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User created content (UCC) has often been celebrated as a grassroots cultural revolution that as a genuine expression of creativity, localism and non-commercialism can arguably also cater for a sustainable culturally diverse environment. The present article puts these claims under scrutiny and in a more differentiated manner seeks to identify the value of UCC within digital game environments considering the constraints upon players and upon creative play that these impose. The article subsequently tests whether UCC in its dynamic sense of a creative and communicative process can be seen as a channel for the promotion of cultural diversity and if so, what the State should (and could) do about this.

User created content (UCC) has often been celebrated as a grassroots cultural revolution that as a genuine expression of creativity, localism and non-commercialism can arguably also cater for a sustainable culturally diverse environment. The present article puts these claims under scrutiny and in a more differentiated manner seeks to identify the value of UCC within digital game environments considering the constraints upon players and upon creative play that these impose. The article subsequently tests whether UCC in its dynamic sense of a creative and communicative process can be seen as a channel for the promotion of cultural diversity and if so, what the State should (and could) do about this.

Children’s books go digital

There is, however, some evidence that e-books are not helping learning.

Stephen Coleman, professor of political communication at Leeds University

A little experiment- not looking to see who can name the pattern (that is easy).

Robert J. Shiller is the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, and Professor of Finance and Fellow at the International Center for Finance, Yale School of Management.

online vide search tool

Interesting post with some great idea idea for using Twitter in the classroom

Edward Alden, Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations; David Backus, Heinz Riehl Professor Chair of NYU Stern`s Department of Economics; Anna Szterenfeld, Latin America editor for Economist Intelligence Unit. Moderator: Thomas F. Cooley, Richard R. West Dean, Paganelli-Bull Professor of Economics, NYU Stern School of Business

4 Days of Spam by cogdogblog
posted 2 Jan ‘09, 9.14pm MST PST on flickr

Made by www.wordle.net from 4 days worth of spam caught in my GMail filters.

This might be more pleasing than the cruft that I scraped from my spam nets.

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

more funny animals

Oh, it’s that time of the year. Left and right people are blogging, tweeting, facebooking, friendfeeding, their lofty goals for 2009 and all their resolutions to Get in Shape, Lose Weight, Get Organized, Do Something Charitable, Clean My Inbox etc..

Will sees value on blogging less. Beth offers great detail to address 3 broad goals. George reflects on going for more depth. Barbara eloquently looks for her way and meaning.

All these folks getting serious, aiming to be a true Slow Blogger.

Well, not here at CogDogBlog- we are dedicated to lots of shallowness, silliness, and fast as possible blogging.

I don’t begrudge people making goals, plans, etc as things to aim for. But we should do it all the time. This post holiday loftiness, fueled by extra helpings of turkey and fruitcake, appears to this dog as sucker bet, a set up to end up depressed when one lands short.

flickr cc licensed photo by Old Sarge

There is some incentive for making your goals public as then there is an extra incentive to reach it, as who wants to be seen in public as failing? But that makes the reason for achieving it–to me– cheaper. You should want to achieve goals because they are important to you, not to keep your public (ego) reputation in tact.

I have a different strategy that has worked (once)- I call it the secret resolution. Make a goal or two, scribble it on a piece of paper, and stuff it in the back of your sock drawer. The goal is only between you and it. No shame in failing and only pride in succeeding. Make a pact with yourself.

Mine happened in January 2005. I whispered to myself in the back of my mind, “I’d like to say I accomplished running a half-marathon before the end of the year” which was silly as I do hate running, and have never gone more than 3 miles in my life. I ended up doing a half-marathon in January 2006, then another in March, the following year, and a year ago managed to run my first (and likely last) full one. I did this for my own sake, my health, state of mind.

Again, there is everything right about making goals, achieving them, but doing so just because it is the first of the year seems like a set up for disappointment.

So I resolve not to make any resolutions, besides hoisting a banner for the movement of Fast Silly Shallow Blogging.

The book ‘Sentient cities: ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space’ by Stephen Graham is a reflection on politics, locative media and ubiquitous computing. Where technology fuses itself into the background of daily life, all sorts of scenes (art-commercial- governmental etc) are utilizing new technologies and seeking combinations, weaving them into certain directions simultaneously. We are moving towards a society of enacted environments

The Mobile City is an initiative that focuses on locative and mobile media, urban culture and identity. We aim to bring professionals from different disciplines (academics, urban professionals, media designers, artists, telecom operators, etc) together to address the question: what happens to urban culture when physical and digital spaces merge?

Looking for growth in new markets where it is increasingly being bypassed, Microsoft said Monday that late next year it would begin offering a new “cloud” operating system that would manage the relationship between software inside the computer and on the Web, where data and services are becoming increasingly centralized.

Change in Orientation- Change in Function by cogdogblog
posted 2 Jan ‘09, 9.51am MST PST on flickr

By sheer accident, I found when using the Calcuator app on my iPhone, it becomes a scientific calculator (more functions, more precision) when you rotate the phone.

This is elegantly beautiful.

Some days I feel arithmetic and other days I just want to cosh π x!

As Second Life gains popularity at universities across the country and throughout the world, the Communications Media department has aquired a new island to pursue new educational oppurtunities with this growing phenomenon. Locations such as Cyprus and Belize may sound like countries too distant to take students on a field trip to, but current technologies allow them to go there without ever leaving the classroom. The archaeology department at IUP is working with the virtual world Second Life in order to simulate real archaeology dig sites.