Stephen Downes

Om Malik interviews Jenna Wortham. I wasn't sure I'd like it because I'm a bit indifferent to Malik (and the early name-dropping and depiction of his subject as "sassy" didn't help). But it's a good conversation and they go into some depth into what's happening at least in the U.S. version of the internet (I can't imagine "everyone has a bedroom just like mine" really being a global phenomenon). And there's a good glimpse of how a younger generation views a world in turmoil despite the promises of people like the editors at Wired, her former employer. "The bubble has popped. Not the tech bubble, but this idea that we live in this techno-utopian-post-racial world. That’s deflating, and we’re quickly realizing that yeah, the problems we face run a lot deeper and are going to be a lot harder to change." Jenna Wortham is a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.

Oh I want to do something like this one day - I've listened to hundreds and hundreds of old time radio fiction over the last few years, I could probably do the genre - and it could be a great format for a presentation. Maybe I can round up some people like Jim Groom and do a proper radio broadcast. Karl Kapp offers his own version in this slide deck (which I actually read through end to end before realizing I was doing it) talking about games and gamification (and game elements...). Good stuff. Now, how does that go again? "Suddenly, a shot rang out...."

Photos from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Enclosures:
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I spent pretty much the my entire university career as a 'student leader' first as a newspaper writer and editor during my undergraduate years, and next as a student association representative and president during my graduate years. I did not experience any "recruiting" efforts in my direction - quite the contrary, actually. I think this points to a difference between the relation between student associations and administrations in Canada and the US (outside North America I simply cannot say, but I imagine one or the other is common). Both student associations and student newspapers appear to be run as part of the university south of the border, while in Canad our associations and newspapers are fiercely independent of administration - so much so that I think it would be a scandal were it to be discovered that student leaders were being "recruited" by the administration. So I personally find this story a bit surprising and off-putting. Students don't need to have admnistrations recruit their leadership - they know who they are.

I'm not sure whether they cover this on U.S. networks but it's interesting to listed to a report on Al Jazeera about the 'Sting Ray' surveillance system originally designed for use against terrorists but not in increasingly wide day-to-day use by forces across the country. The system consists of radio towers that emulate cell phone towers an trick mobile devices into sending access information, data and other information. The judicial logic allowing use is that it is not actually surveillance. "The government did not install the tracking device — and the cell user chose to carry the phone that permitted transmission of its information to a carrier," Gorenstein held in that opinion. "Therefore no warrant is needed." The ACLU lists police departments using the system. Here's an EFF report from a couple weeks ago.

Video from Cathy Davidson's talk "'Changing Higher Education from the Classroom Up' at the X International Seminar on 'Revisiting the Fundamentals of Traditional Curricula, R/Evolution: what “R” Would Mean for Education.' The conference was sponsored by the UNESCO Chair in Education and Technology for Social Change and was held at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya." I haven't reviewed the video but I've seen it referenced in a couple of places. I see Davidson as fairly conservative generally in her thinking but I'll be sure to review this one in the future to test my presumptions.

I was fortunate enough to meet with and converse at length with Craig Weiss while I was in Riyadh, so I thought I'd post a link to give people a sense of what he's about. He is, in short, a fountain of knowledge of learning management systems and related technologies. In this post he interviews Aaron Silvers (no slough himself) on the activity-recording specification called xAPI (aka Tin Can, aka the Experience API). Here is what it is supposed to do: "We want a system to be able to interpret, appropriately, consistently and reliably, the activity you performed and the context in which it was performed, no matter where it was recorded."

This is a great reconstruction of just what exactly is going on with the computers on Star Trek (the original series). "The Star Trek computer, at least in the 1960s, was not ahead of its time, but *of* its time. It lacked the vision to see even five years into the future... There’s no keyboard because there is no text, anywhere, on any computer on the Enterprise to edit... Why? Because computers were for math, stupid!"