Wednesday, December 18, 2002

Karma grading. Cheating karma. I’ve used variations on a karma system in a number of classes over the last few years, but none as large as the 100-person “Media in the Information Age” last semester. It was something of a trial run, and there were imperfections. I guess it ranked the equivalent of a “revise and resubmit.” Two clear failures: [Blog de Halavais] Discussions of failure often illuminate things as much, if not more, than success stories. Alex's report is a case in point. It's really too bad that most peer-reviewed research publications have no space for negative results - thought things are changing: see e.g. this. [Seb's Open Research] 10:01:28 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Ivan Illitch. Ivan Illich passed away last week. I hadn't realized--well, I guess I hadn't realized he was still alive. There was a nice obituary in the Guardian. I will venture a prediction: Illich will be more widely read in the next ten years than he has been in the past ten. This is a different world. [Halavais news] Someone recently blogged links to several works by Illitch available online, but I lost the reference. Can anyone help me? Update: Here they are (thanks again Gilles!): Deschooling Society Tools for Conviviality Energy and Equity and a series of articles Vernacular Values    [Seb's Open Research] 9:59:44 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Being there. Peter Kaminski asks "Is Blogging Now A Necessity?" [...] Without a blog, you're just a lurker on the net. A blog is a social network application that represents the basic social building block: one person. [...] [Seb's Open Research] 9:58:34 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

George Siemens rocks. If you haven't blogged or bookmarked The Art of Blogging part 1 and part 2, here's another reminder. Concise and meaty at the same time, a great way to get into blogging. By one of the authors of the elearnspace blog, which I strangely discover only now though it is more than a year old. According to Technorati, no one links to it. No wonder! [Seb's Open Research] 9:56:10 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Just look at that curve. (Note: the green dots aren't actually clickable) Pretty impressive, eh? [Seb's Open Research] 9:55:18 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

It's been a while since I've read Joel's stuff, but he has an interesting essay on just how hard programming is. It's a good read. I was talking to Dan Appleman a while ago (he's the cofounder of APress books) and he was saying the same thing. He wishes that Microsoft would throw its resources into making programming easier. He remembers the day he saw Visual Basic. That made programming Windows applications dramatically easier. He says we need another breakthrough. It's a theme I've heard from others too who say that .NET was done to make Microsoft's runtime-based languages as powerful as Visual C++ (VB, for instance, now has multithreading and is object oriented) but .NET didn't make most programmer's lives simpler. Most programmers are folks who play around here and there. Not guys like Dave Winer or Joel. Anyway, the industry is due for a new programming approach -- where's the innovation? Something totally new like Hypercard was back in 1984. [The Scobleizer Weblog] 9:48:37 PM    trackback []     Articulate []