This is about connecting people you at colleges or who you went to college with, rather than being a service for academics like academia.edu or others of that ilk, and it’s an incremental change from the existing ways LinkedIn already does pull people who claim the same institutional background together, but an interesting development none the less.
Address of the bookmark: http://pro.gigaom.com/blog/linkedin-launches-linkedin-for-education/
I have made use of this or its influential ancestor article in a few courses that I have taught over the past decade or so and, after a long period of forgetting about it, have done so again recently. Rereading it again, I was as affected by it now as much as I was the first time I read it. Though it relates to events that occurred in the largely superseded technology of the MOO, Dibbell’s detailed descriptions and rich reflections are as relevant in an era of social networks, MMORPGs, Q&A sites, web forums and immersive worlds as they were when he first wrote them. Maybe more so.
It’s a long, harrowing, but rewarding read, not for the easily offended, unravelling the unpleasant story of Mr Bungle and his reincarnation as Dr Jest, the things he did to other characters in the MOO, and the responses of the other inhabitants of the MOO to ‘him’ (I may give away too much with those quotes). It challenges notions of identity, self, and the nature of human engagement as well as offering a fascinating meditation on ethics, consensus and social contracts in both meat-space and cyber-space. No unequivocal answers, but many challenging questions. The denouement that was not there in the original piece is worth waiting for, and makes the whole episode even more ugly and even more thought-provoking than it appears from the start.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/
An interesting study that reveals, in accordance with Nicholas Carr’s predictions, that there is a close positive correlation between what most of us would consider moral ugliness and frequent texting, at least among young people in Winnipeg. The correlations between frequent texting and moral dissolution are unsurprising, as the study appears to suggest that 42% of students in Winnipeg appear to text more than 200 times a day. 12% of them do so more than 300 times a day. That leaves little time for thought. It averages out at once every 3 minutes for 15 hours of the day. I guess they read the replies too And eat and use the bathroom (I don’t want to even think about that in the context of texting). And indulge what appear to be quite prodigious and positively correlated sexual appetites (or that). Luckily for the rest of us, that leaves little time to pursue their interests in wealth and status. My suspicion would be that most activities apart from breathing that that we engage in 300+ times a day are unlikely to do us much good.
Address of the bookmark: http://news-centre.uwinnipeg.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/texting-study.pdf
A fascinating diagram showing developer contributions to the open source core of the Elgg project (used here on the Landing) over the past 5 years or so. Quite fascinating to watch, and especially pleasing to see how the number of contributors has grown over the past year or so, probably as much due to moving to Github from Trac as anything else, though the great work of the Elgg foundation team in building and employing the work of the community goes hand in hand with that. Makes me feel quite a lot more secure about the future of the technology to know that so many people are active in pushing it forward. It would be intriguing to look at the larger ecosystem of plugins that sits around that using a similar visualization.
Address of the bookmark:
Discourse is an extremely cool and open source reinvention of forum software that is replete with modern features like real-time AJAX loading of threads (which are not the usual tree-like things but more a flat form with contextual threading as and when needed), lots of collective features including reputation management, tagging, rating and ranking, what’s-hot lists and so on. Looks slick, hooks into plenty of other services. I’d like to see something like this on the Landing instead of its simple discussion boards. Not trivial to integrate, but it does have an open and rich API so can be called easily from other systems.
Address of the bookmark: http://www.discourse.org/