Episode 28 – Raising the BarCamp
17 June, 20082 comments
Might there be an alternative to the conventional meetings and conferences academics, librarians, and museum professionals go to every year, where papers and panels—and often bored or distracted attendees—are the norm? This episode’s feature story tackles that question by looking back at the experience of THATCamp: The Humanities and Technology Camp, a less structured “unconference” or “barcamp” that turned everyone into active participants. The roundtable discussion of the news includes a discussion of what the iPhone 3G and iPhone apps mean for educational and cultural institutions. Picks of the week include a new site on the Soviet Gulag, a way to avoid distractions on the Mac, and an open source mapping site.
Links mentioned on the podcast:
THATCamp
GreenNote
OS X Spaces
Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives
Open Street Map
Running time: 45:19
Download the .mp3
Categorized under iPhone, unconferences
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Mills Kelly
Bryan Alexander : 19th June, 2008
Good show!
Question on the iPhone: do you see any limitations to its campus adoption based on the AT+T service plan (cost, coverage)?
(Good show so far – am listening to this in stages)
Tom Scheinfeldt : 19th June, 2008
Thanks, Bryan. My sense is that campuses per se won’t adopt the iPhone (or any phone for that matter) for just the reasons you identify. It would be tough to get the George Mason IT and budgets people, for example, to agree to let us buy a bunch of iPhones and AT&T contracts to use in our classrooms or even in our grant projects. However, I do think the new iPhone raises the bar so significantly that soon all other handset makers and service providers will have to follow suit. Indeed we’re already seeing this with the upcoming release of the Sprint/Samsung Instinct, and we’ll see
even more in the fall when Andriod is finally released. Pretty soon I think all of our students and the audiences for our research and public projects will have these iPhone-like devices in their pockets already. It’s at that point that we’ll really be able to take advantage of the new opportunities afforded by the iPhone’s feature set. I certainly don’t expect our administrations to provide much leadership in this area.