So the semester is almost over. I end with a much bigger base of new slides from recent lectures that will probably make the future lecturing task much easier. I had never the chance to use a former presentation 1:1 for a new one: there is always a need for update and improvement – but at least as long as there is improvement I think lights are green!
So the I’ll embrace a motto from a german soccer coach: »After the game is before the game!« – So what’s next in teaching?
First of all I am looking back over five years of teaching with more than one new seminar concept per semester. Almost any seminar could be repeated with new participants without loosing actuality. On the contrary, being able to build upon prior work seems to be an invitation on its own to do so. I think it will strengthen the research focus and also provide another level of certainty to me and to the students.
Secondly I still have a number of topics “in store” that could be adressed or haven’t yet been extended beyond the initial sketch for a seminar.
Weblogging and teaching – status
I have written about my experiences with weblogs as a tool for teaching. Still most of what I said still remains valid thinking – even though I didn’t invest enough energy to move onward from that stage. I am still empowered by the positive feedback. I always opposed forcing students to blog. Now I see weblogs gaining popularity here and so I hope the overall trend may eventually become stronger and maybe students are going to pick it up even without me introducing them to weblogging. I don’t know – but I think this way around it’s much better. Until then I use the seminar weblogs as publishing channels. Even without much student activity it seems to be the weblogs are a simple way to filter the web and provide essential resources to students. But with around 25 active weblogs I am reaching a limit somehow. So there needs to be some thinking on my behalf how to re-use all those news items published. We need some sort of aggregator similar to what kCollector of eVectors ist doing.
This article by Henrik Olsen suggests to design navigation systems in webistes to be much more prominent:
Most web development projects put a lot of effort into the design of navigation tools. But fact is that people tend to ignore these tools. They are fixated on getting what they came for and simply click on links or hit the back button to get there.
Olsen quotes the studies of the Visual Cognition Lab of the University of Illinois where people attending certain features where unable to recognize unusual things properly (inattentional blindness). There is a follow-up to these experiments by Ronald A. Rensink.
Published on
January 20, 2005 in
Politics.
Few days after my returning home from New York after 9/11 (the day I originally planned to fly home) I felt strongly that the WTC attacks were just a episode and that there is a great deal of background and responsibility on the side of the current (and probably former) US governments and the fact that there were so little questioning about that could only be a result of a profound lack serious journalism (and people actually watching/reading these reports).
Now there is a site that offers a huge number of documentaries about all the things you won’t see in the news.
I had my wiki locked for anonymous editing to get rid of spammers. Only one or two pages were editable because I wanted people to be able to work on them. I was hoping that spammers would turn down if they can’t find an editable page ad hoc. Not so.
In “return” they did not only spam the open pages – they also replaced and thus deleted the original content (they used to append stuff to existing content). In addition they also started to add new pages below the editable page (which seems to work if the original page is writable).
Luckily I was able to repair the damage, but I wonder how all these Wikis out there surive.
Published on
January 16, 2005 in
Tools.
I am doing almost all of my presentations with Keynote – and was waiting for Keynote 2 to show up. Actually I am not missing any feature in this application, but I am looking forward to the Flash export and I wonder if it will be easy to do voice-overs for self-running presentations.
What I really would have loved to see in iChat is a way to route the Keynote presentation into the iChat video input so that it would be a snap to do remote lectures. I think there are quite a number of people that would be willing to join a lecture with such a feature.
I don’t have any opinion about Apple Pages yet. It seems to me targetted to consumers “with no sense of style” – so those just need to replace the existing content in the predefined templates. I need to wait reviews to see if that is what I’d love to use. But even though I would not use Pages for my own it seems to have a very slick and simple user interface.
Some have noted there is a table calculation application missing to really deserve the name “iWork”. This might probably be true for most office workers that need to handle data before getting to the text. It is a shame that OpenOffice.org seemed to have no plans for a native MacOS X version (so you need to go with NeoOffice/J from now on).
Update: Dori Smith had a brief look at Pages and says it’s an entry level page layout application and not a MS Word competitor.
Technorati now supports free tagging of weblog posts. This is similar to the tagging used at Del.icio.us and Flickr. Of course I like it. But right now I am not quite sure how to add these tags into my weblog layout. Should I replace my very own categories wit them? Hmmmm…
I should not forget to mention that Technorati has just finished its first Developer contest where developers were asked to invent ways to utilize the Technorati API.
This Wikipedia page is very interesting: While the tsunami wave of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake was by far the deadliest ever recorded it was by far not the highest: that was recorded 1958 in Alaska and was created by a land slide inside a small fjord (LItuya Bay) causing a wave to reach high as 500 meters (1500 ft).
Underwater landslides appear to be a source of much bigger tsunamis than earthquakes. The Wikipedia page about a possible future tsunami:
In 2001, scientists predicted that a future eruption of the unstable Cumbre Vieja volcano in La Palma (an island of the Canary Islands) could cause a supergiant undersea landslide. Later research showed that the threat was less than had originally been theorized. The next volcanic eruption is expected in the second half of the 21st century, but it is not necessarily the eruption that causes an immediate landslide. In the worst case scenario, the western half of the island (weighing perhaps 500 billion tonnes) would catastrophically slide into the ocean. Such a landslide could cause a 100 m megatsunami to devastate the coast of northwest Africa, with a 10-25 m tsunami reaching the east coast of North America 7-8 hours later causing massive coastal devastation and the deaths of perhaps millions of people, threatening Miami, suburbs of New York, and parts of Boston, and all coastal cities in between.
The scientists have different opinions about the probability of this catastrophe.
Published on
January 1, 2005 in
Business.
Cory Doctorow responds to digital rights management advocate Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine:
DRM isn’t protection from piracy. DRM is protection from competition.