I’m at conference called “Cyberinfrastructure and University Policy – Enabling Knowledge, Technology, and Innovation” in DC. There are about 50 people here, heavy on senior ICT (info and communications tech) policy folks, but including academics and open access advocates.

Since I feel like a fish out of water here — these folks know way more about cyberinfrastructure than I do, including what “cyberinfrastructure” means — at last night’s reception I asked John Wilbanks of Science Commons what it’s about. (I am a huge John Wilbanks fan, of course.) As I understand it, this meeting hopes to make progress in the infrastructure for knitting together what we collectively know, especially by using universities. That infrastructure includes issues of pipes, rights, and, yes, metadata.

The reception was surprisingly a tie and jacket affair for the men — the attendees seem to be even split among the various genital possibilities — where the word “senior” kept showing up in titles. Lots of interesting discussions.

So, I’m looking forward to a day as a fish out of water.

[Tags: science_commons cyberinf ]

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Andy Carvin (in a tweet) points to the Wikipedia entry on the phrase “Viewers like you.” All part of the Web’s dismantling (and reassembling) of the traditional notion of topics.

[Tags: wikipedia npr andy_carvin everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Two completely fascinating presentations on technology and education, from very different points of view.

Dylan William brilliantly advances, step by step, toward concluding that technology has a quite particular role to play in education:

What I’m going to argue is that the role of technology in improving learning is primarily in what I call third generation pedagogies. Where we have automated aggregation technologies, which actually take the responses of different students and do some smart things with those things. And give the teacher advice about what are the sensible next steps. The really brilliant teachers are doing this already. But most teachers can’t do it. And so the challenge of third generation pedagogy is to have the contingencies of teaching—that what you do when you know that the teaching didn’t work quite the way you intended—that is supported by technology.

Google’s Peter Norvig, among other things, adds to the mix the value of having students learning in teams so they can teach one another.

(Many thanks to Seb Schmoller for the pointers.)

[Tags: education teaching dlan_william peter_norvig ]

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Dan Gillmor continues to hold Time’s feet to the fire for it’s reluctance to correct Joe Klein’s factual errors.

Time is giving us as good as example as we could have asked for of the down side of relying on institutions that depend on being perceived as authoritative.

[Tags: media joe_klein authority everything_is_miscellaneous dan_gillmor ]

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