The WTO is meeting in Cancun next month and, according to this Wired.com news article activists are preparing "high-tech weapons for getting their message across." The acitivists are hopeful for participation, despite the fact that only "10 percent of Mexico's population regularly goes online."
One activist group mentioned,

I know this is from July, but I ran across it at M.C. Morgan's blog recently and it seemed an interesting story. It seems that Word documents made available by the UK government retained some information about who had made alterations to the file. The revelation that a junior press officer had last changed the file was a minor embarrassment for Number 10 press chief Alastair Campbell.

The line above is from the article, "Powerpoint is Evil," which is yet another installment in the long diatribe against the ubiquitous Microsoft presentation software.

See this past Kairosnews post for more articles on Powerpoint.

The recording industry is in the middle of fighting the mass downloading of pirated music files. This article in the New Scientist suggests that digitized images could be the next arena for such a battle. Amazon.com is already involved in a lawsuit, propelled by the DMCA, concerning selling images without consent.

A very fair article in the NYTimes about the use of technology in writing classes. The article (quoting people such as David Bloome, president of NCTE) puts in a good word for revision, peer review, audience-centered writing, and less teacher-centered classrooms, all of which, it suggests, can be furthered through the introduction of technology. It even mentions wikis and blogs. :)

These are two stories that seem to speak to each other in their focus on how we react to and interact with sound differently than images:


In "Mixed signals," the author focuses on how female radio hosts negotiate gender roles, and the specific difficulties they face being "on the air."

Near the bottom of this article on "participatory journalism" is an announcement that

"The founders of Metafilter Kuro5hin plan to launch an independent news site this fall to track the 2004 presidential campaign. Matt Haughey and Rusty Foster, the programmers behind those two collaborative media sites, will create a "smart mob-style site" to provide a place for independent reporting about next year's election.

Students at several colleges this fall will be living with roommates that they hooked up with using Webroomz software, a computer roommate-matching service. Students access profiles of likely roommate sorted by the auto-match system and choose their own roommate. Though we don't know Webroomz' methods for sorting possible roommates, the more traditional sorting processes mentioned in this NYTimes article on computer roommate matching seem a little rigid.

These two articles at the Chronicle of Higher Education reminded me of the performative aspect of what we do as teachers, but also of the low value placed on what we teach and research--seemingly, if it's not entertaining or shocking, then it's not interesting enough to be televised or remembered.

On the Prowl for Telegenic Experts

Did You Hear the One About the Professor?

Magnus Cedergren's "Open Content and Value Creation," published in the online journal First Monday, should be interesting to those interested in the motivations for working on open content projects. In the abstract, the author asks:

"Which are the driving forces for the cooperation between players that work with open content? This knowledge could be essential in order to understand the dynamics of business development, technical design and legal aspects in this field. In this paper I focus on these driving forces and the relationships between these players."