Your post(wo)man as a server admin?

Published on May 6, 2011 in Media / Sociology, Tech professionalism and Technology. 0 Comments

Google execs, tech experts focus on future of Postal Service – The Federal Eye – The Washington Post.

I like this — a lot.  I’m a fan of the postal service, because of its important role in our history, but realize the challenge that the Internet poses to a costly distribution of paper could be too much for the service to bear. It may be that the postal service somehow gets into the business of providing e-mail addresses, or credentialing/identity verification.

Regardless of the role that the service might play in our national communication landscape, I’m interested in another aspect of this story. Postal workers have a bit of a professional ethic (“neither rain, nor sleet…”). This is the kind of thing that I think we could use more of in the technological realm. Sure, my sysadmin warned me that sudo access comes with “great responsibility,” but given the recent oversights at Sony, how common is this approach? It seems to me that, as security and privacy become increasingly core to what technologists need to concern themselves with on a daily basis.  I think that professionalism might do more than laws to cultivate this approach among the guardians of our servers and wires.

This idea is still in the hatching stage, so I hope to blog more about it in the future.

Berners-Lee: Long Live the Web

Published on November 24, 2010 in Internet Neutrality, Mass Communication Law and Technology. 0 Comments

Web inventor, Tim Burners-Lee pens an article for Scientific American that is an impassioned, yet reasoned argument for open standards and Internet Neutrality (Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality: Scientific American). By couching his argument in principles of liberty, he articulates many of the principles that underlie some of the problems I’ve seen in closed systems like social networking sites and mobile apps.  Here are a couple of highlights that hopefully can stand on their own:

In these cases, no due process of law protects people before they are disconnected or their sites are blocked. Given the many ways the Web is crucial to our lives and our work, disconnection is a form of deprivation of liberty. Looking back to the Magna Carta, we should perhaps now affirm: “No person or organization shall be deprived of the ability to connect to others without due process of law and the presumption of innocence.” …

Some people may think that closed worlds are just fine. The worlds are easy to use and may seem to give those people what they want. But as we saw in the 1990s with the America Online dial-up information system that gave you a restricted subset of the Web, these closed, “walled gardens,” no matter how pleasing, can never compete in diversity, richness and innovation with the mad, throbbing Web market outside their gates. If a walled garden has too tight a hold on a market, however, it can delay that outside growth.

For some reason all of this reminded me that we’re in desperate need of a good mobile browser.  I think that might solve some of the app-etite we’ve been suffering lately.

Books are for keeps

Published on November 7, 2010 in Copyright and Technology. 0 Comments

A recent post in the Economist blog, Steal this book: The loan arranger, an argument is made that booksellers might be getting close to a customer-friendly business model for eTexts.  The author throws away a point that I think is worth sharing –  books (like movies and music, and not like some television) are persistent objects and not disposable.

Allowing such ersatz lending is a pretence by booksellers. They wish you to engage in two separate hallucinations. First, that their limited licence to read a work on a device or within software of their choosing is equivalent to the purchase of a physical item. Second, that the vast majority of e-books are persistent objects rather than disposable culture.

I’ve made this argument here before–some media are like newspapers.  They have value in their day, and perhaps as historical artifacts, but quickly become “fishwrap.”  Books and movies are media that a user can go back to, over and over again.  I think this sense is how many justify paying to own something. They want it on their shelf as a reminder, and as an artifact that they might return to over time.

The larger argument in the article is perhaps up for debate.  The author seems to think that cheap rental systems and in-store browsing are viable answers to things like buying used books (thanks to the first-sale rule, which is quickly disintegrating in the digital world).

I, for one, enjoy going to a used bookstore for the adventure.  Digging up a good book is an activity that is driven by more than my hunt for a good deal.  There’s a spirit in used books that sometimes draws you into volumes you might never have found in an Amazon search. Perhaps cheap rentals will work for blockbusters, but I’ll stick to digging for lost treasures in the dim shelves of my local bookstore.

What’s on tap for SCOTUS

Published on October 5, 2010 in Mass Communication Law. 0 Comments

All Rise: Supreme Court’s Geekiest Generation Begins | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Wired posted a great overview of some of the important tech cases on the Supreme Court’s plate this session.  It could be an interesting year!

Applying the Web 2.0 model to Education

Published on September 29, 2010 in Education and Technology. 3 Comments

O’Riley Radar has a thought provoking look at Education as a Platform. The basic idea builds on that described in a book called Disrupting Class, but I find some of the authors points more illuminating than the analogy between education and technology. First, the author calls out a false dichotomy:

I am of the opinion that the distinction between formal learning (school) and informal learning (museums, Internet, community classes, affinity groups, etc.) is one that is both artificial and obsolete. In Education 2.0 there should be multiple providers of educational experiences, and standard discovery mechanisms that allow great experiences to spread virally as well as standard ways to give students credit for what they know and can do rather than for what classes they’ve sat through.

If you ask a “typical” student, I think they would agree. That student, however, likely wouldn’t connect the dots to the author’s next point – that tests don’t quite do an adequate job of measuring learning. Their answer is, I believe, spot on:

In a world of assessment innovation, a student portfolio might contain a combination of completed projects in addition to state test results, richer third-party assessment results, and innovative assessments of non-traditional skills such as collaboration and creativity. Colleges and employers might value this multi-dimensional view of a student more than just grades and standardized test results when evaluating applicants. Parents and students might take ownership of enriching their portfolio of assessments according to their own values. Publishers of curriculum and educational experiences might be able to improve their offerings based on a broad set of assessments of student outcomes — driving innovation in educational content. Administrators and states might be able to reward teachers for many different kinds of critical achievements.

As we look at using portfolios on our own campus, I hope we’re able to keep this potential integration of formal and informal assessments in mind. My hope is (the smarter) students will demand it.