The Difference that Makes a Difference: an interdisciplinary workshop on information and technology

With two days to go I've just submitted an abstract for the Open University workshop.

Location: The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Dates: 7-9 September 2011

Just attending and keying into what's happening would be a blast, but presenting would add to a great year in publicising Hodges' model and pursuing my interest in health care, information and conceptual spaces (from a social sciences perspective).

With this submission I'm aiming for the following session:

Session 3: Engaging with information

Across a range of disciplines, the key issue about information is the way that we engage with it – the tools we use to store, process and disseminate it, the communities within which we collectively create information, the cultural and psychological factors which shape the way we make sense of information. This session is all about the ‘how’ of information. Some of these hows will be founded on a model of information as a passive object to be stored and transmitted, others will treat it as some very participative and fluid.

In this session we will especially focus on information as it relates to business, library science, and education, as well as emerging fields such as web science. In each case the focus is likely to be on the many different ways in which individuals, groups, societies and machines interact with information.

Two items just to close - I've 3,000 words drafted on the local, global and glocal paper and need to clear the decks for Druapalcon and the Autumn - Winter push (where have I heard that before?).

Very significant news c/o David Talbot of MIT Technology Review on the health IT front and Google:

How a Broken Medical System Killed Google Health