Posts from — June 2007

“teaching with technology” seems to be a conceptual misconstruction that highlights the two issues of technology in classes that are pretty moot when technology is used right. the first is the teacher, the second is the role of technology. to be with, means to be not ‘of’, so teaching with technology will always be bringing it in, but keeping it outside of the practices. I think the proper frame is “learning through technology”. Learning focuses on the learners in the classroom as they are coming to be, the place of technology as being something that we learn through, something that we holistically embrace as part of the learning process transforms it to something that is closer to the everyday lives of our students.

we should give up on “teaching with technology” and move to “learning through technology”.

Richard Rorty, 1931-2007:
Richard Rorty, the leading American philosopher and heir to the pragmatist tradition, passed away on Friday, June 8.
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from telospress…

Feminism Friday: Using pregnancy to criminalize womanhood at Pandagon:
Of course, the other part of this is redefining what a child is, taking women’s participation in the creation of one out of the picture and relegating pregnant women to the role of mere incubators for children that men make. To call something a “child” from the moment a man shoots his load and not after a woman has grown the child for 9 months in her body is part of the project of using pregnancy as a tool to dehumanize women and subjugate us to men.

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Pandagon calls it the way that I see it.

General Wesley Clark – Bush Administration intends to “take out 7 countries in 5 years.” | The Skeleton Project:
General Wesley Clark – Bush Administration intends to “take out 7 countries in 5 years.”

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yes, this will cause terrorism. attacking other countries militarizes the population.

haarlem
haarlem town hall
department store

Interpretation in policy analysis conference <– why i took the trip

I met up with my friend and colleague Frank Schaap and we had some nice pie, and some beer, and some dinner and chatted.

i stayed at my friend Todd’s house for a while, and played with his cats.

I saw the Renee Descartes house

I took pictures of many churches inside and out:

st. nicolaskirk
black church…
oude kirk
new church
grote kirk haarlem

oh there are around 2000 pictures from museums including the pearson, the frans hals, the teylers, and house boat museums. there is even a few pictures of a windmill.

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States

I boycott godaddy because of the owner’s politics, which has seemed borderline fascist to me. mr. diety which was a good and occasionally funny video podcast did an interview with godaddy ceo, I’m afraid this means I’m no longer going to partake of their humor, which was particularly funny in that it was centered on a critique of theism of the xtian variety.

It was the only right (ethical) choice that I had. You see I went down to google’s new york office tonight to see a colleague of mine speak on the future of the internet. I thought it was an open invite without any specific rules as to what I could do with the knowledge that I found there. I registered and attended until Google asserted the rules.

Sometimes… Google gets it wrong. You see I did not have any prior ruleset to know that they do not allow people to blog or otherwise publish their visit to such talks. They did not send one, it was not in any announcement that I received, and I’ve otherwise not seen one. However, there is a set of rules that prohibit blogging or publishing that they announced before the talk. Google said that if i wanted to blog or publicly discuss the event, I had to get their permission. If I’d have known, I would not have attended or been affiliated with the event in any way. I am a professor, was and still am, and by the very nature of my job, i cannot guarantee that I will follow their rules about publication or blogging. I couldn’t consent to them, so I had to leave. I don’t want to have to ask google for permission to speak about something that I already know a good deal about and am perfectly happy dashing an email off to colleagues to learn more. I don’t want to be obliged to them for any intellectual content or public knowledge at all beyond the general service they provide.

The rational that google said justified this request for secrecy and the privatization of knowledge was one of collegiality. I found that justification to be ironic. Colleagues share within the limits of their judgment. Collegiality is broken as soon as the judgment is turned into a ruleset, as soon as trust becomes moot and i no longer have to trust you, instead i just have to trust that you are following the pre-ordained rules. At that point in time of the announcement of rules, anyone in the room could be called colleagues, afterwards we were all subjects to Google and any collegiality was limited by Google’s rules. We were all constructed as lesser beings, less equal, more likely to damage others. We were ‘other’, and untrustworthy, which is the implication of the ‘no blogging’. If you want people to be friends, to become a community, you have to let them communicate, you have to let them establish the common ground by consent.

Thus I had to leave, as I was not going to be subject of Google beyond what I’ve already contracted. I could not consent to silence. I am surprised that the speaker in question would allow this rule, but not that surprised in the end.

Please if you have a talk where people who take ethics seriously are present, never change the rules after the fact, make them public beforehand.

Now I know 2 things,
1. Google changes the rules of public engagement to suit it’s own interpretations
2. Before I attend any future Google event, I should ask for clearly defined rules to be made public and distributed, so that I can decide to either be complicit or not beforehand.

Anniversary:
I feel like the luckest person in the world.
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rochelle lasted two years working in a library… amazing… just utterly, amazing! congratulations.

Whoa.:

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Go Axel Go!

Second Life Makes Dream Of Owning Fictitious Coffee Shop Come True | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source:
“As long as I can remember, I’ve pictured myself owning a multipolygonal 3-D representation of what a coffee shop might be in the real world,” said Jarrett, who has invested hundreds of real dollars and thousands of actual hours in Never Bean, her digital pseudo-business in Second Life’s popular Scurfield district.

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hehehehe