London Underground (Westminster Station)

Revisiting something that I wrote about years ago.

Public transit stations are places of movement. Travelers not only move between stations, but within stations as well. The many escalators and stairways (and the spaces around them) in London’s Westminster Station are just as mechanical as the trains that whisk commuters from place to place. In many ways, subway stations are even more liminal than airports. They are far more transitory, and are unlikely to have places to sit down. In fact, most aren’t places one really feels a desire to linger in.

Public transit and its development is tied to modernist discourses – including its design. Thus, many subway/underground stations are brutally modernist in their appearance and feel. Built of concrete and steel, they seem other-worldly and inorganic. In fact, many stations look like they’re from outer space. The paths and escalators in Westminster station are not unlike those in Space Mountain at Disneyland. Metal beams and tubes, with large rivets accentuate (and decorate) both places.

SEPTA: Under City Hall

Another example, is a tunnel underneath Philadelphia’s city hall (leading to a SEPTA subway station) that looks like a starship generator room. Although, the blue halo in the picture here is really the sky, the artificial lighting in the tunnel dominates over whatever natural light is present. The hum and flicker of the fluorescent lights seem to take away whatever warmth is coming from the sun.

The coldness of such spaces is the reason why filmmakers have used modernist buildings in dystopian sci-fi movies. One of the more memorable examples of a public transit system being used in the genre is Total Recall (1990). Director Paul Verhoeven used Mexico City’s transit system to create a bleak future in which people would pay to have their memories altered, as a means to escape their mundane lives.

The key word is ‘enhance’. Technology is a tool, and not a replacement for well thought out pedagogy and a passion for teaching. However, I do believe the quality of technology is factor in faculty willingness to take full advantage of the LMS. After playing around with D2L, I find it to a simpler and more streamlined LMS than Blackboard. It’s not ‘bloated’ like Blackboad.

The LMS landscape is rapidly changing. Blackboard bought Angel last year, no doubt as a result of Moodle making big strides in 2009 and ultimately becoming #1  market share-wise [1]. I’m particularly interested in this, because open-source seems to be fairly competitive in this ‘market’. Sakai, for example, is another major open-source LMS [2].

Given how lucrative these contracts are, I’m surprised that we haven’t seen megacompanies such as Thomson Reuters jumping in, or a company like Pearson making an acquisition.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix 10.04

I recently got an Asus EEE 1005ha PC to tide me over until I get my Dell laptop fixed (bad Nvidia chip).

I’m digging Windows 7, and the long battery life of the netbook. However, I can really feel it lag when I have a couple of programs open (or even multiple browser tabs). So I decided to try out Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNE) 10.04 (despite the news that Windows 7 manages power better than Ubuntu).

*** This process, however, was more complicated than I expected it to be. The Asus BIOS did not want to see my USB flash drive, so I had to install UNE on an SD card. In a way, this might be better for me since it frees up my USB ports and I can leave the SD card plugged in.

I’m actually digging the UNE set up. Although my screenshot shows my desktop while plugged into my 22″ monitor, the layout works out quite well on my netbook screen. Despite Mark Shuttleworth announcing that GNOME Shell won’t show up by default in Ubuntu 10.10, it makes me look forward to its eventual implementation out-of-the-box.

Other thoughts:

• Not digging the default purple background and color scheme, but the new default theme is nice.
• I guess the rise of social networking makes the Gwibber addition logical.
  • However, I’m still not digging Empathy. I’ll probably install Pidgin when I get around to it.
  • Also no GIMP.
• One of the first things I installed was Chromium, which is available in the Ubuntu Software Center. As much as I love Firefox, it’s just too bloated on my netbook. The only thing that’s keeping it on my computer(s) is Zotero  (which is going to come out with a stand alone version in the future).

There have been 2 major legal motions in the U.S. and U.K. that have the potential to really affect speech and information online. In the U.S. a recent court decision represents a major blow to net neutrality, which means ISPs have the right to throttle or even block applications and websites . In a similar vein, in the UK, a bill was recently passed that allow site blocking by court order. In both cases, the idea is that ISPs, media corporations, and the government have the right to regulate what goes on their networks, despite the convention of net neutrality. In both cases access to information, or free speech, can be blocked. (Of course these are two countries that have been critical of the Great Firewall of China)

But, as Mark Gibbs at Computer World suggests, this isn’t about the right to regulate network traffic, but it’s about content. For example, Christopher Null at Yahoo, reminds us that Comcast (soon to be owner of NBC) can limit access to competitors such as Hulu. There are, of course, naysayers who claim that fears of censorship, throttling, and restriction of content from rival corporations won’t happen. They would also say that this protects the speech and intellectual property of authors, artists, and publishers. Maybe it does? Perhaps, it won’t affect the mainstream of most internet users. This is because most users are fine with centralized access to content. So there is some validity to what they’re saying.

However, there very much is the potential of this limiting free speech and knowledge.  This is especially the case in regards to innovation in open-source and “the cloud”. For example, the arbitrary blocking of P2P and torrents, could affect Ubuntu being distributed via Bit Torrent. In other words, this stymies competition from below. Instead it could change the Internet from a relatively democratic space into a battleground between giant telecom and media corporations fighting for consumer attention.

The purpose of this Flash-based map is to help students visualize spheres of influence & empires. This is a work in progress. Click on England, Spain, France and Russia for their colonial empires.

I had hinted in a previous post that the end of Net Neutrality would mean spats between content providers and cable companies. For actual examples of this happening, look at the following articles [1] [2] [3]. Just imagine if that happened to internet content! Scary right?

Here, I want to expand this discussion a bit. Although the internet can be a commercial tool, as well as a source of entertainment, its based on the free-flow of information. As the old saying goes, “Knowledge is power.” However, knowledge and access to it is becoming more of a commodity that is harder and harder to access. At stake isn’t just the level of ‘content’ (or the finished product), rather the whole processes – e.g. learning and literacy – are at risk. Due to the recent economic crisis, public institutions such as community college and libraries have faced cuts and closures. As such, according to Ars Technica, they are jockeying for stimulus money for broadband given their status as public computer labs all over the U.S. But, should they even have to make such a bid? How can an economy that has moved towards the information/service sector (and away from industrial production) over the past few decades even question expanding public access to computers and broadband? In short more and more money is needed just to get on the so-called information superhighway.

That said, education as a whole is a mess. Some are saying that it’s the ‘next bubble to burst‘ [also]. Higher education as a whole is full of problems, from funding, to hiring. This is the world in which I am starting my career as an academic. Scary right?

Karmic Koala

I upgraded to Karmic Koala recently, and I’m digging how fast it is. It also has a bunch of nifty backgrounds (which you see here to the left in my screen shot).

I´m not digging Empathy though. I’ll probably install Pidgin and make that my default chat program when I have time.

In the image to the left, I´m using the Token icon set with my Avant Window Navigator. I´ve also made a custom blend of the iNiZe and Meliae icons for my other menus. And of course, I’m still using the Scaled Black Mod Emerald Theme.

Generally the reviews for Karmic are good. Although the hype right now is around Chrome OS. People who romanticize open source will probably be upset at this article, but they typically forget how OpenOffice is backed by Sun Microsystems, and that Suse is backed by Novell. The outcome of Chrome will probably be a pretty darn good OS, but as an author at PC World notes… we’ll become even more dependent on Google

The purpose of this Flash-based map is to help students visualize social problems in the United States.

Helpful Links:

• Obesity: http://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/trends.html
• Poverty: http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/
• Reading Ability: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d08/tables/dt08_121.asp
• Unemployment: http://www.bls.gov/web/laumstrk.htm

This is a simple Flash timeline of major figures in classical sociological theory, and some historical events to help contextualize that development. My goal is to make a couple of these Flash timelines (as well as maps and slideshows) for future implementation into my online courses.