Category — Cool Stuff

tonight i’m heading downtown with my lovely wife in order to do something that i’ve never done which is to see a live music show by billy bragg. I’ve been to live music in the burg, but didn’t get out to any in nyc or chicago yet, and well i’ve never really done one like this. should be fun.

[From Teach the Controversy - Intelligently designed t-shirts urging you to show both sides of every story ]

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great t-shirts.

Walk of Ideas

[From Walk of Ideas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

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this is a brilliant idea.

DIRECTORY OF LEARNING TOOLS

[From Directory of over 2,300 E-Learning Tools - Free and Commercial]

This is a great resource with many interesting tools. Some CMS and Library tools are included too.

Since Tuesday I have been in Milwaukee visiting SOIS and CIPR as part of my Information Ethics fellowship. I attended a discussion about a possible future conference on translating intercultural information ethics across the situated understandings that term implies across a plurality of contexts. That seems like a great project, I’m happy to help out there. For the rest of the time, I attended the conference Thinking Critically:Alternative Perspectives and Methods in Information Studies. It was an excellent conference and I met many interesting people in the field of information studies, most of which are leaders in their field or soon to be so. I also attended the 2008 Samore Lecture: “Interpreting the Digital Human,” by Professor Rafael Capurro, at the Allis Museum, which provided an excellent end to the conference. I had excellent dinners and conversation with colleagues that I’ve not seen for some time, and with new friends and colleagues. I suspect that I’ll be seeing many of these people again over the years. It was a great experience all around, though I did not get enough writing done on a promised paper that is overdue. It really looks like the CIPR and SOIS are up to some great things and I’m happy to be affiliated with them as an Ethics Fellow for another year.
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Unrelated to the conference and my fellowship, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Thomas Malaby who has a book forthcoming on Linden Lab. We spoke at length about problems of research, computer game studies, his work with Linden Lab and his related work. It was a fantastic conversation and I hope to have similar conversations in relation to my work in Second Life in the future.
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All in all the problem of alternative methods and the communities that support them is an important issue in my career. I have been affiliated with many groups on this topic from Phil Graham’s old NewMediaResearch, heterodox economics, and the political science perestroika movement list, to my current work with InterpretationandMethods and Theory, Policy and Society, not to mention my work with the Association of Internet Researchers. The work that I perform is primarily interpretive methods, from ethnography to textual analysis, though I’ve been known to use quantitative when it adds to the argument. The key to me though is to come to notion of understanding and being able to communicate what actually leads to certain understandings of the world. It concerns me that there are so many people with so many of the same issues across so many different disciplines and there is so little conversations amongst them. Though there are broad interdisciplinary efforts and efforts toward inclusion.

Researchers across a variety of disciplines including economics, sociology and psychology have been studying economic mobility for some time. Led by a team of researchers from The Urban Institute, the project has summarized the best-available existing research on various factors that might influence individual and family economic mobility, both within and across generations.

[From Economic Mobility Project | Reports & Research | Literature Reviews]

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This is a set of literature reviews of important concepts related to economic mobility.

This site is designed to provide you with a wide range of illustrations scanned from old books. Most of these pictures are wood engravings or woodcuts, fewer are etchings or copper engravings; Visitors looking for nineteenth century or victorian clipart might just find it here.

[From Welcome to » Old Book Illustrations: pictures scanned from old books]

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this is a great connection of old book illustrations.

office politics and policy

[From It's company policy gone ape ]

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this is supposed to be a joke, but somehow i think people find it a bit too revelatory.

Something remarkable happened in a college softball game last Saturday in Ellensburg, Wash.

[From A Sporting Gesture Touches ’Em All - New York Times]

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sportsmanship, it means doing the right thing. These players knew what to do, and should be celebrated.