Gunnar Wolf

This is an update to my last post regarding the «Construcción Colaborativa del Conocimiento» book.

The book is, as we have repeatedly stated, available online for download — Both as a full PDF or chapter by chapter. In the website you will also find videos of all of the conferences held.

But holding a printed book in your hands is just a different experience, isn't it? :-) Anyway, I said I would give here an update on how to get your hands on it. The main venue would be through my University's e-store. I recommend it to anybody interested in buying the book in Mexico. The book's list price is MX$300 (around US$27), but it is currently sold at half price — I don't know how long will that price be offered.

On the other hand, we also uploaded it to the lulu.com self-publishing service. Of course, given I have not seen the printed results, I cannot assure you the resulting product will be of the same quality as the one we got here, but I have a couple of books I have bought at lulu, and their quality is quite acceptable. So, you can also buy it from lulu.com. Note the 20% discount it shows will be permanent — That's what I would get as an author, a payment I decided to forefit given we are 11 authors and it would be unfair to collect it all myself. So, the price at lulu.com is US$12.64 plus shipping — Very similar to the price at UNAM.

Enjoy!

Finally!

Last Friday, after two years worth of work, I finally got the first box of books for the Construcción Colaborativa del Conocimiento (Collaborative Knowledge Construction) project I worked on as a coordinator together with Alejandro Miranda (pooka), and together with a large group of 11 authors:

Translating over from the back cover text (and this is just a quick translation from me — It reads better in Spanish ;-) ):

What defines us as humans is our ability, on one side, to
create knowledge, and on the other, to share or communicate it with our neighbors. Both features have worked together over tens of thousands of years, and, working together, have led the knowledge to transcend the individual, avoiding the need to rediscovery or reinvention of is already known. Sharing knowledge is what has taken our species to the dominant role it occupies today.

But knowledge creation and sharing has seen a deep transformation in recent decades, thanks to the quick evolution of telecommunications, specially the massification of Internet and cellular telephony. We are transiting towards the so desired –and at the same time so feared– knowledge society.

In this book, eleven authors from very different disciplinary backgrounds and geographic origins ellaborate on how a hyper-connected world has modified the basic rules of interaction in areas as diverse as artistic creation, social organizations, computer code development, education or the productive sector.

This book is the result of a year worth of work for in the "Collaborative Construction of Knowledge" seminar, during which we
used the same new forms of knowledge production we have studied.

The videos of the sessions, electronic participations and the full contents of this book are available under a permisive license at
http://seminario.edusol.info/seco3/

We will soon have the book ready in IIEc's e-store (which is mostly meant for national requests). I am also uploading the book to the lulu.com self-publishing service, and we are working on a epub-like edition. Right now it is still not available, but it should be there in some days. I will keep you posted.

Meanwhile, the full contents can be read online at http://seminario.edusol.info/seco3

During DebConf, I managed to squeeze out of the middle of everything for long enough to write a column, a short article for a participation I have every three months, for Mexican Software Gurú magazine. All in all, I liked the resulting text — The current number's main topic is alternative user interfaces.

I find it sometimes hard to define what Software Gurú's audience is — Probably, project leaders in software development; not the actual developers, but people who actually understand about coding... but care more about The Big Picture, Processes, Architecture Engineering and Buzzword Compliance. It is an interesting magazine, all in all, but with a focus and viewpoint I often feel myself not precisely comfortable with.

So, if this trimester's topic was alternative user interfaces, I decided to write on the history and future of the man-machine interface (Spanish only) (version in the magazine's site). My viewpoint comes from the fact that I do not believe we are in a state of so great, innovative changes that everybody is trumpeting, and I'd rather get others to really think on whether user interfaces have gone different in the last decades. Yes, there are many changes, but in form rather than essence.

Anyway, I shared this text with some friends. Some days later, when I was back in Mexico, Pooka/Alejandro Miranda lent me a very interesting book: Hacer clic: Hacia Una Sociosemiotica De Las Interacciones Digitales (Do click: Towards a Socio-semiotics of Digital Interaction (Cibercultura)), by Carlos Scolari. I am not yet even halfway through it, but I am enjoying it — This book speaks, so far, about the meanings of interfaces, and of the history of interfaces themselves, even forgetting that nowadays we (mostly) refer to interfaces as what we have between the man and the machine.

Sadly, I cannot find this book in English, as it is very well worth a read. But if the topic sounds interesting and you can understand the language, don't hesitate and pick up the book. It gives an interesting insight on the topic, for a group of people (us techies) used to looking at things in a much more human-cognitive-process-oriented way.

[update] I found this nice overview of the "Hacer clic" book, written as a presentation for the book. It explains precisely the part I am currently reading - The four metafora for interaction: Conversational, instrumental, superficial and spatial.