ALT Lab

"Hi, my name is Nikolaj Cyon and I am an artist from Sweden who has worked with precolonial Africa as a theme in my art for over a year. I have, as a mind experiment, made a map of what Africa could have looked like in the mid 19th century if Europe had never  become a colonizing world power. In order to do this I have tried to construct an alternative historical time-line in which Europe was much harder struck by the plague in the 1350's and never recovered. Therefore  African nations would have gotten the opportunity to flourish unhindered. "

An entirely different level of the super secret crush page "so, although it looks very simple (it begins with just three short sentences and a small logo), you can spend a lot of time clicking to expand the text out, further and further, each version you expose being by itself grammatical and meaningful but containing within it the possibility of more (more text, more information, more narrative). At the moment there are about 800 links you can click; it can expand from eight words to about 6,800. "

"Cliff began this project because he was noticed that there were "recurring patterns of procrastination and motivation" going on in his life. He began trying to understand them by turning to the large body of literature on human psychology. Then he asked himself, "Would it be possible to use some quantitative methods to track what was happening." Using what he'd learned in his research and his experiences he decided to track his body, emotions, and mind. "

How's this for a course site?

"The findings of this study indicated that when teachers described their successful practices, they often linked them to their changing roles and new representation of their "selves" within an online environment. Their portrayal of the teacher self, both built on a plethora of previous experiences and reformed with the affordances and limitations of the online environment, went through a process whereby teachers were constantly challenged to make themselves heard, known, and felt by their students. This study showed that it was critical to listen to teachers' voices and give them a participatory role in the creation and use of their knowledge and experience in order to form their online teacher personas. As a result, programs that prepare faculty to teach online may need to encourage teachers to reflect on their past experiences, assumptions, and beliefs toward learning and teaching and transform their perspectives by engaging in pedagogical inquiry and problem solving."

Whoa. Just whoa.

This is the homepage of the University of Oklahoma's Domain of One's Own project.

Worth tracking...

I still can't quite grok what Mike Caulfield is doing with Smallest Federated Wiki, but this helps me more than anything else I've read. The videos sure help.

This is what community can look like online.

"We provide a tokenizer, a part-of-speech tagger, hierarchical word clusters, and a dependency parser for tweets, along with annotated corpora and web-based annotation tools. "

""Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about," [Richard] Feynman later explained. "The trouble with computers is you play with them." - George Dyson, describing the beginning of the Manhattan Project's computing effort in Turing's Cathedral. "

An early rough draft of the Hollywood Cemetery data . . .

"I cannot sit on the fence. I like twitter and what it offers. I have learned things I never would, built genuine relationships with international people who I would have perhaps have only met over a quick coffee at a conference. And I have changed the way I speak about science. It is interesting, and often funny. It can of course be a harsh and challenging space. I am genuinely horrified at what I have seen some colleagues endure online - particularly the women: but it is here to stay. I wish my female colleagues and women in general were always treated well, and as people, but the only thing I can personally do is contribute to a positive space. I believe twitter is a strong positive for science, and it is a worthwhile investment of your time. This short document has a few ill-considered ideas about what I like about it.   "

This is awesome. I love this.

"Another type of newsletter has taken off recently, aggregating links like Rusty Foster's Today in Tabs, Alexis Madrigal's 5 Intriguing Things, and 5 Useful Articles by Parker Higgins and Sarah Jeong. This what Jason Kottke and Things Magazine have done for more than a decade on the web. Who? Weekly from Bobby Finger and Lindsey Weber -all about "wholebrities" the not particularly famous people who somehow make their way in celebrity gossip magazines - definitely would have been a blog ten years ago (or a zine twenty years before that). A couple of TinyLetters are written in a voice that I haven't heard since the early years of blogging. Dan Hon's Things That Have Caught My Attention and 6 by Charlie Loyd write commentary that is somewhere in between editorial and diary, for friends and potential friends. "