OLDaily
By Stephen Downes
March 17, 2004

Travel Day
Today is a travel day, so a short newsletter... I'll catch up tomorrow... By Anonymous, March 17, 2004 1:22 p.m. [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Con-text? (An Inquiry)
According to this paper, people communicate online both verbally and non-verbally. "We will need to redefine not only our beliefs of what constitutes communication here, but also begin to assemble a new dictionary of online verbal and nonverbal communication codes, accents, cues and meaning." I am not completely happy with either theory used to frame this discussion, channel theory or process theory, but I do like the discussion, I like the whiteboard examples, and I suspect that as non-verbal authoring tools become easier to use we will see a lot more of this in online communication. PDF, which DEOS News for some reason thinks handles graphics better than a web page (I should introduce them to this great new graphical browser called 'Mosaic'). By Mia Lobel, Michael Neubauer and Randy Swedburg, DEOS News, March 16, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

IEEE Members Furious
The simmering debate at the IEEE has boiled over. "More than 5100 people—most of them members of the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)—have signed a petition calling on the organization to 'cease discrimination against IEEE members from countries that are embargoed by the US government.'" The IEEE has had this sort of controversy before; long time OLDaily readers will recall the debate that erupted when IEEE authors were asked to sign a document affirming that they had conformed to the U.S. Diginal Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a measure that was subsequently revoked. By John Dudley Miller, The Scientist, March 16, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Learning Environmentalism
Seymour Papert: To save the schools, we have to break them. The current move toward standardization is a last gasp, "the last twitch of the dragon's tail" as the old system dies. It is natural, in such a time, for the bureaucracy to close ranks, to centrally impose something like standardization "instead of its direct opposite, higher standards." By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, March 16, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

Sensitize / Desensitize
Again, and let me stress, this is not a simple cause and effect relationship. It's not about killing monsters, and then going out and killing people. Rather, it is about shaping one's understanding of the world. As moderator Renée-Marie Fountain summed up nicely, it's about "how to sensitize, how to desensitize, and who gets to do that." By Stephen Downes, Stephen's Web, March 16, 2004 [Refer][Research][Reflect]

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