Category — other research

In my books, CC By is the only free license.

[From When’s an OER not an OER? « Learn Online]
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In my books…. CC is just another copyright regime. Public domain is the only free content. If you don’t put it into the public domain, all you are saying is ‘restricted’. CC just says, under the terms of copyright, you can do x. Public Domain says, you can do x and whatever else you want. I also like artistic license of Perl, though it is a copyright license.

on another note, the post above has some really great content linked from it.

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.

So, how did the librarian get the word out? By regularly reporting to the library board that no NSL had been issued to any of the city’s 10 branches, which was perfectly legal. Everyone knew that if the chief librarian failed to report that nothing had happened, then indeed an NSL had been served.
[From Privacy Work-Around]

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Sometimes the brilliance of the common sense of librarians is amazing. Given tight legal restrictions, they read the law, and found a solution that was compatible and in the end worked for their library

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this is a great little puppet show about neoliberalism with great social and political theoretical basis. from monochrome

Crisis in the meaning of meaning:
Meaning was the once-natural sequence of being, knowing, interpreting, judging, willing and acting . It is this sequence which no longer operates as it did in earlier times.
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Sean has some thoughts that inspired me to respond a bit.

The Cape Town Open Education Declaration:
Cape Town Open Education Declaration:
Unlocking the promise of open educational resources
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I think most people should support open education, if not in this form, then in some reasonable form that admits that knowledge cannot be owned, though it is frequently proprietized into a commodity, that commodity-form, i argue, is not knowledge anymore, it is an object, whereas knowledge only exists inside subjects, which is something objects tend not to do.

:
A new cosmopolitanism is in the air
Globalisation is anonymous control

A new perspective for a different approach to action

Only capital is permitted to break the rules

We, the consumers, constitute the counter-power

Sacrifice autonomy, gain sovereignty

A state towards which the nation is indifferent

Convert walls into bridges!

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This is indicative of the move toward a cosmopolitan political economy.

edu-Impact | college & university economic impact portal:
Welcome to edu-Impact, the College & University Economic Impact Portal.
Appleseed, a New York City-based consulting firm, created this portal in response to a growing interest in the regional economic and community development impacts of colleges and universities. This portal is the most comprehensive source of information on the subject.

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this is a handy site for economic impact studies related to universities.

University viewpoint: the University of Warwick on ‘The challenge of global education and research’ « GlobalHigherEd:
The challenge of global education and research

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Nigel Thrift writes on the new global education.

The Philips Machine « Organizations and Markets:
I was strolling through the section on computing when — quite unexpectedly, because I had no idea it was on display at the museum — I noticed the famous Philips Machine (here is a pic), essentially a hydro-mechanical analogue computer designed to exhibit the functioning of the economy from the point of a very crude Keynesian perspective. The Machine was constructed by Bill Philips, of Philips curve fame, and was the reason why 1950s macro is sometimes referred to as “hydraulic Keynesianism” (a term that was coined by the brilliant, but now forgotten Alan Coddington).
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The philips machine was a hydraulic analog computer, unlike other analog computers (which i was just reading about in the start of the Processing book) usually were electronic. The use of fluid as an analogue for economic processes is fascinating. It reminded me of the device in the recent Terry Pratchett book. So I thought I’d share the link