Archive for the ‘critical constructivism’ Category

Smartphones, Price Points, and Purchasing Power Parity

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

"Expensive phones are like an enormous test phase, but budget phones are the true launch pad for a mobile technology." Well said. Read the rest at All About Symbian. It's exciting to see the trickle of smart phone functionality into lower end handsets. Perhaps Nokia's actually been listening to its participatory ...

MUSE3 BCNET presentation

Monday, April 28th, 2008

I had the opportunity last week to present my ongoing research into user-centered technology design (which is what is evolving out of my ethnographic research in the lives of mobile handset users) as part of a panel all about Mobile Muse (where I'm the Program Manager, for those who aren't ...

Torrent Tracking on Open Networks 101

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

Today is Northern Voice (I'm presenting tomorrow, but today is the unconference, most of which I hope to catch!), but right now I'm riveted to my laptop (poring over comments about torrent tracking) before I head out to UBC. Really good back n forth over at Nicholas Weaver's Random Thoughts ...

The Internet Is Filesharing :: On ISP Levies and Creators’ Rights to Remuneration in Canada

Tuesday, February 19th, 2008

I was recently asked by the Songwriters' Association of Canada (SAC) to submit a briefing on why file sharing is inevitable, and why a levy system for ISPs makes sense. (The SAC is in the process of submitting a proposal along these lines to the Canadian government, in light of ...

The PhD - the comprehensive exams

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

So I'm diving straight into my comprehensives now. I'm building lists and checking them twice (and more). While building these reading lists is in many ways a very personal journey, I've decided to blog about the process so that I might get feedback from unexpected locales, harnessing the "wisdom of ...

Single Sign-On and Content Aggregation: a Preliminary Analysis of their Potential in Facilitating Progressive Social Change

Monday, December 17th, 2007

What is the relation between the technology of single sign-on and community mobilization? There are two approaches to - or models for - the twin issues of convenience and security in our current era of mass content browsing: (1) single sign-on (OpenID, MicroID) and (2) content aggregation (Jaiku, Pageflakes, Readr). Both ...

AOIR Music and Sound Panel - Oct 18, 2007

Friday, October 26th, 2007

This update is running quite late, but is still valuable, I think, in attempting to sustain the dialogue which was unfortunately given too short an interval at our panel on Music and Sound at the AOIR conference last week. As well, I particularly need to move among the "diaspora" of ...

Technical Micropolitics and Musical Amateurs

Friday, October 19th, 2007

I presented at AOIR today as part of a panel on Music and Sound. Here's the PDF of my talk, complete with notes. I did this with an extreme headache, and a growing sense that I need to, as my friend and colleague Flo articulated it the other day, "coccoon" myself ...

panel 2 panel

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

I'm back from Montréal, having had a good but curt time in la belle province. 4S (image of the plenary at R, more available here) was, to be honest, hit and miss; some panels were dull as television, and some others were painful to watch due to speaker-unpreparedness. Sometimes I ...

4S, Montreal

Friday, October 12th, 2007

I'm blogging this from the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) conference in Montréal. We (Roy Bendor, Jack Post, Peter-Paul Verbeek and I) just completed our panel on Bruno Latour ("Translating Latour") and I'm now in a very interesting panel about "Problematizing Technological Appropriation". My first impression is that ...