Bastard Culture!: How User Participation Transforms Cultural Production Mirko Tobias Schafer 0 Resenhas Amsterdam University Press, 15/07/2011 - 249 páginas In the wake of the recent far-reaching changes in the use and accessibility of technology in our society, the average person is far more engaged with digital culture than ever before. They are not merely subject to technological advances but actively use, create, and mold them in everyday routines-connecting with loved ones and strangers through the Internet and smart phones, navigating digital worlds for work and recreation, extracting information from vast networks, and even creating and customizing interfaces to best suit their needs. In this timely work, Mirko Tobias Schäfer delves deep into the realities of user participation, the forms it takes, and the popular discourse around new media. Drawing on extensive research into hacking culture, fan communities, and Web 2.0 applications, Schäfer offers a critical approach to the hype around user participation and exposes the blurred boundaries between industry-driven culture and the domain of the user.

Martin Ingram Virtually Everything More posts | Read bio December 28, 2010 - 3:09 P.M. The economics of desktop virtualization 4 Comments TAGS:desktop virtualization, enterprise, finance, government, healthcare, hosted desktop virtualization, PC IT TOPICS:Cloud Computing, Cybercrime & Hacking, Desktop Apps, Emerging Technology, Healthcare IT, Laptops & Netbooks, Virtualization, Windows With Thanksgiving and Christmas behind us and the New Year upon us, it is time to take stock and see what changed for desktop virtualization in 2010.  One thing is very clear: We have moved from desktop virtualization being 'about to take off' to 'has taken off' -- the evidence for this is pretty clear in the number of licenses sold. With volumes sold in the low millions, desktop virtualization is way beyond the tryout and pilot stage. However, desktop virtualization is not yet for every user. There are a number of areas where it's still not a good fit. For example, a user who does not always have access to the Internet from his or her laptop may not be able to use a hosted virtual desktop. This is a problem that will be addressed by client hypervisors in coming years. These provide the management benefits of desktop virtualization to the intermittently connected user. For now, they are very new but will become critical for mobile workers and may also have a major role to play in bringing down the costs of desktop virtualization for non-mobile users as well. Of perhaps more concern is the question of the economic basis for hosted virtual desktops. This has recently become more visible thanks to Microsoft's paper 'VDI TCO Analysis for Office Worker Environments,'  which compares the total cost of ownership of traditional PCs and their virtual desktop alternatives. Their conclusion is that hosted virtual desktops are more expensive to deliver than a traditional, well-managed PC. There are a number of interesting points and conclusions to draw from this document. Firstly, Micros

emystifying the Economics of Virtualization and Cloud Computing Posted by Michael Vizard Mar 15, 2011 11:51:15 AM Make the Financial Case for Virtualization and Cloud Computing With the advent of virtualization and cloud computing, figuring out the actual cost of enterprise computing has never been more important or complicated. Now that every application to one degree or another is eventually going to wind up sharing IT infrastructure with some other set of applications, ascribing costs to each application gets significantly more difficult. In the past, when every application pretty much had its own servers, the costs were clear, except for mainframe and minicomputer environments that were designed from the ground up to run a symmetric multiprocessing environment that supported multiple applications. But now that virtualization and cloud computing are pushing the concept of shared IT infrastructure across the entire spectrum of IT, application owners want to know what their true costs for running these environments actually will be. In addition, the chief financial officer - along with the rest of the board of directors - is demanding a more line-by-line accounting of the allocation of IT resources. Conceptually, most IT leaders should welcome this increased level of scrutiny. It gives them a chance to show how efficient they can be, which represents a significant change of pace after decades of meetings with senior managers that only really wanted to know what the availability of IT services was without much regard to the actual budget. The challenge facing many IT organizations today, says Chris Pick, chief marketing officer for Apptio, a provider of IT financial management tools that are available as a service, is they just don't have the tools needed to delve into all the financial elements of the overall IT equation. For example, a new survey of 100 CIOs in the U.S. that was conducted by the market research firm Worldwide Executive Council on behal

igital Learning Day Read some of the highlights from the recently-held Digital Learning Day in the USA. I haven't fully explored all these myself, but they look promising! Digital Learning Day Showcase Digital Learning Day Round-up Digital Learning Day: The Aftermath  

These pages describe the thesis-writing process, and the various formal requirements that pertains to it. Should you have additional queries, please direct them to syo@svet.lu.se.     Before writing the thesis What we expect from a thesis; links to the theoretical courses; which particular events are included: information about thesis templates and so on.           Planning the thesis Thesis plan paper, planning seminars, supervision, finding a thesis partner etc.           While you are writing Locating information, and what resources the department has on offer to aid you in this           Handing in the thesis Information how to go about handing in the completed thesis, and related formal matters (including dates and times when to hand it in)           The thesis seminar... and later events Information about the thesis seminars, what is expected of you as author and as a commentator; grading issues etc.

Evaluating Internet Information The Internet offers a virtually unlimited supply of information, but there is no-one who registers, describes or checks the quality of the material. One of the consequences is that you must yourself both search out the information and evaluate it - much more carefully than in the case of traditional, printed material. The problem of assessing sources calls for a sceptical attitude towards this kind of information. Who is in fact the originator? Can I be sure that it is correct? these kind of questions must always be present when browsing the Internet. Fortunately, the web also offers many useful tools, which can be of service when evaluating the quality of different information resources. Links http://servercc.oakton.edu/~wittman/find/eval.htm Here you find a good and lucid list, outlining what to consider when evaluating information resouces on the net. Recommended as a starting-point for evaluating sources. http://milton.mse.jhu.edu:8001/research/education/net.html This is a similar and complementing site, but it contains more thorough information about evaluation criteria. Recommended for the more experienced user. http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/evaln.htm Contains a large number of links to material about evaluation of information resources, including a list of evaluation criteria at: http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/index.htm The ultimate site on quality evaluation of information on the net. Always remember that it is finally you who are responsible for quality assessment efforts. That is in fact part and parcel of any research effort. [End of document]

Book Reviews Book title: Digitisation Perspectives Type: book Author: Ruth Rikowski Year: 2010 Edition: 1st ISBN: 9460912982 Publisher: Sense Publishers Publisher's Description: This book examines various views and perspectives on digitisation. As Simon Tanner, Director Digital Consultancy, King's College London says in the Foreword: "Digitisation has become a cultural, scholastic, economic and political imperative and raises many issues for our consideration." Furthermore, that the book: "...seeks to address and answer some of the big questions of digitisation... It succeeds on many levels..." There are 22 contributors in the book, all experts in their fields. The book is divided into six parts: Part 1: 'Background and Overview to Digitisation and Digital Libraries' Part 2: 'Digitisation and Higher Education' Part 3: 'Digitisation and Inequalities' Part 4: 'Digital Libraries, Reference Services and Citation Indexing' Part 5: 'Digitisation of Rare, Valued and Scholarly Works' Part 6: 'Futuristic Developments of Digitisation' Topics covered include electronic theses, search engine technology, digitisation in Africa, citation indexing, reference services, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, new media and scholarly publishing. The final chapter explores virtual libraries, and poses some interesting questions for possible futures. The book will be of particular interest to information professionals, educators, librarians, academics and I.T. and knowledge experts. Ruth Rikowski concludes by indicating that: "...hopefully, the book will provide a source of inspiration for further research, leading to some more effective ways to proceed with the digitisation process. Also, that it will be possible to do this within a framework that can be used for good rather than ill, and for the benefit of many." Reviewer: Eric Jukes (Formerly of College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London) Book Rating: 5/5 Buy this book from Amazon  Review Summary

Top 10 Free Online Tutoring Tools for 2012 Topics: education, free tools, guest, technology, technology for tutoring, tutoring resources, tutoring tools inShare Share 462 The Internet provides a wealth of resources for teachers, tutors, and students to go well beyond classroom learning. Whether you're a teacher preparing for tomorrow's lecture, a professional tutor working with one or two students, or you just want to help your cousin in Alabama with some trig homework, these free tools will help you interact with your student(s) sans the confines of the classroom. Skype with Idroo Idroo is an online educational whiteboard used in combination with Skype. Use it with as many students or fellow teachers as you want for tutoring sessions or meetings, as the whiteboard's "only limitations" are Internet connection speed and how fast everyone involved absorbs the material. All writing and drawing done on the whiteboard is visible to participants in real time, making it a true virtual classroom. It also allows for remote math tutoring with its professional math typing tool. Gchat Anyone with a gmail account can access Gchat. Teachers, tutors, and students can talk to one another in real time, as well as send and receive files instantly. Save chats for referral purposes in your gmail account, or download the Google Talk application for voice conferencing with multiple parties. WizIQ Teachers, students and organizations can create free accounts on WizIQ, another online education portal. Students have the option to attend online classes, download free tutorials, use free practice tests, or find teachers with certain expertise. Online classes are not free, however. Teachers and organizations can offer recorded classes through WizIQ or those in real time, create online tests, use live audio and video chat, and distribute course work in any standard format. Teachers must pay per month for this service, though WizIQ offers easy teacher payment collection from stu

We search billions of words in our phrase dictionary on how commonly used they are to identify the proper sentence structure. This helps improve the use of collocation, diction and syntax in your writing when choosing the appropriate sentence pattern. Our wording tool acts as a correct sentence structure checker, e.g. by associating correct examples of prepositions with common language usage to give you the best suggestions for the proper preposition. Our tool can help teach wording, grammar, and expressions, which helps you identify the proper word choice and word order.

What is a Google+ Hangout? A Hangout is a video group chat in Google+ for up to 10 people. If you click "Hangouts with extras" when you start a Hangout, you will see that it has a whole lot more power then just a Web chat feature. (Figure 1) In fact, it's very close to the power of the best online meeting websites. For very small classes, this might be a good alternative to expensive online meeting Websites

Whether you teach online classes or just love bringing social media and technology into the classroom, Google offers up some amazing tools to help you get students thinking, learning, connecting, and sharing. One of the newest, and perhaps the coolest, additions to Google's suite of online tools is the recently updated Google+ Hangouts. Through Hangouts, up to ten users can video conference at once, and the service is easily connected to existing Google+ circles, offering up a whole host of exciting ways teachers can make use of it for educational applications. If you haven't tried out Google+ Hangouts yet, take the time to learn more about it and consider some of these amazing ways you can use it to add to your existing curriculum and make class time easier, more fun, and a more rewarding experience for you and your students alike