Our first Ph.D. Brownbag session came and went today with three second-year Ph.D. students talking about their research work.
To kick-start our new doctoral forum, Jim Costello and Amrita Mohan gave nice overviews of bioinformatics and their areas of interest. Since there isn’t much opportunity, outside of capstone presentations, to understand what the science folk are [...]
Dr. Brownbag
RootsCampSL: Debriefing the Lamont Campaign
Aldon Hynes, who was the technology coordinator for the Lamont Campaign in Connecticut, held an online session of RootsCamp in Second Life this afternoon. He gave an overview of the kinds of technology used in the campaign, then talked about some of the decisions to use (or not use) technology. Aldon has several blogs.
“We [...]
Reflection-in-Action for Informatics
David Hakken gave a lecture in the I501 Intro to Informatics class yesterday afternoon that spoke to the important problem of defining Informatics. One of the paths we all take in the program here is trying to have that term — informatics — make sense to us, in our context of the world. I feel [...]
At this time next week …
… I will be heading toward the public library to set up for the first Bloomington RootsCamp. I’ll be carrying some basic materials — markers, big post-it notes, paper, masking tape (all things I have to buy or have provided) — into a room I have never entered hoping to find people ready to talk [...]
Red State (The Movie)
While finishing up my HCI seminar paper for Dr. J, I stumbled upon a movie called, Red State. Depressed from the last national race in 2004 and finding no solace in liberal groaning on the Internet, Michael Shea packed up a team of movie types and headed out of California to find out what people [...]
Virtual Activism: RootsCamp Second Life
RootsCampSL started today on a fake hill in the virtual land of Second Life. A transcript of the gathering is available online.
I’m pretty new at the SL experience. We had to do some of this in the Sports Informatics class last spring, so my avatar — Old McDunnough — was still virtually living somewhere when [...]
Extended Mind
There were a few other concepts Josh brought up in his recent talk (”Designing culture”). This is one of them: Extended Mind
Andy Clark’s idea of an active externalism gives an active role to the environment in driving cognitive processes. Josh illustrates this with a tasteless joke about Helen Keller: “How do you mess with [...]