58 posts | 15 comments | Last updated on July 1, 2008 Syndicate this site using RSS 2.0

we are the ones we’ve been waiting for…

From the conclusion of Chopra & Dexter's (2007, p173) Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software: Jacques Ellul imagined an iron cage constructed of technology (Ellul 1967), but never the possibility that the cage could be unlocked by its prisoners. We began with a historical note on hacking: ...

draft lawrence lessig for congress

Lawrence Lessig is the originator of Creative Commons and the author of Free Culture, Code 2.0 and the The Future of Ideas. An online campaign has been setup to encourage him to run for the congressional seat vacated by Rep. Tom Lantos (who recently passed away) in California. Having a ...

division of action

I was just reading through the Wired article on Facebook's role in the Burma protests. The marches, organized at a lightning pace by volunteers using Facebook, show the increasing power and reach of a social-networking site originally designed to help college students find drinking buddies. An interesting theme which runs through the ...

a word from the reverend billy…

"The corporations want us to have experiences only through their products." -- Statement of Belief

field notes | union sq | 072707

I've finally gotten around to posting some footage from the Critical Mass at Union Square on 07.27.07. Below the fold you'll find two videos and a slide show of pictures. The first video documents the organization of Critical Mass in Union Square North from 6:45 PM (15 minutes prior to ...

mesh-networking

After reading David Pogue's review of the XO - a $200 laptop created by One Laptop Per Child (O.L.P.C.) - and spending time on O.L.P.C.'s website, I'm absolutely fixated on the mesh-networking feature of this computer (check out the "mesh demo" here). While the XO is light, durable and energy ...

direct democracy

According to the U.S. State Department, democracies can be organized under two general categories, direct and representative. In both forms the public participates in governance yet in a representative democracy elected or appointed officials mediate this participation, whereas in a direct democracy this participation occurs "without the intermediary of elected ...

young people: victims, criminals… red herring

While reading Walter Lippmann's "A Preface to Politics" my attention was mainly drawn to his discussion of the red herring. The red herring -- a metaphor used to describe the obfuscation of, or distraction from, a particular object(ive) -- is portrayed by Lippmann (1913, p261) as both "pest" and "benefit," ...

a reading list: exploring theory and practice

Embracing the so called 'cybercity' as a specific unit of analysis, my second doctoral exam reading list will explore how processes of education and citizen participation are transmuted by the cybercity and how these transmuted processes in turn produce and reproduce the cybercity. In order for this exploration to begin ...




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goodbye learning, hello workforce training

Some sad news regarding the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project: Microsoft has joined forces with the developers of the "$100 laptop" to make Windows available on the machines. According to Wired, Microsoft has had their sights on emerging markets in developing countries for a while now and have viewed low-cost children's ...
May 4th 2008
Tags: citizen power, idea/theme, quote One Comment

we are the ones we’ve been waiting for…

From the conclusion of Chopra & Dexter's (2007, p173) Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software: Jacques Ellul imagined an iron cage constructed of technology (Ellul 1967), but never the possibility that the cage could be unlocked by its prisoners. We began with a historical note on hacking: ...

“what they want is an automatic feed”

Another sign of growing state interest in the semantic web… According to a recent article in the washington post, "the FBI has created a network of links between the nation's largest telephone and Internet firms and about 40 FBI offices and Quantico" as part of their Digital Collection System (also ...

(young) person of interest

What would it look like if we were to situate young people in the growing semantic web? A 2007 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) took a look at some of the data mining programs currently underway at the Department of Homeland Security. In their report, GAO offer ...

information assimilation and the life of the child

From John Dewey's "The School and Society," pp100: It was forgotten that the maximum appeal, and the full meaning in the life of the child, could be secured only when the studies were presented, not as bare external studies, but from the standpoint of the relation they bear to the life ...