I loved reading Jon Udell’s post on net-enhanced democracy. Back in 2006, when I started to do what Jon did so wonderfully in his essay, the hope was exactly this — that some generally less political individuals would take these tools and do what poli-bloggers were doing — dig out the backstory and deflate the Continue reading

When I saw this summary of part of Stallman’s talk in Barcelona, it irked me: When a work embodies practical knowledge you’re going to use for your life, it should be free and it should be free to be modified. It’s not the case of art. Art should be shareable, but not modifiable. Caveats: this Continue reading

If you want to understand why the word-that-must-not-be-named spread like wildfire, you need only read the Inside Higher Ed article on Blackboard “partnering with Syracuse University to develop a way to integrate Blackboard with Sakai.” Jim has a nice post on Blackboard’s co-option of “openness” in their statements on this project. As for me, I Continue reading

I’ve created a new site that bascially aggregates the offlining posts from this site: Offline Thinking. The idea is to eventually get others to post on it as well via tag based syndication. The design of the site is stripped-down WordPress template — the theme is meant to be ASCII-friendly in case you want to Continue reading

So last month we had an embarrassment of riches with intelligent articles on the perils of multitasking and the online rabbit hole. This month, please welcome blowhardization, the inevitable second round of the public multitasking debate where bloviators are given extra time on the mike, and the more intelligent voices are gonged off stage. Exhibit Continue reading

It seems every year for the past several years there’s been a couple of weeks where there is a flurry of intelligent articles about the dangers of multitasking and the hivemind. Then the inevitable blowhardization of the subject sets in, the intelligent voices fade and the Grandpa Simpsons come out of the woodwork. And we Continue reading

Tools used: Sony Reader (yeah, I know, should have waited for the Kindle) T-Mobile Dash I needed to read some of the latest articles on the perils of multitasking (we seem to be in our yearly cycle here). Figured this was as good a chance as any to try offlining. Method: Searched via Google for Continue reading

I’m in the process of creating a new blog, Offlining, which will deal with my experiments in “offlining” (yep, a new neologism) — the practice of disconnecting from some or all of the network in order to increase productivity and life satisfaction while maintaining the killer connectivity which has enriched all our lives. Offlining isn’t Continue reading