intertextuelle

The Meaning Organization | design mind

honeymae — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:42:52 +0000

A better and very different global economy made up of novel, more beneficial industries, more purposive types of organizations, and more passionate work will bring radically more fruitful approaches to commerce, trade, and exchange. We’re in the midst of a bumpy, lengthy transition from a lackluster present, to an uncertain future. The grinding gears and titanic motors of the industrial age are coming, finally, to a clattering, juddering halt. What you might call the age of wisdom is being painfully and noisily born.

via The Meaning Organization | design mind.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

honeymae — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 04:37:36 +0000

Alice laughed. “There is no use in trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.”

“I dare say you haven’t had much practice,” said the queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (Lewis Carroll)

For 2011, I’m limiting / focusing my investigations to six emerging ideas. Below is my initial list, most likely the terms will change, hopefully more specified. So far, these are the ones slowly percolating to the top of my sphere of attention.

1. Global remittance resulting from migration – This is actually not a ‘new’ trend – I have been following this for 12 years, when I first started sending my own remittances to my family.

2. Paradigm shift in business – the 2007 ‘recession’ was an unmistakable tipping point for 20th century capitalism. it is now undeniable that this system is anti-human and unsustainable for the planet. Today, someone put forth the notion of the Meaningful Organization. This is not new. Operaist and autonomists have been talking about this since the 1970s. This includes South-South power alignment, third world renaissance, etc.

3. “gamification” – not a new concept. we’ve been playing since time immemorial. but it’s beginning to get applied to social life as an organizing principle. a new ‘layer’ in the social network. See http://www.ted.com/talks/seth_priebatsch_the_game_layer_on_top_of_the_world.html

4. transparency – as in wikileaks, as in Zamyatin’s “We”.

5. emergent features – physics of language (N. Prevost), spirit

6. love

What is the goal of scholarly publishing?

honeymae — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 17:25:06 +0000

Don’t quote me just yet, but as an insider in the scholarly publishing business, we haven’t “gotten it” yet — understanding how digitization is changing the industry. At my work, our heads are still buried in the books, trying to stop the profit from bleeding. We haven’t even addressed the audience itself: the students. In many ways, it seems we only cater to the profs (authors) who publish to advance their own career, rather than to advance knowledge and learning itself.

I read this from today’s entry on The Scholarly Kitchen, “A Textbook Case of Missed Opportunities“:

“The bigger issue I see is that thinking of the problem as “how do we get a textbook onto an iPhone” is framing it wrong. The challenge is “how do we use a medium that already shares 3 of our 5 senses — eyes, ears, and a mouth — along with geolocation, color video, and a nearly-always-on Web connection to accomplish the ‘job’ of educating a student.” That’s a much more interesting problem to me than “how do we port 2-page book layouts to a small screen.” (Andrew Savikas)

Exactly. The job of educating a student. I thought that was our mandate. Perhaps it is, but not the priority?