet is making structural changes that affect our lives. Those changes are most visible in the digital natives (people born after 1980 or so and have the skills to use digital tech). 2. “We’re teachers.” 3. “We’re parents.”
They also get asked, “Why did you write a book?” It aims to bridge a gap between those who are more or less familiar with digital tech.
They get asked how long it took to write the book, and what use they made of digital technologies. It took about 3.5 years to do the research for the book. The actual writing took about a year. Of course they did much of the research online. They used a wiki to assemble research. They used BaseCamp to share drafts. They opened drafts up to comments. “Writing a book in this digital age doesn’t have a clear starting point and may not have a clear end. It is the beginning of a conversation.”
JP talks about the argument of the book. It’s a “myth busting” book, he says. And it aims to show some of the great things digital natives are doing. The meta-myth is that digital natives is not a generation; it’s a population. For one thing, only a billion people are on the Net.
For DNs, what they write and post makes their multiple identities. They don’t distinguish between their digital and offline identities. They multi-task. They presume that the media they interact with is in a malleable, digital form. They download music using the filesharing services; if they download from iTunes, it’s because someone gave them a gift card. They create media and share it. (We should be teaching young people to work in teams, he says.) E.g., the Digital Natives logo came from a 15 yr old boy in England, via a contest. He points to couchsurfing as an example.
The issues people have about DNs: (1) Security. That’s the first thing parents worry about. But it is a myth that children are more in danger than they were ten years ago. There are fewer abductions than ten years ago, for example.
(2) Privacy: People do share a lot of info about themselves. And that is a concern. We are building up lots of information. No one has yet lived through a lifespan online, so we don’t know exactly what it will be like to have everything from your prenatal sonogram to your obituary available online. JP shows a video from a 17 yr old based on the privacy chapter in the book.
(3) Intellectual property: DNs tend not to have a good idea of what they are allowed do with what they’ve downloaded. He shows part 2 of “The Ballad of Zack McCune“.
(4) Information overload.
JP ends with a “positive outlook.” We should acknowledge the real problems, but also recognize the creativity, the engagement in democracy, the available knowledge and info…
JP ends by saying that the book is of course obsolete the moment it was published. So, join the continuing conversation. E.g.join the Digital Natives Facebook group or go to DigitalNative.org
Q: Is the book on Kindle? Online for free?
A: It is on Kindle. We didn’t have the marketing power to make it available for free. Parts are available for free.
Q: It’s a great book, but you got one thing wrong: Your call for a rollback of CDA Section 230. [That protects hosts from liability]
A: 230 plays a critical roll. We don’t want a rollback. But social networks ought to have the same level under tort liability. If a newspaper publishes a discriminatory housing ad, it’s liable. Craigslist ought to be similarly liable.
Q: But, how can YouTube carry all those videos and be liable for every one of them? And if Google can afford to do it, how can a small competitor?
A: I don’t think YouTube should be liable. I’m saying that related to kids’ safety, there shouldn’t be a difference between online and offline.
Q: But for startups, that’s death.
A: In Switzerland, you have to ask what would be reasonable steps taken by a provider. It’s hard to write it down in law, but it’d be wrong entirely to ignore it. We have to find a compromise.
A: What;’s the offline analogy to Facebook or MySpace? Day care? But there there’s an expectation of monitoring. And Craigslist isn’t publishing anything; it’s providing a forum for others to publish.
Q: The closest legal analogies are shopping malls where you can be a pamphleteer or someone owns it and can kick you out. The analogy is to public spaces, not to publishing. At Craigslist, a take-down system would work, rather than prohibiting the initial posting.
Q: As teachers, have you observed the effects of the digital experience on the way people think, write, or formulate arguments.
A: Each generation thinks things were better when they were younger. The way arguments are structured has changed. They tend to join bits of arguments together, sometimes in quite creative ways, rather going in strict serial order.
A: One of the key myths we were trying work through is whether this is a dumber generation (to cite the title of a recent book). Is it just different or is it worse? E.g., they don’t open a newspaper and read it cover to cover. They browse and sometimes do deep dives. As teachers, we have to acknowledge there are new ways to learn and think, but we also have to think about how to the new ways well. [not sure I got that last point right.]
September 17, 2008
Harry Lewis is the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, a former dean there, a Fellow at the Berkman Center, the author of a terrific book about Harvard (“Excellence without a Soul” …ouch!), the fiercest critic of what I’ve been researching recently, and a person I like a lot. He’s also a co-author of Blown to Bits (blog).
I say all this because Harry is teaching a course at Harvard called “Life, Liberty and Happiness after the Digital Explosion,” which, by weird coincidence, is pretty much the subtitle of “Blown to Bits.” Until the enrollment period closes (probably pretty soon), you can watch a videos of the opening course session (requires the Real player). Harry was given title “Harvard College Professor” because of his excellence as a teacher.
O, if only open courseware were the default!
September 8, 2008
Waveplace is bringing the One Laptop Per Child laptops (AKA “The $100 Laptop”) to poor parts of the world. Here’s a terrific post about teaching kids how to use the EToys program that’s included. For context, there’s this. And you want photos? Yes, you do. Here are some fantastic pictures. (And here’s one of my favorite photos of all time. BTW, the little girl is a double amputee.)
August 13, 2008
Here’s a description of a panel, from an email from Alex Leavitt:
I, along with Tim Hwang (Harvard ’08), Christina Xu (Harvard ’09), and Diana Kimball (Harvard ’09), have been formulating and developing plans throughout the summer for blogging groups, ROFLCon events, Free Culture activities, and SXSW panels.
The panel is titled “Blackboards or Backchannels: The Techno-Induced Classroom of Tomorrow” and its public description from the SXSW website follows:
The traditional classroom: obsolete? Teachers brandish chalk and Powerpoints at students who prefer debating on IRC rather than IRL. How do kids want technology integrated into the curriculum? The students speak out: to debate the potential for Wikis, backchannels, and social tech; interrogate some teachers; and argue for a r/evolution in teaching and learning.
Want to vote this panel onto the South by Southwest agenda? Go here…
(Alex archived the very interesting IRC backchannel chat during a Digital Natives discussion at Berkman@10.)
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