Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

The Phone: new URL

The Phone, which we blogged about with enthusiasm last year, has a new URL: http://www.aooa.co.uk/.  It's a short environment/interface exploration game, creative and delightful.  Especially fun for the haunted telephone meme.

Meet Q1, today's citizen of the uncanny valley

Another uncanny robot, this time from Japan:

But given Q1's reported glitch-related "spasms" at the expo, it may be a while before androids are escorting tour groups or looking after children—which may be just as well. "When a robot looks too much like the real thing, it's creepy," Hiroshi told the Associated Press.

(Jesse)

Dogs from beyond the grave

Life imitates Gothic, part 701, filed under Victor Frankenstein: an Australian source reports on bringing back dogs from the dead.

Metafilter's discussion brings back more on this, in case you weren't weirded out enough.  There's the Soviet film from the 1940s, which shows dogs and, um, parts of dogs functioning minutes after death (bonus points for use of happy Beethoven #5).  Or this abstract from 2004.

More literature blogging: Kafka diaries

Blogging literature continues to expand, with the launch of Franz Kafka's diaries.  I'm adding that to the other literature blog projects at Draculablog.

Sunday, 19 July slept, woke, slept, woke, miserable life

(thanks, Steve!)

Don't click it: clickless interface site

Arnaud alerts us to Don't Click It, a web site which refuses to let you click on any part, as you might expect.  Very clever, especially in the variety of experiments.

Microblogwalking, bonewalking in Austria

We participated in Blogwalk Nine after the Microlearning conference at Innbruck. Conversation was excellent, including learning from and reflecting with Sebastian, Andrea, Sebastien, Arnaud, Christian, Hagen, Stephan, and Martin.  I'll post notes as my travel schedule allows.

The afternoon session included a detour to the nearby town of Hall, including the stunning St. Nikolaus church (check out the panorama).  Martin Lindner and I called this the Bonewalk, based on the Gothic exhibits of human remains at the church, along with our mutual interest in blogs and embodiment.

Microlearning at Innsbruck, day two

Microlearning at Innsbruck continues, day two.  The day began with presentations on mobile content.  Representatives from Nokia and T-Mobile described different projects, one for shared microcontent, the other for magazine push.

Next session: workshops on microknowledge and pedagogy.  Excellent, with actual discussion breaking out, participants challenging presenters, cross-currents and digressions.  Seb Fiedler made a passionate case for radical constructivism, as embodied/enabled by some social software tools and practices.  Stephan Mosel described the intersection of blogging and adult learning as potentially autopoetic, emphasizing tools and practices in terms of viability and identity construction.  Roger Fischer introduced his KAYWA project, which enables mobile phones to push content towards blogs, while also allowing blog reading (cf also Roger's blog).

The interwoven discussion touched on differences between business and academic culture (in terms of goals, time management, motivation).  We briefly considered multiple device content composition and sharing as timeshifting.

Shot of the final panel, courtsy of Roger:

Good conversations with bright people from the African Virtual University.

Microlearning 2005 in Innsbruck

We're in Innsbruck this week, enjoying Microlearning 2005.  Conversations are very rich, running between semantic search, blogging, wiki-blog syntheses, folksonomies, the status of elearning as an academic discipline, humanities computing, and the fate of wifi.  Great folks are here, like Seb Paquet, Theo Hug, and Norm Friesen.  Martin Lindner is the organizing genius behind it all.

I'll try to blog events here, as I can.

Friesen argued for considering web content as genre . This model can work as a "stabilizing force among many choices."

Seb Paquet described the emerging mix of web services, standards, and social software as "Web 2.0." His parallel of the evolution of printed books to magazines, of single web pages to blog, of stock to flow, made a useful heuristic .Arnaud Leene described microcontent with clarity and precision. 

Handheld texts reach the romance novel

Texts continue to work their way into handheld devices, as Harlequin Romances get ready for mobile phones.
I think the private nature of handheld computing should make this a growth market.

Phil Dick, simulacrum

It was inevitable: the Philip K. Dick robot.

(thanks, Jesse)