TIPPINST -- While revising curriculum items for delivery in 2006, I stumbled upon the musings of Stephen Heppell who noted how international delegates at UNESCO resent being "a conduit for a vast market of US curriculum materials". If a global curriculum succeeds, it is because it is "assembled by public service partners rather than delivered by vast corporations," according to Heppell. The same holds true in an Irish classroom.
TIPPINST -- One of the most dangerous habits we have to break is the way we often wear blinders when dealing with emotionally-charged issues. This often occurs with discussions related to globalisation--we have our take and that's as much as we want to know. For that reason, we explore globalisation in a Mass Communication and Culture course to determine what it means, not only to Irish citizens but to other nationalities. Globalisation is a different game for different cultures. Clyde Prestowitz in the Boston Globe explains that while countries like Ireland see globalisation largely in terms of consumption patterns, it works differently for other nations.
WIRED -- Brittan Elementary School in Sutter, California, has received national attention for trying to launch an RFID program in January to track students without properly notifying parents or students. The school wanted to require students to wear photo ID cards embedded with an RFID chip containing a 15-digit number assigned to each student to track attendance. Acrroding to Wired, the school cut a deal with a local maker of the technology to test the tracking system and receive a percentage of profits if the company succeeded in selling the system to other school districts. But after a group of outraged parents protested the plan, the school dropped it. But California lawmakers picked up on the story, and the incident sparked a discussion in the California State legislature about using electronic tagging.
TIPPINST -- In my personal experience, more students read and cite articles online than ones offline. Doc Searls points to an "effort to lead the movement of body of knowlege (now offline) to the Web, where autodidacts can have access to it". There are important issues related to the larger role of both scholarship and scholarly works in the world. One of the stumbling blocks is deciding what makes an article the right unit for scholarly communication. Searls poses the relevant question: "Why not blog it? Why not make it into a wiki?" Doing that would help scholarly information more efficiently find its markets. Then he blogs during the lecture session, and gets outed for his behaviour.
OPEN -- Ray Corrigan, a lecturer at the UK's Open University, points to the first Open University course to be released under a Creative Commons licence. It's a course based on Larry Lessig's book The Future of Ideas ISBN 0375505784. You must register a proper e-mail address if you want to see the course, otherwise it's openly available. Tipperary Institute has several open courses available online, using the Moodle Open Source Virtual Learning environment. Johns Hopkins School of Public Health offer Opencourseware model with these six courses.
KILKENNY -- Here in Ireland's most charming medieval city, we think we know culture. After all, it's all around us. Trouble is, the concept of culture gets very diluted with street culture and pop culture. The Globe and Mail understand that too and unpack culture in a piece that quotes Brian Eno. Eno has a clear definition of culture.
CLONMEL -- If toothing is a hoax, how do I categorise the animated invitation I received in a late night Berlin night club? The third frame of the animation invited me to the toilets. The animation came to my Nokia 9500 over Bluetooth while I was finishing my second glass of Pilsener. Either I misinterpreted the animation or there's a toothing subculture in late night Berlin. That might surprise Ste Curran who claims he fabricated the whole Toothing craze.
NEWSWEEK -- Stephen Levy has a piece in Newsweek where he criticizes the dominance of white men in blogging. He misses two important points.
CLONMEL -- To mark the occasion of another charter flight from Dublin to Lagos, isn't it good for Irishblogs to reflect on listings of things that make us different from others?
DELICIOUS -- I learn what lies ahead by skimming popular Delicious tags. Unlike trendy tagging, social bookmarking provides a clear indication as to whether something is hot or not. The more people linking to a URL, the higher the probability that the material at a specific URL has merit. It's like a community Page Rank for content. I keep mine at del.icio.us/tag/topgold.
