What is Twiki?
A nice overview of the Twiki web.
Thursday, March 22
TWiki . TWiki . WelcomeGuest
Ok, it looks like I'll be using a pre-installed version of Wiki for the CW online project.
MC
Ok, it looks like I'll be using a pre-installed version of Wiki for the CW online project.
MC
Wednesday, March 21
"Early this month, it was off to the NEA Higher Ed conference to learn
something about how to negotiate contracts. There, the big issue this year was the "creeping corporatization of Higher Ed" and how to fight it. For most, that apparently entails fighting, resisiting, or otherwise critiquing computer instruction of every stripe, which is considered to be somehow both the main pipeline for the corporatization everyone fears and the chief instance of it. As is often the case at conferences, I was struck by how this unexamined analogy has taken over: "CEI/CAI/Online Ed is akin to every over 'Big New Thing' that was supposed to rock our teaching world. Like television, radio, video, audio, and correspondance before it, it will (it must!) fail to revolutionize what we do. (And we'll gladly help it fail.)"
This even though IP rights, online class loads, and payment for development of online materials were the topics of the day at nearly all of the contract language oriented sessions."
From Kafkaz on techret@yahoogroups.com
Moi: Unfortunately I am often subject to *layers* of disdain--one layer comes from various (not all) professors of literature who already view Composition as the untheorized toady of corporate America, and then discover hypertext about, oh, 15 minutes ago and insist on using their supreme authority as arbiters of all things textual to reinvent the wheel using "their own" scholars. Zzzzzz.
something about how to negotiate contracts. There, the big issue this year was the "creeping corporatization of Higher Ed" and how to fight it. For most, that apparently entails fighting, resisiting, or otherwise critiquing computer instruction of every stripe, which is considered to be somehow both the main pipeline for the corporatization everyone fears and the chief instance of it. As is often the case at conferences, I was struck by how this unexamined analogy has taken over: "CEI/CAI/Online Ed is akin to every over 'Big New Thing' that was supposed to rock our teaching world. Like television, radio, video, audio, and correspondance before it, it will (it must!) fail to revolutionize what we do. (And we'll gladly help it fail.)"
This even though IP rights, online class loads, and payment for development of online materials were the topics of the day at nearly all of the contract language oriented sessions."
From Kafkaz on techret@yahoogroups.com
Moi: Unfortunately I am often subject to *layers* of disdain--one layer comes from various (not all) professors of literature who already view Composition as the untheorized toady of corporate America, and then discover hypertext about, oh, 15 minutes ago and insist on using their supreme authority as arbiters of all things textual to reinvent the wheel using "their own" scholars. Zzzzzz.
Monday, March 19
The Register Prof. David Crystal, argued that email is unique in that it is a "framing" language. People can take the third paragraph of an email, copy paste and respond to that. They can take the fifth paragraph and do the same. This flexibility (and presumably speed is an essential aspect) has not been possible before, he argues.
In another example, David points out that a chatroom enables 30 or so to communicate at the same time. This would be impossible in any previous form of communication (although people often try it in pubs). Not only that but the non-linearity (ie hyperlinks) of the Internet has and will continue to affect not only language but also art and design and culture in general.
Crystal has just written a book called Netspeak and is giving a talk on the subject at the Royal Society of Arts this Friday. He is the author The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language and numerous other books on language
In another example, David points out that a chatroom enables 30 or so to communicate at the same time. This would be impossible in any previous form of communication (although people often try it in pubs). Not only that but the non-linearity (ie hyperlinks) of the Internet has and will continue to affect not only language but also art and design and culture in general.
Crystal has just written a book called Netspeak and is giving a talk on the subject at the Royal Society of Arts this Friday. He is the author The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language and numerous other books on language
What's Dis'course About? Arguing CMC into the Curriculum "How responsible can we claim to be if, even as we claim to be preparing students to write in the world outside our classrooms, we do not include computer-based discourse? And just as Bakhtin has caused us to question the value of individual writers producing drafts alone as a valid pedagogy, computers and writing advocates are challenging the very notion of producing "final drafts" at all as real-time, computer-mediated communication over local and wide area networks becomes increasingly popular. It seems that we are once again in need of a discursive re-evaluation of our teaching priorities in composition."
Tuesday, March 13
air-l archive 31Jul00 - 14Aug00 first, Arturo Escobar's "Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture", Current Anthropology, 35:3 (June 1994): 211-231.
second, and immodestly, my own "Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000," in Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age, edited by David Gauntlett (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, September 2000).
second, and immodestly, my own "Looking Backwards, Looking Forward: Cyberculture Studies 1990-2000," in Web.Studies: Rewiring Media Studies for the Digital Age, edited by David Gauntlett (Oxford University Press, forthcoming, September 2000).
WebReview.com: March 9, 2001: Labs, Robots, and Giant Floating Brains: The Amazingly True Story of Blogger!" Ev: By more powerful and interesting, I'm referring to some specific functionality I've been dying to build for several months now that will greatly expand the concept of what Blogger is and offer the average user a much greater ability to get their words and ideas out to a larger audience. I see in Blogger the seed for the democratization of media, which has been talked about since the beginning of the Internet and which we ("we," as the Internet/technology field) have only begun to explore. I'm very interested in diving into that."
Monday, March 12
Weblogs.Com : What Are Weblogs? What Are Weblogs?
Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles.
A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there's also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.
A few months ago this site said "There are literally hundreds of these sites, and some people think there will be many thousands by the end of next year. (I am one of those people.)"
Well it turned out that way. The Weblog idea is growing, some people think soon it will start booming. (I am one of those people.)
Weblogs are often-updated sites that point to articles elsewhere on the web, often with comments, and to on-site articles.
A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there's also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.
A few months ago this site said "There are literally hundreds of these sites, and some people think there will be many thousands by the end of next year. (I am one of those people.)"
Well it turned out that way. The Weblog idea is growing, some people think soon it will start booming. (I am one of those people.)
Friday, March 9
Thursday, March 8
Now, there's a whole other side of that conversation, including isolation from
one's peers, increasing restrictions on experimentation, and unhealthy mix of
work versus play, but that's not the point. The point is that some people won't
show up in Google because they've got their noses to the grindstone. And sometimes,
that's a good thing.
Besides, I doubt Google goes back to 1993 when I /did/ have a personal website,
called "vampyr's box of roses".
one's peers, increasing restrictions on experimentation, and unhealthy mix of
work versus play, but that's not the point. The point is that some people won't
show up in Google because they've got their noses to the grindstone. And sometimes,
that's a good thing.
Besides, I doubt Google goes back to 1993 when I /did/ have a personal website,
called "vampyr's box of roses".
CamWorld: Thinking Outside the Box OK, last thought. I sometimes see résumés that are really good. I am amazed. I think "Wow, we need to bring this person in for an interview." But, then I go to Google and try to find information about this person. Nothing. I search industry mailing list archives. Nothing. I check the membership rosters of industry organizations. Nothing. Whoah, does this person even know how to communicate? How come this person doesn't even have a personal web site? Why is their no public proof that they know what they're talking about? Is this asking too much?
Wednesday, March 7
From Phil Agre's Red Rock Eater News studying beginners is not new, and that user-interface people have
talked in terms of the user's "model" of the machine, as opposed to
the "correct" model that is embedded in the design of the machine.
The question then arises of what beginners' models tend to be like,
and how to make the beginner's model and the correct model align.
That alignment could come about in different ways: teaching strategies
that install the correct model in users' heads, or design strategies
that make the correct model transparent to users in the first place.
It's true that I am hardly the first person to think of investigating
users, and if I were writing an academic paper I would be responsible
for citing all of the relevant literature in useability and elsewhere.
My point was different. I want to suggest a naturalistic study of
users that places them in the full context of their lives. I also
want to encourage a polemical view of beginners as rational people,
and of experts as victims of brainwashing. And I am not exaggerating
this for rhetorical effect. I honestly believe that the computers
we have today incorporate ideas about people and their lives that are
radically false. We as experts have to gotten used to the pathologies
that result from these mistaken ideas, and the fine, naturalistic
detail of beginners' experience really is our best way of remembering
what we have lost.
I also have a problem with the word "model". I may not disagree with
it, but I think that it can be misleading. First of all, it suggests
something that is unified and coherent in people's minds. If so then
I am not sure that it makes sense to speak of beginners as having a
model of a computer at all. Beginners do exhibit very characteristic
forms of reasoning, but these can almost be defined as the absence
of the kind of model that experts are said to possess. Alright, you
might say, so beginners need to build a model. What's the problem?
The problem is that beginners are not empty. They come to computers,
for example, with elaborate expectations derived from other media
(on this topic see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation:
Understanding New Media, MIT Press, 1998). They are also familiar,
unfortunately, with all manner of cultural constructions of computers
-- including all of the fiction that anthropomorphizes the computer
and treat *it* as unified and coherent, which it's not. The idea that
computers have all kinds of social contradictions running through them
is incomprehensible against that cultural background.
The notion of a "model" also focuses on the mental lives of individual
users, and thus distracts attention from the larger contexts in which
individual users are embedded. I enumerated several such contexts.
One is the microsociology of interactions between beginners and experts
-- for example, when the experts "help" the beginners by taking the
keyboard away from them, talking technical gibberish at them, changing
their configurations, and generally disempowering them in every way
they can. Another is the local ecology of knowledge and practice in a
home or office; this ecology can be supportive and constructive, or it
can undermine the beginner's capacity to learn. Each case will need
to be investigated on its own merits, but we will usually discover a
combination of both. Yet another context is the computer industry and
particularly the competitive dynamics of standards. Economic pressures
both for and against compatibility are easy to find, and every computer
is a historical conglomeration of different architectural choices and
competitive configurations over many years.
The most important intuition for the naturalistic study of users, in
my experience, is to look in the margins. Experts imagine themselves
to be inside the machine; they *do* have a model of how the machine
works, and they "see" the machine purely in terms of that model.
If the machine fails to behave according to the model, experts have
no problem simply restarting an application or rebooting the machine.
Beginners cannot distinguish between proper and improper functioning
of the machine, and they find this behavior on the part of experts
bewildering. Experts see only the picture; beginners see only the
frame. Experts cannot see all of the detailed work around the edges
of the system: getting an account, figuring out which machine you're
allowed to use, turning it on, logging in, password problems, getting
your hands registered the right way on the keyboard, learning what
you do with the keyboard versus what you do with the mouse, getting
help, knowing what things are called, knowing whether your work has
been saved, logging out, shutting the machine off (and whether you're
supposed to be shutting it off at all), and so on. Very few people
have ever investigated what really happens in college computer labs,
for example. One of them was Steve Strassman, who in the mid-1980s
wrote his senior thesis at MIT based on six weeks of observation in
the computer lab for the 6.001 introductory programming course. His
work is unpublished, to my knowledge. But if you're concerned with
access to the Internet, in my opinion the most important problems are
all in this zone of peripheral vision -- the area that is invisible to
the brainwashed experts. The cost of hardware and software is not the
big problem in my opinion, simply because the cost is dropping like a
rock. The problem, rather, is with knowledge and culture -- and with
the culture of expert knowledge that makes life harder than it has to
be for non-experts.
**
"
talked in terms of the user's "model" of the machine, as opposed to
the "correct" model that is embedded in the design of the machine.
The question then arises of what beginners' models tend to be like,
and how to make the beginner's model and the correct model align.
That alignment could come about in different ways: teaching strategies
that install the correct model in users' heads, or design strategies
that make the correct model transparent to users in the first place.
It's true that I am hardly the first person to think of investigating
users, and if I were writing an academic paper I would be responsible
for citing all of the relevant literature in useability and elsewhere.
My point was different. I want to suggest a naturalistic study of
users that places them in the full context of their lives. I also
want to encourage a polemical view of beginners as rational people,
and of experts as victims of brainwashing. And I am not exaggerating
this for rhetorical effect. I honestly believe that the computers
we have today incorporate ideas about people and their lives that are
radically false. We as experts have to gotten used to the pathologies
that result from these mistaken ideas, and the fine, naturalistic
detail of beginners' experience really is our best way of remembering
what we have lost.
I also have a problem with the word "model". I may not disagree with
it, but I think that it can be misleading. First of all, it suggests
something that is unified and coherent in people's minds. If so then
I am not sure that it makes sense to speak of beginners as having a
model of a computer at all. Beginners do exhibit very characteristic
forms of reasoning, but these can almost be defined as the absence
of the kind of model that experts are said to possess. Alright, you
might say, so beginners need to build a model. What's the problem?
The problem is that beginners are not empty. They come to computers,
for example, with elaborate expectations derived from other media
(on this topic see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation:
Understanding New Media, MIT Press, 1998). They are also familiar,
unfortunately, with all manner of cultural constructions of computers
-- including all of the fiction that anthropomorphizes the computer
and treat *it* as unified and coherent, which it's not. The idea that
computers have all kinds of social contradictions running through them
is incomprehensible against that cultural background.
The notion of a "model" also focuses on the mental lives of individual
users, and thus distracts attention from the larger contexts in which
individual users are embedded. I enumerated several such contexts.
One is the microsociology of interactions between beginners and experts
-- for example, when the experts "help" the beginners by taking the
keyboard away from them, talking technical gibberish at them, changing
their configurations, and generally disempowering them in every way
they can. Another is the local ecology of knowledge and practice in a
home or office; this ecology can be supportive and constructive, or it
can undermine the beginner's capacity to learn. Each case will need
to be investigated on its own merits, but we will usually discover a
combination of both. Yet another context is the computer industry and
particularly the competitive dynamics of standards. Economic pressures
both for and against compatibility are easy to find, and every computer
is a historical conglomeration of different architectural choices and
competitive configurations over many years.
The most important intuition for the naturalistic study of users, in
my experience, is to look in the margins. Experts imagine themselves
to be inside the machine; they *do* have a model of how the machine
works, and they "see" the machine purely in terms of that model.
If the machine fails to behave according to the model, experts have
no problem simply restarting an application or rebooting the machine.
Beginners cannot distinguish between proper and improper functioning
of the machine, and they find this behavior on the part of experts
bewildering. Experts see only the picture; beginners see only the
frame. Experts cannot see all of the detailed work around the edges
of the system: getting an account, figuring out which machine you're
allowed to use, turning it on, logging in, password problems, getting
your hands registered the right way on the keyboard, learning what
you do with the keyboard versus what you do with the mouse, getting
help, knowing what things are called, knowing whether your work has
been saved, logging out, shutting the machine off (and whether you're
supposed to be shutting it off at all), and so on. Very few people
have ever investigated what really happens in college computer labs,
for example. One of them was Steve Strassman, who in the mid-1980s
wrote his senior thesis at MIT based on six weeks of observation in
the computer lab for the 6.001 introductory programming course. His
work is unpublished, to my knowledge. But if you're concerned with
access to the Internet, in my opinion the most important problems are
all in this zone of peripheral vision -- the area that is invisible to
the brainwashed experts. The cost of hardware and software is not the
big problem in my opinion, simply because the cost is dropping like a
rock. The problem, rather, is with knowledge and culture -- and with
the culture of expert knowledge that makes life harder than it has to
be for non-experts.
**
"
Tuesday, March 6
From Jon Katz at Slashdot:
"One of the dominant characters of tech culture has been it's affluent, educated, tech-centeredness. No longer true. The fastest-growing segment of Web newcomers are Americans over 55 years old with working-class incomes, older members of minority groups, blue-collar workers, and people with decidedly non-tech interests and backgrounds. The new generation of wired Americans, says American Demographics, looks "increasingly like the folks who cruise your local Wal-Mart." From the surveys, they are clearly drawn online by e-mail, other messaging systems, and especially, entertainment and related communities. "
http://slashdot.org/features/01/02/28/1515212.shtml
"One of the dominant characters of tech culture has been it's affluent, educated, tech-centeredness. No longer true. The fastest-growing segment of Web newcomers are Americans over 55 years old with working-class incomes, older members of minority groups, blue-collar workers, and people with decidedly non-tech interests and backgrounds. The new generation of wired Americans, says American Demographics, looks "increasingly like the folks who cruise your local Wal-Mart." From the surveys, they are clearly drawn online by e-mail, other messaging systems, and especially, entertainment and related communities. "
http://slashdot.org/features/01/02/28/1515212.shtml
Monday, March 5
"One of the things that this gets to for me, in my current job at Bedford/St.
Martin's, where I do a lot of campus visits and workshops, is the age old
question we all, as technologically savvy people in our programs and
departments, hear locally, often with a slight whine in the asking, "I want
to teach writing, not computers."
But the two aren't separate. Writing is what you write with; what you write
with shapes how you think, how you see writing, how you read. And in most
academic disciplines, writing--articles, proposals, letters of
introduction/recommendation, conference papers, books, textbooks, web sites,
e-mail lists--is the thing that makes the discipline what it is, defines it.
What's been great about the past 20 years or so, as computers have moved
into day to day life, has been the chance to study the change they have
brought to understanding disciplines and what defines them." --Nick Carbone, on Techrhet
Martin's, where I do a lot of campus visits and workshops, is the age old
question we all, as technologically savvy people in our programs and
departments, hear locally, often with a slight whine in the asking, "I want
to teach writing, not computers."
But the two aren't separate. Writing is what you write with; what you write
with shapes how you think, how you see writing, how you read. And in most
academic disciplines, writing--articles, proposals, letters of
introduction/recommendation, conference papers, books, textbooks, web sites,
e-mail lists--is the thing that makes the discipline what it is, defines it.
What's been great about the past 20 years or so, as computers have moved
into day to day life, has been the chance to study the change they have
brought to understanding disciplines and what defines them." --Nick Carbone, on Techrhet
kottke.org - home of fine hypertext products "in practice, I think that the majority of weblogs I come across are awful -- derivative, puerile, self-important, blockheaded, dull. But that's fine: I think that most media products are awful. I don't want to watch most of what's on TV; I don't want to read most of what's on the newsstand. It would be surprising if there were more than a few weblogs that held my interest. Someone's reading them, just like someone -- a lot of someones, actually -- are reading Teen People. It doesn't have to be me."
Friday, March 2
CNN.com - Travel - Machines offer literary snacks on London's Tube - February 27, 2001 On the teeming platform at South Kensington Underground station, vending machines offer a choice of a chocolate bar, a pack of gum -- or classic love poems.
Thursday, March 1
Wednesday, February 28
Ftrain.com: "Internet Culture Review" "While the boom was at its boomiest I quit my third New Economy job, ostensibly to be a freelancer, but more accurately to just stop, be done with it, calm down for a while, stop sleeping under desks, stop having to spew charts-and-bullets nonsense. And that was about the end of my sympathy for anything Wired, anything which promised great gains for the many through utter rhetorical nonsense."
Monday, February 26
Wednesday, February 21
TheStandard.com: Plastic Medium "One of the consolations of the dot-com shakeout is that it provides a much-needed opportunity to take the long view. Now that we know that first movers often turn out to be first losers, the need for speed seems much less pressing than the need for perspective. It's a good time, in other words, to step back and take a look at the ways the Internet is changing some basic patterns of social behavior.
Which brings me to the strange world of blogs. A blog – the word is a contraction of "Web log" – is a simple online diary that can be created with a free Web-based application called Blogger."
Which brings me to the strange world of blogs. A blog – the word is a contraction of "Web log" – is a simple online diary that can be created with a free Web-based application called Blogger."
Thursday, February 15
elearningpost-March 2001 Donald Norman: We have to start at several places. The traditional course is run by a professor, an instructor, who organizes the course material in some logical method and gives lecture materials and assigns readings. This is an approach that we can call either "teacher-centric", or maybe, "content-centric". And it fails to take into account the way people learn. The first step in learner-centric is to understand how learning takes place. Much modern research in cognitive science shows that people learn by doing. So it is very important that people learn not by reading a book, and not by listening to a lecture, but by doing tasks that can engage the mind.
Saturday, February 3
Monday, January 15
Thursday, January 4
The Joys of Powerpoint "It does help lay out thoughts in a coherent manner," he adds, "but it breeds a dependency the likes of which I've only seen in heroin users and Starbucks coffee drinkers. Has anyone seen Microsoft salespeople hanging around school yards yet?"
PowerPoint: What's wrong with it? , Sun Microsystems' president, Scott McNealy, announced in 1997 that PowerPoint was verboten for his 25,000 employees -- but, The New York Times dryly noted last April, "the ban was not enforced."
Wednesday, January 3
Friday, December 22
Wednesday, December 6
S.R. Brown: Q Methodology and Qualitative Research Some of the quantitative obstacles to the wider use of Q methodology have recently been rendered less daunting by virtue of software
packages which have converted to button presses what before were tedious calculations. One such package, QMethod (Atkinson, 1992), is
available as freeware from Kent State University's Listserver, and the way in which QMethod facilitates Q-methodological inquiries, as well as
the way in which such inquiries proceed, is perhaps best illustrated in terms of a concrete example such as the following.
packages which have converted to button presses what before were tedious calculations. One such package, QMethod (Atkinson, 1992), is
available as freeware from Kent State University's Listserver, and the way in which QMethod facilitates Q-methodological inquiries, as well as
the way in which such inquiries proceed, is perhaps best illustrated in terms of a concrete example such as the following.
Diffuse -- WWW9 - The Web:: The Next Generation Meggie provides similar facilities for annotating MP3 files used for aural history interviews by embedding ID3
tags. For Meggie there are also text transcriptions of each interview. The RDF metadata is associated with
separate parts of the transcription/interview, rather than the complete file.
tags. For Meggie there are also text transcriptions of each interview. The RDF metadata is associated with
separate parts of the transcription/interview, rather than the complete file.
Saturday, December 2
Friday, December 1
Thursday, November 30
Wednesday, November 29
Saturday, November 18
Thursday, November 16
Saturday, November 11
THE COMPUTER UNDERGROUND AND POST-MODERNISM
The computer underground is a culture of persons who call
computer bulletin board systems (BBSs, or just "boards"), and
share the interests fostered by the BBS. In conceptualizing the
computer underground as a distinct culture, we draw from Geertz's
(1973: 5) definition of culture as a system of meanings that give
significance to shared behaviors that must be interpreted from
the perspective of those engaged in them. A culture provides not
only the "systems of standards for perceiving, believing, evalu-
ating, and acting" (Goodenough, 1981: 110), but includes the
rules and symbols of interpretation and discourse for partici-
pants:
In crude relief, culture can be understood as a set of
solutions devised by a group of people to meet specific
problems posed by situations they face in com-
mon. . . This notion of culture as a living, historical
product of group problem
Wednesday, November 8
kuro5hin.org || technology and culture, from the trenches
I am the technology coordinator/network administrator at a high visibility public high school in the capital city of a southern state. Because of the visibility of my position, I found myself last week in a meeting with the Governor, the State Superintendent of Education and several representatives of the local military base's IT program. We were there to discuss how we are going to improve Technology Education statewide. All involved want to make sure our next generation has: a) the IT skills to find a decent job, and b) the IT employers in state to hire them. They all seemed quite sincere about wanting to do something, if less sure about what exactly needs to be done
Now I have been told to write an email with suggestions of some avenues to explore. If you had the opportunity to write this email yourself, what would you suggest?
I am the technology coordinator/network administrator at a high visibility public high school in the capital city of a southern state. Because of the visibility of my position, I found myself last week in a meeting with the Governor, the State Superintendent of Education and several representatives of the local military base's IT program. We were there to discuss how we are going to improve Technology Education statewide. All involved want to make sure our next generation has: a) the IT skills to find a decent job, and b) the IT employers in state to hire them. They all seemed quite sincere about wanting to do something, if less sure about what exactly needs to be done
Now I have been told to write an email with suggestions of some avenues to explore. If you had the opportunity to write this email yourself, what would you suggest?
Monday, November 6
"If you write for God, you will reach many people and bring them joy. If you write for people, you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted you will wish you were dead."
-- Thomas Merton
-- Thomas Merton
Designing a Wired Life
Once upon a time, Western culture associated information technology with an old and powerful story about the future. The future, according to this story, lies in rationality, and the task of the engineer is to discover optimally rational social arrangements in a scientific manner and then impose them upon the world. This picture was already fashionable in the early 19th century through the works of Henri de Saint-Simon (Hayek 1952), and it remained vigorous until the end of the Cold War (Lilienfeld 1978). Information technology grew up in the midst of this project of social rationalization, and the main tradition of computer system design is still organized around a cycle of studying existing work ractices, rationalizing them, and either automating them altogether or using technology to impose a rational order on them.
Once upon a time, Western culture associated information technology with an old and powerful story about the future. The future, according to this story, lies in rationality, and the task of the engineer is to discover optimally rational social arrangements in a scientific manner and then impose them upon the world. This picture was already fashionable in the early 19th century through the works of Henri de Saint-Simon (Hayek 1952), and it remained vigorous until the end of the Cold War (Lilienfeld 1978). Information technology grew up in the midst of this project of social rationalization, and the main tradition of computer system design is still organized around a cycle of studying existing work ractices, rationalizing them, and either automating them altogether or using technology to impose a rational order on them.
Wednesday, October 18
genehack: october 2000 archives
And then I remembered: in my haste to get the class together, I'd used the PowerPoint
presentation of the person who was supposed to speak -- a presentation loaded down
with various bits of zinging text and dancing graphics. And at that point, I realized
yet another aspect of the PowerPoint evil. Not only does that crap piece of malware
result in speakers spending more time on useless appearance-based noodling and not
enough time on the actual content of what they're talking about, it encourages the
audience to go into TV watching mode, to sit back and enjoy the little bits of
pixels that go whizzing about the screen.
And then I remembered: in my haste to get the class together, I'd used the PowerPoint
presentation of the person who was supposed to speak -- a presentation loaded down
with various bits of zinging text and dancing graphics. And at that point, I realized
yet another aspect of the PowerPoint evil. Not only does that crap piece of malware
result in speakers spending more time on useless appearance-based noodling and not
enough time on the actual content of what they're talking about, it encourages the
audience to go into TV watching mode, to sit back and enjoy the little bits of
pixels that go whizzing about the screen.
Thursday, October 12
Plan Gives Computers to Teachers
The $110 million in state funding is a one-time investment, and school districts that
choose to participate will have to come up with money to maintain and replace the
computers in the future.
The $110 million in state funding is a one-time investment, and school districts that
choose to participate will have to come up with money to maintain and replace the
computers in the future.
Sunday, October 8
Thursday, September 21
Wednesday, September 20
Monday, September 18
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