Yet the rise of China means more than the emergence of a new great power. Its deeper import is that the ideologies of the past century — neoliberalism just as much as Communism — are obsolete. Belief systems in which the categories of Western religion are reproduced in the guise of pseudo-science, they are redundant in a world where the most rapidly advancing nation state has never been monotheist. Western societies are well worth defending, but they are not a model for all of humankind. In future they will be only one of several versions of tolerable modernity.

via Reading File – NYTimes.com.

via Apps to Make iPhone Shutterbugs Smile – NYTimes.com.

Why we buy stuff and why we will return to buying too much stuff.

I wish I could read the full study linked to in this article (I can, but I don’t want to buy it). As an ABD, I can relate to the pressures that prevent candidates from finishing  Ph.D.s. The author of the article takes issue with this excerpt from the study:

17 percent of those who departed programs reported that they were in managerial positions, 13 percent reported that they were either judges or lawyers, and a majority of the rest found careers in education, mostly at colleges and universities.

This statement doesn’t match her experience, but it does match mine, in a way. I can say that I am in management, because I am. However, I don’t really define myself that way. Instead, I say that I am in educational technology because that is where my passion is. The fact that I am in a “managerial position” speaks to my success in the field.

For some of us, the reason we haven’t completed our degrees is all about opportunity. In my case, I had the chance to follow my passion and change the face of education and the degree wasn’t a requirement. If I had stayed in the program, the opportunity would have been long past when I completed my degree. Fortunately, I had an academic advisor who saw things the same way and counseled  me to seize the opportunity.

I wonder if the study considers how many of us outside the academy realized that the completion of our degrees was not the right path to our goals. I may go back to finish my Ph.D. if my goals change, but right now, it is not really an issue. My ABD status has not held me back yet.

Alternate entry: “I’m going to rob a bank. Don’t tell anyone.”

Seriously though. This guy is probably innocent, but how long before people set scripts to post to facebook as an alibi? This is a new age of corroboration.

I first visited Berlin in 2006 and found it to be a wonderful city, one whose history was still clearly punctuated by segments of the wall now protected from souvenir hunters by fences. I am sure that I was not the first to contemplate the irony of protecting the wall with fences, but I can see the need. The desire to take a piece home with you is irresistible, “oh this, it is just a stone in my pocket….” I was able to get a piece from an area where there was really nothing but foundation left and it was about to be built over, so I don’t feel so guilty.

I took a few versions of the photo above. I waited until I could get a pedestrian framed just right. The first few were inconveniently timed with the passing of cars. It is strange to think that people walk and drive by it everyday without a glance. I came back to these photos today, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the wall. I was a senior in college when the wall fell and it seemed like that fall was the beginning of an age of eternal piece. No more threat of nuclear annihilation; we had won. Who could have foreseen the world order of the last twenty years during that moment? Certainly not a college senior caught up in the end of the cold war and hopeful for peace. I still hope for peace, but I am a bit more cynical now.

Still, it was an amazing time full of opportunity, even if some of it has been squandered.

When discussing lecture capture, the first concern should be capturing the attention of learners. A compelling lecture will be compelling in its recorded form and a boring lecture will be ignored in recorded form. I wish we had lecture capture available when I was in school. It is a key technology in extending the efficacy of in-class learning.

Some excellent suggestions for EDUCAUSE 2010. I enjoyed the conference this year, especially because it was in my home town and I got to sleep in my own bed every night. That said, it felt a little old. Sure, it was my eleventh time, but I would like to see better use of social media and remote technologies. I look forward to participating in a conference that takes advantage of these suggestions.

I like most of these, except for more Flash, not less. There are better ways of developing rich websites these days, and they are even accessible and can scale for mobil devices. Flash seems so old fashioned.

So why am I doing this? Well, I have a problem with content. I don’t have much time to write longer posts and the blog gets stale. Tumble content will help me keep it fresh, as long as I don’t go overboard. I don’t plan to make this my social bookmarking site. Tumble will be for links that I want to say a little more about than I can with twitter. Longer posts will still be separated on the Articles page for easier browsing.

Speaking of twitter, I have installed a twitter aggregator that will post weekly summaries of my twitter activity at the end of each week.