David begins with GoogleURLs, the unique search criteria that turn up our identity in a Google search. David’s is “David JOHO”; mine is “AKMA”; John Rakestraw’s is “John Rakestraw.” But that’s not what he really wants to talk about.
He presents the Web as a conversational medium, as opposed to a broadcast medium (such as television and radio, and especially — in this context — classroom lectures. Oh, phooey. I started out taking notes by hand, but then David challenged me to blog all this. the catch is that I fell behind, trying to transcribe my notesw from earlier, and then I missed something he said while I was typing, and it got really interesting for a moment there, and, well, you get the point. No notes.
By way of report, however, I can testify that we raised hackles among some present when David suggested that the Web constitutes an environment, a knowledge ecology, that calls “expertise” into question. (This seemed like a no-brainer to me; I’ve been interrogating the notion of expertise since the first chapter of my dissertation.) But some of the attendees were fearful that true expertise might be overshadowed by bogus, that we debase knowledge by compounding it with “personality” (where I doubted that they could ever truly have been separated). Hence, we engendered and intensified a small controversy, which kept everyone’s attention way from some of the brilliant insights I had been hoping to retail about pedagogy and technology.
This afternoon we talk with a smaller group about blogs (in particular) and teaching, in a more workshoppy environment. I’ll see whether I can live-blog that meeting; it’ll help if someone doesn’t distract me.
Posted by AKMA at May 7, 2003 02:01 PM | TrackBackIs "expertise" being called into question, or is it "the expert"?
If what's being gotten at here is that one can locate, say, a correct answer to an XML question from some schmo like me rather than an XML Guru, then I do think "the expert" is the problem, rather than simply the existence of accumulated information.
Doesn't bother me, either way. What was your audience like, out of curiosity?
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at May 7, 2003 02:15 PMI think I'm confused in a similar way, or maybe my confusion is more profound. I had the impression that by "expertise" he meant "the judgements of people who have established credentials", including in the concept not only the knowledge but the people and the process by which the people have attained recognition as experts.
So is the problem that the web allows people to be heard and respected who have not "paid their dues" by getting the right diplomas or by not getting them from "the right schools", and that this annoys those with more orthodox resumes?
Posted by: Peter Schweitzer at May 8, 2003 09:11 AMExpertise - or "expert-tease": It's the tease of that little bit of information that the expert provides, so that you have to keep coming back to the expert for more. Expertise is the full-employment act for the expert, who has a vested interest in his own knowledge, and an incentive for putting up large fences around it. New learning reveals the fallacy of the expert: He is no longer the expert with anyone's expansion of the specific domain of knowledge. Thus he has a vested interest in keeping tight control over knowledge, and limiting its expansion.
Long live the amateur, for he and she have nothing to lose by exploration, experimentation and discovery.
Disclaimer: I am not a scholar, nor an expert, and I only play the role of Strategist.
Posted by: Mark Federman at May 9, 2003 01:10 AMThese secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
Posted by: Heneage at January 13, 2004 02:32 AMWe can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.
Posted by: Cassandra at January 13, 2004 02:33 AMEarlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.
Posted by: Alan at January 13, 2004 02:33 AMEarlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.
Posted by: Faustinus at January 13, 2004 11:13 AMOur next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.
Posted by: Margaret at January 13, 2004 11:14 AMSeth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.
Posted by: Ciriacus at January 13, 2004 11:15 AM