THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATION, COMMUNITY, AND VALUES

About this Issue

With this posting of Interface we begin a season of widely expanded activities. This posting discussed many of these activities as well as presenting a series of articles.

Our feature article “Postmodern features of Chinese Internet literature” by lin Jie and Qui Xue Hui, two advanced students at Wenzhou Medical College in China, is one of the first of which we are aware to offer insights into the impact of the Internet on the writing and thinking of younger Chinese posters. It reveals significant changes in the ways in which the Internet facilitates new ways of looking at writing, and at the world in general.  See it at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2005/05/0505.php

Our Legal Editor, Leonard DuBoff, writing with his colleague Christy King, offers an important piece of direct relevance to many of our readers who host their own web sites: “Domain Name Resolution” See it at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2005/05/duboff.php Anyone who has registered or might register a Domain Name should read this piece.

Mark Szymanski, our funding and education editor and a former Berglund Fellow, writes on the “International Conference on Children's Rights and Education: A Concern for the Soul” Found at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2005/05/szymanski.php Mark reports on this important conference which he attended this past summer.  The piece speaks to an important impact of the Internet, the attempt to work out a civic culture appropriate to a wired world increasingly consisting of communities of those committed to common concerns such as children’s rights.

Our Gaming Editor, Chris Pruett discusses the relationships between academic notions of “artificial intelligence” and the real-world needs of game designers required to create ever-broader ranges of increasingly sophisticated characters operating within ever-more elaborate visual devices.  As always, Chris teaches us a great deal about the present and the future of this international community of game players and producers.  See it at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2005/05/pruett.php

We review two very different books in this issue:  One is Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Our review, by Bill Van Derbok, is a somewhat contrarian view of this increasingly influential and popular book and is found at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2005/05/friedman.php . The second is of Cory Doctorow's eastern standard tribe. As well as being a is a very important voice in a number of Internet communities, Doctorow is also widely held to be the writer of speculative fiction who most centers his work around the impact and the future of the Internet.  See the review at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2005/05/doctorow.php

In addition to the pieces noted above, there are also a number of announcements that will, we hope, be of interest to our audience.  We continue to invite applications for Berglund Fellowships, and for special projects.  See them at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2005/04/proposals.php and at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/rfp.php .  We announce a new series of Berglund Roundtables featuring speakers from the industries which rely upon the Internet. Read about this series, which permits remote audience participation, at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/roundtables.php .

Finally, in my own piece “From the Editor’s Desk,” I discuss recent and future developments here at the Berglund Center for Internet Studies.  See it at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2005/05/edit.php .

As always, we hope that you will find this issue of Interface both useful and entertaining, and that you will look for our next posting, in October.

Jeffrey Barlow
Editor, Interface


September 2005

Volume 5, Issue 5

Feature

Lin Jie and Qiu Xue Hui - Postmodern Features of Chinese Internet...

Legal

Leonard D. DuBoff and Christy O. King - Domain Name Dispute Resolution

Funding & Education

Mark Szymanski - International Conference on Children's Rights and...

Gaming

Chris Pruett - Deceiving Intelligence

Book and Site Review

Cory Doctorow's eastern standard tribe

Book and Site Review

Thomas L. Friedman's The World is Flat: A Brief History of the...

Editorial

From the Director's Desk