In a short but provocative piece at edge.com Berkeley’s Marti Hearst suggests we will see text decline in favor of video and speech based interactions in the future. This is not the first time the predictions for the power of new media have been made (David Jonassen infamously predicted in 1982 that the book [...]
Check out the site, view the pictures and read some of the horrific data of our current world from the Amnesty 2008 report which shows that sixty years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations, people are still tortured or ill-treated in at least 81 countries, face unfair [...]
I had dinner last night with Madelaine Albright - yes, shameless name dropping, I know, but the fact remains, I and a few other people did have the pleasure of hearing her talk frankly about US foreign policy on her visit here to mark the opening of the LBJ School’s new Masters in Global Affairs. [...]
I was surprised and a little annoyed to find an advertisement on the the ACM CHI-JOBS listing today that, before even describing the interface design and UX skills required for the position, made clear that the person hired had to be a current member of a particular church and prove ‘temple-worthy’. Yikes, this is [...]
Interesting article this week in the Science section of NYT on Paul Otlet in the context of modern web design. There is even a video clip from the documentary “The man who wanted to classify the world”. The tone suggests Otlet is forgotten — maybe by CS types, but he was considered foundational to the [...]
When I used to teach students the classic innovation diffusion model of Rogers, I would try to bring up examples of technologies that were more meaningful to them than the agrarian and medical techniques that fill the textbook. The potato famine just doesn’t have the same resonance for non-Irish learners, I discovered. The trouble was [...]
In the dim distant past, some of us used to distinguish our work from the masses by declaring proudly that we were ‘user-centered’. At one time this actually meant you did things differently and put a premium on the ability of real people to exploit a product or service. While the concern remains, and there [...]
Much of the ferment over libraries, information, technology and digital life springs from rigid divisions drawn between people, professions and purposes. In our discussions here in Texas on the future of our own program and our plans for the future, we have given serious thought to advancing discovery as the true purpose of the information [...]
A couple of years ago the NEA produced a study entitled Reading at Risk which suggested literary reading among the US adult population was diminishing at a worrying rate. Last week they released a follow-up, entitled To Read or Not to Read; A Matter of National Consequence which suggests that not only is reading continuing [...]
Indiana University’s School of Education has received a federal grant of $3m to study how technology is used in the classroom and to what effect. Am pleased there will be more data on this since some of us have conducted significant reviews over the last decade that raised serious doubts about the claims made for [...]