Some information about me for those who feel a need to know about this sort of thing.

An overview of the earthG and wpnooza projects.

We arrived back yesterday evening from fifteen days in Agadir, on the coast of Morocco. Upon arrival there we had been equipped with a rock-festival-like wrist band which entitled us to unlimited food and drink.

In this paper I try to tackle a problem that has been disturbing me for some time now: the way that the self-serving term “virtual reality” has been allowed to fashion and shape much of the discussion that takes place around this topic, to the detriment of everyone except a small group of hucksters and cheerleaders.

For over a week now Tim O’Reilly has been writing and talking about the desirability of a Blogger’s Code of Conduct – a proposal that arose out of an attack on Kathy Sierra. I felt from the outset that this was a worse-than-bad idea.

We have just had a two-way video conference with George Siemens in Manitoba. He gave a talk that I need to think more about. It seemed to me to be very problematic in some key areas, particularly in the area of truth.

3D is better than 2D because people are not frogs. That is something that Jakob Nielsen wrote in November 1998, and I still think almost everything he wrote is valid today.

In this essay I will look at several aspects of Marshall McLuhan’s thinking and seek to relate it to the current cultural environment: one in which information is transmitted and received instantaneously, and stored at a distance, in amounts unthinkable even two decades ago. I will briefly attempt to place McLuhan’s cultural commentary within a political framework drawn from the writings of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire.

When asked, students, almost without exception, reported that there was something wrong with the virtual worlds they had seen. We asked them to be precise about what they meant. Eventually we got two enlightening answers. One: there is something hollow at the heart of the worlds. Two: it feels like you are wandering around amateur stage sets. The consensus seemed to be that the worlds felt like cardboard boxes painted in one way or another. As one student said, “When I went to the Venice world there was no Venice-ness about it”.

There has been a thread on the Second Life Education mailing list about griefers, of which there have been a plentiful supply recently. This set me thinking and I posted the following note, which I will expand at some point into a more considered piece.

Lev Manovich argues that the database is replacing central perspective as the dominant symbolic form by which we make sense of our world. This essay is simply me thinking aloud about some of the issues and questions that this raises: issues that I may want to think about more deeply sometime soon.

From Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, by Jerry Fodor

A page of notable or useful quotations.

The Microlearning Page on Wikipedia is a good starting point for understanding what this emergent concept is actually being used for. Here are some other links too.

Today I learned that Robert Anton Wilson had finally died after a long illness brought on by his childhood polio

This is a powerful book that takes a wide-ranging, historical approach to concerns about intellectual property in the information age. It was written in 1996 by James Boyle, but its arguments are still valid ten years later.

Follies and Fallacies in Medicine has been unfairly forgotten, but it is available as a free download from the Skrabanek Foundation.

Some quotations from the immortal Yogi Berra, plus some links to more of the same.