Too much oxygen/too little oxygen

Try it on education. Thanks to Steli Efti. Via Clau. (Glad I didn't duck.)

Network effects?

It's been two days since I've been at the fringes of the hustle and bustle of !people (an elgg implementation South of Manila). Now I can't keep up with the emerging "sea" of conversations (About 3,057 comments since March 4, 2007). Indeed, "The Internet is people".

Homework sucks?

Not if you have a sense of proportion.

Here's Cory Doctorow's experience with homeworks:

"I was lucky enough to attend excellent, publicly funded alternative schools through my educational career. We had homework, but we were also given a
lot of time for free play, and a lot of free rein to choose our subjects and design our curriculum -- I remember spending half of the fourth grade working my way through two or three math textbooks and the other half designing and writing a parody of MAD Magazine, to the exclusion of all other work. The next grade I ollowed the class for most of the semester, except when I didn't. In high-school, I took a year off, moved to a little house in Mexico, and wrote stories. All of this stuff contributed more to my learning than any amount of worksheets and homework ever could have."

More of Doctorow's article.

Reality Check



Thanks to Hugh MacLeod

Here's an example. After all have been said and done.

Parliament of YouTube?

Imagine a government in turmoil over YouTube clips.

Read Cory Doctorow's post on Croatian politicians fighting over "funny" YouTube videos of the Interior Minister.

Then wonder how politicians elsewhere will handle similar events.

Feature Creep

aka Feature Fatigue

James Surowiecki of the "Wisdom of Crowds" fame wrote an essay in the New Yorker about how consumers, when given choices for customizing a product (Read: gadgets), actually pick as many as 20 features at the store, only to regret having done so when they get home.

Perhaps we can apply Pareto's rule here? "80 % of consumer satisfaction is supplied by 20% of the product features".

via David Pescovitz.

Here's a bold WOV

Browse Smarter. - Adaptive Blue.

The sense I'm making is that it's approaching the Semantic Web.

Seems like Pearson is shifting focus from books

eSchool News reports that Pearson Education unit is buying eCollege.com which sells eLearning sytems in a deal worth about $538 million. The report also says that "[l]ast year, Pearson generated more than $1 billion in sales from these digital learning products and services."
I wonder how much sales the books generated.

Blogs + Metacomments

Jane of Archives Hub Blog wrote a fairly easy-to-read summary of Paul Anderson's ‘Web 2.0: Ideas, technologies and implications for education’. I put in my marginal notes via trailfire.

Read the main post along with the "bubble notes" on the right-hand side.

Swedish Embassy on Second Life?

Inquirer.net reports that Sweden will open the first 'embassy' in web world of SL.

Now, that seems like "second nature" (pun intended) to Sweden considering that it ranks No. 1 in "The Global Creativity Index" according to Richard Florida's book "The Flight of the Creative Class".

Rounding up the rest of the top ten are

2. Japan
3. Finland
4. USA
5. Switzerland
6. Denmark
7. Iceland
8. Netherlands
9. Norway
10. Germany

Reminds me of a point of comparison in Knowledge Management where the Scandinavian model (focusing on the dynamics of people engagement) seems to be more powerful than that of the American model (which emphasises success around considerations of efficiency).

Kongregator

Play and upload games. Sounds like Gaming 2.0

Tale of 2 elgg cities

1. people@dls-c got a redesign. Check out the WOV. Discover.Link.Share.Create.
2. pinoys4education has more inhabitants. pop: 51 active users. (Philippine High School for the Arts teachers are in the house)
   

Google Experimental

Want a view of your search results across Time OR Space (sorry no "AND" yet)? Check it out here.

Try entering "Social Software" to see what I mean . Here are the TIME* and SPACE results.

* The returned dates validated results of my "brute force" research efforts on the history of social software portion of an earlier paper I wrote about Social Software and Community Learning .

Too intriguing to ignore (IMHO).

24weeks.com

"Starting with nothing more than a vision, an empty shell, a laptop and a jar of nutella, Tav will:

• Conduct a social experiment at open collaboration to …
• Enable people to do what they want to do and …
• Create a profitable billion dollar company.

All in 24 weeks!"

Jury's out until November 18, 2007.

Social Exergaming anyone?

Ian Bogost writes about the the cultural and social future of exergames (Exercise + Games portmanteau) in Persuasive Games: The Missing Social Rituals of Exergames

In the process, he had to take the Wii for a "stress" test. Bottom line is:

"[I]t actually affords more slothful play than its traditional controller-bound competitors (try it yourself, you can play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess slouched back in your sofa, hands at your sides. Just wiggle your wii remote hand to swing your sword)."

So Ian argues, "To incite real, motivated physical activity, exergames will have to do more than just demanding physical gestures that produce latent exercise. In addition, they will have to simulate and create the social rituals that make us want to be physically active, whether alone or with others."

Interesting piece of article. And I thought we could look forward to going to gyms that feature Wii Consoles.

Out of the "commonplace into the rare"

... perhaps "[b]ecause language is a translation of grace…"

Keep the rest of the world inspired Clau.

This is just another marker.

Voting (Read: Participation in an electoral process) for the "right" people ...

I am still thinking of one. Do not hold your breath ...

Might as well choose not to vote. Have not done so voted since 1998.

Happy Day!

... to all Moms, Mums, Mothers,







Inay

Just a little bit of techmeme history

Got this off seth's Meebo blog.

"Where did those pesky little emoticons come from? I mean, originally? It turns out we all have Scott Fahlman to thank! The original forum posting, grabbed from Wikipedia, was:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman : - )
From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

: - )

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

: - (

"

Visual WOV

In the midst of all the actions/verbs swirling around Social Software/Web 2.0, I attempted to summarize what I'd like to think is a broad WOV set.

More meta information on 2D2C.

BTW the image is sitting in Flickr.com. Their blurb declares: "The best way to store, search, sort and share your photos."

Lego.com and Web 2.0

Thinking that Lego.com is very much into Prosumers, I thought of looking for a counterpart Lego.org. Couldn't find one. Perhaps I should look harder.

The Chaordic Age and the New World Wide Web

Dee Hock had been preaching and practicing chaordic concepts when he was interviewed at the turn of the century (2000) by Smartleadership.com. "Hock coined the term to describe any organization, system or business that is "self-organizing, self-governing, adaptive, nonlinear, and complex, and which harmoniously combines the characteristics of both chaos and order."

More of his ideas in his 2005 book One from Many. Now for the rest of us, the challenge could perhaps be how to harness the value of "engagement at the edge" of chaos and order.

Suddenly I'm reminded of Espen Andersen's take on blending dot.com and dot.org.

BTW this post was provoked by randommind's blog: Who da boss when it comes to social software in learning organizations?

Video Resumes? Now they are talking.

eSchool News reports about the the latest trend in job seeking with a reference to what they call the YouTube generation.

Don't be surprised if employers run searches on "applicants' social-networking personal pofiles." I guess it's time to rid photo galleries of compromising items.

Mash-ups

I am running a mash-up of freedictionary and yahoopipes:

Word of the Day

Word of the Day
provided by The Free Dictionary

Here's the result of my experiment. Still figuring out how this can be useful. Perhaps some sort of Pictionary?

WOV I have overlooked

Publish. Get. Post. Go.

Been using this for 3 years yet have never realized its purposive power until now.
blogger.com

I give this a 10/10




{{video:http://www.youtube.com/v/xTHxAKypvwk}}

WOV sighting of the day

Claim. Spread. Connect.

Jyte.

Bonus: OpenId-compliant

To Digg or not to Digg

In an article "Digg users show who's the boss in Web 2.0 world" Dan Moren writes a compelling analysis of the HD-DVD cryptographic key caper and discusses how the ensuing legal actions just couldn't hack it (pun intended).

Here's the "hydratic equation". About 2,000 blog mentions today. You may wish to track it periodically.

Now what could be the undying and underlying ideology here? Sounds like a case in point in The Starfish and The Spider + Wikinomics.

Dialstation: call-from-your-mobile-phone project

In beta and offers free 20-minute call. Haven't started using the service though, but could perhaps be worth looking into.

The following is part of the blurb:

• Not only do you get some free credit when you first try Dialstation, but we also credit your account whenever somebody calls you on Dialstation! Every person you call will receive 20% of the value of the call as a credit in their Dialstation account. Another reason they will be glad you called!

• Dialstation is a product of Telekommunisten, we seriously care about the world we live in. We are anti-war, against corporate globalization, and against racism and inequality.

• We are a 100% worker owned and operated technology company. Every cent you spend on Dialstation contributes directly to the service you receive and supports the work we do.

The Flight of the Creative Class

Intriguing findings and arguments by Richard Florida in this follow up book to "The Rise of the Creative Class".

I like the part where he argues that if we "[p]ut these three ideas together -- that creativity is the most important source of wealth in the modern world, that every human being is creative, and that people everywhere place a high value on engaging creative work -- and you begin to see the scope of the [economic] transformation." The book seems primarily addressed to U.S. audience though.

Would be interesting to think about and see this happen in emerging economies in a slightly different way (Read: Bottom-up)

MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching

Sounds like MIT OCW 2.0.

Get a quick review of the site from The Web 2.0 Teaching Tools blog.