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Things I Learned This Week – #20

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

This weekend I’m in Edinburgh with my wife, Hannah, to celebrate 10 years of being together (hence this being a  bit shorter than usual!) I’ve learned a lot about many things over those years – but that’s a whole other post… :-p

I learned this week that no-one reads Twitter bios. Not really, anyway. It took over 5 days for someone to notice that I’d changed mine from something useful and descriptive to ‘Middle Eastern arms dealer’. 😉

Also, people are very helpful when you say you’re affiliated with JISC. Oh, and I’ve learned how to do the Super-Hula properly on Wii Fit, you’ll be pleased to find out… 😉

http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW20

Tech.

  • Have a guess what Free-OCR.com does? Handy! 😀
  • CommonCraft have produced a video explaining Augmented Reality. Shame you can’t embed it elsewhere… 🙁
  • I am genuinely more excited about this tablet computer than I am about the Apple iPad. Why? It’s got a Pixel Qi transreflective screen for a start…
  • “The future is here. It’s just unevenly distributed” William Gibson is famously quoted as saying. Robert Scoble witnessed the idea first-hand this week and blogged about it in a bit of a useful link-fest.
  • Need to add widgets and stuff to your website and don’t know how to code? try Stiqr!

Productivity & Inspiration

Do you often find ideas that change everything in a windowless conference room, with bottled water on the side table and a circle of critics and skeptics wearing suits looking at you as the clock ticks down to the 60 minutes allocated for this meeting?

If not, then why do you keep looking for them there?

The best ideas come out of the corner of our eye, the edge of our consciousness, in a flash. They are the result of misdirection and random collisions, not a grinding corporate onslaught. And yet we waste billions of dollars in time looking for them where they’re not.

A practical tip: buy a big box of real wooden blocks. Write a key factor/asset/strategy on each block in big letters. Play with the blocks. Build concrete things out of non-concrete concepts. Uninvite the devil’s advocate, since the devil doesn’t need one, he’s doing fine.

Have fun. Why not? It works.

Education & Academic

  • Doug Holton doesn’t think Jean Piaget, John Dewey, Maria Montessori, or Paulo Friere would get published in most academic journals today. He has a point.
  • 68% of students at Edinburgh University have contract mobile phones with 49% owning ‘smartphones’. Kind of dispels some myths. More here.

Data, Design & Infographics

Misc.

  • Everyone likes free stuff. And most people like Twitter. So, Mashable’s post 5 Ways to Get Free Stuff On Twitter is a solid-gold winner… 😉
  • An unexpected, but fitting tribute, to our great, glorious, departed, unelected leader:

Quotations

It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out, it’s the pebble in your shoe. (Muhammad Ali)

Effective communication is 20% what you know and 80% how you feel about what you know. (Jim Rohn)

Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive that is Youer than YOU! (Dr.Seuss)

Conflict cannot survive without your participation. (Wayne Dyer)

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. (Henry Ford)

Main image CC BY photojenni

Things I Learned This Week – #19

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Offline this week I learned that children really do just cry for no particular reason, democracy is a very fragile thing, and that even just a couple of cakes and some red wine can throw put your productivity and weight-loss regime back to square one… 😮

http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW19

(64 bookmarks)

Tech.

  • Need to mount an NTFS drive under Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard? It’s a (hidden) built-in feature, but this makes it easier!
  • Google have announced that all Google services will be available to Google Apps users. Which, if I was in the habit of using the term ‘game-changer’ I would be using right now.
  • So the iPhone can now be made to run the Android operating system. If you’re asking “Why?” the answer is 37.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJj0kHQgC9w&w=640&h=385]

Productivity & Inspiration

  • It turns out I’ve got lots of koans:

A koan… is a fundamental part of the history and lore of Zen Buddhism. It consists of a story, dialogue, question, or statement; the meaning of which cannot be understood by rational thinking, yet it may be accessible by intuition. One widely known koan is “Two hands clap and there is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?”

…

English-speaking non-Zen practitioners sometimes use k?an to refer to an unanswerable question or a meaningless statement. However, in Zen practice, a koan is not meaningless, and teachers often do expect students to present an appropriate response when asked about a koan. Even so, a koan is not a riddle or a puzzle. Appropriate responses to a koan vary, as different teachers may demand different responses to a given koan, and answers may vary by circumstance. One of the most common recorded comments by a teacher on a disciple’s answer is: “Even though that is true, if you do not know it yourself it does you no good.”[who?] The master is looking not for an answer in a specific form, but for evidence that the disciple has grasped the state of mind expressed by the koan itself.

  • I’m going to be checking out flowr over the next few days/weeks. Looks like it could be a good productivity and workflow tool for organizations. And it’s got an iPhone app!
  • Instapaper is a great service. I’m really glad I came across these 7 ways to make it rock even harder though!
  • Finally! A blog for people who like Open Source stuff (especially Linux) but don’t find patching kernels every other day fun. Productivity using OSS FTW!
  • There are many ways to be ‘rich’. This Dumb Little Man post reminds us of some of the others. I prefer being ‘Time Rich’. 😀

Education & Academic

  • Here’s another article about an esoteric, elite school doing something innovative around ‘unlearning’. To me, that’s not interesting. What’s interesting is when whole states or countries do it and things become embedded.
  • Videolectures.net has a whole host of free, online, useful, um, video lectures. The clue’s in the title, I suppose… 😉
  • I now know what ‘stigmergic’ means thanks to this article:

Under stigmergic organization, any individual can formulate any individual innovation he sees fit, and make it universally available, and any other individual or group of individuals can adopt it as they see fit. If there is disagreement within a group as to whether or not to adopt it, they can fork and replicate two different versions of the same project. Every single “collective” is the product of the unanimous agreement of the individuals making it up. And every single contribution is modular, to be adopted or not adopted by unanimous consent in every discrete grouping out there.

  • The Pearson Foundation published a report this week entitled The Digital World of Young Children: Emergent Literacy. More fuel for the bonfire of definitions of digital literacy I’ll be making in my thesis… :-p
  • A New York Times article entitled Antisocial Networking? actually comes to the conclusion that it’s too soon to tell “whether all that texting, instant messaging and online social networking allows children to become more connected and supportive of their friends — or whether the quality of their interactions is being diminished without the intimacy and emotional give and take of regular, extended face-to-face time.” Quelle surprise.

Data, Design & Infographics

  • Nathan Yau’s got a enlightening post on the history of infographics over at FlowingData. They’re big drivers of online traffic, donchaknow.
  • An infographic I found extremely useful this week was a flowchart by the BBC entitled ‘What happens after the election?’ It did exactly what such things should do – tell me what I need to know, quickly and effectively!
  • There’s some great graphics in this post to explain how to communicate your ideas more effectively:

  • Looking for a well-designed yet functional case to house your iPad? I reckon I’ll be going for a DODOcase when I get mine. Review here.

Misc.

  • Ever had a dream where you’re in a sinking car? I have and I’d prefer to be able to escape if it happened for real. Which is why this was handy, even if it is very unlikely I’ll ever need to use the information for real…
  • The Met Office posted some great photos from a test flight last week to make sure it was safe for planes to fly after another ashcloud from the Icelandic volcano. This one’s my favourite:

  • Amazon has put together a page that aggregates the most-highlighted sections of books by Kindle users.
  • Google Analytics now has an application gallery featuring all kinds of awesome ways of visualizing your data. 🙂
  • There is actually a difference between things that are simple, complicated, complex and chaotic. Fortunately, this post by Harold Jarche includes an explanation, amongst other things!

Quotations

To believe a thing is impossible is to make it so. (French proverb)

Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army. (Edward Everett Hale)

There’s only one way to succeed in anything and that is to give everything. (Vince Lombardi)

There’s not the least thing can be said or done, but people will talk and find fault. (Dante Alighieri)

..and a lengthier one quoted by The Art of Manliness this week:

To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.

To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.

To reach out is to risk involvement,

To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.

To place your ideas and

dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss.

To love is to risk not being loved in return,

To live is to risk dying,

To hope is to risk despair,

To try is to risk failure.

But risks must be taken because

the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.

The person who risks nothing, does nothing,

has nothing, is nothing.

– William Arthur Ward (1921-1994)

Main image CC BY-NC Rain Rabbit

Things I Learned This Week – #18

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Out in the ‘real world’ (if there is such a thing) this week I learned that more people than you would imagine still smoke, that dandelions are stubborn little beggars, and that Wii Fit comes over all nicey-nice but then tells you you’re overweight. The cheek! :-p

http://delicious.com/dajbelshaw/TILTW18

(36 bookmarks)

Tech.

  • Steve Jobs doesn’t like Flash. Turns out he’s got six good reasons why. Some people have conspiracy theories. And some people think that Flash is fundamental to the internet – and produce images like this:

  • If you’re looking to get started with app development for a range of mobile platforms, PhoneGap is “an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Build apps in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of core features in iPhone/iTouch, iPad, Google Android, Palm, Symbian and Blackberry SDKs.” Handy! 🙂

Productivity & Inspiration

  • In a great example of unexpected time being put to good use, some of those stranded due to the closing of airspace following the volcanic ashcloud got together to produce a magazine. Inspiring!
  • I’m still testing GQueues, but it could be the holy grail of task management, given its integration with Google Accounts…
  • Who’s got the right to judge your work? Only those whom you allow to, answers Seth Godin.
  • Alternaview featured a post this week about coming up with your own List of Best Practices. Awesome idea! 😀
  • I’d be surprised if you weren’t already doing these 7 Habits of Highly Excellent People, to be honest.

Education & Academic

Find time to think during the day. They pay me to worry. It’s OK to stare at the wall and think about how to manage change. I have 70 people who work at King. Even the most centered has three bad days each school year. Multiply that by 70 people and that’s 210 bad days, which is more than the 180 school days in a year. So, me, I am never going to have a good day — just get over it.

  • Academics are increasingly judged by how many times the articles they produce are cited – a process known as ‘bibliometrics’. It sounds intuitive and positive, but actually can be undermining of the very things academic should be doing. Check out Bibliometrics as Weapons of Mass Citation for further explanation.
  • Thinking of using Google Apps as an eportfolio solution? Looks Dr Helen Barrett’s done all the spadework for you!
  • Wondering where the money spent on education in the UK goes? The BBC explains (could do with some infographics!) :-p
  • Harold Jarche:

Informal learning needs will continue to grow as more work requires access to contextual knowledge, as Robert Kelley showed over a 20 year study of knowledge workers:

“What percentage of the knowledge you need to do your job is stored in your own mind?”

1986 ~ 75%.
1997 ~ 20%
2006 ~ 10%

We cannot train individuals for that 90% but we can support access to knowledge and expertise across the enterprise. This is an opportunity.  There is much experience available in the fields of knowledge management, organizational design, human-computer interaction and information design that is valid and can be put to good use.

Data, Design & Infographics

  • This graphic by David McCandless ended up adorning his book Information is Beautiful. It shows what colours are associated with in different cultures. As you’d expect, white is associated with ‘truce’, red with ‘passion’ and yellow with ‘illness’ pretty much universally:

  • A cityscape made out of staples. Quality.

The making of Ephemicropolis from Peter Root on Vimeo.

Misc.

  • Why would you vote for David Cameron when he can’t even do the hokey-cokey?

  • Looking for a walk down memory lane and a laugh? Check out Good Show Sir, a blog dedicated to ‘only the worst sci-fi/fantasy book covers’!
  • Will Richardson produces the now-standard review of ebook readers. Explain that you love books and have lots of them. Explain why you bought an ebook reader. List the things you can do with an ebook reader that you can’t with a book. Say that books will never be replaced with ebook readers but that the latter will augment the former. Done.
  • This lizard has two heads. The larger one tries to attack the smaller one. There’s a parallel/metaphor/life lesson in there somewhere… 😉
  • Anyone recognise the thinking of Dilbert’s boss in this cartoon?

Quotations

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet. (Aristotle)

Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it. (Henry David Thoreau)

The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. (G.K. Chesterton)

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else. (Judy Garland)

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts. (Edward R. Murrow)

Main image CC BY-NC-SA fish2000


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