By Stephen Downes
September 29, 2003
Emaki Productions
Jeremy sent me
this, found, he says, with a nice collection of other
visual language references on Peter Merholz's site, a fascinating
website by Neil Cohn on the subject of visual language. The
idea behind this theory is that images in a sequence embody
a grammar similar in form to Chomsky's syntactic
structures. There is some great work here, and it's worth
the time reading not only the web pages but also the two
research articles. Cohn argues for what I have suggested in
the past: not only do images constitute a grammar, the
resulting grammar is more complex than its linguistic
analogue. Cohn focuses on the transformations happening in
sequences of graphical images - sequences of events, for
example - but I would suggest that this is only one
dimension to a wide array of representational
possibilities. By Neil Cohn, September, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
A Stroll Through Patent
History
"Developing countries like India, which
is scheduled to come into full compliance with an
international patent treaty in 2005, may be better off
without strong patent laws." Many people have been saying
this for a while, but this author has come up with some
proof. Instead of looking at patent libraries, the locus of
most such reserach, Petra Moser used exhibition catalogues
from the 19th century to get a less sanitized view of
invention. She observes, "Many of the best innovators in
what was the high technology of the day came from some of
the smallest countries in Europe, and these nations did not
have patent laws... Exhibition data are particularly useful
for studying the effects of patent laws on innovation
because they measure economically useful innovation in a
way that is independent of changes in patent laws.
Countries without patent laws were really doing quite
well." By Teresa Riordan, New York Times, September 29,
2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Another E-learning Mantra in The
Making
Interesting reaction to my posting last week of Belinda Davis
Lazarus's measuring online teaching time. Martin Terre
Blanche comments, "It only takes between 3 and 7 hours per
week for classes of 25 (i.e. up to 17 minutes of instructor
time per student) if one is into the kind of teaching where
conventional online discussion groups are central to how
learning happens and the instructor feels compelled to play
a conventional busy-body instructor role - facilitating,
goading, grading the learners into submission." Fair
enough. But then he continues, "OLDaily is at the centre of
a very large network of online learners... that's still
only 2.4 seconds of instructor time per learner per day.
OLDaily is e-learning on steroids..." 2.4 seconds per
learner is close (it's actually even less than that), which
does indeed raise some interesting issues. So let's grapple
with the main one: is OLDaily, as I
claim, really online learning? Comment by clicking [Reflect]. By Martin Terre Blanche,
Collaborative Learning, September 28, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Social Impact Games
Marc Prensky
writes, "I have published a "catalog" (i.e. a database) of
"Social Impact Games" (i.e. "Entertaining Games with a
Non-Entertainment Goal"). I hope this site, which I will
try to keep as up-to-date as possible, will be a useful
enhancement to the community and collective efforts of
those interested in games for purposes other than pure
entertainment.
By Marc Prensky, September 29, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
The Copyright Cage
"We are in the
midst of a cultural war over copyright, in which the salvos
show the complete disconnect between the colliding
copyright regimes of statute and practicality, law and
life." This overview article surveys a wide range of issues
and contains numerous examples of the misapplication of
copyright law. It recommends a reconsideration of the law,
noting that "we do ourselves a fundamental disservice by
fixating on current income structures and not thinking
about future possibilities premised on amazing
technological advances." Quite right. By Jonathan Zittrain,
Darwin Magazine, September, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Managing Intellectual Property in a Global
Environment
The author describes the start-up
and initial experiences of the Australian content
marketplace, AEShareNet. The author's point of view is
clear: "The United States of America in particular, has
taken a strong lead through the establishment of an
organisation to help educate the community and society
about copyright practice. It was discovered that there was
a woeful, even willful ignorance about basic copyright
issues which gave rise to the NINCH Town Meetings." The
latter part of the article is devoted to listing some of
the issues encountered by AEShareNet, but there isn't a lot
of discussion, nor is there much in the way of commentary
on AEShareNet's current performance. PDF format. By Carol
Fripp, Global-Ed, September 26, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
World+Dog Fight Over World Summit of The
Information Society
Things are not developing
according toscript for the World Summit on the Information
Society. This article takes a balanced look at a number of
the issues: the question of access, the question of freedom
of speech, the question of management of the internet, and
the question of inclusion of non-government organizations.
As Beatriz Busaniche, of the University of Buenos Aires
centre for ”tele-work” and ”tele-training”, warned writes, "If governments continue to
exclude our principles, we will not lend legitimacy to the
final official WSIS documents," a sentiment underscored in
a strongly worded press released issued Friday. By Monika
Ermert, The Register, September 27, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
Understanding the Economic Burden of
Scholarly Publishing
I always worry when authors
take a lot of time arguing that "move beyond hand-wringing
and finger-pointing" because it means that, at a certain
level, the author does not want to look at the cause of the
issue. And what we get - at least to my perspective - is a
prescription that amounts to a bunch of tinkering with the
existing system, rather than something that addresses the
underlying causes. The author, for example, uggests that
the crisis in publishing could be addressed by paying
mandatory dues to academic associations, offering book
subsidies to junior academics, replacing royalties with rax
write-offs and battling competing with commercial
publishers. But why, I ask, would we not simply abandon
book publishing altogether and enbrace a system of
self-archiving? The author writes, "electronic publishing
isn't easy, and it isn't cheap." Well, that depends on what
you're trying to do. My entire corpus of written material
has been provided online for less than the cost of a couple
of nights out. But I'm not trying to get my stuff
peer-reviewed, and I'm not trying to implement e-commerce
or access control. There is much more discussion on this
issue, including comments at The Invisible Adjunct, Chun, and more. By Cathy N. Davidson, Chronicle
of Higher Education, October 3, 2003
[Refer][Research][Reflect]
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