So I’m fooling around with things for my “Learning from the Anti-Collection” paper, and I found this astonishing collection of culturally-situated learning tools and a fascinating paper on Native American cybernetics from Ron Eglash at RPI (who has an Erdös number of 3, so he obviously knows his math, hehe!) Check out the virtual bead loom!
Live from Las Vegas: Mind Flex.
After so much fuss over “the Millennials,” I can hardly wait until Mattel’s Mind-Flex-trained generation hits the classrooms…. and the libraries. Consider this your early Mind-Flexers alert, people!
Concern about “inappropriate environments” (especially ones that involve social networking) imposed by instructors etc. on undergraduates etc. is now being dubbed the “creepy treehouse effect,” but it seems to me that many things can constitute “creepiness.” (In fact, you might call it “concept creep” for the “creep concept.”) For instance, how about wikigenes, which is allegedly built on a technology that can track the authorship of every word in an edit? Now, that technological concept and its potential uses and misuses in copyright suits, plagiarism accusations, and scholarly evaluation creeps even me out!
P.S. On the other hand, I think Trevor Owens’ use of simple RPG software to generate historical role-playing games is tree cool.
Last semester in Competitive Intelligence, we had a pretty wide-ranging discussion about ethics (for example, whether it’s okay to eavesdrop on a loud-mouthed group from your competitor’s firm in a hotel bar at a trade show.) One of the things that came up was IBM’s business conduct guidelines, which gave an interesting and useful turn to our discussion. (I know from observation that these guidelines are taken quite seriously, as my “other job” for the past 25 years has been that of “IBM spouse”….)
Anyway, IBM has also had blogging guidelines in place since 2005, and I believe is now the first company to produce business conduct guidelines for virtual worlds, including but not limited to their own Metaverse.
As Scott Wilson has cleverly pointed out, the thing about virtual metaverses, like all other possible worlds, is that there are so many of them. But, wherever you go, there you are — or aren’t you?
Considerable angst on Planet Library that no “library resources” made this particular top 100 list of e-learning tools. If you look at the current list of respondents, however, you’ll note that many of them list at least one “tool” marketed by their own company, and the entire list of respondents seems to be self-selected! So it seems like a good list of tools to check out (I found some neat ones, such as VoiceThread, that are new to me), but hardly a matter for extraordinary concern. (Except for the fact that well-known educational thinker Stephen Downes has admitted in a comment that he hasn’t used his own library’s online resources for several years…. since I’m an admirer of his Stephen’s Web, I’m wondering what’s up with that!
Okay, so I’m googling (yes, assistant professors google a lot!) Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, to check out a hint that his “Project Halo” is about to go commercial with the launch of a really intelligent search engine, when I accidentally come across the “other” Paul Allen of Ancestry.com (self-identified as “Paul Allen the Lesser”), who has a post about his own experiences as a CEO. Read more…
Boy, talk about your lost generation! Apparently I’m part of it, and I’ve only just now heard the term, courtesy of Tame the Web. So I’ve already accepted that I’m not a Sooner, and it seems that I’m not even a Boomer. No more Boomer Sooner ringtone for me! (Note: That’s an OU in joke, just in case anyone from out of state ever reads this.) Now I see why the so-called Millennials don’t necessarily believe in these generational labels either….
Rome Reborn is such an amazing project why am I disappointed that it has no avatars? Poor dear Mr. Rowan at Bridgewater-Raritan West would have had a lot less trouble attracting people to Advanced Latin class way back then if we’d had something like that to go along with translating the orations of Cicero. The Junior Classical League is apparently missing the navicula here, by not making use of it. Read more…
Hmm, Marc Andreessen is now blogging. Unlike the famous “Fake Steve Jobs” blog (which I *won’t* link to, but which is easy enough to find if you’re curious), this one looks authentic, though I’m somewhat bemused by the fact that it actually seems both intelligible and useful to the average reader like myself. Can it be that Andreessen’s always had crossover dreams of becoming a librarian?
Not specifically about Library School 2.0, but from the LITA-L listserv recently regarding the upcoming “ultimate debate” at this month’s ALA about whether or not libraries innovate. The next-to-last paragraph of this post from Fred Gertler, dean of the University of the Pacific library, ties the two discussions together in a way that I find very useful: Read more…
