Posted: July 20th, 2003 | No Comments »
J’ai enfin terminé mes notes sur le livre d’Edgar Morin, Raúl Motta et Emilio-Roger Ciurana “Eduquer pour l’ére planétaire”.
Posted: July 18th, 2003 | No Comments »
A few quote from the chapter “The Desktop” in Steven Johnson’s Interface Culture:
“The modern shopping mall – with its teeming equivalent of displays and byzantine floor plan – is the spacial equivalent of today’s MTV-style advertising. In these high-velocity times, anything that disorients sells product”.
“The way we choos to organize our space says an enormous amount about the society we live in – perhaps more than any other components of our cultural habits“.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: July 18th, 2003 | No Comments »
By reading a post by icon on seminare on Outdoor distributed computing, a few questions came to my mind:
Isn’t the term “outdoor” abusly used to mean “mobile”? (outdoor is a sub-caterogy of mobile?) If no, what is the difference between outdoor and mobile?
What is meant by “conventional distributed computing does not work”? What drawbacks of conventional distributed computing have been mentionned? What are the potential solutions?
For all the points mentionned, decentralized(peer-to-peer) distributed computing immadiatly poped to my mind. (p2p=dynamic configuation, tolerates unpredictable delays, configuration changes during execution (example of decentralized mobile agents framework “Negotiator” where state of the nodes changes
) Did the seminar went that direction too (or was it non-technical and more abstract)?
Posted: July 17th, 2003 | No Comments »
Resumen de un articlo sobre Bruce Sterling publicado en el periodico espanol El Pais. Bruce Sterling esta una de las principales figuras del ciberpunk (junto a William Gibson). La palabra cíber se refiere a la civernética y el control del hombre sobre la máquina, tal y como la definió Norbert Wiener en 1948. El segundo concepto, punk, se emplea de forma generalizada desde 1976, aplicado a un estilo musical autodidacta, caracterizado pro actitudes independientes y anárquicas. El ficción de Sterling hace referencia al futuro cercano y “al impacto que origina la tecnología en la sociedad”. Por Sterling, el término ciberpunk suena un tanto desfasado hoy en día. “Nada es una novedad siempre. Así que cualquier cosa que sea cíber, incluso el término cíber, he quedada anticuada. Es como decir electro, atómica or aerodinámico”.
En la actualidad, Bruce Sterling prefiere escribir artículos titulados La información quiere ser gratuita. “Esta idea es casi tan poderosa como la anterior”. Al contrario de piratos de software (ellos se comportan como si pertenecieran a una cultura abierta, pero lo único que hacen es vulnerar la propiedad ajena), gente con una cultura de libre acceso (Open Source Culture) tiene un plan. Van de la A a la B a la C y consiguen grandes cosas. La gente de Open Source es mucho más agresiva. Tienen soluciones práticas para un montón de problemas acuciantes y eso es algo viable y poco frecuente.
El interés de Sterling por la contracultura ha terminado. “Eso es para amas de casa aburridas”. Está interesado en escribir un novela que sólo pueda haberse escrito en el siglo XXI. Parte del material probablemente pueda encontrarse en su último libro, “Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Year”.
Posted: July 17th, 2003 | No Comments »
I started reading Interface Culture (How new technology transforms the way we create and communicate) by Steven Johnson. The central topic of this book is about the fusion of art and technology that Johnson calls interface design. In his introduction, he flaters every engineer’s ego by coupling them with artists:
Was the original cave painter an artist or an engineer? She was both, of course, like most artists and engineers since. But we have a habit – long cultivated – of imagining them as seperate, the two great tributaries rolling steadily to the sea of modernity, and dividing everyone in their path into two camps: those that dwell on the shores of technology and those that dwell on the shores of culture. The opposition colors much of modern thought. (Even the human grain is now seen as having a lobe for artists and a lob for engineers.). But it is false as the genetic separation between human and ape.
I have been thinking the same since I got my degree
My favourite quote so fare: “In the cultural sphere, the hybrids are stronger, more innovative, more robust than the pure breeds“.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: July 17th, 2003 | No Comments »
Aguardiente con un nombre muy explicito…
![](http://www.girardin.org/fabien/seventh-and-half/images/gijon_aguardiente_small.jpg)
Posted: July 10th, 2003 | 1 Comment »
I do not consider myself as a gamer anymore, but I happen to think that games of my teenage years like La Hanse, Player Manager (kick-off extension), or even Bubble Bubble (played in pairs) or later Civilization or Sim City were great educators. James Paul Gee goes deeper and shows the world the importance of games video games. A few quotes:
Games make kids smarter when they play them proactively, that is, when they think about game design, how their own styles of play interact with that design, how different strategies work, and how games relate to other things like books, movies, and the world. Schools may not yet care about this, but modern workplaces care about whether people can think about how their environments are designed and can be re-designed to be better and more productive.
It dawned on me that good games were learning machines. Built into their very designs were good learning principles, principles supported, in fact, by cutting-edge research in cognitive science, the science that studies human thinking and learning. Many of these principles could be used in schools to get kids to learn things like science, but, too often today schools are returning to skill-and-drill and multiple-choice tests that kill deep learning
Humans are terrible at learning when you give them lots and lots of verbal information ahead of time out of any context where it can be applied. Games give verbal information “just in time” when and where it can be used and “on demand” as the player realizes he or she needs it.
What makes a game is an interactive world that the player partly creates through his or her actions and decisions. Also, people are too hung up about learning “content” in the sense of facts. What we need people to learn is how to think deeply about complex systems (e.g., modern workplaces, the environment, international relations, social interactions, cultures, etc.) where everything interacts in complicated ways with everything else and bad decisions can make for disasters.
Posted: July 7th, 2003 | No Comments »
Avant que je ne le perde sur la Shoutblog, voici le lien du Personal Marabouts Generator pointé par icon.