I think the Adobe meeting tomorrow for financial analysts may be a defining moment for the Web. My guess is they will concentrate on Flash and AIR and that print and Postscript will not get much attention.

Print media still tend to prefer print. On Guardian Talk (Apr 12) LittleRichardjohn wrote-

The level of internet hysteria on GUT is clear enough. The posters most worried are those who seem to have a definite vested interest in preserving the dominance of print media (and its reliance on hard capitalism) over the new publishing and communications freedoms. The ones who call themselves writers, in fact. The people who should in theory be most in favour of wider freedoms of expression are often most hostile to it in action.

In Education Guardian (published in print and online) Hilary Swain wrote this advice for "anyone wanting to make the most of learning opportunities offered by new technology."

.....lovely as your new laptop is, learn to leave it alone sometimes. Sometimes, you may be able to find better information in a book - or even from a person.

Rather less nuanced is an editorial about local TV in the Western Morning News (not online as far as I know. A news story on a Conservative policy document quotes Jeremy Hunt as pointing out that although barriers are falling rapidly with the arrival of broadband internet TV "it is not going to take off until people can access it through their remote controls." However the Western Morning News editorial is less than impressed.

We welcome the idea that the Conservatives are taking "localism" seriously. But please, Mr Cameron, don't try to impose trashy US-style television on us.

My guess is that actually the Western Morning News is more aware of how effective a combination of broadband and local TV could be than they would like their readers to be.

Not off topic yet, the media pages and the education pages could get swapped over more often as Jeff Jarvis has suggested. He seems to think news stories should just have tags, not be limited to once a fortnight, hat tip to David Weinberger he adds. Which reminds me, the paperback of "Everything is Miscellaneous" is out soon on Amazon USA. Available in the UK by post. Normally the London literary editors do not review paperbacks. but then they did not review the hardback either, in this case.

The Safeliving blog has a graphic of a poster from the National Health Service (NHS) headlined "Public Service Propaganda Posters." So it is the propaganda aspect that is interesting for researchers in this case. The poster informs us that "Hands can transfer germs to every surface you touch" and suggests "Clean your hands as soon as you can."

This is part of a discourse, fair enough, but it may also be true. There could exist such things as germs and it may be good practice to wash hands. I am making this point as it seems the sort of thing that may get lost in this IAS project.

The Safeliving Blog has added a link to the Protection Science Swicki and set the search to start with "anxieties" and "danger" . This explains why these search terms are getting bigger on the word cloud. See recent screenshot.



I have also added ISO27000 and this is getting some attention. The Swicki allows votes on results for each search. So it could get better, in various directions.

I have tried to have a look at Critical Management Studies through the web. To make sense of the Networked Learning Conference it helps to keep up with critique, or at least it offers some clues.

Google finds

http://www.criticalmanagement.org

but this starts with a directory of files. I think it is helpful to record the problems, that is just the quality management approach that I support. And the graphic shows another problem.



Not sure why this should be. I did download reedy.pdf and there has been no disaster so far. But the message is not encouraging and so I think there should be an approach to Google to work out some corrective action.

Patrick Reedy seems to me to be questioning whether there is any request from activists for an academic contribution. Now much of what I work on is not progressive or even political. Quality assurance is obviously a corporate sort of topic. But I am also concerned with web design for general use including social groups. My impression is that the critique take on network learning has not moved much past objecting to the conditions for dialogue, so there is hardly a design phase. What is there about forms of practice? I would like to find some links so if I have missed them, guidance would be welcome.

Meanwhile social networking sites do exist but they seem to have happened in a parallel universe.

Academics seem much more interested in the "dark side", the negative consequences of anything at all. There is now a dedicated conference.



Here is a sample-

Organizations also seem to have a history of and an interest in repressing basic human impulses such as sexuality, carnality or violence whilst institutionalizing them (Foucault 1977; 1990) Organizational processes of normalization create and define deviance and perversion in those activities that cannot effectively be eradicated, and generate disciplinary practices to police this body of behaviour. Is the repressed always subject to return and never completely eliminated or contained? Is organizational crime always with us? Moreover, do exposures of the dark side of organization : 1. indicate mismanagement, loss of managerial power, passivity, neglect of duties and inadequate surveillance, and invite intervention for improved performance; or 2. do they indicate the presence of fundamentally uncontrollable forces that are an inalienable part of the viscerality of human organising?

So is Google a safe environment? I think so, why not? Comments welcome.

And is there a message board somewhere?