I am sure you have all read the mass of news on Amazon’s Kindle. Makes me feel secure that books will be here for a long time.

As Catherine Sheldrick Ross and others have said, reading is a social activity. Books are borrowed, lent, shared, resold and bought second hand. They are picked up […]

Went into the professor’s office today to discuss my research proposal for Research Methods. I am doing really well in the class, and you need an A- to do the thesis option.

I have been considering it–when I came here I had a specific issue that I wanted to look at, but as I have […]

Walking in the rain today I was amazed by some of our major biases towards the book as a vehicle of thought transmission. We give much credence to the book: an author’s thoughts are represented by his books, so much to the point that when we say “Augustine’s thought on this subject” what we […]

I’ve had the week off here, not that I’ve used it as productively as I would have liked to. Worked on Monday and Friday, so Xuan-Yen and I took the three days together, not that we did anything useful. Got a new camera as well.

Have been working on a take home exam for […]

The uniqueness of Wikipedia is that, unlike the traditional models of creation, dissent is included in the presentation. That is, unlike a traditional encyclopedia which might frame a debate as entirely or mostly one-sided, the collaborative nature of Wikipedia illustrates how ideas work in the real world. Most topics, especially as you move away from the purely abstract to the purely concrete, don’t exist in a state of total one-sided consensus. If there is a heated debate surrounding a topic or issue, is that not in itself worthy of being known by the end user, by the very fact that it allows the reader to make an educated choice for his- or herself? Is it not information, part of the truth of the issue that such a debate exists?