Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Edublogging article

A new article on blogging and education correctly addresses this as a pedagogical-cultural issue. Bravo!

Listen to this, for example:

On LiveJournal.com, a blog-hosting service, there's a community blog for students of Wisconsin's Beloit College. The school doesn't control it.

Turning library vandalism into art

Reversing vandalism traces the creative response of the San Francisco Public Library to an attack on lesbigay-themed books. Superb transformations:

Using night vision goggles to bust video pirate

Slashdot points to an account of an MPAA tipster using night vision goggles to pick out a member of a movie audience using a video camera on a film. California law allows him to be sentenced to jail time.

Ruben Centero Moreno, 34, was arrested after the projectionist used night vision goggles to spot video cameras.

Confusion: a Wired interview

Wired interviews Neal Stephenson about The Confusion, his new novel. Short, but some nice notes about information flows, money, and an early global economy.
There's a wiki site, too.

...money is a sort of medium for the exchange of information. When the price of cloth went up in Antwerp, it was because the system of international trade, in some fashion that's too complex for us to understand, was transmitting information about the supply/demand balance. Money makes that kind of information flow better.

Willful Infringement

Over at Mindjack, JD Lasica reports on Willful Infringement, Horowitz' documentary on creators stymied in copyright access.

Information operations weaken in Afghanistan: Hersh

In The New Yorker Seymour Hersh reports on the instability of Afghanistan. In terms of information, perhaps the most telling signal of change or weakness in the US plan is a slide from unconventional to conventional practice, which could mean a lessening of emphasis on information operations (IO).
Speaking of information flows, the article also has a pithy OODA loop analysis:

In the early summer of 2002, a military consultant, reflecting the views of several American Special Forces commanders in the field, provided the Pentagon with a briefing warning that the Taliban and Al Qaeda were adapting quickly to American tactics. “His decision loop has tightened, ours has widened,” the briefing said, referring to the Taliban. “He can see us, but increasingly we no longer see him.”

(thanks to Jesse Walker!)

Calvinball!

Master of fun Bernie Dekoven blogs an account of my children playing Calvinball. Bernie also notes this game as a form of Junkyard sports, whose rules are a manic delight of informatics. And collaboration:

The most obvious connection scholars will one day make between Calivinball and Junkyard Sports is, of course, the Permanent Rule, which both of them more or less share, except for the fact that in Junkyard Sports you are allowed to try playing a game the same way twice. A perhaps more definitely subtle connection can be found in the relationship between the players. If one of them were really trying to win, the game would fall apart, immediately and completely. If you remember playing with kids who don't quite understand this subtlety, you'll know immediately what I mean. True, kids'll change a game, at every possible opportunity, but usually only as long as they can change it to their immediate advantage. Whereas C&H, like the true Junkmasters they are, change the game to keep it fun. For everyone

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Infocult to CNI

Infocult hits the road again this week, this time to the spring meeting of the most excellent Coalition for Networked Information (CNI). Will be blogging from the road.

Free Culture chapter two

Free Culture reading, continued.

Chapter Two: the main focus of this is to argue that a permission-centered system is bad for creativity, culture, and, above all, pedagogy. Examples include popular photography and Just Think! (a digital video program). The advantages of tinkering are sung, for their cognitive bonuses and the resulting cultural goods.

The chapter climaxes with a passionate plea for digital pedagogy, worth quoting in full:

Brown's concern is earlier, or younger, or more fundamental. It is about the learning that kids can do, or can't do, because of the law.

"This is where education in the twenty-first century is going," Brown explains. We need to "understand how kids who grow up digital think and want to learn."

"Yet," as Brown continued, and as the balance of this book will evince, "we are building a legal system that completely suppresses the natural tendencies of today's digital kids. ...We're building an architecture that unleashes 60 percent of the brain [and] a legal system that closes down that part of the brain."

We're building a technology that takes the magic of Kodak, mixes moving images and sound, and adds a space for commentary and an opportunity to spread that creativity everywhere. But we're building the law to close down that technology.

"No way to run a culture," as Brewster Kahle, whom we'll meet in chapter 9, quipped to me in a rare moment of despondence.

Air Loom Gang: The Voice catches on

The Village Voice catches up with Infocult, and praises the American release of The Air Loom Gang. Readers will recall this is an account of James Tilly Matthews' mania.