dougbelshaw.com/blog » Technology

Beyond Elegant Consumption.

Doug Belshaw — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 05:30:54 +0000

At the Mozilla Festival last year, Mozilla Chairperson Mitchell Baker stood up and gave a short talk. Something she said really resonated with me. In fact, it resonated so much that I baked it right in as a central message of my TEDx Warwick talk.

We need to move beyond mere ‘elegant consumption’.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with elegant consumption in and of itself. Reading, watching and experiencing other people’s creations put together in a thoughtful and delightful way is joyful. But if that’s all we’re doing, then we have a problem.

I’ve championed Apple’s hardware and software since buying my first MacBook in 2006. I love the way that their offerings are so easy to use. At some point over the past six years I think I’ve owned or used pretty much their whole product line.

So why this week did I install Pinguy OS (a Linux distribution) on my iMac and trade my iPhone for the open-source Nokia N9?

Until last year, it was possible to swap out almost any hardware and software and still have a functioning ecosystem. An individual or organization could first decide what they wanted that ecosystem to look like and then invest in the constituent parts of that ecosystem. I feel like that’s changed. Now it’s a case of choose your vendor lock-in. And worryingly, that choice seems to be increasingly an aesthetic choice.

Yes, it’s nice that Apple, through iCloud, auto-syncs all of my stuff everywhere. And it’s wonderful that Google can present me with a (mostly) seamless experience on their combination of hardware and software. But I don’t want to have to buy into their whole ecosystem to get the functionality I require.

I’ll tell you what I want. I want interoperability. I want standards. I want a world where I can plug one thing into another and it (mostly) works. And if that world is slightly less shiny than it might otherwise have been? Well, that’s fine with me. At least I’ll have learned to start worrying and love my data.

On the new politics of technology.

Doug Belshaw — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 09:05:12 +0000

Over the last couple of days I’ve listened to two excellent podcasts that I wanted to share with you. Both of them are about the relationship between technology and politics.

Background

I’ve always found politics difficult. What I believe society should look like doesn’t fit well with the traditional two-dimensional left/centre/right representation.

On the one hand, I believe that a guiding principle should be for the State not to interfere in our lives (wherever possible). So far, so Libertarian (and usually, so Conservative).

On the other hand, however, I’m not a great believer in the ‘invisible hand’ of the free market to solve all our woes. And I certainly don’t think that billionaires should co-exist in a world with starving people. So that’s fairly Liberal and left-wing.

Hmmm…

To me, we seem to be missing a third dimension to politics. Sometimes it’s not either/or. Sometimes it’s and/and/and.

The podcasts

Whilst I enjoy the high quality of podcasts from the BBC (In Our Time and Thinking Allowed being my favourites) my go-to podcasts when commuting come from Canadian broadcasters.

The first, Spark is hosted by Nora Young, who has a voice like butter. Not only that, but the Spark Plus podcast features the full version of interviews we only hear a snippet of in the regular podcast. It’s a goldmine of interesting people talking about important ideas.

Recently, Nora interviewed Gabriella Coleman about Anonymous. It’s fascinating:

The second, always high-quality, Canadian podcast I think is fantastic is Big Ideas from TVO. Not long ago they featured John Duffy on The Emerging Politics of Technology. The last 17 minutes or so are devoted to questions, leaving just over half an hour of really thoughtful consideration of the three-dimensional nature of politics I allude to above.

Both are well worth watching or listening to. And if you haven’t subscribed to any/many podcasts, I’d highly recommend both Spark and Big Ideas.

Conclusion

The left/centre/right two-dimensional version of the political spectrum has served its purpose as what I call a ‘convenient hypocrisy’. But to try and force every issue into its confines forces the metaphor to breaking point.

Apart from perhaps politicians in line with the party whip, no-one I know exhibits purely Liberal or purely Conservative behaviours. We’re three-dimensional.

What I find really interesting is that, as John Duffy points out, the political battleground is shifting from the economy to issues surrounding technology.

And that sounds like a debate I’d like to be part of.

Education: it’s what you can’t see that counts.

Doug Belshaw — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 16:36:02 +0000

I had a great, wide-ranging discussion last night with Bud Hunt (@budtheteacher), Audrey Watters (@audreywatters) and Steve Hargadon (@stevehargadon) after the second day of the DML Conference 2012. Much of it focused on the role of technology in educational reform with much of it sparked by an excellent keynote panel of which Connie Yowell (MacArthur Foundation) was the star.

To me, the whole problem with educational reform is that what matters can’t be seen or touched. It’s physically intangible.

What do we tend to do? We focus on the things that we can see. As Bud pointed out, teachers in his district will sometimes point to discrepancies in access to technology as being a limiting factor on their performance. Others look at the material conditions of one learning environment and attribute ‘success’ to these easily-observed factors.

We should be used to this by now. Living in a world of networks (and networks of networks) we know that it’s the invisible bonds, the weak ties, that connect us to people and ideas. As Connie Yowell pointed out it’s this kind of innovation that scales. Audrey Watters extended this point when she commented that technology scales vertically, whereas people scale horizontally.

So what can we do about this? The first thing we need to do, I’d suggest, is to surface processes and networks. These both need to be as open and inclusive as possible and we need ways to talk about them to make them more tangible.

Any suggestions? I’d love to hear them in the comments.

On the importance of human agency.

Doug Belshaw — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 05:34:05 +0000

Update (6 October 2011) I awoke to the sad news that Steve Jobs, visionary former CEO of Apple, has died. If anyone exemplified the power of human agency, it was Steve.

Exhibit A

Thinking back to meetings I’ve attended over the years leads to many different experiences blurring into one. There are, however, a few of these experiences that do stand out and, of these, two in particular are quite memorable. The first was a staff briefing session at a school whilst I was on my first teaching practice in 2003. The second was in April 2010 when I joined JISC infoNet.

Why were they so memorable? Because they involved steep learning curves and made me think. The jargon and acronyms being bandied about were a useful shorthand to others but confused me. A few meetings later in each case and I was au fait with the terminology and, indeed, using it myself. I had built some ‘mental sandcastles’.

Exhibit B

I used to teach History. In fact, after my degree in Philosophy I self-funded an MA in Modern History to get on to the PGCE Secondary History course at Durham University. It’s fair to say I’m very interested in, and enjoy, reading and talking about history.

As a teenager, however, I was very nearly turned off History (as a subject) by reading some A.J.P. Taylor. Why? What really annoyed me was his ascribing human qualties to countries and states (e.g. talking of Germany as ‘She’) whilst abstracting away from individuals to make a point that suited his grand meta-narrative. Here’s an example of Taylor’s prose from Wikiquote:

The worker is by nature less imaginative, more level-headed than the capitalist. This is what prevents his becoming one. He is content with small gains. Trade Union officials think about the petty cash; the employer speculates in millions. You can see the difference in their representative institutions. There is no scheme too wild, no rumour too absurd, to be without repercussions on the Stock Exchange. The public house is the home of common sense.

Some people may like that kind of stuff, but to my mind it’s severely lacking in resonance. I don’t seem to inhabit the kind of world A.J.P. Taylor describes.

Conclusion

As I attempted to show with Exhibit A, jargon and acronyms can be useful if people are using them as a shorthand to express something that has previously been expressed in detail. Nevertheless, I think it’s probably a good idea to have meetings and conversations every so often where jargon and acronyms are banned. In my experience, people build ‘mental sandcastles’ ostensibly made of the same stuff as those created by others but actually differing based on their experiences, prejudices and preferences. Kicking down those sandcastle once in a while (to continue the metaphor) is probably a good idea.

Things don’t just happen. They are made to happen. This can be due to natural proceses but also, more often than not, by individual human agency. Organizations have agency, of course they do. An organization is a group of individuals who have come together around a common cause. That organization may seem to ‘express’ certain traits (e.g. a conservative outlook) but this remains the result of collective individual action.

So, to get to my main point in a rather roundabout way, when I see techno-determinist opinions (for that is what they are) dressed up as inevitable facts I have a similar reaction to that of my teenage self reading A.J.P. Taylor. You may well predict that the biggest trends in 2015 will be x, y and z. But, given that nobody predicted everything kicking off in the Middle East earlier this year, you’ll excuse me whilst I look at what people are actually doing whilst you peer into your crystal ball.

The future is ours to shape. Let’s not forget that.

5 free, web-based tools to help you be a kick-ass researcher.

Doug Belshaw — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 19:23:49 +0000

I do a lot of research. Not only is my day job Researcher/Analyst at JISC infoNet but when I go home I’m researching and writing as part of my doctoral thesis. Quantity and quality are different measures, but I’d hope that I’m at least half-decent at something I spend a fair amount of my life doing.

Being a researcher before the internet must have been a very difficult occupation. Much less access to information but, I suppose, on the other hand, it must have been a much more ‘embodied’ existence than spending hours mediated by several different kinds of screens. Without a focus it’s very easy to become confused very quickly and be like a dog chasing after shiny cars.

My focus at the moment, as shown by dougbelshaw.com/research is upon:

Open Educational Resources

Mobile Learning

Digital Literacy

I use several tools to stay up-to-date in these areas and to discover new resources. Here’s five of the best:

Twitter + Storify

This goes without saying: Twitter is my social dashboard and an absolute treasure trove of useful information. The important thing is that it’s a network (of networks) of people who have expertise, influence and opinion.

Recently I’ve started using Storify to, for want of a better phrase, ‘curate tweets’ about stuff I’m researching. Here’s an example for iPad mindmapping apps. Asking a question, getting replies, curating them and re-sharing helps everybody.

LinkedIn Signal

This feels like, in a phrase Ewan McIntosh used five years ago, giving away some kryptonite as LinkedIn Signal is truly amazing for researching specific terms. It’s based on your LinkedIn connections, which I’m careful to keep based on people I’ve met. It shows your relation to that person but also the most discussed links about that search term.

Try it. You’ll love it.

Amplify

Amplify is for ‘clipping’ content from websites and adding your comments to it. You can find my most recent clippings in the sidebar of this blog. The power of Amplify, however, is twofold: (i) the people you follow who often post things you wouldn’t come across, and (ii) the search functionality.

Futurelab’s EducationEye

The ever-innovative Futurelab have recently announced EventEye, a paid-for version of EducationEye for (unsurprisingly!) events. EducationEye is a service that pulls in posts from blogs (including this one) and arranges them in a visually pleasing and useful way.

Again, there’s a search function available but it’s also handy for serendipitous dipping in and out of in order to keep up with the zeitgeist.

Quora

I use Quora about once per week. It’s a social question-and-answer site where people can vote answers up and down and summarise answers once there’s plenty of responses. It can work very well and there’s an extremely diverse mix of people on there. It’s certainly worth ‘tracking’ questions to see what kinds of responses they get and from whom.

Conclusion

So there we are! Five recommendations of tools that help me be a better researcher. What have I missed?

Image CC BY-NC-SA Stuck in Customs

Revolutionary tools do not a revolution make.

Doug Belshaw — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 17:30:34 +0000

A lot has been made of about the role of social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter in the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa recently. Whilst I don’t know enough about Egypt, Libya and Bahrain to comment on their internal political situation, what I do know is that it takes more than the mere ‘potential’ of something to make a difference in practice.

And so it is with education. Mark Allen’s contribution to the #purposed debate reminded me of the important difference between something’s being available and an individual or group having the requisite skills and critical faculties to use it in a new, interesting, or even revolutionary way. As I mentioned in my comment on Mark’s blog, one of the reasons I think everyone should study a little Philosophy and History is because it prepares one to consider the ways things might, could or should be rather than being limited to tinkering within existing parameters.

So next time you read or hear of a technology or service that is going to, is, or has ‘revolutionised’ something, think of the context and milieu into which that tool or idea has been launched. As with Purpos/ed, it’s very likely you’ll find more than a hint of latent demand and the ‘adjacent possible’ in there. It’s never just about the tool or service.

Image CC BY Rev. Strangelove !!!!

Things I Learned This Week #50

Doug Belshaw — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 07:00:58 +0000

Please note that this will be last of these posts for this year. I’ll be back in 2011 [why?]

Offline this week I learned that there’s literally two types of people in the world (Dweck was correct!), that ‘female festive frenzy’ is now a term in general use, and that brandy hot chocolate is almost always better without the chocolate… :-p

http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW50

Technology

If you go to the ‘Advanced Settings’ for Google search, you can now get readability guidance for each result. You’ll be glad to know that this blog comes up as ‘Basic reading level’. Clear writing FTW!

Dropbox is now available for Teams. Looks like a good deal for small businesses, although I think they’ve missed a trick by not also targetting education. This would be awesome for educational institutions!

Google have turned on desktop editor for Google Docs. GigaOM also has the best explanation ever of why I use Apple stuff.

The GSMA Development Fund has published their mLearning report. Interesting reading! [PDF]

Malcolm Gladwell discusses the ‘affordances’ of paper and why it’s an accident of history that we consider tech in any way superior to it.

Productivity, Inspiration & Motivation

Here’s 7 things you should stop doing at work. I’m pretty good at avoiding them, but it’s always worth being reminded!

Want to leave your soul-crushing day job? Here’s how.

Jason Fried posted this quotation over at 37 Signals this week. Spot. On.

You probably only have to interrupt someone a couple times a day before they’re unable to work on hard problems at all. (Paul Graham)

Do you feel like you do ‘fake work’? Here’s how to spot it and deal with it.

Your job is a platform for what you do. So sayeth Seth Godin (with my blessing, obviously)

Education & Academic

Really interesting stuff over at SmartMobs about ‘Lévy flights’. Also a useful link to the Cooperation Commons.

[T]here is a class of random walks called Lévy flights, which include occasional long-distance jumps. The distribution of step sizes is described by a power law, which means that there are steps of all sizes and no well-defined “average” step size, at least for one class of Lévy flights. They have been observed in various natural settings, most famously in the search strategy of certain animals when food is scarce. For example, hungry sharks will typically scour back and forth over small areas, but if the search is fruitless, they will intermittently “jump” to new, far-off areas [1]. “People have also [studied] Lévy flights in stock prices, epidemics, and small world networks,” says Ajay Gopinathan, from the University of California, Merced.

Rueben Puentedura, he of SAMR model fame, has posted three recent presentations he’s given to his blog.

Jim Groom is running a MOOC on Digital Storytelling.

Stephen Downes links to Dave Cormier’s videos explaining what MOOCs are (nicely done!)

UNESCO and EU publications. You’ve got to love them. The former have announced a policy framework around ICT compentency for teachers. Which will be ignored by Gove.

Data, Design & Infographics

Google have announced their 2010 Zeitgeist of popular searches. What’s even more awesome is that Paul Lewis, a friend of mine helped code it!

Lifehacker have rounded up their most popular photography tips, tricks and hacks of 2010. Which is very nice of them, really.

Like retro travel posters? Like superheroes? Then you’ll love these:

And whilst we’re on the topic of superheroes, this minimalist poster of well-known characters is just fantastic:

I have issues with the relevance of their data, but MIT don’t half make some pretty visualisations. This one shows the strength of ties between areas of the UK based (I think) on landline phone calls. And who makes those any more?

Miscellaneous

With the imminent arrival of Belshaw Junior Mk.2 this zero-to-ten year timelapse is begging to be replicated:

Everyone’s got to have a business plan. Even a pimp.

I think this may be the most important Wikileak of them all [context]

Check out the Top 10 Weird New Animals according to National Geographic. These have all been discovered in 2010. The Sneezing Snub-nosed Monkey looks interesting. Shame the only known example was shot and eaten…

Why did people stop wearing hats?

Quotations

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. (George Orwell)

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. (Albert Camus)

The people who matter will recognise who you are. (Alan Cohen)

Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun. (Mary Lou Cook)

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

(more quotations at my quotabl.es page)

Main image CC BY auspices

Things I Learned This Week – #49

Doug Belshaw — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 13:33:45 +0000

Offline this week I learned to fly direct and take only carry-on luggage where possible, that the UK is ridiculously underprepared for snow compared to other European countries, and that thrash metal isn’t as bad as you’d think… :-p

http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW49

Tech.

I’m far from the only one who found the Wikileaks ‘cablegate’ affair more than mildly disturbing. The US government were able to get the site shut down because ‘wikileaks.com’ is resolved via something called ‘DNS’ to a particular IP address of a computer connected to the internet. To prevent such shutdowns happening again, the bittorrent community is working on a decentralised .p2p top-level domain suffix. Awesome.

In a world of quick tweets and retweets, it’s good to know where the facts are. Check out Channel 4′s FactCheck blog (it’s also on Twitter, appropriately)

Don’t use Twitter’s version of retweets. It stops real conversation.

Viber is an iPhone app (Android, etc. coming soon) that integrates your existing contacts, without signup, to allow for Skype-like Voice-over-IP goodness. Engadget has an overview.

Concerned about people using things like Firesheep when you’re on an unsecured public network? Using a Mac? You need this.

Productivity & Inspiration

Seth Godin reckons you – yes, you – are the worst manager in the world. Why? Because at the end of the day we’re all really self-employed:

If you had a manager that talked to you the way you talked to you, you’d quit. If you had a boss that wasted as much as your time as you do, they’d fire her. If an organization developed its employees as poorly as you are developing yourself, it would soon go under.

Where and when are you most productive? For me, it’s leaning back slightly, coffee and water on-hand with music on. In other words, when I’m by myself. Granted, there’s times when I need to be with others for collaboration and the social element, but not 9am-5pm every day. Check out this TEDx video from Jason Fried, author of ReWork and this blog post. I really like his points about “trading in your work day for a series of work moments” by going to the office and the relationship between sleep and work. More about this at Michael Hyatt’s blog.

When I’ve got more information to synthesise than I can possibly handle, I print out stuff and let it ‘stew’ in my study. There’s a time when it all comes together. That’s why I really like this post which can be summed up as “don’t try too hard”. Strange, but true.

I found this post on three types of procrastination really interesting – especially the third: “we procrastinate because at some level we can’t accept the larger meaning of our actions.”

Getting people onboard, agreeing with you and motivated to do things on your behalf is an important life skill. Check out this post about the genius of Bill Clinton’s Reality Distortion Field (especially the video)

Education & Academic

ALT is taking over Becta’s ICT in Education Research Network discussion list (in association with Naace). Scroll down to List 4 here to join (or rejoin).

As a Philosophy graduate I do, of course, think that everyone should have some grounding in Philosophy. I’ll be using resources like this one with my children as they grow up.

On the subject of my children (one soon to be born, one four next month) I’m really concerned about the education they’ll receive in England. And I speak as a former teacher and senior leader in secondary schools with a wife who’s still a primary school teacher. What should my four year-old know? asked one worried mother. Check out the response:

She should know that she is loved wholly and unconditionally, all of the time.

He should know that he is safe and he should know how to keep himself safe in public, with others, and in varied situations. He should know that he can trust his instincts about people and that he never has to do something that doesn’t feel right, no matter who is asking. He should know his personal rights and that his family will back them up.

She should know how to laugh, act silly, be goofy and use her imagination. She should know that it is always okay to paint the sky orange and give cats 6 legs.

He should know his own interests and be encouraged to follow them. If he could care less about learning his numbers, his parents should realize he’ll learn them accidentally soon enough and let him immerse himself instead in rocket ships, drawing, dinosaurs or playing in the mud.

She should know that the world is magical and that so is she. She should know that she’s wonderful, brilliant, creative, compassionate and marvelous. She should know that it’s just as worthy to spend the day outside making daisy chains, mud pies and fairy houses as it is to practice phonics. Scratch that– way more worthy.

Tom Barrett has been using QR codes with in Early Years. Awesome.

Simon Bostock is organising a group (including me) to produce a Learning Experience Digest. The idea? To make some of that ‘web-hating stuff’ (PDFs and the like) searchable and linkable. We’re all going to contribute something every month. Do join us. Oh, and I just have to repost one of the images that Simon used to illustrate that post (click here if you don’t get it!)

Bonus: via Simon, the Boyer model of scholarship (scroll down to colourful table at the bottom). I think I’d like to have my finger in all of those pies please.

Data, Design & Infographics

It’s great when people do new things with webdesign. I’ve certainly not seen anything like this before! (scroll down)

I’ve seen this before, but was reminded of it again this week: You Suck At Powerpoint! (best viewed fullscreen – click on ‘Menu’)

David McCandless at Information is Beautiful posted a ‘thought piece’ this week on a potential hierarchy of visual understanding. What do you think? Is he onto something? I do.

McCandless has also looked at the effectiveness of those recent ‘personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’. Wow!

Misc.

Adam Curtis has an interesting BBC blog post on how the UK coalition government’s new ‘Behavioural Insights Unit’ is a return to Skinner’s behaviourism (and why that’s dangerous)

What would happen if you got a bit of every element in the periodic table and rammed them together at 99.99% of the speed of light? Probably nothing very interesting, as it turns out.

Lord Adair Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, reckons that what goes on in most financial centres such as Wall Street is ‘socially useless activity’. Great article in The New Yorker:

In effect, many of the big banks have turned themselves from businesses whose profits rose and fell with the capital-raising needs of their clients into immense trading houses whose fortunes depend on their ability to exploit day-to-day movements in the markets. Because trading has become so central to their business, the big banks are forever trying to invent new financial products that they can sell but that their competitors, at least for the moment, cannot. Some recent innovations, such as tradeable pollution rights and catastrophe bonds, have provided a public benefit. But it’s easy to point to other innovations that serve little purpose or that blew up and caused a lot of collateral damage, such as auction-rate securities and collateralized debt obligations.

You can ‘beatbox’ with Google Translate. No, seriously.

I love this collection of car-focused hack posts at Lifehacker. Especially the Nike+ central locking hack!

Quotations

You just can’t beat the person who won’t give up. (Babe Ruth)

Leap and the net will appear. (Julia Cameron)

Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy. (Sir Isaac Newton)

Only the guy who isn’t rowing has time to rock the boat. (Sartre)

The greatest motivational act one can do for another is to listen. (Roy E Moody)

(more quotations at my quotabl.es page)

Main image by me on Thursday in Berlin

JISC Mobile and Wireless Technologies Review

Doug Belshaw — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 10:14:22 +0000

If you’re reading this via email, RSS or a non Flash-enabled device the embedded media probably won’t work. My presentation is on Slideshare and the mobile review is accessible at http://mobilereview.jiscpress.org. Alternatively click here to view this post on the blog.

Since starting at JISC infoNet in April 2010 I’ve worked on a OER infoKit and a learning and teaching upgrade to the Digital Repositories infoKit, both with the talented Lou McGill. Back in July I wrote a successful proposal to embark on a mobile and wireless technologies review for the JISC e-Learning programme. It grew to be a much larger piece of work than I envisaged, probably because I enjoyed researching and writing it so much! I’ve interviewed, met and read about wonderful people doing fantastic things in mobile learning.

I’ve now finished that review and it stands at about the same length as my MA dissertation. Wow. You can access various versions of the mobile and wireless technologies review via http://mobilereview.jiscpress.org or directly below (click to enlarge):

In addition, here’s a presentation I’m making to a JISC Review Board meeting today about my findings (you might want to view it on Slideshare with the notes on!)

I’d love to hear your feedback on the review, either here or at the JISCPress site.

Things I Learned This Week – #48

Doug Belshaw — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 07:00:18 +0000

Offline this week I learned to buy more bags of winter grit than I think I need, to do exercise even when it’s too slippery to go running outside, and that a bad seated posture can give you headaches.

http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW48

Tech.

Want to test out Ubuntu Server? Do it for free, paid for by Canonical, here!

Wow. Rome ‘rebuilt in a day’ using Flickr photographs and a home PC (albeit with 4 graphics cards)

Roll audio you find around the web into your own podcast using Huffduffer.

Upgraded your iPad to 4.2? Missing the ability to lock your screen’s orientation? Here’s how to do it quickly and easily.

Imagine a layer on top of websites that you could write on and leave notes at for friends. It’s here. It’s called Glass.

Productivity & Inspiration

Recognising the situation you’re in is half-way to solving the problem. Are you a product of Digital Taylorism?

Seth Godin tells us (some of the places) where ideas come from.

Create then tweet.

Gandhi’s ‘be the change you want to see’ is one of the quotations by which I try to live. That’s why I found these 5 life lessons from the great man so interesting. I especially liked number 5:

“Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.”

Want to be creative and productive. Abandon crap.

Education & Academic

There’s lots of TED Talks. That’s why this list of some of them, divided by subject area, is pretty useful.

I’m a bit sad that Joss Winn has decided to quit Twitter. But not only did he explain why, but he posted how he works on the web. Some really interesting stuff here, and some things to emulate.

Summarity is a bookmarklet that auto-summarises text. Potentially useful in the classroom and for academic papers, although it didn’t do so well this this blog. Perhaps I write weirdly.

McDonalds is launching a degree in business management, accredited by Manchester Metropolitan University. Unbelievable, but true.

I wouldn’t bother reading Michael Gove’s Education White Paper. There’s a lot of hot air and propaganda and meaningless ‘we know that…’ statements. I’d just read the NASUWT’s response and this Guardian article instead. They tells you everything you need to know about this ‘assault on schools’.

Data, Design & Infographics

The 4_21 polytype is, apparently, “most geometrically complex and aesthetically beautiful structure in mathematics” and “models all interactions and transformations between known and postulated sub-atomic particles.” It’s so complex that machines can’t draw it (because they can’t draw perfect circles). This is hand-drawn to a tolerance of 1/10,000:

BBC News magazine has a really interesting article on diagrams that changed the world. I like their description of the power of a diagram being “to crystallise a new way of seeing the world”.

I love the music of Tycho. But I had no idea that Scott Hansen, the man behind the moniker, was such a talented graphic designer as well! Blog here.

Like many people, I’m super-excited and can’t wait for Tron Legacy to come out – especially as the music’s by Daft Punk. GeekDad did a post on the art of Tron Legacy. Un-frickin’-believable.

Nathan Yau of Flowing Data has a handy tutorial on bubble charts. I tell you, a good bubble chart, á la Hans Rosling is all kinds of awesome.

Misc.

How to count using only one hand:

I know I should expect it having seen some of them before and watching Mad Men, but 48 ads that would never be allowed today does really make you realise how much society’s changed. The pig slicing himself into ham is disturbingly funny though.

This VW advert never made it onto TV. As the father of a 3 year-old literally laughed out loud:

A plaque found above a men’s urinal at a store selling diamond engagement rings. Is it reverse psychology or reverse-reverse psychology?

Wow. Just wow. Ants imitate liquids – check this out!

Quotations

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least. (Goethe)

I would challenge you to a battle of wits, but I see you are unarmed. (Shakespeare)

Success or failure is caused more by mental attitude than by mental capacity. (Sir Walter Scott)

A problem is a chance for you to do your best. (Duke Ellington)

The way to succeed is to double your failure rate. (Thomas Watson, founder of IBM)

(more quotations at my quotabl.es page)

Main image CC BY paul (dex)