Ed Webb's Library tagged future → View Popular

Internet use is as widespread as cable TV, and an internet user in rural Utah has access to more books than a citizen of Greenwich Village had before the web.
hey are worried about bookstores in and of themselves. This is a form of Burkean conservatism, in which the value built up over centuries in the existence of bookstores should be preserved, even though their previous function as the principal link between writers and readers is being displaced.

This sort of commitment to bookstores is a normative argument, an argument about how things ought to be. It is also an argument that might succeed, as long as it re-imagines what bookstores are for and how they are supported, rather than merely hoping that if enough nice people seem really concerned, the flow of time will reverse.
6 more annotations...
- value from a store’s existence as a inviting physical location, value separate from its existence as a transactional warehouse for books.
- Treating the old side-effects as the new core value would in many cases require non-profit status.
- Any change from a commercial to a cooperative model of support would also probably have to be accompanied by a renegotiation of commercial leases
- Even when the current recession ends, it’s hard to imagine vibrant re-population of most of the empty commercial spaces, and it’s easy to imagine scenarios in which commercial districts suffer more: consolidation among pharmacy chains, an uptick in electronic banking, the end of our love affair with frozen yogurt, any of these could keep many street level spaces empty, whatever happens to the larger economy.
- mixed commercial-and-communal use
- trying to save local bookstores from otherwise predictably fatal competition by turning some customers into members, patrons, or donors is an observably crazy idea. However, if the sober-minded alternative is waiting for the Justice Department to anoint the American Booksellers Association as a kind of OPEC for ink, even crazy ideas may be worth a try.

18 Nov 09

NGOs and the News » Nieman Journalism Lab

www.niemanlab.org/ngo - Preview

journalism future NGOs

NGOs and the News:
Exploring a Changing
Communication Landscape
essay series

15 Nov 09

The Future of American High Speed Rail: Regional and Slow | Planetizen

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rail high-speed future transportation environment USA

11 Nov 09

Education at the fork in the road

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bogle education higher-ed future openness educause conferences OER

No revenue model for news? Labor steps up

www.ojr.org/...1795 - Preview

journalism future journalists funding unions

09 Nov 09

Rupert Murdoch vows to take all of Newscorp's websites out of Google, abolish fair use, tear heads off of adorable baby animals - Boing Boing

www.boingboing.net/...rupert-murdoch-vows.html - Preview

Murdoch internet journalism future idiocy

So good luck with that, Rupert. have a delightful, Howard-Hughesian dotage, acting out a crazed, Moby-Dick dumbshow against the Internet, hoping that the world's politics and economies will reform themselves to suit your fevered imaginings. This is how history will remember you.

26 Oct 09

A post-oil world gets less sci-fi by the day | Business | guardian.co.uk

www.guardian.co.uk/...oil-prices-production - Preview

postoil peak oil energy future dystopia

A post-oil world gets less sci-fi by the day

Dwindling supplies and no plan B – are we heading for Mad Max scenario?

University blasts in Pakistan and the future of Islam - Yahoo! News

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Pakistan Islam future education LeVine

Mark LeVine
When the Taliban attacked the International Islamic University in Pakistan this week, many were shocked that militants were targeting an Islamic school. In fact, the double suicide bombers were going after a university that is at the forefront of changing the way Islamic and Western knowledge are brought together in the Muslim world.
3 more annotations...
- when I delivered my second lecture on globalization early on a Saturday morning, the room was filled with students, more women than men (upward of half the student body at the University are women), who grilled me about the assumptions underlying my research and methodologies. Would that most of my students back home were as interested in what I was teaching as were they.
- The University was carving out a much-needed space in Muslim intellectual, and through it political, life through its bringing Muslim and Western traditions into dialogue.
  
  Yet it was receiving, and continues to receive far less attention from scholars, commentators, or policymakers than the fully American-style universities being opened across the Persian Gulf.
- the singular focus of KAUST on hard sciences is ultimately myopic and will likely produce little in the way of the larger societal change in Saudi Arabia predicted by the new university's boosters. Such changes come only with a robust public sphere where citizens who are educated broadly and humanistically are equipped with the social knowledge and skills to challenge the dominant political and social-religious discourses.
  
  Building such an active Pakistani citizenry was and – I imagine despite the bombing – remains a major goal of the IIU.
  
  Sadly, it's just such a goal that probably made it a "legitimate" target for the Taliban, for whom a healthy public sphere populated by educated citizens willing and able to challenge, potentially democratize, and clean up their government would pose at least as big threat to its position in the country as the army they are now fighting in the country's northwest.

15 Oct 09

Europe's first 'personalised paper' | The Australian

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media newspapers future journalism paper Germany startups

they said that young people are tired of trawling the Internet for news and would pay for the personalised, tailored service that niiu would offer
people prefer to read from paper
2 more annotations...
- very targeted advertising
- Eventually, clients will also be able to choose the length of the paper delivered - for example, eight pages on a busy Monday but 60 pages on a Friday when there is more time to read.
  Initially, the paper will be 16 pages.

12 Oct 09

Free Online Courses, at a Very High Price - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

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open open-ed OCR openaccess distance onlineeducation MIT Yale future Chronice

A success for college-made free online courses—except that Mr. Ziegler, who works for a restaurant-equipment company in Pennsylvania, is on the verge of losing his job. And those classes failed to provide what his résumé real ly needs: a college credential.
the recession and disappearing grant money are forcing colleges to confront a difficult question: What business model can support the high cost of giving away your "free" content?
17 more annotations...
- David Wiley, open education's Everywhere Man
- The education oracle offers another prophecy for open courseware. "Every OCW initiative at a university that does not offer distance courses for credit," he has blogged, "will be dead by the end of calendar 2012."
- ventures around the country are seriously exploring new business strategies. For some, it's fund raising à la National Public Radio; for others, hooking open content to core operations by dangling it as a gateway to paid courses.
- "Given that exclusivity has come to be seen by some as a question of how many students a university can turn away, I don't see what's going to make the selective universities increase their appetite for risking their brands by offering credits for online versions of core undergraduate courses,"
- the unbundling of higher education.
- MIT, where students pay about $50,000 a year for a tightly knit package of course content, learning experiences, certification, and social life. MIT OpenCourseWare has lopped off the content and dumped it in cyberspace. Eventually, according to Mr. Carson's take on the unbundling story, online learning experiences will emerge that go beyond just content. Consider Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative, another darling of the movement, whose multimedia courses track students' progress and teach them with built-in tutors—no professor required.
- "Social life we'll just forget about because there's Facebook," Mr. Wiley says. "Nobody believes that people have to go to university to have a social life anymore."
- Peer 2 Peer University
- University of the People
- Western Governors University—a nonprofit, accredited online institution that typically charges $2,890 per six-month term—where students advance by showing what they've learned, not how much time they've spent in class. It's called competency-based education. It means you can fast-forward your degree by testing out of stuff you've already mastered. Some see a marriage of open content and competency-based learning as a model for the small-pieces-loosely-joined chain of cheaper, fragmented education.
- much open courseware is "lousy,"
- "There's a pretty significant fraction of the population that learns better with instructor-led kinds of activities than purely self-paced activities,"
- "It doesn't shift what's happening in some of the very stable traditional institutions of higher education. But there are huge numbers of others who aren't being served. And it's with those that I think we'll begin to see new forms."
- The model boils down to six words: Do you like this? Enroll now!
- a Korean university where students competed to produce open lecture notes. The prize was an iPod and lunch with the university president.
- Carnegie Mellon is trying a different model. When its courses are good enough, with other colleges assigning them as e-textbooks, it asks students to pay a fee as low as $15, says Joel M. Smith, vice provost. "That would be a very, very, very cheap textbook," he says. "If it were used by a large number of colleges and universities, it could sustain the project."
- the free courses taught him one thing, something important when you've been out of school so long: He can do it. He can follow a Yale class. He has nothing to fear.

28 Sep 09

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

www.shirky.com/...looking-for-the-mouse.html - Preview

technology web2.0 shirky Culture future Media sociology history connectiveknowledge crowdsourcing networks

television
watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year.
Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a
year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the
U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads.
The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather
than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that
combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting
community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over
there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But
despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because
there's so much complexity.
4 more annotations...
- The normal case of
  social software is still failure; most of these experiments don't
  pan out. But the ones that do are quite incredible
- It's better to do
  something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute
  pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute
  captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you
  see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play
  this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.
- media is actually a triathlon, it 's three
  different events. People like to consume, but they also like to
  produce, and they like to share.
- Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships
  broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not
  be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the
  people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go
  through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's
  Island, they just assume that media
  includes consuming, producing and sharing.

25 Sep 09

academhack » Blog Archive » The University and the Future of Knowledge

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university future broadcast video presentation

My central claim is that the organization of the University is based on a factory/print broadcast, model of knowledge creation and dissemination, and thus is ill prepared (or perhaps cannot make the transition) into the new knowledge landscape.

The 'Web Squared' Era - Forbes.com

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TimOReilly web web2.0 future ARG augmented ubiquity RFIDs

Web 2.0, the name we gave this phenomenon in 2004 when we named our new conference, turns five on Oct. 5
Web Squared.
4 more annotations...
- Web Squared is another way of saying "Web meets World."
- collective intelligence applications are increasingly driven by cascades of sensor data being thrown off by devices, often without explicit human intervention. Today’s smartphones contain microphones and cameras, as well as motion, proximity, location, and direction sensors. They have their own eyes, ears, and sense of touch. Revolutionary new applications connect those senses to cloud databases and programs running on massive server farms.
- Where the Web Squared world gets really interesting, though, is when applications use all the senses of a device, coordinating them much like the human brain coordinates our senses, to draw conclusions that would be difficult with one sense alone.
- our world will have "information shadows." Augmented reality amounts to information shadows made visible.

21 Sep 09

Futures Thinking: The Basics | Open The Future | Fast Company

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future futurism futurist futurology cascio how-to

BY Jamais Cascio
Futurism as it's practiced today doesn't try to predict the future, but rather to illuminate unexpected implications of present-day issues; the emphasis isn't on what will happen, but on what could happen, given various observed drivers
6 more annotations...
- basic methods of structured futures thinking
- Asking the Question; Scanning the World; Mapping the Possibilities; and Asking the Next Question
- ten years is a good target--it's far enough out that some big changes are likely, but near enough that much of the world will still be familiar.
- most good futures work is done collaboratively
- there is no one future. Trying to figure out "the" future is always a mistake; it's much more productive to think about an array of possible outcomes. Remember that the futures you come up with will almost certainly be wrong--the goal is to be wrong in a way that offers insights into present choices.
- Often one of the key insights from many futures projects is the simple realization that the future is in our hands--that our choices matter.

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