I'm back from an intense four days at Santa Clara University for IEEE's Global Humanitarian Conference. I have written elsewhere about the presentation I was giving on technology due diligence in humanitarian contexts. I first introduced this idea, that we needed an enhanced form of due diligence when considering technologies for humanitarian projects, last year [...]
Communitarianism and major online ed streams
I just discovered that the professor who created the very first MOOC is a Mennonite. It was 2008 and George Siemens was a researcher at University of Winnipeg. He has more recently described his theory of learning as springing from those Mennonite roots. Seeing learning as going beyond mere content to being in community. You [...]
Communitarian Ethos for Technology
Nicholas Kristoff is returning to the New York Times but for a few months between October 2021 and early spring 2022 he was a candidate for Governor of Oregon, my home state. His candidacy would have caught my attention no matter what he said at launch or how he described himself but I was intrigued [...]
Update on OPM industry
Sounds like an illegal drug-related market doesn't it? Actually, it is the Online Program Industry and in the moments after I hit publish on the preceding post, I saw a tweet about 2U, the putative pioneer of the industry. I got cranky as I tend to do when I see yet more dialog about this [...]
More on humanitarian tech
A while back I shared the abstract from my recent submission to IEEE's Global Humanitarian Tech Conference. You can see the original post here. I learned this week that it has been accepted. Hoping that this year's conference really will be in person. For more information on timing (September 8-11), place (Santa Clara University), and [...]
The soul of innovation
This thought that tech architecture might be rooted in something other than way cool technology or wealth creation rolls around in my mind all the time. It informed the due diligence methodology I recently proposed for IEEE's Global Humanitarian Technology Conference. It also relates to my memoir project covering my experience and insights as a [...]
Humanitarian Tech and Crypto
IEEE is preparing for another Global Humanitarian Technology Conference and I have submitted again. I billed this as Part II of the technology due diligence methodology for humanitarian contexts. Here is my new abstract which combines elements of the first GHTC talk I delivered and my participation in the Web 3 panel of January. The [...]
Web3, Meaningful Framework or Rebranding
I was invited to participate in a panel discussion about Web3. This is the title: "Governance and Web 3.0: Sense and Sensibility." It struck me as a clever enough title. The details were a bit complicated. It was a virtual meetup with over 80 attendees. I suspect most were enthusiastic about the Blockchain/Crypto angle on [...]
descant labs 