Higher Learning Online Magazine

Higher Learning; Technology Serving Education is an online magazine launched in 2001 aimed at the higher ed market. It comes out about once every two months as a PDF and is a spin-off of TEACH Magazine. It is interesting that they provide the PDF versions for free of both HL and TEACH. What is dissappointing is that they are similar to Educause, emphasizing commercial technologies and “success” stories. Probably a good place to keep up on the hype, but I’m not sure they will invest in critical inquiry.

Wayback Machine: Internet Archive

In my previous post I mentioned the dissappearance of NewMIC and how hard it is to find information about ghost organizations. Two places I have found that can be used to find information are:

  1. Ghost Sites: Where Dead Web Sites Live On is a blog with articles on ghost sites and their history. From there you can link to Ghost Sites: The Museum of E-Failure (Dead Web Site Screenshots).
  2. Internet Archive: Wayback Machine is an archive of sites. If you search for a URL like newmic.com it will give you a list of dated snapshots.

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RFID: Radio Frequency Indentification

Site Watch, on RFID is an irregular column by Treanna Szelei of SFU that is part of digest a report on emerging trends in “human-technology interaction and e-lifestyles.” This column has good starting spots on RFID (Radio Frequency Indentification), arguably the most important embedded technology that people don’t know about. RFID has the potential to be a huge surveillance and privacy issue, but the tags are so small and unobtrusive that we don’t know they are there. Not knowing they are there, unlike active badges, means that we don’t worry about them potentially leaving us all wearing active tags that can be tracked.
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NRC: 3D Technologies

The 3D Visualization Technologies Research Group is part of the National Research Council Institute for Information Technology. They have developed laser scanners that can digitize spaces and objects. (See The Virtual Theater). They have also developed technologies for generating 3D spaces from images/paintings and technologies for searching 3D databases.
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Copernic: NRC Summarizing Tools

Copernic is a company that has licensed text summarization technology from the Institute for Information Technology at the National Research Council. They have agent and summarizer tools that can help searching the web and managing results. The Copernic Summarizer, in particular, looks like an interesting application of summarization for everyday use, including the ability to summarize web pages in real time. Neat!
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CBBAG Bookbinding

Paul Lisson pointed me to Canadian Bookbinders and Book Artists Guild (CBBAG, pronounced “cabbage”). They have a great site on bookbinding and book arts that includes online exhibits like Textual Relations. The amount of information on the site and all the activities of CBBAG (from aprons for sale to home courses) suggest an active community (and thorough web mistress.) I have not excuse now, but to take a course or buy the home video series.

HTML Art Context

In Look, See: July 04, 2004 – July 10, 2004 Archives, Chris Ashley was amused by my entry and attempted experiment. He notes that for him these works need to be understood in context,

My drawings, though, don’t stand alone. They exist within a context; anyone who has followed these for awhile will have a sense that:
1. the drawings have or respond to a subject, and are somewhat representational, but not always of tangible things;
2. the drawings also derive their meaning from the fact that they exist within a weblog where I have a daily deadline, one drawing (typically) is exhibited each day, and the weblog serves as a gallery and an archive, all public;
3. meaning is also inherent in the fact that the drawings (almost always) are in series, so that drawings are part of a body; and
4. I am really working up against the edge of the limitations of HTML tables, a very simple medium, so that even though I use the grid everday I am working against making an image that is just a set of blocks;
5. I use color like a painter, which is my background- I mix, tint, shade, and use it for structure, space, and composition.

While his works don’t stand alone, and that makes the site more than just a collection of HTML art, does that mean that the technique can’t be repurposed and used in other contexts? How tied is a technique to its original context? Does one have to follow the blog to appreciate a particular work? These parallel the questions we have in literary theory around the authority of the author and their control over their work. The web (and blogging) makes it that much easier for fragments to be taken out of context. I would go further and say that you can’t count on context on the web. I certainly missed the importance to Chris of the sequential evolution of his work working my way backward from the entry point.
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