Things I Learned This Week – #22
I learned so much from attending the Thinking Digital conference for 2.5 days this week that I’ll have enough for several blog posts when I eventually go through my notes! What’s below is what I learned apart from those times that I was in the magnificent Sage in Gateshead. 🙂
http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW22
Tech.
- I haven’t got one (yet!) but if you’ve got an Apple iPad and want to display what’s on your screen to a projector, you need to jailbreak it and install Display Out via Cydia.
- Of course, you should be waiting for an Android tablet:
- Viewer2 looks like something that should be Mac-only but is actually Windows-only. What is it? An exceptionally cool way of organizing and tagging photos, that’s what!
- Want your Android phone to act like an iPhone on certain websites? Here’s how.
- You can probably tell I’m heavily considering going Android this week – here’s Lifehacker’s guide to the best bits of the 2.2 ‘Froyo’ operating system update.
Productivity & Inspiration
- Remember that 30th anniversary Pac-Man game Google put on its home page? It cost society $120,483,800 in lost productivity. Allegedly.
- Dan Meyer gets asked what we all get asked from time to time (except much more so, presumably). Namely: where do you find this stuff? The difference with Dan is that, instead of sighing and rolling his eyes, he’s actually answered such people in a quasi-philosophical way. Which is nice. 🙂
- Need to effect a behaviour change? You need The Behavior Wizard!
- Gardening can be geeky. So I might do some now. :-p
- Abraham Lincoln was a clever guy. Which is why these 7 Must-Read Life Lessons From Abraham Lincoln are, erm, a must-read… 😉
Education & Academic
Becta, the UK government agency for the promotion of technology in education, will be gone by November. Some people think this is A Bad Thing.- Wow. Donald Clark is right: educators do need to know about the Ebbinghaus ‘forgetting curve’!
- Here’s a list of 100 Google tricks that will save you time in school. You may already know some of them, but you know what they say about assumption… 😉
- TeachMeet is four years old. People have been discussing how to move the unconference idea forward.
- A UK school that was ‘Outstanding’ according to Ofsted last time around is now ‘Inadequate’ since become an Academy. I’d love to say I was surprised.
Data, Design & Infographics
- Below is a heat map of ‘touristyness’ based on density of Panoramio photos. Great idea!
- Twitalyzer produces nice graphics related to the stuff you do on Twitter (it thinks I’m generous, which is nice – and live in Doncaster, which is wrong…)
- At the conference I mentioned in the introduction, I got a chance to have a go at some origami. My efforts were feeble, which is why I have the utmost respect for these awesome examples of paper art!
- Twitter Streamgraphs produces some very pretty visuals of… guess what? 🙂
- I thought Walk With Me, a ‘soundtrack for walking’ was a great design idea (and it’s free!)
Misc.
- A 13-year old boy has become the youngest person to climb Everest. Turns out there were age restrictions in place on the Nepal side, so the team ascended using a more difficult route within China!
- Mark Twain requested that his autobiography not be published until 100 years after his death. It’s time.
- If Ian McKellen (Gandalf from Lord of the Rings) decided to be Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air for a day, this is what it would sound like:
- Stuff that happens in movies – you know, like a truck full of bees crashing and the bees escaping as a black cloud – actually happens every day…
- It was Towel Day last Tuesday. Check out what people around the world did to celebrate the life of Douglas Adams on Flickr!
Quotations
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. (Douglas Adams)
I never learned from a man who agreed with me. (Robert A. Heinlein)
Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards. (Vernon Law)
Luck is a dividend of sweat. (Ray Kroc)
There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the consequence for the cause. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Image CC BY-NC-SA ::hap
