Mesofacts

Remember when Pluto was a planet? Did you grow up being told that dinosaurs were slow, cold-blooded dull lizards (in my own defense, i never believed this one)? Remember when the moon had no water? Name the countries that make up Africa.

The things we know as 'fact' change. Knowledge is not a constant. This is very exciting albeit a little inconvenient for school text book publishers. It is also slightly inconvenient for those amongst us who fondly remember the good old days when schooling was about learning facts and useful stuff that you could demonstrate your mastery over via direct recall.

Samuel Arbesman introduces the concept of the mesofact. In the Boston Globe, he writes: "When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close. But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime". Read the article here. Visit mesofacts.org here. I very much like the concept although i'm not sure that his example of a capital city and a mountain are good examples of facts that don't change.

Google's Model Your Town Competition

Maps, geolocation, studies of place and space are all the rage. The popularity of Google's mapping software, particularly Google Earth and Google Maps (who can live without 'street view'?) are testament to our fascination with where we are in relation to everyone else.

The Google Model Your Town Competition has been running since December 2009. The competition was about creating detailed 3D models of communities (and demonstrating the power and beauty of Google's SketchUp and Building Maker). While all the entries can be seen here, the five finalist towns have been selected (Barranco (Lima, Peru), Braunschweig (Niedersachsen, Germany), Donostia-San Sebastian (Gipuzkoa, Spain), Dursley (Gloucestershire, UK) and West Palm Beach (Florida, USA) and the competition has now opened for public voting. If you're interested and want to vote, voting closes May 1 with the winner announced by May 15.

Women in science & technology

Ada Lovelace worked with Charles Babbage in the 1800s and between them they laid the foundations of modern computing. Ada, in fact, wrote the world's first ever computer program (October 1842). March 24 has been set aside as Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. Ada remains one of our enduring science and technology heroines.

But, just in case you were worried that women are not getting enough acknowledgement for their contributions to science and technology, fear not. The two latest Barbie careers have been released: computer engineer and television host!

With thanks to Naghmeh for pointing out the computer engineer Barbie!

Urbanisation is unstoppable

This is the Urban Age.

This ...

The newly released UN report "State of the World's Cities 2008/2009: Harmonious Cities". Its preamble: "Half of humanity now lives in cities, and within two decades, nearly 60% of the world's people will be urban dwellers. Urban growth is most rapid in the developing world, where cities gain an average of 5 million residents every month. As cities grow in size and population, harmony among the spatial, social and environmental aspects of a city and between their inhabitants becomes of paramount importance. This harmony hinges on two key pillars: equity and sustainability"

leads to this ...

Justin McQuirk's design focused blog in The Guardian outlining the role that designers must play in creating livable urban spaces. He writes, "By 2050, three quarters of us are expected to be urbanites. But here's the scary part: most of this growth is happening in places where millions of people already live in slums: Mumbai, Delhi, Karachi, Shanghai, São Paolo, Kinshasa: these are the fastest-growing cities in the world, most of them destined to have populations of more than 20 million by 2025". In additional already large cities will over-run each other, becoming 'mega-regions'. Some of these will swell across national borders. The endless city.

leads to this ...

Meanwhile, an article by Simon Romero for the NYTimes draws us back to the scene of a large-scale urban crisis: the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. He describes the chasm between wealth and absolute poverty that has been exacerbated since the earthquake. He writes of the "surreal contrasts along the streets above Port-au-Prince's central districts. People in tent camps reeking of sewage are living in areas where prosperous Haitians, foreign aid workers and diplomats cone to spend their money and unwind. Often, just a gate and a private guard armed with a 12-gauge shotgun separate the newly homeless from establishments like Les Galeries Rivoli, a boutique where wealthy Haitians and foreigners shop for Raymond Weil watches and Izod shirts".

Equity and sustainability?

I use 'The google'

Interesting, funny, slightly scary You Tube video called 'What is a browser' filmed by a Google employee.

If you find it a little worrisome that so many of us don't actually know how we get online and stay there, reading Adam Engst's TidBITS Opinion piece "Have we entered a post-literate technological age?" will make you shudder. I am as guilty as anyone. I just want stuff to work!

Identity jigsaws

According to the NYT's Steve Lohr, "Services like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae - birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched. Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person's identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number".

Given how many of my colleagues, relatives and young people have close online relationships mediated via Facebook this is fascinating. Read the complete article here.

Goodbye Margaret Moth

Margaret Moth died yesterday. The world is smaller.

Go here to start watching "Fearless: The Margaret Moth Story" and here to read Jessica Ravitz's moving piece remembering her.

World of Goo Trailer 2 Director's Cut
by 2dboy

Lately I've been really interested in some of the games coming out from indie developers. World of Goo is one example, in the tradition of games such as Lemmings or even The Lost Vikings, but with its own unique twists. I played it compulsively for a few days and could only stop once I had completed it. It's the kind of game that reminds me of Nintendo's approach to game development: it has a strong emphasis on simple yet engrossing gameplay rather than all the extras that are often packaged into a game, especially when this central element is missing. In recent months I've found Boing Boing sister blog Offworld to be a good place to keep up with the indie game scene...

5 minute interview with Dr Jennifer Rowsell

The latest in our series of mini interviews with key researchers in the New Literacy Studies: Dr Jennifer Rowsell from Rutgers Graduate School of Education. Jennifer is an Assistant Professor of Literacy Education at Rutgers where she teachers undergraduate and graduate courses in multimodality, multiliteracies, and New Literacy Studies. She is all-round fabulous.

What digital technologies do you have in your handbag/satchel?
I always have my blackberry and a tape recorder just in case I suddenly have to interview someone (which has never happened incidentally).


Which one/s can't you live without and why?
Clearly, I can live without the tape recorder, but I love my blackberry.

What's your current favourite blog/website/virtual world?
I really like YouTube. I go to it often when I miss big events like Obama's Acceptance Speech or Tina Fey impersonating Sarah Palin. Also, I go onto YouTube with our daughter when we want to look up goofy things like Funny Animal Videos or Funny Fart Animal Videos.

What are you finding fascinating in relation to technology/literacy/text at the moment?
When I think about technology and literacy these days, I focus on production and such questions as (currently): how do digital spaces create communities and communities of practice? For example, what happens when CNN develops a partnership with another digital space such as YouTube - especially given that CNN is quite conservative and YouTube is quite liberal. Or, Facebook developing a partnership with Vonage or Sprint - how do these partnerships shift the content of a website? How do partnerships impact users? Or, a war videogame partnering up with The History Channel?

What do you predict will be a key issue/s in digital technologies/literacy over the next 5 years?
1. New writing pedagogy - that accounts for multiple genres and using different modes to create these genres (and maping out what goes into our thinking).
2. New reading pedagogy - that accounts for reading multiple texts at once and closing the gap between reading and writing (because there is less of a gap between reading and writing when working online).
3. Assessing what modes best fit a text and having students explain their preferred choice of mode. In other words, how do we assess what goes when we use 'new literacies'?
4. An account of the material and artifactual nature of meaning-making instead of a focus on written accounts or more traditional technologies.
5. Looking outside of education broadly and literacy education particularly to explain what it means to make meaning with contemporary communicational systems (because the marketplace creates texts, practices, and digital environments).
6. Being greedy I will do a sixth point because I believe that there is a need to understand networks of information as well so that we have far more meta-knowledge of discourses and ideologies when we make meaning with texts (this will involve geosemiotics and multimodal-discursive understandings).

Mobile-based health education

I stumbled across a description of Project Masiluleke in the World Aids Day supplement of this weeks The Guardian Weekly. According to Pop!Tech, one of the funding partners, Project Masiluleke:

is a path-breaking effort that harnesses the power of mobile technology to address one of the world’s gravest public health crises. This ambitious initiative will leverage the ubiquity of mobile devices in South Africa to help fight the country’s crippling HIV/AIDS and TB epidemics.

Because nearly every South African has access to mobile phones they have become a most effective method of private mass communication. There is more detail about the project and the confluence of community health and mobile technology at The Praekelt Foundation...