Filed under “technology”

The point where creativity and invention occur

 From the preface to Arnold Pacey’s The Maze of Ingenuity : Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology: So far I have written about efforts to inaugurate a new direction for technical progress as if the chief problem is a lack of methods and discipline. But there are other problems too. Technology does not [...]

Ambiguous URL

 Photo from awesome teacher @paulramsay who used PrintAndShare.org to share his classroom’s DonorsChoose Project. As a result of building PrintAndShare.org I am hyper-sensitive to the drawbacks of URLs—which is my service’s weakest link. I’m using bit.ly shortened URLs that unfortunately have an ambiguous mix of upper and lower-case letters; ambiguous both in terms of typeface (els and ones [...]

“Describe the basis for your approach to this project. How did you determine the need for this project now and who was included in its design?”

 From the Gilbert Center in an excellent article entitled “Asking the Wrong Questions: Challenging Technocentrism in Nonprofit Technology Planning”: In every domain in life, the questions we ask shape the responses we get. Our questions reveal our frame of reference and impose that frame on our answers. As a result, much is revealed by examining [...]

Nailed that response

 Google just announced a new national technology service corps, in partnership with the HandsOn Network and AmeriCorps*VISTA—not unlike the Digital Arts Service Corps I have managed for the past 4.5 years and will be shutting down this August as our funding expires. Google describes their program thusly: These AmeriCorps*VISTA members will work full-time for one [...]

Assessment of needs-assessment needs

 One of my AmeriCorps members asked for resources on technology needs-assessment surveys and I came across some varied approaches. Above is from the US Department of Education hosted An Educator’s Guide to Evaluating the Use of Technology in Schools and Classrooms. Below is from the National Center for Technology Planning’s “Perceived Educational Technology Needs Survey” [...]

Accessible leisure through technology

 I always talk about technology as a multiplier of action; here is someone with better credentials than me making the same point: Kentaro Toyama writing in the Boston Review on “Can Technology End Poverty? [No]” The following excerpt touches upon how technology enables the developing world to experience the same leisure activities the developed world [...]

The Analog Divide

 A sensible reply to Slashdot blustering over OPLC’s Nicholas Negroponte’s superficially-nutty statement “Paper books are really dead — they’re gone. And they’re not being killed by tablets, they’re creating tablets”: …living in a 3rd world country where access to book is diffucult and “piracy” normal (including on books) I think he might be “righter” than [...]

What does your computer symbolize?

 The introduction to Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: In the mid-1990s, as first the Internet and then the World Wide Web swung into public view, talk of revolution filled the air. Politics, economics, the nature of the self—all seemed to teeter on the edge of transformation. The Internet was about to “flatten organizations, globalize [...]

Criticism for everyone

 From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: At present we’re snowed under with an irrational expansion of blind data-gathering in the sciences because there’s no rational format for an understanding of scientific creativity. At present we are also snowed under with a lot of stylishness in the arts—thin art—because there’s very little assimilation or extension into underlying form. [...]

He thinks I’m working on parts. I’m working on concepts.

 The following quote is from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. (The John mentioned is the protagonist’s buddy who wants to escape modern technological life via a motorcycle he deigns to tune-up): Precision instruments are designed to achieve an idea, dimensional precision, whose perfection is impossible. There is no perfectly shaped [...]

Axemaker conclusions

 The following is from the conclusion of the Axemaker’s Gift by James Burke and Robert Ornstein: The first step may be to recognize that we can use our technology as it has been used time and again through history. We can use it to change minds, but this time for our own reasons in our [...]

Welcome Grassroots Users of Technology

 This weekend is the Organizers’ Collaborative’s (and our 20 wonderful sponsors’) 10th Annual Grassroots Use of Technology Conference (still time to register!). I’m President of the Board for the Organizers Collaborative, so I’m a little excited. Even more so because I got top billing in the Program Booklet: Welcome. We gather to celebrate as much [...]

Media and Radical Technology

 I’ve been digging through the section on communications in Radical Technology, the 1976 anthology of the magazine Undercurrents. The global village is no such thing. It is a global castle, in which the barons may chat over their wine, while the serfs outside may overhear a few fragments of merriment. Our planet does boast some [...]

Graphical Organization of the Talmud

 Interesting explanation about the traditional layout of the Talmud. From Andrew on the Marks and Meaning mailing list I’m reminded as you discuss this of the arrangement of texts in a traditional manuscript copy of the Talmud. Most printed copies are a bit different, but originally a Talmud page was divided into nine squares like [...]

Facebook to Phone Trees: Nonprofit Technology for Everyone

 I was really excited about this year’s Grassroot’s Use of Technology Conference because I had submitted and had accepted a great proposal entitled “Facebook to Phone Trees: Multi-Generational Outreach Strategies” that was to be co-presented with Angela Kelly of Mass Peace Action and Daniel Karp of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). [...]

Conference notes: managing nonprofit technology projects

 Notes from Rebecca below on managing nonprofit technology projects http://aspirationtech.org/events/mntp-sf http://mntp.aspirationtech.org/index.php/Event_Agenda Becket divx …maybe I’ll clean this up someday. —- !!!Basic Stages of a Project 1. Initiate * define project * talk about start and end points, budget, participants/roles, timeline 2. Plan * defining scope, requirements, use cases 3. Implement 4. Monitor 5. Close *how [...]

Why I like Apple Computers

 Ran across a Slashdot comment that neatly summarizes my evolution of computer preference: I used to hate Apple for the same reasons that you prefer non-Apple products: I like to feel like I have control and figure out how things work, etc. However I got a Macbook Pro for school to go with my PC [...]

Bees and Biology

 “We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,” Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. “We’re wanting them to function as a machine.… We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.” From a [...]

Close to the Machine

 HouseSitter movies Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture has an amazingly pointed criticism of modern technocracy (my word) following what is an amazing outline of both Countercultural/Communal philosophy and modern cyberculture. One book mentioned in this conclusion is Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine: (page 258, paragraph breaks and emphasis mine) [Ullman’s life is] flexible [...]