>>: This weekend will find me in the heart of Circleville, Ohio, home of the annual Pumpkin Show (that's with a 'p', mind you). If you've ever wondered what any food tastes like after being fortified with pumpkinny goodness, this is where you find out. I hope to climb on top of the biggest pumpkin and yell "Hulk smash!" before security wrestles me to the ground.
>>: In my tireless quest to attain academic celebrity (it's like regular celebrity, only you have to impress a lot fewer people), i just had a letter published in the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, a general interest academic magazine. It was about an article they published on free and open source software, and I had this to say (excerpted):
Open source can also create opportunities for access to technology for those social groups who have been previously barred from entry, it is often a great alternative to implement in computer labs from an administrative standpoint, and from a political perspective, it sends the message to software corporations that regular civilians have a legitimate claim to the inner workings of software applications that are often hidden behind the opaque curtain of its interface--monopolies don't just hoard capital, they often create exclusive knowledge regimes as well, and open source helps overturn one such regime.
Maybe now folks will think I know a little something about something...
>>: Upcoming Talk Alert! I'll be part of a panel next week sponsored by the First Year Writing Program on "Digital Media and the Writing Classroom." Info below:
Oct 27, 2006, 1:30 PM-03:00 PM 131 Mendenhall Laboratories Writing Pedagogy Forums Digital Media in the Writing Classroom(Cindy Selfe, Scott Lloyd DeWitt, Susan Delagrange, and Ben McCorkle)
Sponsored by the Writing Programs of the Department of English
Faculty, Lecturers, and Graduate Teaching Assistants are welcome
Refreshments will be provided.
I've been preaching for years about the approaching paradigm shift in computing: in a nutshell, the desktop is on the way out, and we're already seeing a new model emerge where Internet-based apps are beginning to take over. It's kinda reminiscent of the good old days of dumb terminals and mainframes, only now the mainframe is spread out all through that labyrinthine system of tubes that we know and love as the Internets. So now I guess it's all official and stuff now that WIRED is writing about it. Oh, but I'm not bitter about it.