Another great set. Surprisingly, there are 8 photos in here from Calgary…
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From the monthly archives:
October 2006
Rob Wall just posted a great blog entry about the myth of the “digital natives” – he (rightly) says:
People are learning in the same way that we always have – mostly from each other, but in some cases we learn in formalized learning institutions. The elements that make for sound instruction, whether formal learning with a teacher teaching a math class to grade nines or informal learning with an apprentice welder learning the trade from a journeyman, have not changed. Indeed they cannot change since they are so deeply dependent on the way our brains work.
I agree, that the nature of learning in and of itself has not changed. We learn in roughly the same way as cavedwellers did millennia ago. (“how catch deer? thog show.”) What has changed is the nature of communication, for some of the students. Their reach has been amplified by pervasive, interactive, and global media. The scale and scope of their community has changed such that while they are learning mostly from each other, the number of individuals they can potentially learn from is much greater than it was for us “immigrants”.
The use of the term “digital natives” is misleading. I’m as “native” as possible. I cut my teeth decades ago (at the age of 12) on the Vic-20, then the C-64, C-128, Amiga 1000, Macintosh II, etc… (anyone remember COMPUTE! Magazine? Before the Internet, that’s how we communicated, and we liked it)
I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t doing something with a computer. But that’s not what is changing things. The real agent of change isn’t familiarity/expertise with computers or applications. It’s not about computers. They are just an enabling tool. While I grew up with computers, I did not grow up with the Internet. I spent a lot of time on the precursers (BBS, FidoNet, and many false starts which I’ve since forgotten), but the real agent of change isn’t hardware, it’s the always-on, global social network of individuals and communities that is enabled by that hardware.
I think the real paradigm shift is with the “internet natives” – people who just assume they have access to their peers at any time, from any location. And they assume they have instant access to any information or communication resource they could need, at any time, from any location. This, in effect, amplifies the effect of things like connectivism, where an individual’s “knowledge” is spread across a network – if you have access to a better/faster/bigger/smarter network, your effective knowledge (or at least the data and processes to provide that knowledge) is greater.
Also, I don’t think there needs to be a distinction between “internet natives” and “internet immigrants”. While I am most certainly an “internet immigrant” – in that I wasn’t exposed to the Internet until I was 18 (and it wasn’t the WWW, sonny!) I’ve incorporated the ‘net in such a way that it’s just a reflex. It’s built-in now. Perhaps something more useful than a native/immigrant distinction (which is arbitrarily and artificially divisive) would be an understanding that there is a spectrum of incorporation of the network into the individual.
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Brian just posted about Northern Voice 2007, which will be hosted in Cyprien Lomas‘ palacial treehouse on the UBC main campus. I’m going. The first two NV events were awesome (the first was the best conference I’ve been a part of).
With more room to spread the sessions out, and in a more flexible, amazing new learning space, this is going to be one helluvan unconference. Here’s hoping they dial back the femmie quotient on the conference T-shirt this year, though…
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Sami beat me to the punch, but it’s worth publicly repeating. Garth Turner, MP for the Halton Constituency in Milton, Ontario, was booted out of the Conservative Party yesterday. For blogging. An elected member of parliament was Dooced.
Here’s the comment I posted on Sami’s blog, but I want to repeat it here as well (in case someone like the MP for my riding happens to see it):
It’s strange. This is our Government, and they boot someone out for documenting meetings and voicing honest opinions. Isn’t that what we do every day? Isn’t that what we should expect, even demand, from our representatives? The MPs represent US, not Harper. They have (IMO) an obligation to be honest (and open, and public) participants, not party mouthpieces.
Turner was booted out because he was openly communicating with his constituents, even when he disagreed with the Prime Minister (who happens to be the leader of the party to which Turner was a member).
We need more people like Garth Turner, who put the people ahead of power. Who believe it’s more important to be open and honest than to tow the party line. Politicians aren’t on The Hill for their own purposes. Nor are they there to serve their Party. They are there to represent us, the citizens of this kick-ass country. One way to do that effectively is to communicate. Blog the hell out of meetings. Politics is a conversation, and all of that Cluetrain stuff.
Now, if he’d have been blogging in-camera sessions, that might be a different thing. If he’d posted Top Secret Plans For Canada’s Troops in Afghanistan or something, I could see sanctions. But from what I’ve seen, he’s simply been posting his thoughts and critiques of his own government’s actions and policies. Which is his right to do, but apparently not as a member of the Conservative Party.
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I was contacted this morning by someone from Lexi.net to let me know about the upcoming “Your Online Identity” conference in Calgary on November 17, 2006. I hadn’t heard of the event before, so had to check out the conference website for info. It sounds like a really cool event. Not as by-the-people-for-the-people as Northern Voice, but still sounds interesting. They’ve lined up an impressive list of speakers, including The Dooce herself.
I think it’s pretty cool to have an event like this in Calgary. I’ve been toying around with the idea of a Northern Voice YYC since I went to the first Northern Voice YVR. I’m not sure Calgary’s ready – Vancouver’s much more plugged-in and seems more aligned with the whole “web 2.0″ / blogging / yaddayadda stuff. But, maybe this is a sign…
I’ll try to make it to the Lexi.net event. It’s definitely not as inexpensive as NV, at $125 for the day, but I’ll try to make the case for it.
Update: I’m in. Looking forward to it!
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Got back from Peachland last night. Had a great week relaxing in Okanogan wine country – even though the lake was too cold to actually go into the water. That was a bit tortuous for Evan, but he adapted OK. Thankfully, there were LOTS of rocks to throw into the water…
I wound up taking way too many photographs – probably took 1000 shots, nuking 90% of them and really liking only about half of the survivors. I was driving Janice nuts by dragging my “camera purse” everywhere. But I got some shots that I’m really happy with. I’m not going to write a long, boring (especially to me) post recapping the week. That’s why I took pictures.
I will say that the drivers along the BC Highway 97 between Kelowna and Pentiction are evil, aggressive, and just plain mean. Worse even than the psychos frequenting Calgary’s Deerfoot Trail. This is Wine Country, in small lakeside communities. Chill out already. We saw 2 fatality accidents as a result of these maniacs.
Then, the morning after we get back to Calgary, I get this:
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I’m packing up and heading to the interior of BC for a week. The family will be hiding out in a lakeside cabin with no phones or internet. Although apparently there’s wifi nearby. Dangit. I’ll have to bring the Powerbook to offload photos from the camera, so will have to fight the urge to check in. See you in a week, internets!
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I went to the Nickel Arts Museum on campus during lunch today, to explore the Ancient Peru Unearthed exhibit. It's a collection of the first archaologically recovered artifacts from northern Peru, from the Sicán era 900-1300 AD.
It's a pretty cool story. Until this find, all previous artifacts from northern Peru were recovered through looting. Amateurs with shovels or even bulldozers. No concern for archaelological preservation or documentation. But, the groundwater level in the area was high enough to protect the tomb of the Sicán Lord as looters couldn't get past the groundwater. In the early '90s, the water level dropped low enough to allow excavation, and the team went to work properly documenting and carefully extracting a ton and a half of artifacts.
Because these artifacts are from the Sicán Lord, they are chock full of gold. And not just gold leaf, but actual sheet metal, uniformly 0.6mm thick and amazingly crafted.
The mask (pictured to the right) was found on the skull of the Sicán Lord. It's probably 6 feet tall, crafted with the gold sheet metal and encrusted with jewels. The curve of gold holding the "feathers" is a solid sheet band, 2 metres in length. The face has been shaped and detailed without tearing or creasing the gold sheet. The workmanship is amazing.
It's too bad I wasn't allowed to take pictures. There is a strict "No Photography Allowed" policy clearly posted all over the place. I'd brought my camera, but it stayed in the case for the duration. So, I sprung for the postcard (scanned above) and a poster.
Also, it's so cool to be able to drop by the on-campus museum. In my almost 20 years (!) on campus, this was my first time. The museum isn't optimal (but I've been rather spoiled) but when the new Campus Calgary Digital Library building opens, they'll be moving into new space (along with the TLC, Library, some of IT, etc…) Regardless – it's a great exhibit, well worth the price of admission. I'll go back again before it leaves town.
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Woah. Dreamhost is celebrating their 9th birthday, and decided to party by increasing limits on accounts. Account holders now get 200 GB (200 gigabytes – a fifth of a terabyte) of disk space. And 2 TB (2 terabytes) of bandwidth per month.
That’s insane. Three things must have happened, in order for them to be able to offer this at $7.95/month.
- bandwidth costs have come waaaay down over the years
- the cost of hard drive space has come waaaay down over the years
- almost nobody comes even close to using their full allotment of either
It’s awesome that Dreamhost is doing this. It’s pretty cool knowing I’ve got 200GB backing my account, and that I’ll never have to worry about bandwidth. Now, if only the performance of the MySQL server would get a boost…
So… Why hasn’t the decreasing cost of bandwidth affected my home DSL connection at all?
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I’ve been using an rsync-based script to backup my iPhoto library to another computer, just in case my Powerbook blows up or something, so I don’t lose every photo I’ve taken for the last 4 years. It’s worked flawlessly, run every now and then from home, to squirt changes in my Pictures directory to my desktop at work, where I further back it up on an external drive using another rsync script.
But, now that I’ve added Aperture to my work desktop, the script I had been using became suddenly quite dangerous. As in, destructively dangerous. And I hadn’t thought to check out the script in awhile.
So, I ran it last night. It faithfully chugged through my ‘book’s ~/Pictures directory, so I walked away as it started working.
Then, late last night I did a quick scroll through the rsync log, and to my horror found a whole bunch of stuff like “Deleting: ~/Pictures/Aperture Library.aplibrary/...”
Holy. Crap.
I’d accidentally told my computer to nuke my Aperture library on the work desktop.
So, I cracked open the “rsyncpics” script, and lo and behold, I’d left in the “–delete” flag. Which wasn’t a problem – it was actually desired – when I was only using iPhoto. But since Aperture isn’t on the Powerbook, the “–delete” flag told rsync to nuke anything on the desktop that isn’t on the powerbook. Like the Aperture library. Doh.
Thankfully, I also periodically backup my work desktop’s home directory to an external drive, so had a slightly out of date version of the Aperture library which I could just copy back into place. But it was missing everything after Ken Ryba’s session from a week ago. I’d copied the best of the “Campus Tour” photos to my home iPhoto library, so it’s not fatal, but a good lesson learned.
The moral of the story is: be careful with rsync, especially when using --delete. I’ve learned my lesson, and have resurrected most of the lost photos. I’ve also added an Aperture Vault on the external drive. They offer these backup tools, so why not use them?
Update: Between the various locations I’d copied files, and a healthy application of the awesome Flickr Backup utility, all photos worth saving have been restored. Whew.
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