Category Archives: Information Technology and Information Literacy

The Emperor’s New Interface

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Timothy Burke

A beginning-of-the-semester raft of posts is on the way. Let me start off with a little appetizer of outrage before I get on to the long-winded equivocating, though. It seems like most librarians are willing to kiss and make up … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | Comments Off

Islands in the Mire

Posted on June 29, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Try to imagine, if you will, a person buried alive, growing desperately weak, fighting and struggling… to reach up through the dirt in order to grab some nearby stones to pile on top of his grave. That’s what watching the … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Politics | Comments Off

iFlit? kk: uBore.

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Timothy Burke

One thing you can say for the first wave of blogs: ubiquitious self-publishing was an unintended cure for the tendency of editors or publishers in old-media publications to seize the microphone for their own indulgence. A hundred thousand commenters up … Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging, Cleaning Out the Augean Stables, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 8 Comments

Imaginary Menaces

Posted on June 3, 2010 by Timothy Burke

The dedicated Kool-Aid drinkers who brought us the entertaining proposition that risks should be made public and any profits that derived from public investment should be made relentlessly private have left a number of curious inversions in their wake. Witness … Continue reading →

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Politics | 2 Comments

Four Reasons Why The World Is Better Because of the Internet

Posted on April 6, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Cash Gordon Chatroulette in Ben Folds concert (via 11d) Hark a Vagrant Wikileaks ——— One of the things that drives me nuts about the stalwart defenders of old media and their closed-shop underpinnings is an unwillingness to concede that online … Continue reading →

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture | Comments Off

Puzzlement

Posted on January 28, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I don’t get the iPad, except as a Kindle and Nook killer. It doesn’t seem to me to offer more than a netbook or other tablets. Arguably it offers less, in a more closed and proprietary environment that has some … Continue reading →

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy | 8 Comments

Customer Dissatisfaction

Posted on January 27, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I made a few comments on a thread at Inside Higher Education concerning UCLA’s recent decision to stop the streaming of video materials for classes behind password-protected course management systems, in response to pressure from the Association for Information and … Continue reading →

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 7 Comments

Everybody Out of the Pool

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Modest proposal: not just Google, but every single multinational company offering online products and services should get out of China. Not as an embargo designed to force improvements in human rights, but out of self-interest. Why operate in a country … Continue reading →

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property, Politics | 3 Comments

Anatomy of a Search

Posted on November 30, 2009 by Timothy Burke

If there’s anything that I think needs to be learned through experience or through directly witnessing the experience of others, it’s online information-seeking. I don’t think you can give a useful general description of how to search that a student … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Production of History | 7 Comments

If You Must

Posted on November 11, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Via Margaret Soltan, an interesting thread on PowerPoint in the classroom. I still think that PointPoint is a scapegoat of sorts, that bad pedagogy that uses PowerPoint was bad before PointPoint or even personal computers were involved in higher education. … Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 7 Comments