Do-it-yourself (DIY) is back in style again and on bookstore (and library) shelves.  I recently read two of these books which take decidedly different tacks on the perils and rewards of a DIY lifestyle.  In Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World, Mark Frauenfelder, editor of Make magazine and Boing Boing (tech culture and weirdness blog) provides a pretty positive outlook on the benefits of doing it himself.  Manny Howard in My Empire of Dirt: A Cautionary Tale isn’t quite so sunny.

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I recently read Jaron Lanier‘s new book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.  It was a gift, and while I hadn’t heard anything about the book, it looked promising.  Lanier is an early internet pioneer counting early work with virtual reality (and coining the term itself) among his accomplishments.  And the basic premise of the book — essentially a contrarian view of the current state of internet culture — is interesting.  A regular practice of challenging common assumptions and examining choices made along the way is healthy.  Unfortunately Mr. Lanier’s arguments are poorly supported, and often based on inconsequential or incorrect assumptions.  I’m not going to recap his whole argument here — check out the linked articles instead.  But here are a couple of points inspired by ideas exposed in the book: Read the rest of this entry »

I want to like Drupal, but despite a fair amount of effort I haven’t been able to get over its shortcomings.  Four years ago we had a need to create a web-driven resource library serving dialect training mp3s to students.  I did some research and found a really great model powered by Drupal.  I’d heard a bit about the system, and after researching it sounded like a good fit for our needs.  But as I started digging into a test implementation I found myself feeling a little overwhelmed, so I hired a consultant to serve as a technical resource.  We continued that relationship over the course of 2 months, with weekly phone conferences which were really training/technical consultation calls.  I got the application up and running, and even expanded its functionality over the last year with the help of a really dedicated student worker.  Now I’ve done a fair amount of PHP work, and extensive work with other open source systems like WordPress — and this student worker also had a really strong PHP background.  Neither of us ever got to the point of really liking Drupal, or feeling like we wanted apply it to any other projects.  Why?

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Twitter and other companies are smart enough to let their users innovate — see what catches on — and then integrate the successful features.  At the university can we empower students to do the same with classroom technology systems and course management/learning systems?  Why not?  Our users are certainly a cut above the average Twitter user — at least more selectively chosen!

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If Google Wave lives up to even half of the hype surrounding its closed beta release it still will be an awesome product.  Some are raising the notion that is could bring a number of web 2.0 concepts together and become a new tool for personal learning systems — and replacing the traditional course management system.  But then again moving things to the Google cloud is not without its concerns, as recent outages highlight.  And it may be that Wave doesn’t live up to its hype — time will tell.

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Take the circumstance in a city where tourists passing from a transit stop to a popular attraction.  The most direct route passes along a normally quite industrial area, especially on evenings and weekends.  And our tourists are regularly being mugged.  What is the problem here, and how do we fix it? Read the rest of this entry »