The Act Laboratory

The Applied Communication and Technology Laboratory is located at the downtown Harbour Centre campus of Simon Fraser University. The Lab offers workspace to graduate students, post-doctoral candidates, and visitors. It is equipped for programming, web services, and photographic imaging. 

Current projects:

Open source software development for online education. The TextWeaver application program developed under a FIPSE grant is being converted into a web based program in conjunction with open source initiatives at Simon Fraser. 

The Lab possesses an extensive archive of documents from the French May Events of 1968. These documents are being digitized for publication on the Web.

Preliminary research is engaged on a second archive of documents from the origins of the French Minitel system.

A research report is in preparation on a third archive of documents from the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute's early online education program.

Documents and articles on the history of communication on computer networks are being collected for a future research project.

A photographic exhibit of Andrew Feenberg's street photography is in preparation for an October showing.

Publications of the Laboratory in 2003-2004:

Community in the Digital Age, edited by Andrew Feenberg and Darin Barney, Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.

"Facilitation," by Andrew Feenberg and Cindy Xin, Sage Encyclopedia of Distance Learning, Sage, 2004.

"Technology in a Global World," in Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technology, by Andrew Feenberg in R. Figueroa and S. Harding eds., Routledge, 2003, pp. 237-251.

“Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of Enlightenment,” by Andrew Feenberg in Herbert Marcuse: A Critical Reader, J. Abromeit, and W. M. Cobb eds., Routledge, 2003, pp. 67-80.

“Virtual Community – No ‘Killer Implication,’” Andrew Feenberg and Maria Bakardjieva, New Media, 6(1), 2004: pp. 37-43.

“Looking Forward, Looking Backward: Reflections on the 20th Century,” by Andrew Feenberg in  Globalization, Technology and Philosophy, D. Tabachnik and T. Koivukoski, eds., SUNY Press, 2004.

Upcoming 2004-2005:

Research on surveillance in public transportation carried out under a grant to CPROST from SSHRC (principal investigator, Richard Smith).

Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of Technology, by Andrew Feenberg, Routledge, 2004.