Dan's blog

Idea for developing a design for the journal: identify a theme from among those in the drupal open source community--criteria tagged extendable, standard, sustainable, robust, etc. Recuit two or more people to adapt the design for the journal--image, layout, etc. Post your design. Get votes and feedback. Revise. Become site theme.

Related idea: try to get groups of people involved in every element of the journal's development, bring out their skills and creativity, a renaissance mode that spreads.

Action idea: get down the philosophy. There's the gift culture. Participant status. Education. Breakdown. Education: reading, writing, composing across texts, disciplines, social networks; gift culture: bring one, read one; participant status: if you read something leave a mark, gain recognition through reading and teaching.

Arching idea: learning how to teach something is the best learning.

Gizmodo reports on a new book about the cross over artistry of Norman Rockwell. There are some great images depicting Rockwell's use of photographs as raw materials for his iconic paintings, like this one.

Via dayblend.

Personal Democracy Forum reports on the white house Web site switching to drupal Glad to know that the drupal movement is rolling right along. I think this is a big boost to the open source movement, especially to hybrid models featuring people linking their work activities to open source. The most obvious links are those economic ones between outfits like acquia and the open source community, but the links also seem to be along the lines of professional ethos and open source sharing.

via Liz Losh

A piece for all of those worried about Web surfing and brain rot. Not much surprising here to my mind, but still it's always good to have evidence to use when needed.

 A project that is about to take off: The People, Ideas, and Things Journal. Things are still amorphous but the key process will be developing an online journal in concert with writing activities in several classes but also public and open to a larger public. I need to get down some thoughts that I'll push under the tag of PIT outcomes or big picture aspirations from Dan for the project:

• Experiment with time. Think about connections between the writing and publication processes. What happens if something goes public once every three weeks instead of six months? What should go public? How/when should items move from authors to readers to editors to publics?
• Experiment with group dynamics. What f2f and social activities and connections play out? What about the sizes of groups, motivations, and processes?
• Connect with clasrooms. The project should be co-influential with practices for teaching and learning to write.
• Innovate with social networking tools. How do tools, people, and concerns of teaching and writing participate in a remediating circuit with one another?
• Theorize about technology and social concerns. What can we say about cultural networks, conceptions of knowledge or groups, time, space, flowzones?

These are at least some of the broad goals to start thinking about.

I'm not sure how best to describe the vocalizing of Sue Tompkins, singer for Life Without Buildings. I guess I'd have to say the words and their performance speak to the melodic side of any debates about whether song lyrics are best understood in terms of the soundscape of a song or for their semantic messages. The lyrics, though have a strange accumulative effect that shows them to be more than melodic placeholders. The weaving of "wassups" into various segments of the song creates a kind of phatic connection for the listener. A connection picked up on with the "contact" punctuations, though I have no idea what is meant by budokan worp.