Category — General

New Global Vision.

New Global Vision is an interesting video project out of Italy. They are aiming to archive videos from around the world to ease the burden of bandwidth on any single download source. They've assembled a database of 130 videos so far — all under the Attribution, Noncommerical, Share Alike Creative Commons licenses.

New Global Vision is also powered by free software technology.

[Creative Commons: weblog]

interesting, this is something like i'm working on….

Semantic Studios: Trust by Design. Peter Morville. In recent months, I've become a big fan of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab and the Web Credibility Project. Their studies regarding how people evaluate a web site's credibility show the critical importance of information design and structure. [Tomalak's Realm]

some interesting work here….

Philip Greenspun on the death of the MIT Media Lab. [Scripting News]

yes, it will be viewed with disdain hopefully as a marker of the downfall of public oriented research…

Digital Storytelling Festival returns
Eight years ago I attended the first Digital Storytelling Festival in Crested Butte, Colo., at which a group of three dozen or so invited guests assembled to talk about the collision of narrative art and digital technology. It remains one of the high moments of my conference-going career — and not only because Crested Butte is about 9000 feet above sea level.

In the three successive years that I attended, the conference grew in size, and it acquired a more specific focus on how individuals — professional artists and everyday people alike — can use digital tools to tell their own stories and break through the logjam of “old” media. Yet that first event set a pattern of intelligence and camaraderie that held up through the years.

I was unable to go to conference number five, in fall 1999, and since then the event has been on hiatus — its founder and guiding spirit, Dana Atchley, passed away in Dec. 2000. But Dana's wife Denise — working with Joe Lambert and Nina Mullen of the Center for Digital Storytelling, and with the core of people that have formed the Digital Storytellers Association — has revived and revitalized the festival this year. It happens June 12-15, and I'm going to be talking there, along with a bunch of great people (including, as of now, Brenda Laurel, Harry Marks, Jonathan Delacour, Derek Powazek, Kit Laybourne, and many others).

One big thing that's changed is the location: The festival has moved to Sedona, Arizona. Arizona in June may sound like a recipe for frying, but Sedona's up high (though not as high as Crested Butte) — I've been there in June, and it's delightful. There's lots more info here. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]

nifty i hope the invite deena.

Genderplay: Successes and Failures in Character Designs for Videogames.
How do gendered elements of character design impact gameplay? [game girl advance]

Interesting, now is the hypersexualization really the problem? or is there a nascent appeal toward stabile identities…. is there a problem or does the theory and assumptions make us believe there is…..

Ethical rudders. It seems I am more ethically aligned with Kant than with Nietzsche. News to me! This according to the Ethical… [Blog de Halavais]
1.Ê
Jean-Paul Sartre ÊÊ(100%)
2.Ê
Nietzsche ÊÊ(92%)
3.Ê
David Hume ÊÊ(87%)
4.Ê
Thomas Hobbes ÊÊ(77%)
5.Ê
Nel Noddings ÊÊ(75%)
6.Ê
Aristotle ÊÊ(73%)
7.Ê
Epicureans ÊÊ(68%)
8.Ê
Aquinas ÊÊ(67%)
9.Ê
Stoics ÊÊ(66%)
10.Ê
John Stuart Mill ÊÊ(59%)
11.Ê
Kant ÊÊ(56%)
12.Ê
Spinoza ÊÊ(54%)
13.Ê
Jeremy Bentham ÊÊ(48%)
14.Ê
Ayn Rand ÊÊ(48%)
15.Ê
Cynics ÊÊ(46%)
16.Ê
St. Augustine ÊÊ(39%)
17.Ê
Plato ÊÊ(36%)
18.Ê
Ockham ÊÊ(32%)
19.Ê
Prescriptivism ÊÊ(24%)

Dogma tagging.

Mitch Ratcliffe: Invisible Dogmas. A long, very thoughtful piece. The penultimate paragraph:

Simply put, the source of dogmas is our own laziness about addressing systemic issues in our organizations and in recording the reasons we do things within a company. We opt, for instance, for ÒcollaborationÓ software to make people collaborate instead of teaching them to work together respectfully and constructively. We fail to appreciate how these tools change the requirements when hiring new employees, and often blame the employees when they fail to thrive in the stunted learning environments weÕve created. If management wants to take credit for success, the institutionalization of critical thinking about our choices of information tools is absolutely essential to the role of a manager in the information age.

Lot of stuff to respond to there. But no time. Maybe later. Tomorrow, probably.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

ummmmm, this is what we have always done though…. if you think about it. you structure learning environments to meet certain needs. currently as the number of teachers fall and the number of students rise in a variety of fields, environments become more about managing populations than about anything else. nothing new there though….

The Cornell University Library has scanned 441 his …. The Cornell University Library has scanned 441 historical monographs (about 160,000 pages) and put them online free of charge. While all the monographs are in the public domain, Cornell claims a copyright “in the images, underlying encoded text, selection, indexing, and display of materials” and authorizes personal and research use only. Commercial use and reproduction require permission. The scanned text images are not searchable, but are presented in a very readable high resolution. See for example page 1, volume 1, of Harriet Martineau's translation of The Philosophy of Auguste Comte, London, 1896. (Thanks to the Scout Report.) [FOS News]

umm, no, they should not claim this copyright….

Elizabeth Gadd, Charles Oppenheim, and Steve Probe …. Elizabeth Gadd, Charles Oppenheim, and Steve Probets, Self-Archiving: The 'Right' Thing? An Introduction to the RoMEO Project, SCONUL Newsletter, Winter 2002. From the introduction:

[FOS News]

Interesting project…. but I'm not sure if their methods really will generate the posiiton that would allow movement for or against…. we'll see

Mother of invention. How the Mosaic browser triggered a digital revolution. [CNET News.com] How many remember Mosaic? The first time I saw it running was on a Mac in the Graduate Student Union's office at Trinity College, and I was just blown away. Thanks to 1) being a student with academic access to computers, and 2) having an academic father also with internet access back when long distance calls from Ireland were *really* expensive; and 3) having gone out with various computer programmers [grin -- I've always liked computer programmers...!], I'd been using the internet for several years, belonged to some mailing lists, knew how to ftp and had mangled emails with just about every email package going at the time (ooooh, remember PINE?). FTP had really amazed me — that you could go look in the computer files of another computer halfway around the world, and download them to your computer!! (I know, I know; but I wasn't an embryonic hacker, really).

Then along came Mosaic. “You have to check this out,” said one of the computer science postgrads on the GSU committee, turning on the Mac. Whoa! Hyperlinks! Gussied-up text, and colours, and little images! Bye-bye, command line interface. I used to go up to the office at night and look at ALL the new “What's Cool” sites, which might be about 10, and which were probably ALL the new websites that had come into being that day in the whole world. It was a gas. Not too long after that I tried repeatedly to get the technoculture.com, .net or .org url, but those were already gone. The idea that there would ever be a browser war, or web-related IPOs, or even [gasp!] weblogs would have seemed pretty impossible. What a long, strange trip it's been…

[[ t e c h n o \ c u l t u r e ]]

there are all manner of historical claims, but are any of them really history in the end?