"OpenCourseWare" [Daypop Top 40]

Another thing I want to watch, just to see if it is all that.

A Brief Description of OCW

At a press conference on April 4, 2001, MIT announced its commitment to make the materials from virtually all of its courses freely available on the World Wide Web for non-commercial use. This new initiative, called MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), reflects MIT's institutional commitment to disseminate knowledge across the globe.

We see OCW as a way to share our thinking about the content of a modern curriculum in all the areas in which MIT excels. Users of the OCW site may include other academics around the world and individual learners who may not have access to similar educational materials.

The task of creating a highly visible web site that draws together the materials of virtually all of MIT's course offerings is considerable. However, the majority of faculty support this effort and believe that it is consistent with MIT's long-standing objective to focus the contributions of both its faculty and its new technologies on broad, societal benefits.

For further information, read the MIT OCW Fact Sheet.

9:36:59 PM    

I just had sort of a stupid thought, and my brain is half empty, but maybe I can pull it together.

I've just lately been paying more attention to films that come out of Australia and New Zealand and thinking about why I like them more than ones sanitized for the US. This is all probably pretty obvious.

So hopped over to Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com) and compared the covers of "Romper Stomper" and "American History X." Basically same covers. "Romper Stomper" is much grittier and more disturbing, but on the other hand, I did love "American History X."

Then there is "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" and "To Wang Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar." Really no comparison, an obvious knockoff. The question is, why is the knockoff watered down so much?

In a class by itself is Peter Jackson's "Heavenly Creatures." Did anyone try to knock that one off? (Hint, "Lord of the Rings" is probably the wrong answer, but maybe not)

I don't have an answer here, so anyone reading, feel free to contribute. I am a zombie today. If I could figure out the answer I'd probably then know why I have this strange desire to work with writers and artists and filmmakers and media designers Down Under. Until then, I'm stuck sweating it out.

Miasma <----doing the CanCanCan with Baz Luhrmann
9:20:01 PM    

I don't know if I would call it the next thing or not tho. Howard Rheingold always likes to beckon from out front, but it is easy to stay there when you make up new names for things and call it a trend. I prefer my trends in science fiction, eh?

Add To My [Someday] Reading List.

Classrooms of the Future

"Verner Vinge's Fast Times at Fairmont High just won the Hugo for best novella. The story is set in the 2020s in a world where wireless technology, pervasive computation, augmented reality and wearables make future classrooms and their ethics a lot more complicated for both students and teachers." [Smart Mobs]

[The Shifted Librarian]

I don't have an answer yet. I'll reserve judgment until I hunker down and get a handle on the book more.

For now, here is a copy of Rheingold's summary. Sort of sounds like just another slice of life in his virtual community, but there you go.

Book Summary

Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive, used by some of its earliest adopters to support democracy and by others to coordinate terrorist attacks. The technologies that are beginning to make smart mobs possible are mobile communication devices and pervasive computing - inexpensive microprocessors embedded in everyday objects and environments. Already, governments have fallen, youth subcultures have blossomed from Asia to Scandinavia, new industries have been born and older industries have launched furious counterattacks.

Street demonstrators in the 1999 anti-WTO protests used dynamically updated websites, cell-phones, and "swarming" tactics in the "battle of Seattle." A million Filipinos toppled President Estrada through public demonstrations organized through salvos of text messages.

The pieces of the puzzle are all around us now, but haven't joined together yet. The radio chips designed to replace barcodes on manufactured objects are part of it. Wireless Internet nodes in cafes, hotels, and neighborhoods are part of it. Millions of people who lend their computers to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence are part of it. The way buyers and sellers rate each other on Internet auction site eBay is part of it. Research by biologists, sociologists, and economists into the nature of cooperation offer explanatory frameworks. At least one key global business question is part of it - why is the Japanese company DoCoMo profiting from enhanced wireless Internet services while US and European mobile telephony operators struggle to avoid failure?

The people who make up smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world.

Media cartels and government agencies are seeking to reimpose the regime of the broadcast era in which the customers of technology will be deprived of the power to create and left only with the power to consume. That power struggle is what the battles over file-sharing, copy-protection, regulation of the radio spectrum are about. Are the populations of tomorrow going to be users, like the PC owners and website creators who turned technology to widespread innovation? Or will they be consumers, constrained from innovation and locked into the technology and business models of the most powerful entrenched interests?

9:01:47 PM