Intrigued by Jon DiPietro’s Klout’s Konference Kalculation, I took a look at my own Klout score to see what impact all the events of the past two weeks (FutureM, Berkman Center “Vast Wasteland” session, Inbound Marketing Summit, and DrupalCamp Montreal) might have had.
That’s a big bump in my supposed influence – but doesn’t it really show just how artificial the whole mechanism is? Did I become more influential by attending and tweeting about conferences?
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Last week the Berkman Center hosted an event for the 50th anniversay of the “Vast Wasteland” speech, when Newton Minow (then chairman of the FCC) was publicly critical of the assembled National Association of Broadcasters for not doing more to serve the public interest:
We all know that people would more often prefer to be entertained than stimulated or informed. But your obligations are not satisfied if you look only to popularity as a test of what to broadcast. You are not only in show business; you are free to communicate ideas as well as relaxation. . . . It is not enough to cater to the nation’s whims; you must also serve the nation’s needs. And I would add this: that if some of you persist in a relentless search for the highest rating and the lowest common denominator, you may very well lose your audience. Because, to paraphrase a great American who was recently my law partner, the people are wise, wiser than some of the broadcasters — and politicians — think.
(Full text of the speech, including audio recording)
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DrupalCamp Montreal was this past weekend, and the videos are already posted! The event venue was McGill University’s McIntyre Science Center, which is equipped with an automated system to capture lectures at specific times.
The system captures the video output being projected as well as video of the lectern where the speaker is standing, and makes the files available on a predetermined url. (I found that the “webcast” view with slides and speaker both visible sometimes failed in Firefox but worked in Chrome – unfortunately it’s silverlight based).
Definitely Worth watching:
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Cathy Davidson‘s Now You See It argues that the educational system in the US is failing to prepare graduates for the work they will be doing in the 21st century. While I found myself vigorously nodding at the general argument of the book, there were also some places I wished Davidson had developed in greater detail.
The best part of the book for me is the description of the roots of our standard educational approach going back to the early 20th century: Taylorism, the IQ, and standardized testing on a large scale. These approaches made sense when education’s focus was the creation of disciplined, managerial, bureaucratic middle-managers for hierarchical, command-and-control corporations.
Unfortunately, while the workforce is adapting to new realities of globalization, the digital revolution, and commons-based peer production, the educational system has not kept pace.
Just found out I will be speaking at DrupalCamp Montreal in a few weeks, on the subject of Open Source Video, using Kaltura with Drupal.
We’re doing some work with an institute at a local university involving migration of a large video archive and design of a video microsite, so the research for the presentation will line up nicely with the ongoing effort.
Look forward to seeing Montreal – I haven’t been in years – and also hope to run a BoF for Drupal in higher education.
Already planning some restaurant visits on Vegan Montreal. (It’s very strange to my anglophone ears that “végétalien” means vegan in French, but “végétarien” means vegetarian – what trouble that must be for native Japanese speaking vegans trying to visit Montreal, given this).