On The Margins

Thursday June 04, 2009

[ Persian (فارسی) ] Network Management Data Reduction and Smoothing -- A MySQL Webinar

ScienceLogic embeds MySQL in its EM7 network management appliances. An installation of EM7 can perform over half a billion database queries daily, storing massive amounts of data for both real-time and trended performance reporting.

Michael McFadden, senior software architect with ScienceLogic, will discuss all this in an upcoming MySQL webinar.

2009-06-04 15:57:24.0 -- Comments [1] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
analysis data databases learning management mysql networks software

Friday December 09, 2005

[ Philosophy ] Why We Need to Learn about Learning

We need to learn about learning because never before have we "meddled with it on the scale on which we do today," to borrow Etienne Wenger's words —

For many of us, the concept of learning immediately conjures up images of classrooms, training sessions, teachers, textbooks, homework, and exercises. Yet in our experience, learning is an integral part of our everyday lives. It is part of our participation in our communities and organizations. The problem is not that we do not know this, but rather than we do not have very systematic ways of talking about this familiar experience.

In his book, Wenger focuses on disclosing a new, systematic way of talking about the familiar experience of learning in "communities of practice" by way of finding meaning and identity through "participation". One should probably also think about knowledge networks.

2005-12-09 00:26:30.0 -- Comments [5] ; Permalink ; Trackback.
community learning philosophy

[ Philosophy ] Communities of Practice, Learning, Meaning, and Identity

I've begun reading Etienne Wenger's Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity.

I ran into this book while reading John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid's Social Life of Information, about which I've written here earlier. I've always been interested in how social groupings and organizations learn, evolve, prosper and survive, how we learn and work, and how we come to be who we are as individuals.

Wenger's book would be a good start for whoever wants to explore these topics. Wenger is also deeply interested in building the conceptual framework that will help with the design of organizations, artifacts and processes.

Wenger's ambitious enterprise suits the practitioner as much as it stimulates the theoretician. As the book plate says, the material "is presented with all the breadth, depth, and rigor necessary to address such a complex and yet profoundly human topic."

2005-12-09 00:13:05.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.
community education information learning philosophy practice social