In-Flux- Science, Technology and Innovation - The Idea of Innovation"...the project on the idea of innovation looks at innovation as a category and its historical development since Antiquity. It identifies the concepts that have defined novelty through history and that have led to innovation as a central category of modern society." […]
- The Perils of Perfection - Evgeny Morozov"Whenever technology companies complain that our broken world must be fixed, our initial impulse should be to ask: how do we know our world is broken in exactly the same way that Silicon Valley claims it is? What if the engineers are wrong and frustration, inconsistency, forgetting, perhaps even partisanship, are the very features that allow us to morph […]
- An Institution Is Not an Invention: Heretical Thoughts on Mitra « Mike Caulfield"He urges us to destroy a system that he has not made the slightest effort to understand. He sees math added at a particular time in educational history, makes some broad claims about why that might be, and associates the utility of math in the current curriculum with a series of decisions made by thousands of individual administrators nearly two centur […]
- DRM Chair only works 8 times"all the joints of the chair are cast in wax with a piece of nichrome wire embedded in the wax. An Arduino with a small switch keeps track of how many times the chair has been used, while a solenoid taps out how many uses are left in the chair every time the user gets up. When the internal counter reaches zero, a relay sends power through the nichrome w […]
- Thom Yorke: 'If I can't enjoy this now, when do I start?' | Music | The Observer"We were so into the net around the time of Kid A," he says. "Really thought it might be an amazing way of connecting and communicating. And then very quickly we started having meetings where people started talking about what we did as 'content'. They would show us letters from big media companies offering us millions in some mobile […]
- Facebook Is Recycling Your Likes To Promote Stories You've Never Seen To All Your Friends - Forbes"Facebook is now recycling users Likes and using them to promote “Related Posts” in the news feeds of the user’s friends. And one more thing, the users themselves have possibly never seen the story, liked the story or even know that it is being promoted in their name." […]
- Briefing on MOOCs for the Board of Governors"Comparatively few of the nation’s more than 4,000 degree-granting American colleges or universities …. have the personnel, instructional and technological infrastructure, reputation (brand), and available cash to invest in launching their own MOOCs" […]
- Learning Through Digital Media » Crowdmapping the Classroom with UshahidiVia Scott Leslie: "Returning to our opening example of Blackboard’s interaction design, we can see how verisimilitude to the classroom has been deliberately created to maximize the more efficient management academic labor in order to cut administrative costs and cater to the exploding market within higher education for distance learning. Developing a di […]
- Science, Technology and Innovation - The Idea of Innovation
Monthly Archives: June 2011
Oliver Kellhammer: Botanical Interventions – Open Source Landscape and Community Repair
“I take biological systems and I remix them. In the way a DJ would remix music, I remix ecosystems and plants. Same principle.” I was disappointed that Oliver Kellhammer’s course Open Source City ended up not happening, but was delighted … Continue reading
Posted in Audio
Tagged environmental art, mp3, open, open culture, open education, presentation, street art, sustainability
1 Comment
“recommended for viewing with a helmet”
There’s the relentless global economic meltdown, the lack of accountability, and the injustice of who is bearing the burden of financial crime and negligence. Then there’s steady degradation of the internet, from a space of potential liberation to one which … Continue reading
Posted in Video
Tagged copyright, corporatization, doom-mongering, open culture, protest, remix, Video
1 Comment
More bike-friendly open data goodness from UBC
From the same people who brought you the Vancouver cycling route planner… some nifty visualizations measuring the ‘bikeability’ of the city. Uh, what? We created a bikeability index, based on five components identified in the Cycling in Cities opinion survey … Continue reading
Posted in Imagery, Tech
Tagged data, open content, open data, street art, sustainability, UBC, visualization
2 Comments
A not-at-all amazing story of openness (Wiki Embed)
Scott Leslie could have emailed us, but instead he flagged Novak and myself via a Tweet: That’s a good question. And it just underlines how negligent a blogger I’ve been this past year. The old Wiki Ink plugin has been … Continue reading
Posted in Abject
16 Comments
“stay alive by hiding”
Via Letters of Note, this card from Isaac Asimov to the children of Troy, Michigan congratulating them on the opening of their new library: This one from E.B. White is also a fine thing: You can view 97 letters from … Continue reading
Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham, 1969
I think I remember hearing some joke by Woody Allen about speaking with the Reverend Billy Graham… But had no idea if that conversation was real, much less on YouTube. Though it was posted on Boing Boing, Open Culture and … Continue reading
Boring site note: all moved in, switched over
DSCN0123 shared CC by LosAnheles Just a quick note that may affect a few of you reading this… I have changed the primary blog on my Feedburner RSS feed from http://blogs.ubc.ca/brian to http://abject.ca Hopefully this transition will not mess up … Continue reading
The ‘sports-industrial complex’ is just the beginning
I’m woefully ignorant of hip-hop culture, so much so that I was unaware of Jay Smooth. That changed shortly after Luke Waltzer linked (via a comment – blog and ye shall receive) to this video, which is one of the … Continue reading
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
The Royal Library shared CC by cuellar I’ll admit to an uncouth amount of pleasure spending my workdays based at UBC’s Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, which takes the vintage Main Library and now offers a set of spaces that … Continue reading
