mtl3p

île sans fil
Entrevue avec Laurent Maisonnave
98,5 FM - Lafrance le matin, 24 août 2008
http://www.985fm.ca/mp3player.php?mp3=169813.mp3

(Laurent gave a wonderful interview here. Very impressively done.)

Le wi-fi montréalais brille à l’étranger
Entrevue avec Daniel Drouet
La presse, 27 août 2008
http://technaute.cyberpresse.ca/nouvelles/internet/200808/27/01-20122-le-wi-fi-montrealais-brille-a-letranger.php

(this is in the print version of La Presse today. Alain wrote a wonderful piece with really good information from a bunch of sources including our colleagues from Austin Wireless.)

I’ve been spending a bunch of hours/days on this so far and it’s been a really interesting learning experience.

Daniel Drouet wrote an informative update on the status of ISF’s project with the city.

ISF has been working hard during the last year to partner with the city of Montreal. We submitted a proposal to them which was accepted and now, after many back-and-forths, the project seems to have lost the attention of officials. More news here…

Île sans fil lance un appel à l’aide! by Alex McKenna

and from Michel Dumais.

This is all too bad, especially since Sherbrooke and Quebec’s groups are working so well with local institutions and municipal officials (and are making so quick progress).

ISF has shown clearly during the last 5 years that we are extremely effective and efficient, innovative and reliable as an organization. I hope that our dossier makes it back on track.

it’s hard to listen properly to silence. It’s not necessarily actual silence, it can just be something that we’re not attuned to enough to hear. I was watching an ant walk around the floor or my bathroom the other day. It has black and white tiles and to my perspective the ant would jump in and out of existence as it went about its day. I was in a terrible place to be able to see the ant and my perception of it was pretty useless. It’s silence (or disappearance) meant nothing nor did it’s sudden appearance. It’s meaning was obfuscated by my placement, my perspective.
When I contemplate my almost disappearance from this space, I wonder about this from an egotistical and personal perspective.

Saramago’s novel Seeing was good because it made clear how silence is (or at least can be) full. It’s difficult to interpret and probably you have to be extra careful because it can serve as a place to hang things that we wish were being said. A self-reflexiveness and specifically the tools that let you be able to detect transference and counter-transference seems to be necessary.

I’ve loved the idea of cultural clearings from Phillip Cushman’s book. It’s been many years and it’s still one of the richer books I’ve read. It offers an amazing set of tools for thinking.

When silence is too hard to hear, too distant to be able to be able to start to perceive, I would pay careful attention to practitioners and listen to them talk outside of the spotlight. It’s too constraining in the spotlight - too many forces keeping one on track. Miriam’s refusal to give in in her blogging is remarkable, especially as everyone else leaves the early idealism behind, forgotten. And part of something Steven just wrote motivated me to publish this. I won’t excerpt it, because I suspect that would make it less visible.

Breakfast in America

Convocation publique

Marchons pour exiger Vérité et Justice pour Freddy Villanueva

Un groupe des mères s’autoconvoquent ce samedi à midi au Métro St Michel pour marcher vers le poste de Police 31 du quartier.

Pour faire publique notre indignation et tristesse, pour réclamer Vérité et Justice pour Freddy Villanueva.

Nous voulons que la vie et les droits humains de nos enfants soient respectés et garantis par les autorités en place, que plus jamais un de nos enfants soient assassinés par les balles de la police et qu’on cesse de les discriminer, harceler et humilier. Au contraire qu’on leur donne la place qu’ils méritent dans cette société que se dit démocratique, respectueuse des droits et libertés des individus.

Apporter des pancartes, globes, fleurs, chandelles, soyons créatives!!!

La mort de Freddy ne doit pas rester dans l’impunité!!!

Nous sommes toutes, la mère de Freddy!!!

* Les hommes qui aimeraient nous accompagner peuvent marcher derrière nous

more critical-ness of the OLPC

Such are the challenges of introducing not just a strange new machine but an alien world to a child brought up in isolation from outside culture. The leaders of OLPC believe the laptops must be much more than electronic substitutes for textbooks if they are to profoundly effect learning. The group, an offshoot of MIT’s Media Lab, which Negroponte launched 23 years ago, has based its educational philosophy on the theories of Seymour Papert, a Media Lab professor who pioneered the use of computers in elementary education in 1967. Papert, now retired, developed a theory called Constructionism, which posits that young children learn best by doing rather than by being lectured to. So to create a tool that could deliver more than rote lessons and e-books, OLPC designed the machine and its software to enable collaboration, exploration, and experimentation. “We’re hoping that these countries won’t just make up ground but they’ll jump into a new educational environment,” says David Cavallo, OLPC’s chief education architect.

CULTURAL IMPERIALISM?

While this philosophy is essential to the mission of OLPC, it’s also a source of tension. Current educational leaders in Peru embrace Constructionism, but most countries base their education systems on the idea that teachers pass their knowledge to receptive students. That was a problem for OLPC in China as well as India. India’s education department, for instance, calls the idea of giving each child a laptop “pedagogically suspect,” and, when asked about it recently, Education Secretary Arun Kumar Rath barked: “Our primary-school children need reading and writing habits, not expensive laptops.”

Some observers accuse OLPC of cultural imperialism. “It’s arrogant of them. You can’t just stampede into a country’s education system and say, Here’s the way to do it,’” says William Easterly, a professor at New York University and author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

link (from businessweek. neat.)

– Just got my copy of Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace. Mark Tovey interviewed me for it. I’m looking forward to reading through it.

– I’ve had some good conversations with different folk recently criticizing social entrepreneurship. It seems that other people grock my concerns and some of them already share them. It’s been interesting. And definitely not over.

– Tracey has a neat abstract up of a paper (her comprehensive).
I like this part:

“Community communication networks / infrastructures (CCN/Is) are emerging as significant grassroots technosocial movements worldwide. These can be a Wireless Local Area Network, a sneaker net, or a fully connected Internet mesh network. Irrespective of the infrastructure’s architecture, CCIs are community created and maintained. CCIs often consciously and sub-consciously embed local, social, cultural and political values in the technological and social infrastructures being constructed. The expertise, commitment of members, the spirit of open source coding, hacker/tinkerer ethic and free culture associated with these and the unique mix of citizens involved, combined with the propagation of knowledge, support, and inexpensive technology is quite unique and characteristic of the Web 2.0 ethos. Infrastructures are complex social, technical and culturally specific artifacts that are shaped by and in turn shape societies. It is suggested that citizens can be active agents in the creation and maintenance of as opposed to passive recipients of infrastructures.”

I like the transition from CWN to CCI. Something we’ve talked about a lot together (the I part, not sure if I like “communication” over “information”. tbd). Been thinking more about Local Information Ecologies and what they would mean. And wishing that they didn’t spell “lie”. jeesh. although maybe that’s a sign not to appropriate powerful real-world metaphores and apply them to abstractions of invented artifacts.

–Meeting the G.G on wed at her Quebec residence. Because of my work with ApathyisBoring. I’m looking forward to that.

Speaking of AisB, I encouraged the marketing people from both orgs that i work with - Coco and AisB to attend a web training for social change event in Toronto last week. I’m on both of their web committees and I’m really looking forward to contributing to those projects. It will be fun to just be able to discuss and give impact and not have any decision making power.

–
Lastly, I think i’m going to head to Ottawa next week for Anne Galloway’s defense. Weird thing to do, but I’m definitely interested.

there’s a bus leaving from Montreal. Exciting that I’ll be participating my first public rally. So much cooler than online petitions, “virtual” sit-ins, etc.

========================
www.netneutralityrally.ca

Demand broadband access, and choice for all Canadians

join the rally to save the open Internet

We need to protect innovation, competition, free speech, and Canadian culture, by protecting the principle of Net Neutrality and the Internet’s level playing field.

Our Internet freedom of choice is under attack!

If we don’t stand up now our Internet freedoms could be up for grabs by the highest bidder, or worse, simply taken away!

Parliament Hill, Ottawa
Tuesday May 27th
Event starts at 11:30 am

Speakers for the Rally include:
Charlie Angus - NDP MP
Mauril Béllanger - Liberal MP
James Clancy - NUPGE
Philippa Lawson - CIPPIC
Meera Karunananthan - Council of Canadians
Tom Copeland - CAIP
John Selwyn - National Capital Freenet
Steve Anderson - Campaign for Democratic Media
Rocky Gaudrault - TekSavvy Solutions Inc.

To learn more about Net Neutrality and why we need to save the open
Internet, visit:

www.SaveTheNet.ca

it feels so good to read this after seeing so much poorly thought through support of the project and equally poorly thought through criticism.

Sic Transit Gloria Laptopi

“As far as I know, there is no real study anywhere that demonstrates constructionism works at scale. There is no documented moderate-scale constructionist learning pilot that has been convincingly successful; when Nicholas points to “decades of work by Seymour Papert, Alan Kay, and Jean Piaget”, he’s talking about theory. He likes to mention Dakar, but doesn’t like to mention how that pilot ended — or that no real facts about the validity of the approach came out of it. And there sure as hell doesn’t exist a peer-reviewed study (or any other kind, to my knowledge) showing free software does any better than proprietary software when it comes to aiding learning, or that children prefer the openness, or that they care about software freedom one bit.”

It goes on. The author is for constructivist learning. The way that I’ve written about this project before might make it seem that I’m against it. I’m not. I just had a big problem with this not being openly discussed as a huge experiment with enourmous cultural consequences if they deployed at the scale they wanted to.

Anyways - fantastic article by a key person in the OLPC project.

With this comment (out of the 35 so far) being my favorite:

“Guido van Rossum said,
May 14, 2008 @ 12:32 pm
I’ve thought for a while that sending laptops to developing countries is simply the 21st century equivalent of sending bibles to the colonies.”

This whole deal reminds me of the unbridled enthusiasm I/we had around creating software to “improve third places” through ISF. Kind of a clusterf@#$. I guess something to be appreciative of is that we weren’t successful. That’s a little bit too hard on ourselves, because at least we were going to try and design in such a way that respected and extended the existing spaces and put time and thought into that (that’s what first drew me to University of the Streets). But still, as technologist interventions go, it was pretty damning mix of geek chauvinism and ignorance.

I think I’m going. And why isn’t anybody talking about and promoting this?

Net Neutrality Rally (May 27th, 2008)

Speakers = Charlie Angus - NDP MP and Mauril Béllanger - Liberal MP (more to come)

Participants
Michael Geist - http://www.michaelgeist.ca/
Charlie Angus - http://www.charlieangus.net/
Mauril Bélanger - http://maurilbelanger.parl.gc.ca
CIPPIC - http://www.cippic.ca
Campaign for Democratic Media - http://www.democraticmedia.ca
TekSavvy Solutions - http://www.teksavvy.com
National Union of Public and General Employees - http://www.nupge.ca
Acanac - http://www.acanac.ca
National Capital Freenet - http://www.ncf.ca
Google - http://www.google.ca
P2PNet - http://www.p2pnet.net

lazyweb request. My friend is writing an article on Canadian innovations (for an engineering mag). Anybody know of some good ones that he should include?