Fortnightly Mailing

Get the lingo. Financial Times article about Twitter

"Twitter users post short messages, either from a personal computer or mobile phone. These are usually made public, though they can be restricted to selected people. Anyone who wants to track a Twitterer’s public “tweets” can choose to become a “follower”: the “stream” of messages is then mixed in with streams from all the other people that are being followed, whether just a small number of friends or a large group made up of celebrities, politicians and others who have rushed to get a voice in this new domain."

I do not use Twitter, other than occasionally coming across other people's use of it when searching the Web.  Just as blogging used to leave me cold, so does Twitter.......

This longish piece by Richard Waters, Chris Nuttall and David Gelles, in the Financial Times, follows the US start-up's recent success in raising £24m in venture capital. The article gives a coherent description of the service and the underlying reasons for its success, and provides non-users with an overview of the Twitter "lingo". [I've included a chart from the article despite its the lack of any scale for the y axis.) The piece also manages to include a sidebar picking up on Baroness Professor Susan Greenfield's views - which are everywhere - about being active online causing brain damage.

Draconian New Zealand copyright law put on hold?

Over the last few days there have been protests in New Zealand against a newly amended Copyright Act (Section 92A) which establishes a guilt upon accusation principle that can, according to this report, "see anyone accused of copyright infringement getting his or her Internet connection severed". There have been extensive protests in New Zealand against these unworkable changes, and Richard Elliot dropped me a note today reporting that the National Party yesterday decided to "delay and review section 92A of the Amended NZ copyright Act".

Director of Digital Engagement in the Cabinet Office

The Government is looking for a Director of Digital Engagement. Here is an excerpt from the advertisement.

"Within six months the Head of Digital Engagement will have developed a strategy and implementation plan and be able to show concrete signs of momentum in executing the plan.

Within a year the Head of Digital engagement should be able to point to two departments whose use of digital engagement are recognised in the digital community as being world class.

Within two years the use of world class digital engagement techniques should be embedded in the normal work of Government."

A challenging role. Closing date 4/3/2009.

Jeff Han's multi-touch, mult-user eight foot wide display/interface

In the continuation post below is an impressive 4 minute video of Jeff Han demonstrating his company's eight foot wide multi-touch, multi-user display/interface, and you can read more about touch screens in this 4/9/2008 piece in the Economist. An early prototype for the screen was developed by Han at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Once you've got the general idea from the video, skip to the final minute for Han's insights into the difference between 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional interfaces.

With thanks to Dick Moore for pointing out the video.

Carly Shuler's "Pockets of Potential - Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children's Learning"

Carly Shuler's 2009 Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children’s Learning [600 kB PDF] for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop (from which the diagram above is taken) provides a  cool-headed overview of the potential of mobile technologies for children's learning, and ends with some US-oriented "a multi-sector action plan to transform
mobile learning from a state of uneven and scattered innovation into a force for dynamic educational impact".

New Becta "Emerging Technologies for Learning" service

Becta's new Emerging Technologies for Learning web site describes itself as follows:

"Bringing together news, articles, research, views and opinions on emerging technologies for learning The Emerging Technologies for learning area draws together news, research, analysis and views around technology developments and trends relevant to education. It aims to provide an environment for debate on technology futures within the education community and those serving it, encouraging dialogue and building shared understandings about the future."

The site badly needs its RSS feeds to be available on every page (they can be found here, and this is the overal feed); and its editorial policy needs making clear. Specifically:

• who is writing it?
• what are its editorial policies?
• what if any process exists for drawing its editors' attention to "stuff" that needs covering?

By way of a relatively minor design quibble, users need to drill into the site too much for comfort. For example, to escape from the site's events listing to the web site of a listed event requires rather too many clicks. But overall, a definite improvement on what went before.

Mobilising the minds of the masses - Anil Ananthaswamy in the New Scientist

Source: txteagle

"The total amount of idle time literate, English speaking mobile phone subscribers have within the developing world is estimated to be more than 250,000,000 hours every day. Given high rates of unemployment and marginal income sources, much of this population would greatly benefit from even an extra dollar per day."

Interesting article in the 14 February 2009 New Scientist by Anil Ananthaswamy. The article is partly about Nathan Eagle's txteagle, a service that "allows rural Kenyans to earn airtime and money by performing small tasks such as translation and transcription using their mobile phones" (from whose site the above excerpt is taken), but it develops into a more general discussion about mobile phones, and the credit they hold, as payment-transaction devices in less developed countries, using Safaricom (a mobile-phone based banking system) as an example.

Nathan Eagle is a research scientist at MIT and his Nokia-funded work on "reality mining" is also of interest.

Love the brain you are with

I made this diagram for a talk last month, based on Richard Sennett's description in The Craftsman of a thought experiment by the evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith. Its point? Evolutionary change is very slow when compared to cultural change. Cultural change is very slow when compared to technological change. Don't get too carried away with recent technological developments. In effect, "love the brain you are with".

John Medina's "Brain Rules"

John Medina - source: John Medina's web site

"Toss your PowerPoint presentations. It's (sic) text-based (nearly 40 words per slide), with six hierarchical levels of chapters and subheads — all words. Professionals everywhere need to know about the incredible inefficiency of text-based information and the incredible effects of images. Burn your current PowerPoint presentations and make new ones."

Amended 22/2/2009 and 2/3/2009

I enjoyed John Medina's excellently implemented, thoroughly referenced, browsable and entertaining  Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School partly because it complemented some of my prejudices. 

I did my teacher-training in 1976-1977, and the proportion of the 1-year full time course devoted to the science of learning was small. (Sure, 30 years ago less was known about the subject than is the case now.)

Medina's web site could not have been produced in 1976 (either technically, or from the point of view of its science), but one would hope that teachers and others will be making a point of using it now, whilst retaining plenty of the natural scepticism we evolved for life as hunter gatherers. (One of Medina's points is that our brains and bodies evolved to make us fitted for life as hunter gatherers, and his 12 "rules" are built on that assumption.)  One thing Medina's slick web site would benefit from, though it would be costly to manage, is some space for (peer reviewed) challenges to the science that underpins his "rules". For a 2 March 2009 overview of Medina's site see this post by Donald Clark.

Related posts:

•  9 September 2006 Come dance with me, whispers the neuroscientist to the teacher;
• 12 March 2007 Useful terse articles by Itiel Dror about the science of learning;
• 14 March 2007 The bandwidth of consciousness;
• 4 January 2008 Baboon Metaphysics. The Evolution of the Social Mind.
  

Ma.gnolia - when a service "up in the cloud" goes wrong

Last year I was involved in project that used, to good effect, the social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia. The nice thing about Magnolia was its support for OpenID and the way that small groups could form around narrowly focused bookmarking endeavours, without the clutter of "mass" services like Delicious. Thankfully the project is long finished. Otherwise the data-loss described in this rueful message from the founder on the Magnolia web site would now be causing problems.....