Michael Hausenblas has an interesting way to think about Open Data in “Open Data – a virtual natural resource”.
Category Archives: Communications, Connection, Internet, Web, Media
Some Thought Provokers For The Weekend
Boing Boing: “The Web Kids Manifesto”
NYTimes: “There’s More to Nothing Than We Knew”
NPR.org: “Our Media, Ourselves: Are We Headed For A Matrix?”
“Every day at my job I helped people just barely survive” on Metafilter and Hacker News
codacorolla, a librarian, posted his thoughts to a Metafilter conversation about Califaornia cuts to library funding and spurs a terrific thread at Hacker News.
Read his entire comment and check out the conversation:
“The digital divide isn’t just access, but also ability, and quality of information, and the common dignity of having equity of participation in our increasingly digital culture.”
I’m proud to say there has been a movement in Philadelphia on supporting the mission of libraries, and rethinking how they support their ultimate purpose, and that whenever funding has gotten seriously threatened, people have stood up.
For my part, I’m in talks with my local library to host an after school program teaching MIT’s Scratch. Following that I’d like to initiate a Code and Coffee meetup there and maybe encourage the Blogger Meetups that use to take place to consider local branch libraries as places to meet.
Classics: “The Twelve Networking Truths” and “Fallacies of Distributed Computing”
Succinct and always worth a re-read: “RFC 1925: The Twelve Networking Truths” and “Fallacies of Distributed Computing”.
Jonathan Stray: “What should the digital public sphere do?”
A fantastic piece from Jonathan Stray on “algorithm designers to dedicated curators to, yes, traditional on-the-scene pro journalists, a great many people in different fields now have a part in shaping the digital public sphere”: “What should the digital public sphere do?”.
Favorite blog of the moment: Letters of Note
Every few days there is a post here that makes me take a moment and pause and it is so worth it: Letters of Note
If you’re not going dark, help others get informed: Be a Better Activist Day is today
Embedded in this post is a stream to an event, starting this morning at 10AM, on getting informed on how Congress works, organized by the author of “Information Diet”, Clay Johnson. There is a fantastic set of speakers that will help all of us better navigate the system and make change.
The stream below will remain blank to around 10AM. Click the link if you don’t see the stream starting then. Related links below the video.
Related Links:
Information Diet: “Dear Internet: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works”
Mother Board: “Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works”
O’Reilly: “Stop SOPA”
EFF.org: “Stop the Blacklist Legislation: a Guide to In-Person Meetings with Your Congressional Representatives” and “Strike Against Censorship”.
Fight for the Future: “Stop American Censorship”
Google.com: “End Piracy, Not Liberty”
Wikipedia: “SOPA and PIPA – Learn more”
YouTube.com: “Our Internet”:
Daphne Koller of Stanford on Technology as “Passport to Personalized Education”
NYTimes: “Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education”:
…our approach to education has remained largely unchanged since the Renaissance: From middle school through college, most teaching is done by an instructor lecturing to a room full of students, only some of them paying attention.
How can we improve performance in education, while cutting costs at the same time? In 1984, Benjamin Bloom showed that individual tutoring had a huge advantage over standard lecture environments: The average tutored student performed better than 98 percent of the students in the standard class.
Until now, it has been hard to see how to make individualized education affordable. But I argue that technology may provide a path to this goal.
Community Computer Center Opens in Frankford
The Frankford Gazette has a post on the new computer center that opened in one of my old neighborhoods, maybe I can stop by and help: “Community Computer Center Open in Frankford”:
The majority of the residents of Frankford do not have internet access. The Free Library Branch does offer some service which is very well utilized all day long by students and others but those facilities cannot come close to meeting the demand. The new computer center will help to close the gap.
Alistar Croll: “much of human interaction has shifted from atoms to bits”
Read his post on O’Reilly Radar: “The feedback economy”:
In a society where every person, tethered to their smartphone, is both a sensor and an end node, we need better ways to observe and orient, whether we’re at home or at work, solving the world’s problems or planning a play date. And we need to be constantly deciding, acting, and experimenting, feeding what we learn back into future behavior.
We’re entering a feedback economy.