Things I Learned This Week – #11

As this is published I’ll be in Kizilcahamam, Turkey, with my long-time partner-in-crime Nick Dennis. We here (there?) at the request of EUROCLIO and are doing a presentation followed by a couple of workshops around technology in History education. 🙂

http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW11
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As a consequence of being in Turkey between Thursday and Sunday, I’ve had to complete this post before I travelled on Thursday . So this is more like Things I Learned Between Monday and Wednesday This Week and is the reason it’s slightly shorter than usual… 😉

Tech.

• Just as it took a long time for Bluetooth to catch on, it would seem about the time for QR codes is almost nigh. It’s something I blogged about almost four years ago now, but the support structures and familiarity are there now. James Clay blogged about Microsoft Tags this week, which seem to be more-easily-recognisable by mobile devices.
• Lifehacker has a guide to creating your own personal QR code (like the one to the right)
• Papa Sangre is a game for the iPhone coming out at the end of April. As Ewan McIntosh put it, it’s the world’s first video game without any video. It’s completely high-definition audio-only!

Productivity & Inspiration

• Dumb Little Man has a great post entitled 10 Amazing Life Lessons You Can Learn From Albert Einstein. I totally agree with the advice about following your curiosity and making mistakes!
• Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time and resources available.
• As this Get Rich Slowly post points out, clutter doesn’t just lead to diminished productivity, but can hurt you financially as well!

Education & Academic

• Many educators in the USA attended TEDxNYED and posted their thoughts and reflections. I found those by Dan Meyer and Alan Levine most useful and interesting.
• Want your students to blog, but not sure about the topic? Try this list of 10 ideas from Lee Kolbert. 🙂
• Artichoke has an interesting post on curriculum with some timely questions about education, social networking and technology.

Data, Design & Infographics

• The BBC has a great visual explanation of how the internet works. I shall be using this to enlighten people in future!
• Google have launched Google Public Data Explorer which visualizes publicly-accessible data in visually-delightful ways.
• Tim Berners-Lee on how open data has spread and is being used in ways the people putting it on the web couldn’t have imagined:

Misc.

• The recent earthquake in Chile was so strong it moved the capital city, Santiago, an entire 10 feet to the west!
• There’s a website for everything on the internet, including those who want to commit adultery. An analysis by one of these websites found that those women most likely to cheat are teachers and those men most likely to cheat are doctors. Estate agents (unsurprisingly, to me) featured in the Top 5 for both men and women.
• Europa Film Treasures is a free archive of classic European films. Which is nice.

Quotations

Think like a person of action and act like a person of thought. (Anonymous)

Why you gotta act like you know when you don’t know? It’s okay if you don’t know everything. (Ben Folda)

Quality means doing it right when no one is looking. (Henry Ford)