Laura Marling – Night Terror
Wiki-Wishes
Having spent the past three years of my life in the Enterprise 2.0 / Collaborative software market, I remain struck by the industry’s continued lack of ability to define a compelling reason for enterprises to adopt new software applications, such as blogs, wikis, microblogs, etc. In the early days of the Enterprise 2.0 movement, much of this software was dismissed as the next wave of Knowledge Management, which was largely viewed as a zero ROI investment (or at least in the eyes of the venture capital community, it did not produce any break out, high return investments). Today, it is largely viewed as a necessary evil because the likes of Facebook and Twitter are impossible for the enterprise to ignore.
Unbundling the 20th Century Mindset, Brian Magierski
This is a piece written for a specific audience– people interested in the ways that businesses are (or are not) adapting new technologies– so it’s a little heavy on jargon. (If you are one of those people, of course, it’s not jargon at all.) But it’s worth reading because we will either find a way to use these technologies for the greater good or they will be used against us.
We could use these technologies (blogs, wikis) to re-create the workplace along more democratic lines, encouraging transparency iand eliminating the need for a lot of supervisory management. This is particularly important in education, which ought to be, among other things, leaders in workplace democratization. Universities ought to be the leaders of the leaders in this area.
If we don’t start figuring out how to use these tools they will likely be used against us. Especially if we stay unorganized, we will do more but someone else will reap the benefits. Kids who “grow up digital” may well find that, like their parents, their productivity isn’t reflected in a rising standard of living. Indeed, if recent history is any evidence, just the opposite is more likely.
Green Reading
In May, Amazon introduced the electronic book reader Kindle DX, touted as a new way to read textbooks, newspapers and other large documents. This fall, six colleges and universities will test the technology in a pilot, which includes making the textbooks for certain courses available online.
The Kindle DX (for “deluxe”) is searchable and portable, a plus for students accustomed to toting heavy backpacks. But there is another reason that some institutions jumped at the chance to try it out: the technology could substantially reduce their use of paper.
July 30, 2009, Universities Turn to Kindle — Sometimes to Save Paper, Sara Peters
Here’s another chance for me to get all crabby and complain about the way technology tends to get adapted– at least at first– mostly to help those who don’t need much help. That is, we give the best tools to the students with the sorts of privileged backgrounds that make education seem an inevitable rite of passage rather than a transformative economic and social necessity.
That’s also true of other green initiatives. Organic foods are still probably too expensive to be widely adopted; the alternative energy tax credits are not yet generous enough to really push the technology into the mainstream. (That doesn’t have to be true, of course.) We do things upside down, starting with those who need help the least, hoping that it will trickle down.
Still, I think that if the universities are willing to resist the inevitable pressure they will feel from the textbook industry, the electronic book could be a boon to affordable education. The problem, of course, will be digital rights management and property. The textbook industry will try to milk students (as always ) for as much money as possible, in effect, encouraging pirating of textbooks.
That debate is likely to create a smokescreen that obscures the real issues, which ought to center around educational affordability and access to information. The real hope is that we can use these devices to link to open courseware and to the emerging ecosystem of free textbooks. Somewhere out these someone is working on a hack for the Kindle…
Dodos: Red and Purple/ Eyelids