fat friends, contagion and other whispers

- Why can't we be friends?
- Because my mummy says that if I'm you're friend I'm going to get fat just like you. You're nice but I don't want to be fat.

'Obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus, researchers are reporting today. When a person gains weight, close friends tend to gain weight, too'. New York Times, 25th July 2007. [Source]

"produsers", generation C and some hype from the mobile media conference

If I had the time and could afford it I would have liked to attend the Mobile Media 2007 conference. It was held at the University of Sydney and the full title of the conference was this: 'an international conference on social and cultural aspects of mobile phones, convergent media, and wireless technologies'. Nonetheless I attend through the lives of others and their extension in the blogosphere which I invite you to look at through Playful Identities, Most Mobiles and amongst others Snurb's blog. Some people have been kind enough to provide reviews, put papers online and extend conversations to the public. Thank you even if you never read this.

What's the fuss about for me today? Well there's the article in the Australian:
'Hi-teach carrots to tempt generation C' by Milanda Rout. The Australian, Higher Education, July 18th 2007.

It refers directly to Jude Smith and Axel Bruns and their [warning: pdf] paper/presentation at the Mobile Media conference, saying that 'traditional tertiary learning is under threat from generation C'.

Architect Hamilton Wilson has teamed up with the University of Queensland to look at what lecture spaces of the future should be like and the connection they will have to teaching and technology.
Mr Wilson said teaching was evolving from knowledge-based to understanding-based, where students collaborated and interacted more with material than just reading books and writing essays. "New technologies have forced this hand," he said about the change in teaching practices.
"But this active learning is abetter way to teach in the firstplace."

Source: http://theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22091792-12332,00.html
Last Accessed 18th July 2007

The example they give is something about walls and screens that switch between what they're calling instructive and collaborative. I worry about teachers/lecturers using this equipment to do the same thing they were doing without the equipment. I also wonder whether this is actually responding to the much weightier challenge presented by the initial Smith and Bruns stuff. In any case, I shouldn't complain too much because I risk feeding fuel to the technophobic fire.

Very shortly I will be reading [warning: pdf] the paper which is obviously more substantive than the fast food version from the Australian. [warning: pdf] This paper also is on my to-read list. I found the links to both of them on Bruns's blog post.

Dewey Decimal to Consumer Ranking

This caught my fancy after hearing about it in a New York Times podcast:

---
Dewey? At This Library With a Very Different Outlook, They Don’t
By SARAH N. LYNCH and EUGENE MULERO
Published: July 14, 2007
An Arizona library has forsaken the Dewey Decimal System, and is arranging books in a manner similar to the approach taken by Barnes & Noble.
---

Source: Article
Last Accessed 16th July 2007

preliminary thoughts: wars (history, geography, vodka)

This is my first post on this topic and at this point my thoughts are relatively unformed. There's a lot to be said about this area so what I'm going to try to do is begin sketching the areas which I think are relevant and later add/take away from it (if I ever find the time). So what's this about? Well, most of you would have heard of the 'history wars':

Source: http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2006/07/22/davidson_2307_narrowweb__300x374,2.jpg
Last accessed: 14th July 2007

The debate is on the surface about what and how history should be taught in schools and hence what constitutes history (read truth). Kevin Donnelly has, of course, had his say in all of this and there has been an ongoing exchange between Donnelly and Stuart McIntyre. More recently the same argument has been transplanted to geography. I was very surprised to see this today:

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200707/r160023_584612.jpg
Last Accessed: 14th July 2007

The vodka war is about what constitutes vodka in the EU and what's at stake, from the perspective of legislators and the industry, is billions of dollars.

History, geography and vodka. All of this is about boundaries, the boundaries of entities, the boundaries of disciplines, categories. As these boundaries leak (crudely that history becomes histories, geography also becomes about space and place, vodka is not just distilled from potatoes) the legitimacy of the actors, that imbue the process of boundary maintainance with power, is dropping. This process of seeking to re-establish the boundaries, to reterritorialise, has already been thought about in many ways. How do we think what is happening to history, geography and vodka now?

James Gee in SecondLife: very exciting!

I think I have said something previously about the Global Kids' Digital Media Initiative which is definitely something to follow closely. There seems to be some aussie presence but nobody I know. Again, I feel I must say this... I wish more people would get involved with all of these great projects. Anyway, back to the title of this post, James Gee has appeared on GK Island in SecondLife and someone posted it on youtube:

just over five minutes with giroux

1. The relevance of theory
2. Never engage in a practice for which you're not reflective about that practice

'recommoditization' of labour (Bauman) and schools/teaching

I just started reading Zygmunt Bauman's new book, Consuming Life and I couldn't help but think of the state of education when I read this paragraph in which Bauman responds to the idea of the 'zero drag' employee.

The art of the 'recommoditization' of labour in its novel, updated form is singularly unsuited to being learnt from the unwieldy, notoriously inert, tradition-bound, change-resistant and routine-loving governmental bureaucracy; and that bureaucracy is singularly unsuited to cultivating, teaching and inculcating it. The job is better left to the consumer markets, already known to thrive on and be adept in training their customers in strikingly similar arts - and it is. Shifting the task of recommoditizing labour to the market is the deepest meaning of the state's conversion to the cult of 'deregulation' and 'privatization' (Bauman, 2007, p.10)

By the way a zero drag employee (Silicon Valley jargon) would be:

...a person with no previous bonds, commitments or emotional attachments, and shunning new ones; a person ready to take on any task that comes by and prepared to instantly readjust and refocus their own inclinations, embracing new priorities and abandoning those previously acquired in short order; a person used to a setting where 'getting used to' as such - to a job, or a skill, or a way of doing things - is unwelcome and so imprudent; last but not least, a person who will leave the company when they are no longer needed, without complaint or litigation (Bauman, 2007, p. 10)

If that last paragraph doesn't sound like the ideal student of VELS I don't know what does.

Reference

Bauman, Z. (2007). Consuming life. Cambridge: Polity Press.