What we create to survive during one era serves as neurosis for another. In education – particularly in technology enhanced education – a similar trailing of ideologies from another era is observed. George Siemens writes that: “Without going through a painful attempt to deconstruct learning and its systemic origins, I think it’s safe to state… Continue reading
Rebecca Moore on Mapping Tools for Indigenous People
One tribe’s defense against encroachment through laptops and maps: (Make magazine has other interesting video presentations here; recommended for our p2p audience is Mackenzie Cowell on DIY Synthetic Biology; Luke Iseman on the Garduino Garden Controller; and the reportage on the Green Maker Fair Tech.)
Launching P2P Research Clusters
Great proposal by Smari McCarthy, addressed to science and research oriented friends: “Interested in launching a P2P Research Cluster? The idea is to form research clusters at universities all over the place to study participatory models, crowdsourcing, distributed algorithms, peer-to-peer culture, viable business models and anything else that relates to the emergent ecology of the… Continue reading
Why Creativity Needs Shorter Copyright Terms
Republished from Glyn Moody the tireless advocate of openness: “In response to a tweet of mine about shortening copyright to stimulate creativity, someone questioned the logic. It’s an important point, so it seems useful to do some thinking out loud on the subject. First, I should probably address the question of whether *longer* copyright stimulates… Continue reading
Does the local and distributed economy need patents?
In our P2P Research mailing list, local economy advocate and developer Sam Rose has argued that the use of patents are counter-productive for local efforts that rely on distributed manufacturing networks: “It may seem dogmatic, but I think that usually for the problems we are focused on, patents and traditional capital (with it’s traditional expectations… Continue reading
The crisis of value is for real: Return on assets has declined by 75% since 1965
The video below is a panel discussion on “the new world of work in a web squared world’, introduced by John Hagel. It contains a very interesting passage, starting just before the four minute break: the return on assets (for publicly listed companies in the U.S.) has declined, by an incredible 75%, since 1975. This… Continue reading
Don’t enclose our broccoli! (No Patents on Seeds and Animals campaign)
Below is an explanation from a EU centered campaign against the enclosure of life NO PATENTS ON SEEDS AND ANIMALS: Stop the expropriation of farmers and breeders “The continuing patenting of seeds, conventional plant varieties and animal species leads to far-reaching expropriations of farmers and breeders: farmers are deprived of their rights to save their… Continue reading
The Long Tail of Respect
Well, the Media Ecologies conference in Manchester, UK, was (in my opinion) a rousing success. Of particular interest was discussion around of the importance of getting ourselves engaged in activities that work in tandem with our thinking minds. As I was contemplating this, I realized the following. With so many minds and bodies jiggeting around… Continue reading
On the Open Design of Tangible Goods: 6 case studies examined
Article: On the Open Design of Tangible Goods. By Christina Raasch, Cornelius Herstatt and Kerstin Balka. R&D Management. Volume 39 Issue 4, Pages 382 – 393 Excerpts below are from the preprint version in fulltext. Kerstin Balka has extra documentation here. Abstract: “Open source software development has received considerable scholarly attention, much of which is… Continue reading
Beginning to Rethink the Ethics of Higher Education in Light of P2P
A contribution from Ryan Lanham: Recently the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article suggesting that universities are fairly conservative when it comes to the capacity to change in the face of financial crisis. Not much of a surprise. In other breaking news, Wales still wet, and head lice found in kindergartens. Indeed the Chronicle… Continue reading
Special Issue: NeoGeography and Web 2.0
(via the Digital Urban blog, which has all the source links: I missed this when it came out in August, perhaps you have to?) Special Issue: NeoGeography and Web 2.0. Journal of Location Based Services. edited by Sanjay Rana and Thierry Joliveau. Summary: “The current issue of the Journal of Location Based Services is a… Continue reading
On Defining a Post-Industrial Style (3): Emerging examples
The last of our 3-parter on post-industrial design, by Eric Hunting. Today we conclude with examples that incorporate the precepts Eric introduced yesterday. Eric Hunting: Examples: “Let’s now consider some examples of artifacts that exhibit characteristics of Post-Industrial design sensibility. We’ve already discussed one of the prime examples; The personal computer: The PC represents the… Continue reading
Social networks for sentiment analysis
A contribution by Mark Andrejevic, via the IDC mailing list: “The familiar framing of submission to various forms of online monitoring in terms of the logic of exchange (we submit to the collection of information about ourselves in return for access to “free” goods and services) needs further interrogation: not just in terms of what… Continue reading
Special Issue: Open R&D and Open Innovation
Special Issue: Open R&D and Open Innovation. Edited by Ellen Enkel, Oliver Gassmann, and Henry Chesbrough. Volume 39 Issue 4, August 2009. This seems a closed academic journal, but the folllowing sample articles should show the articles are very promising: * Open R&D and open innovation: exploring the phenomenon. By Ellen Enkel, Oliver Gassmann and… Continue reading
On Defining a Post-Industrial Style (2): some precepts for industrial design
This is the point where peer-to-peer theory starts to become very important to our discussion. If we except the proposition that a design becomes a social construct through, basically, the reverse-engineering of the user experience and then add in the option for a community of users to pro-actively participate in that design evolution, then we… Continue reading
A sophisticated treatment of code politics in Web 2.0: from black box platforms to constrained worlds
Web 2.0 actualizes the universal platform, a constructive space independent of hardware. …. The challenge, then, lies in formulating alternatives that make use of specific protocological articulations and divert them so that they are not about stabilizing a system, but rather about creating other possibilities. Essay: Mapping Commercial Web 2.0 Worlds: Towards a New Critical… Continue reading