kids today
jdupuis | July 24, 2015Gabriella Coleman's Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous is largely a laudatory history of the Anonymous hacker activist movement with some anthropological and political analysis. Whitney Phillips' This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture on the other hand, is much more geared towards an analytical and philosophical analysis of past and present (and even future) of how online trolling relates to contemporary culture.
Neither book is perfect, and both tend to falter where it comes to how closely…
jdupuis | April 26, 2013I'll admit, I'm a bit of a book snob, a strange thing to say for a lifetime comics/science fiction/fantasy/horror/mystery fan, but there you go. Perhaps more precisely, I'm a snob about books versus other media.
But in my defense I'll maintain that I'm getting better as I get older -- more tolerant and accepting and less snobby. Perhaps not coincidentally, I think my takes in reading material are getting more diverse too.
In any case, let's all enjoy 30 things to tell a book snob.
1. People should never be made to feel bad about what they are reading. People who feel bad about reading will…
jdupuis | March 2, 2012Personally, I find it inconceivable that any writer could come up with such a wonderful list.
Lines from The Princess Bride that Double as Comments on Freshman Composition Papers.
Here's a few to refresh your memory:
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
"At a time like this that's all you can think to say?"
"Nonsense. You're only saying that because no one ever has."
The Princess Bride (memorable quotes) is one of my favourite films and I'm sure it's one of yours. There are no doubt lines from other films that could be re-purposed as essay comments or…
jdupuis | September 20, 2011A project I heartily endorse on a topic near and dear to my heart, launched by the Library Society of the World, Librarianship by Walking Around:
The Library Society of the World is putting together an online and print-on-demand anthology of weblog posts, essays, articles, and other material entitled Librarianship by Walking Around, patterned after the successful Hacking the Academy project.
Librarianship doesn't just happen in the library! Librarianship happens wherever information exchange happens--that is, just about everywhere. Librarianship by Walking Around celebrates librarians who…
jdupuis | June 7, 2011I'm doing a short presentation later today on using social media as a researcher. It's part of the York University Faculty of Graduate Studies' Scholarly Communications Series. This one is titled Scholarship in the Public Eye:
The Faculties of Graduate Studies and Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, along with the York University Libraries, are collaboratively facilitating a series of information sessions focused on scholarly communications intended for all graduate students and faculty members. The series will address issues related to research skills and research dissemination,…
jdupuis | May 31, 2011Twitterers of the world.
We've all heard the questions. The murmurs. The doubts and whispers.
"Twitter is a waste of time," they say.
"People are just talking about what they ate for breakfast, or what their dog is doing."
"No good can come of it, no way to spend work time, turning us all into ADHD cases."
The mother of all social media doubter articles came out a little while back, The New York Time's Bill Keller on The Twitter Trap:
I don't mean to be a spoilsport, and I don't think I'm a Luddite. I edit a newspaper that has embraced new media with creative, prizewinning gusto. I get that…
jdupuis | May 22, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Sharing, Privacy and Trust in a Networked World, is from November 19, 2011.
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OCLC's newest state of the library world/environmental scan report was published a few months ago: Sharing, Privacy and Trust in a…
jdupuis | January 9, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This post, from April 4, 2009, covered two books:
Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow
Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It's Still Broken by…
jdupuis | December 1, 2010A couple of really interesting articles in InsideHigherEd the other day:
Should Profs Leave Unruly Classes?
Now two faculty members at Ryerson University, in Toronto, sparked discussion at their institution with a similar (if somewhat more lenient) policy -- and their university's administrators and faculty union have both urged them to back down, which they apparently have.
The Ryerson professors' policy was first reported last week in The Eyeopener (the student newspaper) and then was picked up by other Canadian publications. Two professors who teach an introductory engineering course in…
jdupuis | October 22, 2010Ah, The Cronk News. Always good for a laugh at academia's expense!
I like this one from a few weeks ago, an amusing take on the whole town vs. gown issue: Townies Make Preemptive Strike On College
Town/Gown relations in Norwich, CT deteriorated in record time this year when students returned to campus. For over fifty years, tensions between "townies" and college students have centered around student vandalism of locals' mailboxes, cars and homes. But this year, the townies took matters into their own hands.
"I was sound asleep and heard screaming and yelling," said Patrick Minchoff, a…
jdupuis | September 28, 2010Your Hate Mail Will be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 is a collection of John Scalzi's favourite posts from the first decade of his blog's existence. And it's quite a collection too -- of course one that is best taken in short doses, one or two posts per day over a longish period of time. Just like you you consume a blog.
Scalzi started Whatever way back in 1998 and since then it's become one of the most popular science fiction author blogs out there. His mixture of humour, politics and just general zaniness is hard to resist. Most of all, Scalzi is passionate, he has a strong…
jdupuis | June 21, 2010Yes, that David Gilmour.
Anyways, there was a post on Gilmour's blog a few months ago that provoked quite a little storm: Chopping up albums.
Basically, the point Gilmour makes is that many albums are really meant to be listened to as a whole and shouldn't be split into individual tracks at record companies' whims. Read the whole thing to get the full sense of his argument, but I think the excerpt below gives a good sense:
I'll go first: Blood on the Tracks' frenetic 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' by Bob Dylan. There, I said it. (Forgive me, Bob.) More often than not, it gives me an…
jdupuis | June 11, 2010Priceless, just priceless.
PALO ALTO, CA--All 1,472 employees of Facebook, Inc. reportedly burst out in uncontrollable laughter Wednesday following Albuquerque resident Jason Herrick's attempts to protect his personal information from exploitation on the social-networking site. "Look, he's clicking 'Friends Only' for his e-mail address. Like that's going to make a difference!" howled infrastructure manager Evan Hollingsworth, tears streaming down his face, to several of his doubled-over coworkers. "Oh, sure, by all means, Jason, 'delete' that photo. Man, this is so rich." According to…
jdupuis | April 30, 2010From The Cronk of Higher Education, New First Year Experience Class: How To Not Be An Asshole, this is very funny.
The six-week class is comprised of five modules:
So You're Drunk: A Guide To Quietly Stumbling Home
Street Signs Are Not Dorm Room Decorations
Streaking: A Fast-Track To Suspension
Noises Neighbors Hate To Hear After 10 pm
Nine Reasons the Police Will Handcuff You
Current students expressed skepticism about the offering.
"I think it's retarded," remarked Marco Miller, a current first year student. "Sometimes, when I'm mad, I just want to pee on a statue or throw bottles at…
jdupuis | April 20, 2010That's the topic for the most recent Schubmehl-Prein Prize for Best Essay on Social Impact of Computing.
The Schubmehl-Prein Prize for best analysis of the social impact of a particular aspect of computing technology will be awarded to a student who is a high school junior in academic year 2009-2010. The first-place award is $1,000, the second-place award is $500, and the third-place award is $250. Winning entries are traditionally published in the Association for Computing Machinery's Computers and Society online magazine.
The winners of the 2009 contest are published in the most recent…
jdupuis | April 13, 2010There's a massive libraryland industry organized around figuring out what students want from us in terms of space, collections, services, etc. We survey, observe and focus group them to death. And that's great and incredibly valuable. But sometimes I think we might have a tendency to see what we want when we're observing and they might have a tendency to tell us what they think we want to hear when we survey or focus group.
Personally, I like to do Twitter searches. It's an interesting way to find out what they're saying and thinking about us when they're being candid and brutal and don't…
jdupuis | March 24, 2010Nice article by Delaney J. Kirk and Timothy L. Johnson on Blogs As A Knowledge Management Tool In The Classroom (via).
Based on their experiences in a combined 22 business courses over the past three years, the authors believe that weblogs (blogs) can be used as an effective pedagogical tool to increase efficiency by the professor, enhance participation and engagement in the course by the students, and create a learning community both within and outside the classroom. In this paper they discuss their decision to use blogs as an integral part of their course design to contribute to both…
jdupuis | March 4, 2010I'm away for a couple of days, so I thought I'd fill in a bit with an oldy-buy-goody from February 4, 2009. It ended up being the first of three parts, with the other two being here and here. As usual, the first part got the most readers and comments, with the two after that being decidedly less popular. Go figure.
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I was just going to call this post "On Blogging" but I decided I like Robert Scoble's rather provocative statement better. This is not to say that I agree with his rather extreme stance, because I definitely don't, but I think it's an…
jdupuis | January 13, 2010I was chatting with a colleague during the long commute home the other day and he noticed I was reading this book. "What's it like?" he asked.
"Clay Shirky lite," I replied.
And that's about right. In Six Pixels of Separation, Mitch Joel comes to grips with the effects of social media on marketing, media, sales and promotions, he covers a lot of the same ground as in Clay Shirky's classic Here Comes Everybody (review). Glib, conversational, fast-paced bite-sized -- an easy read for sure -- Joel does a solid job of translating Shirky's more scholarly approach to a business audience.
Which…
jdupuis | November 30, 2009...present of public and academic libraries?
What got me thinking along these lines most recently was the recent Clay Shirky blog post,
Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization. It's a pretty good post that puts a particular kind of physical retail into the context of current online retail and media shift realities.
In the first section of the post, Shirky basically outlines the trouble that physical bookstores are in, caught between the rock of the competition of online/big box store and the hard place of the coming media singularity.
Like record stores and video rental places,…