Projectories

Letters & Bytes

Francis — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:38:26 +0000

Letters & Bytes

I finally handed in my dissertation! The defence is scheduled for the 18th of december. I’m both happy and nervous. Happy about finishing it, and nervous about the finality of sending it to the printers. Now I just need to handle the defence…

Technology is everywhere in education: in the seating arrangements in the classroom, in the coordination of work, and in the delivery of lectures. In each and every educational meeting technology shapes interaction, pedagogy, and knowledge. However, technology is not a neutral tool that can be used in any way the teacher sees fit. Technology is permeated with hypotheses about its use, technological solutions, and social interests. Regarded in this manner technology becomes a complex and vital part of structuring educational practice.

Letters & Bytes uses distance education to explore technology as a powerful force that affects education. Through a number of cases the book investigates the history and a possible future of distance education. The historical case is correspondence education in the mid 20th century. The future illustration is Learning Objects, a developing standardized technology for reusing educational material. In exploring these cases the author emphasizes how technology not only shapes educational practice, but also how technology is steeped in economy, markets, education, knowledge, and other technological solutions.

In engaging educational technology, Letters & Bytes has both a theoretical and reflective motive. The point of departure being that techno-advocates often proclaim New Technology as a reformer that will reshape education. This rhetoric draws on two arguments. The first is that technology will reform education from the outside, and the second that technology can be used in any manner that the teacher sees fit. The involvement of technology in complex social and material processes makes these two positions untenable. This book seeks to sort out these fundamental misconceptions.

B/W Metal Photography Week

Francis — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 23:14:47 +0000

Sometimes it’s hard to decide what to shoot. The possibilities are just too immense, and it’s hard to break out of the mundaneness of the everyday objects that you see around you. To remedy this social blindness, me and a friend decided that this week is B/W metal photography week.

Here are the pics so far.

CF Helgesson New Professor at Tema-T

Francis — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:29:33 +0000

We’ve been waiting for a new professor in Economy and Technology for several years at our department. Before x-mas the search committee had finally ranked the candidates. The top candidate was Claes Fredrik Helgesson from the Stockholm School of Economics and SCORE. CF Helgesson has a strong interest in economy, medical technology, as well as STS and Actor-Network Theory. He’s going to be a great addition to the department. Now, only the rector and the salary negotiation stand between him and the appointment. If all goes well, he’ll start this summer.

New Year

Francis — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:01:36 +0000

This blog has been asleep for a long time now. But it’s not dead. I’m now a father of Reuben, who’s 14 months. I’m working half time on my dissertation and the other half I’m taking care of Reuben.

I’ve finished one article during this year, which has been submitted to STHV, and I have just finished the first draft of a second article. Both of them are about the inscription of social and pedagogical values into digital standards in education. I’m also planning to finish a first draft version of my dissertation for my 80% seminar before the end of January.

Between all these activities, I’m also going to find some time to blog!

Good Copy Bad Copy

Francis — Thu, 22 May 2008 22:02:55 +0000

I recently spoke to a friend in the music industry: he had given up. His friend’s kids in fourth grade looked at him like a lunatic when he asked what they thought of record stores. They had never been to one. A 20-something relative of mine watches and listens to all media on his laptop in his parents home. He doesn’t own a single record. What’s happening with digital information?

The Danish documentary GOOD COPY BAD COPY takes a global view on digital reproduction and remixing. It traces copyright and digital reproduction in the US, Russia, Brazil, and Nigeria, and shows the variety of ways that people and societies handle infinite replication without quality loss. How does a county without copyright handle movie making? How do low cost producers and DJs in Brazil make money? Recommended viewing.

Also check out this blogpost on DRM.

STS Search Engine

Francis — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:18:25 +0000

A New STS search engine has been launched as a google custom search. It searches STHV, SSS, 4s online. It’s a bit limited in scope, not including a lot of other STS journals out there. But it’s a start.

More STS Radio

Francis — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:44:34 +0000

[Via Jeremy Hunsinger and the STSGrad mailing list]

STS Radio

Francis — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 22:29:23 +0000

Does a radio show featuring Bruno Latour, Ulrich Beck, Simon Shaffer, Ian Hacking, Andrew Pickering, and Brian Wynne sound interesting? If you do, check out the How to Think About Science podcast series.

If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it?
Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny. This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this new field of study.

[Via TMTTLT]

Copy-Paste Culture

Francis — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:35:40 +0000

I’ve sometimes wondered whether there is any credence to if we live in a copy paste culture which is changing the way we produce and relate to texts. Now there seems to be evicence that indeed we are. According to Microsoft the single most used command in Office is Paste!

Windows Office team learned that paste is the most-used command in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (accounting for 11%, 15%, and 12% (respectively) of all commands issued in each application).

This could be something for the RIAA.

Via the Mac Office Team blog.

Open and International ISI?

Francis — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 11:25:04 +0000

Open access journals can be compared to musicians who release their music on myspace or on the Pirate Bay. Rather than being locked into copyrights owned by large corporations, open access content flows free. This seems to be a growing movement in academia that aims to circumvent the publishing houses that have made academic publishing big business.

The question is when ISI ranking will be replaced with an open alternative, perhaps taking into account several types of data like the 0xdb for movies. Currently, according to Wikipedia, there are a billion English speakers on a “basic” level, hopefully such an index might allow “international” to be broadened to include the 400 million native Spanish speakers (600 million if you count the Portuguese speakers who could probably decipher Spanish), or the billion+ that can read Chinese characters. Why English should be the only lingua franca of academia is a good question.

See: Open access in STS or On Academic Productivity