Knowledging across life’s curriculum

Some interesting thinking

Sorry folks for some reason my linking feature doesn’t work. 

Unconferencing where the audience members are the speakers

It seems to me that there is a growing dissatisfaction with the standard conference model of panel presenters and an audience full of possibility who are just listeners.

I have a conference paper due in a couple of days…in fact it is overdue. I remember asking my very experienced prof the unthinkable question “What if I never presented at a conference, but instead chose to present in alternative venues?” A blank stare was the response. PhD students should not be asking these questions right? With tech progressing the way it is, and time a  more than precious commodity, my feeling is a profound change is on the near horizon. 

Inequeties in Web 2.0 

The phenomena being called Web2.0 is disproportionately influenced by white men. Issues raised by anti-racist, anti-classist and disability and gender-rights activists in other contexts are just as relevant to this new technological and political development (Web2.0) as they are to any other.

A related issue : Danah Boyd takes a closer look at linking patterns and blogrolls. In uncovering the male dominated blogrolls (what is new) she also underlines the necessity to develop better metrics to measure what is REALLY happening across blogs.   

The [gender] biases of links

I have a hard time respecting anyone who believes that science or technology is neutral. [...] After reminding folks at Blogher that there are gender differences in networking habits, i decided to do some investigation into the network structures of blogs. Kevin Marks of Technorati kindly gave me a random sample of 500 blogs to play with. I began coding them based on gender (which is surprisingly easy to do given the amount of personal information people put about themselves) and looking for patterns in links and blogrolls.

Here again I question randomness. I question who shows up on the ‘radars’. Many out there may be blogging in various spheres but are not showing up on the technorati or other similar types of screens. I have a couple of other blogs which don’t show up there either.