Archive for July, 2010
we went for a quick bike ride and geocache hunt. we came up empty (0/2) on the geocaching, but had a nice ride anyway.
Reading Anthony Bourdain’s Medium Raw and was struck by this passage. I’d heard it before (possibly from the same place Anthony did), but reading the way “hamburger” patties are produced by global meatco Cargill makes my intestine crawl. iBooks doesn’t like copy/paste, so here’s a screengrab:
The fact that it’s economically viable to ship coliform bacteria laden meat trimmings from Uruguay, to be treated with chemicals to kill the fecally introduced bugs, before going into an übergrinder to be mixed with trailings trucked from plants around the rest of the continent? disturbing. That we’d buy this crap (literally, crap) to save a few cents on a beef-like hockey puck? even more disturbing. I haven’t bought prefab patties in maybe a decade, but still… I wonder what other parts of the supermarket are infested with this type of practice.
I’ve actually been feeding The Boy™ pretty well. With fruits and vegetables and everything. I know! We decided to clog our arteries with a big old pepperoni pizza tonight.
Ethan Zuckerman spoke at TED Global. Stephen Downes wrote about it earlier, and the BBC just posted an article about it.
Here’s the video from TED:
Ethan posted the text of his talk. Here are some choice quotes:
It’s data like this that’s leading me to conclude that the internet isn’t flattening the world the way Nicholas Negroponte thought it would. Instead, my fear is that it’s making us “imaginary cosmopolitans”. We think we’re getting a broad view of the world because it’s possible that our television, newspapers and internet could be giving us a vastly wider picture than was available for our parents or grandparents.
When we look at what’s actually happening, our worldview might actually be narrowing.
on filtering:
We tend to use two types of filters to manage the internet – search, which is great at telling us what we want to know, and social, which promises to tell us things that we don’t know we want to know. There’s a lot of people trying to engineer serendipity by taking advantage of the fact that not only are you on the internet, your friends are also on the internet. And if your friends – or just someone with similar interests – finds something that’s interesting, it might be a serendipitous discovery for you as well.
There’s just one problem with this method. Human beings are herd animals. Like birds of a feather, we flock together. And so what you see on a site like Reddit or Digg – or what links you get from your friends on Facebook or Twitter – is what the flock is seeing. The flock might help you find something that’s unexpected and helpful, but it’s not likely to find you something from halfway around the world.
This set my PLN radar pinging. The talk of crafting the personal learning network/environment, to harness network effects, etc… is the explicit construction of flock-powered echo chambers. We choose to include people whom we mostly agree with. Everybody gets a group hug. And we slowly shrink the subset of the world to which we pay attention.
on the power of bridges to connect different communities and flocks:
For a wider web, we need this third form of filtering – we need search, social, but we also need these shepherds to help us break out of our flocks and find different voices.
and
If we want a wider world, we need to celebrate, recognize and amplify the influence of these bridge figures.
And we need people to walk across these bridges.
and finally
How do we cultivate xenophiles, celebrate bridge builders and rewire the media so we’re experiencing a wide world and not just our flock?
Xenophilia. An affection for the unknown. The people that seek to connect different communities, cultures, flocks, etc… This is what’s needed – but not for some magic individuals to step up and take the role. We need to support and foster xenophilia in everyone. It’s the only way to break out of the insular withdrawal that results from flocking filtering.
from A wider world, a wider web: my TED Global Talk by Ethan Zuckerman
I don’t understand what Telus is trying to say with this image. Do they have mad tongue skillz? Giggidy.
these rafters were hoisting a pirate flag. not sure they had the capability to overtake other vessels on the river, but it sure looked refreshing…
Evan and I went for an epic 31km bike ride this afternoon, making our way from Tuscany, down through Baker and Bowness parks, then on through Bowness toward downtown, before turning around and heading back up the hill for home. Not a bad ride, especially for a 7 year old!
I haven’t had a chance to check it out since the initial announcement, but it looks like it’s progressing nicely. A social network application built entirely using Drupal and a set of modules.
Eduglu Alpha 2 is available now. I’ll have to grab a copy when I’m back in the office next week…
Now, how to reconcile this with my disdain for the concept of the PLN? Because Eduglu isn’t claiming to be the whole widget. It’s a way to connect various sources of content, published by various people, distributed across the internet, and then use that in the context of a class. Where the magic really happens.
from Fully supported hosted Eduglu is coming! | Eduglu — Drupal Social Learning Platform
The Reverend is back from another trip slaying the Montauk Monster. And he’s back in fine form.
Point is, the open web is not a convenience we need to evolve, it is a public good we need to preserve and foster. You cannot do that when it’s all been accounted for and the gig is up— if “open and free is an ideology” then isn’t “closed and expensive” just as ideological as well—and shouldn’t the two be in deep struggle on a larger stage? Rather, what’s happening, is the one is trying to subsume the other under cloud of night and terminological uncertainty. The LIS standard that’s been announced makes systemwide integration easier perhaps, but does it give people control over their identities and data? Does it promote a sense of one’s space and value on the web in real time? Does it deliver on the idea of a Personal Learning Network on the open web undergirded by syndication and community? These things are integral to teaching and learning on the web right now, and they have little, if anything, to do with an LMS, or so it seems to me.
Standards and interoperability specs only serve institutional needs, unless individuals are in control of their own data.
But I gag at the need to draw the PLN into the picture. Why does this mythical PLN have to be invoked whenever digital media is discussed? I don’t recall the term used in a wider, anolog sense. The PLN doesn’t really exist – we all learn from various and organically shifting sources, and contribute likewise. Defining a PLN is overly simplistic.
I just switched my blog’s theme to Vigilance (after using Thesis for awhile). I’ve hacked Vigilance a bit, to make the content area wider, and nuke the sidebar (well, really the sidebar just displays underneath the content div) and a few other things (like telling it not to show the author – I’m the only person that posts here – and turning off some of the comment-specific logic and display.
Doesn’t get much more minimal than this. No banner images. No sidebars. Wide content. No fuss. Exactly what I want.
I’m taking a few days off work to hang out with The Boy™, and we spent some of the morning colouring butterflies. Much more important than futzing about with university stuff…