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The beautiful use of statistics
If ever you wanted to enthuse someone about data and statistics then show them Hans Rosling’s TED presentation ‘New insights on poverty and life around the world.’ The stories you can tell with good data and visualisation tools are beautifully illustrated in this talk. And I love the phrase ‘grandma verified statistics.’ –> (Hat tip: D’Arcy Norman)
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Some thoughts on ‘Founders at work’ (or ‘why I’m not a millionaire’)
I recently read the fascinating ‘Founders at work’ by Jessica Livingstone, which has interviews with a range of tech start-up people. The insights are interesting, although I would say it’s hard to draw many general rules for success from the book. Here are some observations: Working with friends or people you find interesting is the starting point, not the technology or idea, which often comes later. This seems to me something we rarely take on board as individuals or organisations. Several interviewees said they met some people at college and knew they wanted to do something with them, but didn’t know what. It’s a young man’s game. Not many women…
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The edublog awards experience
The awards ceremony for the Eddies was on Saturday night in SecondLife. I’m not much of a SecondLifer, and besides, spending my Saturday night in a virtual world is probably grounds for divorce, so didn’t attend. I was up in the Best Ed Tech Support category, which was won by El Tinglado. Congratulations to them, I think it’s great to see a non-English blog winning – there is a tendency to first of all be North-America-centric about blogs and then English-speaking centric. I thought I’d reflect on the experience of being nominated. One of my informal roles at the Open University is blog evangelist, and as part of this I…
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My personal work/leisure/learning environment
Following on from the previous post I was thinking about how I have accrued a set of technologies around me. This wasn’t a deliberate policy – I didn’t think "I need to construct a personal working environment. Here are the functions I need…" Rather I have come across them, experimented with some, rejected some and kept others. It was only when considering what tools I couldn’t afford to lose that I realised I had ‘constructed’ something that might loosely be termed a working environment. I’ve mapped it out in Compendium, and here is the image (click on it to open up in a new window): I suspect my set of…
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What web 2.0 apps would you least like to lose?
This is sort of web 2.0 desert island discs (I know lots of people have done this before, e.g. here and here). Having heard stories of people having their Flickr or Facebook accounts pulled, I wondered what would be the service I would least like to lose? Here are my top three: Blog – okay, it’s not a single service as such and pre-dates the use of the term web 2.0, but it’s my list, so I’m bundling it in. As I said in my post of why educators should blog, I see the blog as the base camp for your online world. Everything else spreads from this identity. For…
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Status wars revisited
Back in September I posted about the status wars between Twitter and Facebook. At the time you couldn’t get Twitter to update your FB status. A couple of people had cracked it but been told by FB to remove their code. I argued that FB don’t want Twitter to update the status because that is the key to stickability for them. I was wrong in that Facebook does now allow Twitter to update status (I thought they wouldn’t allow it). But I was right in that this is a problem for Facebook stickability. At least that’s my experience, and it’s interesting to reflect on the subtle difference between your Facebook…
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Google reader recommendations
Like a lot of people I use Google reader, and find it very useful (I recently discovered the mobile version which is cool). They’ve added in a recommendations panel recently which lists some blogs they think you’ll find interesting. As the Google blog says: Interesting" here is determined by what other feeds you subscribe to, as well as your Web History data, all taken into account in an automated, anonymized fashion. The recommendations I’ve had have been pretty good, so whatever data mining technique they’re using it seems to be effective. It’s a cool feature and another step along the complete Googlisation of my life. It’s a good way for…
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The future of gifts is personalisation
It was the 40th birthday of a friend of mine recently and I was rather at a loss as to what to get them. I’ve known him for 20 years so I started thinking about our time in the eighties when we did some travelling together and spent weekends partying. The (often rather poor) music we listened to at the time came back to me, so I started compiling a playlist in iTunes with the idea of burning a CD. It then occurred to me that I could probably give the playlist as a gift, and yes you can: The gift went down well, and I had great fun compiling…
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The Cape Town declaration – some thoughts and suggestions
A group of experts, charities, commercial organisations and interested parties got together in Cape Town to look at the issue of openness in education. The output is this declaration. Before coming on to criticism of it, here are some of the key points: Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. We could argue that, but they’re right to bring attention to the growing OER movement. They are also planting the seeds of a…
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Google answers existential question ‘Where am I?’
Tony has a post on Google’s new My Location service. It uses mobile phone cell tower identification (so no GPS required) to give you your location on Google Maps for mobile. Reminds me of my favourite Einstein story – he once rang his wife Elsa and asked ‘where am I? And where should I be?’ If only he’d had Google…
