details of a global brain
EdMedia blog panel
Adrian Miles jotted down his experience of the blog panel at EdMedia 2004 in Lugano. He concludes: Key outcomes: a high level of interest in the possible use of blogs, confusion about how or why you would use them, questions and problems about how to encourage, foster and nurture their use with disinterested or resistant…
Tinderbox improvements
Eastgate does inofficially keep development versions of Tinderbox on their public ftp server. The latest release is 2.2.1 d7. Tinderbox users that dare to run on a development release may find some very useful enhancements (like better map printing). Finally images won’t be rewritten at each HTML export. These images were uploaded anytime I synchronized…
How thinking goes wrong
Michael Shermer about twenty-five fallacies that lead us to believe weird things. What a great document about scientific thinking.
Platform vs. Strategy in E-Learning
I just heard an e-learning expert demonizing the platform discussion (e.g. “Which Learning Management System is best?”) while at the same time suggesting to evaluate Microsoft e-learning products. Then I found this other quote someone called Björn from a discussion thread on Peter Baumgartners weblog: … every system claimed to the-one. I find that boring…
Wiki added!
So I managed to add a wiki space to this site. It will take some time to grow. You’re invited to add yourself to a list of guests or suggest topics.
Ruby on rails
It is actually the first time that I blog about Ruby. I had a look at Ruby on Rails – a web application framework based on the Ruby scripting language. Ruby appears to be a very well designed scripting language (see here) for anyone who loves “quick but not dirty” programming. Ruby is very successful…
Realtime Wiki
I am playing around with Wiki tools. Because Zope is the platform on my current development agenda I looked into ZWiki. It offers full Plone integration and support for the ExternalEditor Extension (which means that I can click on small pens to edit pages inside my favorite text editor instead of a textarea inside the…
Design + Knowledge Destruction
Rosan Chow reflects on work by Alain Findeli. She wants to help characterize design activity by projecting a fringe view on the relation between design activity and knowledge, scientific or non-scientific. To me, the essence of design activity lies in the ontological realm and how it affects the way we are that is different than…
Introduction to Apple Software Design Guidelines
Apple posts some notes on developing software for Macs. Brent Simmons recommends it not only for other developers but also for anybody who enjoys thinking about software.
How children can learn cognition science
Through a posting on the simplicity weblog I came across Edward De Bonos site. He started to collect bedtime stories for children that incorporate his theories. The first (and only) one by Lorna Santín tells about De Bonos concept named “Six thinking hats” and it’s called “The Magic Hats”.
Computer boosts cognitive agility of pre-school children?
CNN reports that computer use of children aged 3 to 5 scored higher on tests that gauge school readiness and cognitive development. Some earlier studies have found computer use improves children’s fine motor skills and improves recognition of numbers and letters. Is there a study that shows how extensive computer use in early childhood influences…
Patents can allow BigCos to annihilate open source?
This german news item (heise.de) speculates that software patents in Europe will allow big companies like Microsoft to kill the open source movement. It forces open source projects to play according to the rules of capital. Patents are nothing more than land mines in a economic war. I can’t see why Microsoft wouldn’t use patents…
Former Microsoft employee switched
Here is a little story of a former Microsoft employee that switched to MacOS X: I worked for Microsoft for eight years. I’m a long time Windows loyalist. […] Now that I can see them side by side, it’s obvious that the Macintosh provides a brighter display experience than the PC. It’s a more aesthetically…
Pros and Cons of Wikis in education
Here is a summary of experiences with using a Wiki in a educational project. Obviosly a Wiki structure has some advantages over a weblog system (more focussed on content creation and hypertext structure). A Wiki is better suited to generate a set of encyclopedic pages, while a weblog works better as a messaging and news…
Designing success and small companies
Maish R Nichani on elearningpost.com: Yet another article on the importance of design. This one from Inc. magazine reports that even small companies are using the design factor to gain a competitive advantage. (The May 17 issue of Business Week featured The Power of Design and the June issue of Fast Company featured Masters of…
Simplicity (cont.)
Finally there is some movement on the weblog of the “simplicity” seminar. And some very good items popped up already. For instance some explanatory animations by Nigel Holmes which look pretty much like the things we did in the “density” seminar. And also I learned that John Maeda at MIT started an experimental research project…
The little engine that could
Robert X. Cringely thinks that a small $70 wireless router running on Linux is a disruptive technology.
Learning by accident…?
Martin Spernau’s comment on “accidental learning/teaching/sharing” got my attention. There is are lot of “non-intentional” aspects in communication and we tend to discuss and regard only the “intentional” aspects (just think of body language for example). But “by accident” is not a strategy. You can’t do anything willingly “by accident”. So I’d rather think of…
We saved American life
Sometimes I accidentally surf to very strange pages that stick with me for a while. For instance here: The 2004 Veteran Manhatten Project & Symbosium which is an event organized by the “Children of the Manhatten Project“. Reading the agenda felt like going through a ghost party program: a bunch of old men (or children…
BlogWalk 2 – First impressions
I am just sitting on the train back from Nuremberg to Cologne after a day of intense discussion and thinking. I met new people and I appreciated to have had a chance to learn a lot. Most of the people seemed to have a more general interest in the subject and were not trying to…
Got any book recommendations?