Prof. Dipl.-Des. Oliver Wrede

Blog

  • 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 discuss particular questions. That let to a more open discussion where people were willing to jump on topics which were not so close to their personal issues.

    I was not able to answer some of my questions but there was a lot of other things emerging that were worth listening to without sticking to own themes.

    I was missing some critical voices that really challenged the advocates of “self organized learning” and “personal publishing” as a method of facilitation. I won’t say that the discussion was positivistic journey into self fullfilling prophecies, but I think it is pretty hard with a bunch of convinced bloggers to crack the reasoning of a student that has good arguments against an unquestioned and pseudo-liberal “self responsibility” in formal education.

    There is more responsibility that remains on the side of the educator than just to be a “light tower” for otherwise self-organized learners. There is a strong expectation among students about the benefits of studying in contrast to being self-learning and I am not ready to agree that most university courses fail miserably in helping students master certain fields. What I would agree on is that many courses define a much too strict curriculum that leaves few or no chance to practice a research approach in learning.

  • Informal Education

    The Encyclopedia of Informal Education seems to be a very good resource.

    I came there in preparation for the BlogWalk 2 meeting (which I will travel to tomorrow). Sebastian Fiedler suggested to read the article about Ivan Illich (in particular his thoughts on Learning webs). But I also think the documents on David A. Kolb and Kurt Lewin will be very useful for me.

  • Substance of Style

    Virginia Postrel is the author of The Substance of Style and The Future and Its Enemies. She also writes the “Economic Scene” column for the New York Times and maintains the Dynamist blog. In her presentation at SXSW Interactive, Postrel discussed the importance of aesthetics, how design comes into play, the role of expertise, and why people respond the way they do to aesthetically pleasing people, places, and things.

    Quote from a partial presentation transcript:

    We’re experiencing a rise in the value of aesthetics. I don’t mean the philosophy of art. I mean communicating through the senses. Aesthetics is not narrative. It’s pre-rational. Not irrational, pre-rational. As a designer, if you try to create aesthetic affects, you will go through some cognitive process. Ellen Dissanayake, author of Homo Aestheticus looked at art as making something special — “emotionally gratifying and more than strictly necessary.”

    Well, I agree on the pre-rational part. What I don’t agree on the conclusion that the value of aesthetics is fundamentally a gate to meaningful consumerism.

  • Copenhagen Consensus

    This week there is a conference in Copenhagen where scientists debate environmental challenges of the world.

    Copenhagen Consensus is based on the aim to improve prioritization of limited means. The world is faced with a countless number of challenges such as diseases, environmental degradation, armed conflicts and financial instability. Copenhagen Consensus takes a new and critical-analytical approach to assessing the effects of international opportunities for solving the challenges.
    Ten challenges representing some of the world’s biggest concerns have been identified. In Copenhagen, nine outstanding acknowledged economic experts will gather to discuss, analyze and rank the opportunities corresponding to each challenge. Ten specialists have each prepared a background paper on a challenge within their field of research in order to provide the experts with the best and most recent information.

  • Contextual, Process-Centric and Community-Driven

    ZDNet recently published a Meta Group report by analyst Mike Gotta that suggests collaboration is a business strategy, not a tool strategy.

    Through 2004, organizations will rein in tactical collaboration products (instant messaging, teamware, and Web conferencing) for companywide deployments, driven by architecture needs, product standardization benefits, and shared infrastructure flexibility. By 2008, “contextual collaboration” – enabling organizations to embed collaboration into production applications – will span customers, employees, and partners, creating time-to-market, problem resolution, and travel displacement efficiencies as part of an overall service-oriented architecture-based knowledge worker infrastructure strategy.

    Included in the report is this prediction:

    By 2005, we expect a sales automation application to be connected to a process orchestration engine that has a rule set that defines semantics around creation of a “virtual sales war room” when a sales process reaches a certain point. For instance, upon receipt of an RFP, a team workspace would be automatically instantiated and populated with a task template, documents, RFP response templates, buddy lists, discussion forum, and a common project calendar. Embedded collaboration services such as “presence” (knowing if someone is online) will increasingly become a core piece of metadata associated with application and content objects. Users will be able to right-click on an object within an application to obtain contextual information, such as an account name to obtain a pop-up list of contacts (e.g., salesperson, account team, service representative), and would be able to escalate from that profile information into a screen-sharing or document-sharing session (e.g., to clarify a question or response related to the RFP). This design model is different from earlier collaboration efforts that focused on people and not how people work within processes.

  • Knowledge tools

    I think it is pretty remarkable how many applications have appeared that could help people to capture creative thinking. Here is a selection (I restrict it mostly to OS X applications):

    Graphing

    Outlining

    Here is a comparison of NoteTaker and NoteBook.

    Managing notes

    • Tinderbox: notes organizer, hypertext writing, mind mapping, personal content management (this site is done with it)
    • KnowledgeTank: another tool to collect notes (seems to be an early release but has a promising roadmap)

    Personal databases and structure creation

    • DEVONthink: a freeform database to store and query information pieces
    • Haystack: a personal desktop information portal/dashboard
    • ZOE: a search system mostly for the personal e-mail repository (creates a browsable hypertext of the mailboxes)

    Groupware

    • IHMC CmapTools: a groupware client/server concept mapping tool
    • Groove: a groupware tool on a peer-to-peer network base with pluggable modules for outlining, whiteboarding
    • Near-Time Flow: networked aggregator for adresses, files, RSS feeds
    • SubEthaEdit: the concurrent writing feature makes this text editor a very interesting groupware application

    Other

    • Curio: organize a scrapbook hierarchically and publish it online in one go; add structured dossiers to projects
    • Keynote: an easy to use slideshow application (easier compared to PowerPoint)

    I am sure this list is just the tip of an iceberg. But keeps me thinking though is that there is no developed practice yet to really deal with all that power. These tools train their users on the fly. They allow structuring things only if a systematic strategy is applied. But where does this strategy come from?

    Sometimes the question is how to tell the application what the user wants (and he/she needs to know what he/she wants) – sometimes the application suggests how to do it (then the user needs to know if which approach aligns best with the goals).

    Here are some skills, that users need to care about if they want to become powerful action researchers with these tools:

    • Simplification: do not collect everything (be willing to hide/delete too narrow sideways); writing with simple wording if structure is the main actor in the scene
    • Keeping goals: always re-iterate on the goals you want to achieve, ask wether or not the document will serve the final purpose
    • Educated decisions: make informed decisions on structure and relations instead of hoping that the tool will suggest one or let one emerge
    • Explicate intention: Keep record of your intentions when doing chances if there is one; ask if new goals emerge and prioritize goals
    • Use hypothesis: experimentally ask questions and try to answer them with your document;
    • Epistemological twists: use falsification; remodulate questions to reveal new answers; try to become better in asking revealing questions

  • Nuclear power the only green solution?

    This article by James Lovelock keeps me thinking. 25 years ago he was one of the first to warn about the global warming and he first conceived the Gaia hypothesis while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in the mid-1960s, where he was designing life detection instruments for NASA’s Mars Viking probes.

    He proposes switching to nuclear energy is the only available option to reduce the greenhouse effect, which -if not stopped- will cause much greater problems because it is a positive feedback loop that will turn catastrophic sooner and faster than we all may believe.

  • Counter-Productive Multitasking

    Another article about how much counter-productive is multitasking.

    Because we’re people, we don’t swap out the content of our brains as easily as a computer does, and we definitely don’t swap in the old state when we’re ready to return to the original task. […] Gerald Weinberg, in Quality Software Management, Vol. 1, Systems Thinking (Dorset House, 1992), estimates the context-switching cost among three tasks to be 40 percent. That means that 40 percent of your available work time is spent on non-task activities.

    [via Timeris]

    There is also another article on that topic by Joel Spolsky: Human Task Switches Considered Harmful (which links to this article on CNN.com).

    I filed this articles under “Weblog Theory” because I think context-switching is what bloggers do almost all day long. So there seems to be an eminent danger for bloggers to be not very productive. Only some bloggers have developed a discipline to just blog on particular reserved hours a day (before work or after work). I guess that many bloggers can’t separate their blogging from their work (as it is has become part of their work).

    The author of the Timeris weblog (no name available on site) uses a time-prediction method for managing his workload. At the same time he talks about interruptions that can distort the time prediction. But he thinks that Weblogs are a very powerful personal productivity tool, which is contrasting the idea of productivity-loss by blogging.

    So there seems to be really a question of how to use Weblogs. effectively.

  • Digital Technologies for Deliberative Democracy

    A project at Columbia’s Center on Organizational Innovation is looking at how technology has or hasn’t been used to enable participatory democracy in the rebuilding of the WTC:

    “New digital technologies have figured critically in the process of deciding the future of Lower Manhattan after September 11th, not only supplying the infrastructure for soliciting public input but also opening new channels of communication between citizens, designers, advocacy groups, and decision-makers…”

    “By compiling an archive of all the websites devoted to Lower Manhattan redevelopment issues and tracking changes in the form and structure of the websites over time, the project will examine how old and new advocacy groups are adapting to a political landscape in which new deliberative technologies may be challenging traditional mechanisms of citizen participation”….”Analysis of the website database will chart whether and how architects and urban planners are capitalizing on new digital technologies to involve residents more directly in design.”

    There is a project outline available as PDF file.

  • Asian movies

    I heard on the news that asian movies were great in Cannes this year. But I am sure this title was not among the nominees.

  • Leaks in Los Alamaos

    Somehow I find this article very disturbing:

    Los Alamos National Laboratory has confirmed that classified computer media can not be located.

    Could it be that the Los Alamos laboratory is a self-service outlet for spies and terrorist affiliates?

  • Findability.org

    Peter Morville on findability.org:

    Ambient findability describes a world in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime.

    And Al Abut posts a comment on that site:

    You know what would help me with the findability of your site updates? An RSS/Atom feed!

  • TYPO3 QuickStart 3.6.1 for Mac OS X

    MacOS X installer for TYPO3 3.6.1 ready for download! Get the updated package here. Andreas Beutel (who provided the OS X package) also wrote an installation tutorial.

  • HazardCards

    HazardCards is a project spearheaded by the Learning Lab Denmark. What is it? A bunch of visual cards to learn and teach about technological hazards. You can play a game with the existing cards or create your own cards. A new twist to a old method of disseminating facts and stories.

    [via elearningpost]

  • Software patents in Europe

    This news story reports the EU finally will decide to allow software patents in Europe. But it appears the patents will be limited to software that is attached to specific hardware or can be used to produce new things.

    Seriously I think software patents will destroy more economic value than they can protect. Their primary effect is not to protect development investments but to rather limit growth of competitors.

    I have an idea for a great user interface enhancement that I am sure will be part of any standard GUI one day. Who is willing to pay the patent fees and share the profit with me if it turns out to become reality?

  • SubEthaEdit 2.0 released

    SubEthaEdit is a group-enabled text editor for Mac OS X and it has been updated to version 2.0. Some of the new features:

    • Regular Expression Find and Replace
    • New collaboration feature: Invitations
    • Read only access to documents
    • Show invisible characters
    • Autocompletion
    • Splitview
    • More powerful syntax modes
    • Preferences per syntax mode
    • 300% more efficient network protocol
    • iChat and Mail integration
    • Fully IPv6 enabled
    • Line endings conversion