Category — General

Open Media Project Launched: “JD Lasica and Marc Canter have launched a promising new organization called Open-Media.org, and it deserves wide attention.
Here's JD's take on the subject, and here's Marc's posting. Good, important work going on here.” [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] [Universal Rule]

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it is a good idea, and it isn't the first time we've seen it. we'll see how successful this project is in comparison to other projects.

welcome to the new crusades…. bush policy is pretty clear apparently. break all commandments, and then justify it in the name of religion.

Rob linked to this article about flow and educatio …. Rob linked to this article about flow and education ages ago, but I wanted to save this quote:

“The implicit hope has been that if we discover more and more rational ways of selecting, organizing, and distributing knowledge, children will learn more effectively. Yet it seems increasingly clear that the chief impediments to learning are not cognitive in nature. It is not that students cannot learn, it is that they do not wish to.”

It's all about motivation, relevance, connections to others, meaningful networks and authentic tasks. These words all seem like the opposite of traditional education. [Jeremy Hiebert's headspaceJ -- Instructional Design and Technology]

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simple solution, don't teach those that don't want to learn, just fail them. then explain to them, what that means, not in terms of today, but in terms of their future. then, let them self-motivate.

ICC Telecoms Liberalization. An international business guide for policymakers. The International Chamber of Commerce has launched a new guide to assist countries considering embarking on the liberalization of their communications infrastructure. http://www.iccwbo.org/home/statements_rules/statements/2004/liberalization.pdf… [InternetPolicy.net]

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like energy liberalization….. probably not a great idea to let corporations, which have recently been fairly compared to sociopaths, guide policy.

Hypothesis: It's Still A Free Country. Thanks to Beth Novak for pointing me to the NYCLU site on Protecting Protest: Protecting Protest is a campaign of the New York Civil Liberties Union to ensure that protest can take place safely and legally during the Republican National Convention this August. We’re defending civil liberties from a storefront near Madison Square Garden, in the courts by challenging NYPD demonstration control tactics, at City Hall, and on the streets. The Republican national convention and the protests it inpires seem like a decent field test of the hypothesis that it’s still a free country. I am mildly confident that thanks to the the work of the NYCLU and other groups like it, we will again fail to invalidate this hypothesis…. [Discourse.net]

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especially since the republican's won't let people wearing prochoice t-shirts in the 30 people mobs of bush supporters that hear him speak.

Mike Davis. “The Pentagon as Global Slumlord” [Interactivist Info Exchange]

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worth a peak.

WGIG consultation. According to the ITU Strategy and Policy Unit blog, the Secretariat of the UN's Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) is now operational. Executive Secretary Markus Kummer says: “…one of our priorities is to make sure that the process ahead… [InternetPolicy.net]

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interesting little bit of politicking going on here, i'd say…..

Nothing to hear here, please move along. No, really.

[Chocolate and Vodka]

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one of the shexxshiest voices in audioblogs around, why isn't suw a dj in some enlightened part of the world? i mean come on people, everything is there with an appropriate skew. i know friends that would just get excited listening to her voice, accent, etc. so pay attn. well worth it.

dodgy dossiers, astroturfing, they the media.

Becky Howard, a colleague of mine, was asking the other day about how she might publish something she's been working on, and publish it quickly, since it's relevant to the Presidential race. After talking about it a while, and coming up with nothing, she's decided to self-publish it on her website. My first response was: well, of course, you blog it. Which would be the perfect solution but for the fact that Becky has no blog. Oops.

So my second-best alternative? I blog it. Becky, as some of you probably already know, is one of the country's foremost experts on plagiarism, and the essay in question is a close look at the process by which the Brits and the Bush Administration set about justifying our actions in Iraq. It also makes no secrets whatsoever about its own position: Plagiarism and Fraud in George W. Bush's Foreign Policy. Check the URL if you think I'm joking about this.

[Kairosnews - A Weblog for Discussing Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy]

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interesting paper, worth the read

IETF News. The IETF, despite the fact that it keeps the Internet running, doesn䴜t get much news coverage. I suspect that䴜s partly because its structure is pretty well 100% opaque and incomprehensible to outsiders (and it seems to not a few insiders, especially newbies like me). There䴜s actually no such organization as the IETF but there are (in alphabetical order) CNRI (who run the Secretariat) and Foretec and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) and the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) and the Internet Research Task Force and the Internet Society (ISOC) and the RFC Editor. Anyhow, there䴜s news. Big news, I think. Most of it I don䴜t understand and the parts that I do I may have been told in confidence. The fairly severe angst coming out of this spilled over into the Jabber channels from Thursday night䴜s plenary session. I think it may be as smooth and simple as the IETF trying to do the same thing more efficiently, or it could be a lot more complicated and ugly. Don䴜t ask me to explain it; but I think it matters. [ongoing]

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interesting happenings, i wonder why, probably money related…. major changes are almost always money related.