iamdan's blog

Some credo ideas for the PIT Journal:

• If you bring a paper, read a paper
• If you read a paper, make a comment
• If you make a comment, read the paper (first)
• If you read a paper, leave your mark.

From the Chronicle: Colleges to Try 'Crowdsourcing' Their IT Help Desks.

Dewitt A. Latimer is among the most vocal proponents of the crowdsourced model of college technical support. He's chief technology officer at the University of Notre Dame, where the help desk is open only from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. "But our students don't stop learning at 5 o'clock, and the faculty don't stop teaching at 5 o'clock," he told me recently. And, unlike Indiana, Notre Dame does not have an online database of advice, even for internal use.

 

A couple of years ago Mr. Latimer attended a college-technology conference and had one of those aha! moments. The keynote speaker was Barry Libert, a co-author of We Are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business, who talked about how companies like Amazon.com were tapping into user recommendations to increase sales. "I was sitting there in the audience," Mr. Latimer said, "and I thought, This concept was very applicable to the higher-education space—it just needed somebody to recognize it and run with it."

I'm just about finished with the book Crowdsourcing by Jeff Howe. It offers a nice study of these kinds of social trends that  have recognized in the Web 2.0 realm for a while. Much of the discussion parallels points made by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody.

Dennis Jerz posts on the trend of outsourcing university computing into the clould

CNN also has a piece by John D. Sutter in which he reports on his efforts to find his data in the cloud. The information on the energy footprint of data that we might wrongly assume floats off into the ether is a good reminder of the concrete conglomerations of things that are associated with our conceptions of knowledge.

 Much as I hate the idea of dressing up pets, I guess it's worth sharing this photo of the family dog ready for Halloween.

This clip precipitated a nice discussion in our Literature and the Arts class two nights ago. The video depicts Ukrainian artist Kseniya Simonova's representation of Germany's invasion of Ukraine in World War Two. The great thing about the piece is the way it challenges notions of art as product; instead we see disposable moments, creations wiped away, and art as process and storytelling.

My nephew's old band just got a write up in Wired. Give them a listen on myspace. Also check out Aubrey's more recent work with Skating Club.