Michel Thomas iPhone app, and a reason for learning 'cos' in maths

Michel Thomas iPhone app - petal math
Originally uploaded by BERG Studio

I admire pretty much everything the many Matts and others at Schooloscope a few weeks ago and, now, a suite of Michel Thomas language learning apps for iPhone.

What caught my eye in the behind-the-scenes making-of blog post was the graphic, opposite, showing how Matt (Brown) designed a "procedural petal", the captivating animated flower that flows in colour with Thomas' hypnotic voice. It's the first time since quitting maths class aged 16 that I've seen how and why you'd use cos.

I was forever that annoying kid who'd always ask Mr Cooper [swap for your own maths teacher's name] "why do we have to learn this?". Rarely did I get an answer beyond, "you might need it one day", and Mr Cooper hadn't picked up on his colleague Mr Walker's fascinating with programming BBC computers and early Macintoshes. Had I known that understanding cos could've helped me get a job with BERG building iPhone apps for Michel Thomas then I'd have stuck it out to the bitter end.

Alas, I didn't, and instead became a teacher of French and German, which means I can but admire and now attempt Spanish with BERG's beautifully produced homage to Michel.

If you want to learn language fast before heading off this summer holiday, then I reckon the boys' app is a great place to start - see the sample video below.



Notwithstanding this, please do check out my good friend Mark Pentleton's award-winning, iTunes-chart-busting Coffee Break language series. It's ace, fast for learning, too. It's just missing procedural petals.

Bing Destination Maps: Simplifying beautifully

Bing have offered up some lovely 'sketchy' maps as part of their Destination Maps project. Seemingly covering just the US for the moment, these maps reduce the complexity of a city grid or LA sprawl into a back-of-the-napkin sketch outlining the main routes and turns.

I think these would be great for students (or playful adults) wanting to make pirate treasure maps, 'olde worlde' effect documents or simplified materials for prospective elementary students coming to high school etc etc... If we ever get formalities sorted out (it seems some days like a real uphill struggle) this would be an ace way to map out the BeCuriousTour.

I smile at the juxtaposition between these sketches and the complexity of the 3D-scapes of Bing Maps, the ability to map inside buildings and see user generated photo content and live in-map video streams that Blaise Aguera y Arcas demo-ed at TED earlier this year, below.

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• Bing Map Apps SDK Release, Site Enhancements and New Platform APIs (bing.com)
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• Bing Maps...now with Worldwide Telescope integration (blogs.msdn.com)
• Bing Maps launches ability to embed Twitter maps on your site - #sxsw example (blogs.msdn.com)

Links for 2010-06-05 [del.icio.us]

• HOW TO: Organize Your Contacts for Networking Success
  Here is how to create a basic contact management strategy, stay connected and organized from your desktop to your phone, and give you some insight onto how to expand your network.
• Yahoo! Address Book
  Allows you to import your Facebook contacts' email addresses and phone numbers into your address book.
• How to Export Email Addresses of all your Facebook Friends
  Go to address.yahoo.com and click the Facebook icon. A login dialog should pop-up, just sign-in with your Facebook credentials and within seconds, you entire Facebook address book will be available inside your Yahoo Mail Account. Once the import is done, click this link to download a CSV file with the email addresses of all your Facebook contacts to your desktop.
• My Contacts: Export LinkedIn Connections | LinkedIn
  If you would like to back up your LinkedIn connections to Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo! Address Book, or Mac OS Address Book, please select your application and file type from the menu below, then click “Export.”.
• More thoughts on Six Spaces and transgression « TEST
  What is remarkable about the Epic Boobs and Facebook transgressions is that they are gradual and hard for the person involved to track. In an analogue media world, the transgression between registers is sharp and obvious – a newspaper would have had to contact you to get a copy of a photo for them to use, and your personal photographs couldn’t become a global property without you knowing about it. We now live in an age where transgression is insidious and invisible, where users can’t understand the potential risks of sharing until it’s caused them significant pain.
• The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook
  The data for this chart was derived from my interpretation of the Facebook Terms of Service over the years, along with my personal memories of the default privacy settings for different classes of personal data. The population sizes are statistics from Google, the Facebook Data Team, and wild guesses based on what seemed reasonable to me.
• Imaginatik's Idea Central - the Collaborative Innovation and Idea Management software leader
  Idea Central is a robust and scalable web-based application for Collaborative Innovation and Idea Management. It is an enterprise crowdsourcing platform that allows organizations to maximize the benefits from the Collective Intelligence of their employees, customers, suppliers and other third parties. Idea Central leverages the combined brainpower of an organization to boost revenue growth and profitability, increase collaboration, build sustainability, and streamline process improvements. Its recent releases have been developed in deep collaboration with Imaginatik’s customers.
• What is MagCloud? | MagCloud
  MagCloud, the revolutionary new self-publishing web service from HP, is changing the way ideas, stories, and images find their way into peoples’ hands in a printed magazine format. Whether you are a novice or experienced publisher, MagCloud offers you a way to create commercial quality magazines, printed on demand with no upfront costs or minimum print runs. MagCloud is creating new ways to bring consumers and publishers together in a web-based marketplace where choice, flexibility and print on demand are the cornerstones of the community.
• DIY Moleskine Pen Holder
  DK's mum's sewing project downloaded 10k times over a few days.
• How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking - Peter Bregman - Harvard Business Review
  Doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we're getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40%. We don't actually multitask. We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process.
  
  You might think you're different, that you've done it so much you've become good at it. Practice makes perfect and all that.
  
  But you'd be wrong. Research shows that heavy multitaskers are less competent at doing several things at once than light multitaskers. In other words, in contrast to almost everything else in your life, the more you multitask, the worse you are at it. Practice, in this case, works against you.

Links for 2010-06-03 [del.icio.us]

• Countries with top Facebook penetration to population | Facebakers.com
  In figures we can see that first position with highest penetration is occupied by Iceland with 55.12%. If you read newspapers you know that citizens of Iceland aren’t your target because they don’t have money (or at least their banks don't). United Kingdom is sixth in penetration with 38.31% and USA is tenth with 35.92%. Having in mind salaries in these countries and population you can seriously work with penetration because in these cases it makes sense to advertise/to sell something.
• Facebook Statistics, Application Statistics, Page Statistics | Facebakers.com
  Facebakers.com is a portal run by Candytech to deliver up-to-date data and statistics about Facebook - including Facebook statistics of users by countries, top Facebook Page data, and top Facebook Applications data. We love baking things for Facebook, and the portal Facebakers.com is a way of showing this.
• Workwithus Fundraiser Plus - Workwithus.org
  From online donations to sponsorship and personal fundraising pages, Fundraiser Plus is quick, easy and fun to use.
• Montreal Start Up
  If you think you might have a great venture for us and you are willing to grow it in Montreal, or if you share our passion for early stage investment and would like to invest alongside us we want to hear from you!
• John Stokes | Montreal Start Up
  John co-founded Montreal Start Up in November 2007. He is currently Managing Partner of the Fund and sits on the boards of Beyond the Rack, Book Oven, Oneeko, Emotify, KeenKong, Mobilito and Standout Jobs.
  
  John has more than 15 years of experience, both as a founder and an investor, in start-up, early stage and growth companies.
• (Future) Home of the Web ... in Montreal ! | NOTMAN HOUSE
  Notman House will be an attractive and energizing location for the web entrepreneurs of Montreal to develop and iterate their business ideas and beta products.
• THE HUB | HOME
  The Hub in Gateshead helps startups collaborate
• at the Stephen Lawrence Centre - missionmaker
  We have been using Immersive Education's MissionMaker software at the centre for the past two years and love it! This site has been created to showcase the games created by the schools in Greenwich and to promote the teaching and learning.
• @ ADMS: Murdoch’s Speech In Full: ‘If A Wind Blows, Ride It’ | paidContent:UK
  At the opening speech of the first Abu Dhabi Media Summit, Rupert Murdoch is exhorting Arab nations to open up and let creative talents flow.
• Welcome To Trojan Mice
  Much change is of the 'Trojan horse' variety. At the top of the organisation a decision is taken to introduce a strategic change programme and consultants or an internal team are commissioned to plan it down to the very last detail. The planned changes are then presented at a grand event (the Trojan Horse) amid much loud music, bright lights and dry ice. More often than not, however, a few weeks later the organisation will have settled back into its usual ways and rejected much of the change. This is usually because the change was too great to be properly understood and owned by the workforce.
  
  trojanmice, on the other hand, are small, well focused changes, which are introduced on an ongoing basis in an inconspicuous way. They are small enough to be understood and owned by all concerned but their effects can be far-reaching. Collectively a few trojanmice will change more than one Trojan horse ever could.
• Liquid Agency Brand Exchange » Knowing. Making. Doing.
  The problem with this process is that what you “know” is limited to either “what is” or “what was,” while innovation is all about “what could be.” It’s impossible to know what could be without the process of design. To generate new ideas, the design process inserts a middle step: making.
• The Ideas Bank
  Browse opportunities, connect with people and bank ideas for others to see, its all here on the ideasBank and it's FREE to use.
  
  The ideasBank is a funded project to provide ideas and opportunities to people in the North East of England. It is also about creating a community of enterprising people.
• The King George Hotel: Welcome to our Downtown San Francisco Boutique Hotel
  Experience a downtown San Francisco hotel at the King George. In the center of Union Square, the King George Hotel is a unique boutique hotel in San Francisco offering comfortable accommodations with a European flair at affordable rates. Our convenient San Francisco hotel is a short walk away from restaurants, shopping, theaters, the Moscone Convention Center and San Francisco’s world famous cable car line to the iconic Fisherman’s Wharf.

Links for 2010-06-02 [del.icio.us]

• Invitation to the Cloud Chamber « Cliff Yates
  The Cloud Chamber is an online meeting space to share ideas, skills, poems and experience about writing poetry in different disciplines. Contributors will be poets, educators, academics and researchers who have an interest in the way in which poetry can play a vital part in the process of learning, for example in enabling young people to respond imaginatively to the world around them. The Cloud Chamber will create a network of people who are involved in poetry developments throughout the UK. As well as enabling them to share skills and experience, it may also lead to further collaborative work.
• Weblogg-ed » Nervous Writing / Well-Trained Teachers
  “You know, something like 1.3 million people have bought an iPad and I doubt any of them have gotten any “training” on how to use it.” The people in the room half chuckled, but one woman said “Our teachers won’t do anything with technology unless we give them training.”
  
  Sigh.

Links for 2010-06-01 [del.icio.us]

• Museum of London - Street Museum
  Augmented reality history exploration of London
• Trapped in the Closet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "Trapped in the Closet" is a story set of 22 chapters featuring one melodic theme with varying lyrics released by contemporary R&B singer R. Kelly in 2005 and 2007, which relate an ongoing narrative, which Kelly and Jive Records promoted by releasing each chapter to radio stations one at a time. This also serves as the first official single off R. Kelly's album TP.3 Reloaded.

GETinsight: "Practical strategy" for school leaders

Strategy is putting a vision into practice, so "practical strategy" is an aphorism if ever there were one. But so few education strategies actually lead to the intended outcome on the ground, and the series of blog posts and audio discussions I'm facilitating on the GETinsight platform is intended to help school leaders become better translators of vision into action.

So far I've done three blog posts with two of our live webchat discussions now live to hear back. As more get published, I'll update and repost this blog entry to keep you up-to-date:

• An Adoption Strategy for Digital Media in Schools Turning Great Individual Practice into the Norm
  Blog Post   |   Webchat summary and archive
  
  
• Games-Based Learning for Leaders: How Video Games Can Improve Literacy in One Semester
  Blog Post   |   Webchat summary and archive
  
  
• Open Professional Development: How to Motivate your Staff to Create their Own Learning Experiences
  Blog Post   |   Webchat archive to follow

Next week will be a follow-on from Open Professional Development, where we look at how to crowdsource policy and planning. If you have any ideas, examples or contributions you'd like to make to the blog post, please feel free to add them as a comment here or send an email.

Pic from Dave.

Links for 2010-05-26 [del.icio.us]

• Trendrr
  Track qualitative, quantitative, influence, sentiment, location and competitive trends in real-time and over time.
• Kurrently - What's everyone thinking?
  Search across Facebook AND Twitter in real time
• Fragomen
  Pros in sorting out working Visas

Are you on a Consensus Project?

Links for 2010-05-25 [del.icio.us]

• - The Obvious? - A blast from my past
  I find it increasingly paradoxical that the "grown up" world of suits and offices and job titles is the one that encourages you to remain childish. You are not really encouraged to say what you think, you pass responsibility up to the grown ups above you and you are rarely able to be held accountable for your decisions.
  
  On the other hand in the supposedly childish online world of forums, blogs and wikis you have to be prepared to say what you think, be prepared to stand by it and jusfity it in a debate and if you have fucked up your written thinking is there for all to see forever.
  
  I wonder when the grown ups will get this?

#tmfuture: TeachMeet hits its fourth birthday: Coming of Age

TeachMeet is entering its fifth year and the unconference for teachers, by teachers has helped hundreds - maybe thousands, in fact - to try out something new, alter the way they already teach and learn, join a community of innovative educators or completely transform their way of working.

The hope was that the model would spread. It has, but as those who have created and helped pull TeachMeet together over the past four years, we want to see it spread further, deeper and with increasing quality of input from practitioners. This post outlines how we think we might manage this. This is the beginnings of a conversation with those who care about TeachMeet. Add your views in the form of any blog post or comment or tweet - tag it #tmfuture

What are the goals of TeachMeet?
TeachMeet was originally designed to:

• Take thinking away from the formal, often commercialised conference floor, and provide a safe place for anyone to pitch their practice
• Provide a forum for more teachers to talk about real learning happening in real places, than one-hour conference seminar slots allow
• Showcase emerging practice that we could all aim to undertake; sales pitches not allowed
• Be all about the Teach, with only a nod towards tech that paved the way for new practice.
• Provoke new ways of sharing our stories: PowerPoint was banned. We wanted people to tell stories in ways that challenged them, and the audience
• Empower the audience to critique, ask questions and probe, all online, through SMS or, later, Twitter.

Over the years, these 'rules' have altered, leading to some great innovations, others less so. The answer to "What is a TeachMeet?" has become a myriad of meanings, some pretty far off the original goals. We need to help and support people to organise, run and contribute to events that build on previous ones. We need to make TeachMeet as accessible to newbies as it was in 2005. We need TeachMeet to once more find its focus.

Supporting the "infectiousness" of TeachMeets

Organising TeachMeets should not be easy. Taking part in them should be. But more support is needed for organisers:

• Sponsorship is hard if there's no bank account into which funds can be sent
• Without sponsorship, any event over 30 people becomes tricky to organise while also giving people a special night of learning, the time, space and mood that gets people over their self-conscious selves
• Paying for refreshments and venues is impossible if there's no organisation to pay them the precise sum.
• The best TeachMeets provide social space, social activity, entertaining MCs, good refreshments, good online coverage and some form of online 'conclusion' - this needs coordinating by the organiser(s), but it's not a skill everyone will have the first time around.
• We've got a superb opportunity to curate the best bits from all these TeachMeets that are happening weekly - this needs a degree of oversight.

A means to make TeachMeet more sustainable, easier to use for sponsors and organisers, and have the ability to do something spectacular
TeachMeet is owned by the community that shape it - but there needs to be a body to manage sponsorship and sponsors, and provide support for new organisers so that they maintain the TeachMeet goals. We assume that if someone is organising a 'TeachMeet' they would like to emulate the success of those popular early TeachMeets, and better-supported national conference ones (e.g. SLF and BETT).

What would support look like? (is this for new organisers of events? support from the TeachMeet body?)

• Seeking of sponsorship all year round - including ways and means to get your message to as many teachers as possible
• Brokerage of sponsorship - i.e. one place sponsors and those seeking sponsorship can come together, in a transparent manner
• Recommendation of onsite support (good venues at discounted rates/free, A/V, event organisation [for bigger venues], catering etc)
• Suggestions for various formats that have worked in the past
• Mentoring from previous TeachMeet leaders including on-the-night help
• Featuring of content and promotion of the event in a timely manner on an aggregated, higher profile TeachMeet site
• A group calendar so that events can be seen by geography and date
• Promotion of TeachMeet through international and national events, using contacts of existing TeachMeeters
• In-event publicity (e.g. if you plan an event at a regional ICT day or national event, then we can help broker paper materials for insertion into packs etc)

But, above all, TeachMeet is reaching a point of saturation in the UK - things are going really well in terms of enthusing teachers about their own learning. We have a great opportunity to carry over a small proportion of the sponsorship and contributions towards creating a TeachMeet culture in countries where teacher professional development in this way is still blocked by barriers physical, financial or cultural. This is just one idea, harboured for a long time but unable to realise in the current setup.

This body can take the form of

• A Limited company (with a Director and shareholders)
• A Charitable Limited Company, with a board of directors and voting rights for fellow 'shareholders' (we could work out some way of people being 'awarded' shares based on [non-financial] involvement?)
• A Social Enterprise, perhaps formed as a Limited Company (see more information on what this means and how it might work (pdf))
• A Charity (this feels like a lot more red tape to pull through and perhaps not entirely necessary)

As we take things forward we invite you to contribute your ideas and thoughts to make things work smoothly. We want you to comment, probe and make your own suggestions before the end of June, using the tag #tmfuture

Pic from Ian Usher

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• GETinsight - Open Professional Development (edu.blogs.com)
• TeachMeet Student Editions - round 2 (stuartmeldrum.co.uk)

Links for 2010-05-24 [del.icio.us]

• Electronic Travel Authority (ETA) to New Zealand
  The Electronic Travel Authority (ETA) is equivalent to a visa, but there is no stamp or label in your passport and there is no need for you to visit an New Zealand diplomatic office to submit an application.
• Internet Visa Services Australia
  If you are planning a holiday visit or a short business trip to Australia, you will need to apply for either a visa or an ETA (Electronic Travel Authority). An ETA will let you spend up to three months in Australia.
• The Little Books - Little Books written by litttle people!
  Little Books allows young people to become published authors whilst having fun writing.
• An Internet Where Everyone Knows You’re a Dog — Crooked Timber
  Facebook appears to be deliberately and systematically making it harder and harder for people to vary their self-presentations according to audience. I think that this broad tendency (if it continues and spreads) impoverishes public life.
• How Social Media is Changing Government Agencies
  A good recent example of this is how the team of energy companies and government agencies responding to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico are putting these strategies to use.
  ---
  On April 3rd, Detective Chief Inspector Mark Payne of the West Midlands Police in the United Kingdom used Tweetdeck (TweetDeck) to keep an eye on demonstrations involving two controversial and politically opposed groups; the English Defence League and Unite Against Fascism. He checked out Facebook (Facebook) rumors of stabbings and vandalism, and posted on Twitter when the information was found to be false — potentially quelling violent backlash. “This is groundbreaking stuff for policing in the UK. We have used social media as a broadcast platform during protests in the past, but we have not had immediate updates from officers on the ground, enabling two-way conversations,” Payne wrote after the event.
• Mango Marketing - Education PR and Marketing

#tmfuture: Wednesday night live web chat

I'm using my regular monthly webchat on GETinsight to talk about how teachers and school leaders can create more informal, more worthwhile forms of professional development along the TeachMeet model. It starts on Wednesday, May 26 - 12:00 p.m PST, 3:00 p.m. EST, 8:00 p.m. British Summer Time.

Given the post yesterday from many of those who have hosted them in the past, discussing how we meet some of the challenges in getting things off the ground for a TeachMeet (including the pain of teachers having to invent headed notepaper to pay for venues or refreshments), the platform will be an ideal one to take some of the discussion off Twitter and into some live chat and discussion, talking about how formal things need to get in terms of pulling an event together, the tricky elements and the parts that work best left to local groups.

If you want to learn more about the background of TeachMeet there's a great article written by Iain from the GTCS magazine.

The 45 minute format will be:

• short introduction from me on where TeachMeets came from and why;
• what the point of them is (as opposed to traditional conference type events);
• discussion around some of the challenges faced: starting off a local event, dealing with sponsors, venues and AV techs, understanding and translating the vision into local circumstances.
• more discussion around what people thinks works particularly well in their own local areas and why.

If you can join us it would be great. Sign up a little bit in advance and make sure you're near a phone and computer at the time of the event. Wednesday, May 26 - 12:00 p.m PST, 3:00 p.m. EST, 8:00 p.m.

Links for 2010-05-22 [del.icio.us]

• The Difference Engine aims to bring the YCombinator or TechStars mentality to European startups
  The Difference Engine is shaping up to be the kind of raw, Web 2.0 incubator the UK has lacked for some time.

Links for 2010-05-20 [del.icio.us]

• Lovely Charts | Free online diagram software - Flowchart & process diagram, Network diagram, BPMN diagrams, Sitemap, Organisation chart, Wireframe, business drawing software

#BeCuriousTour : US Tour 2010

This September, I'll be hitting the road with Christian Long and Mediasnackers' DK to discover more of the Big Country, offering up masterclasses, talks and meetups. The Be Curious Tour 2010 boys today completed a very productive pre-launch meeting thanks to a pulling a late night (US) + early morning (UK) Skype chat across the Pond.

Why? We're all friends, we're all working at building our own young businesses, and we all share a vision of learning where startups, schools and business have more in common than they think to learn about how to harness digital media such as video games and all the various social media at our disposal.

A call to action

We're interested in hearing from anyone or any organisation who might be on our (rough) route, and who wants to have some professional development masterclasses on social media, digital literacies, digital media creation from tweets to movie-making, how school spaces and technology could be better harnessed, or how school leadership could benefit from thinking more like a startup.

Who we are

Christian (@christianlong) brings a deep understanding of physical learning environments, technology and how the two intersect on learning. DK (@mediasnackers) has developed a superb reputation in the nonprofit and business sector for his understanding of how we can build and harness our digital footprints to benefit ourselves and those around us. I bring ten years of education practice, action research and policy work, blended with the past three years of building and guiding startups through from ideation to execution to nearly $5m of investment, and leading the building of communities in education (TeachMeet, MFLE) and the creative industries (38minutes, Digital Dockyard).

Follow our preps and the trip

There's a Be Curious Tour Facebook page if you want to get our updates there, the hashtag on Twitter (#becurioustour) will allow you to track our movements, our thoughts and, vitally, share your own.

Basically, we want to open up this tour from East to West, by giving lots of ways to follow, share ideas and let interested folk connect with us to set up specific events, coast to coast.

Please stay tuned.  Lots of content + daydreaming, + strategic business to be added week-by-week.

Thanks to my compatriots for the lovely start! If the tour's as exciting as it's been pulling it together, then we're all going to have rather a lot of stretching, productive fun.

Links for 2010-05-19 [del.icio.us]

• What Ever Happened to the Book? | the human network
  The emergence of the ‘tl;dr’ phenomenon – which all of us practice without naming it – has led public intellectuals to decry the ever-shortening attention span. Attention spans are not shortening: ten year-olds will still drop everything to read a nine-hundred page fantasy novel for eight days. Instead, attention has entered an era of hypercompetitive development. Twenty years ago only a few media clamored for our attention. Now, everything from video games to chatroulette to real-time Twitter feeds to text messages demand our attention. Absence from any one of them comes with a cost, and that burden weighs upon us, subtly but continuously, all figuring into the calculation we make when we decide to go all in or hold back.
• Weblogg-ed » tl;dr
  The lure of the link has a two-fold effect on our behavior. With its centrifugal force, it is constantly pulling us away from wherever we are. It also presents us with an opportunity cost. When we load that 10,000-word essay from the New York Times Magazine into our browser window, we’re making a conscious decision to dedicate time and effort to digesting that article. That’s a big commitment. If we’re lucky – if there are no emergencies or calls on the mobile or other interruptions – we’ll finish it. Otherwise, it might stay open in a browser tab for days, silently pleading for completion or closure. Every time we come across something substantial, something lengthy and dense, we run an internal calculation: Do I have time for this? Does my need and interest outweigh all of the other demands upon my attention? Can I focus?

Links for 2010-05-18 [del.icio.us]

• Are these Melbourne's 20 Finest Cafes?
• Social Media for Audience Development & Community Building : Our Man Inside
  Great outlines and notes on how to enhance the connection with your audience if you're an arts or cultural organisation (or anyone else, for that matter):
  
  In the modern world of millions of people vying for your attention, it’s not your presentation; it’s your connection to your community that’s important
• TED2007: Face Morphing
  To support the theme for TED2007, I was invited as a guest artist to visualize human icons. Working in collaboration with Corbis, I produced a 15 minute animation that morphs famous iconic faces in an eerie progression. One of the interesting effects is to notice the moment-to-moment sense of recognition as we see faces liquify from one to another. Many people will, for an instant 'see' or recognize a person in mid morph when the blended features - an eyebrow or chin shape - resembles a person other than the two morph subjects.

Links for 2010-05-17 [del.icio.us]

• Cellphones Now Used More for Data Than for Calls - NYTimes.com
  Instead of talking on their cellphones, people are making use of all the extras that iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smartphones were also designed to do — browse the Web, listen to music, watch television, play games and send e-mail and text messages.
  
  The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association. And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say.
• The Obliquity of Policy « The Heutagogic Archives
  Interesting comparisons, although perhaps differently understood from my perception of tech push and market pull, about how education pushes while good learning takes the pull from learners:
  
  We have the wrong policy system based on the “push” of education.
  
  The Pull of Education
  
  A hot new topic in the web world right now is Pull which is about how the Semantic Web might transform businesses and two new books, Pull and The Power of Pull discuss this. Pull starts with the dramatic statement. “In a time of drastic change it is LEARNERS who inherit the future.”
• Why Boulder Is America's Best Town for Startups - BusinessWeek
  When I ask longtime players about local government, they shrug. When I ask them about state government, the common refrain is that the best thing it can do is invest in education and otherwise stay out of the way. The lesson here is that it doesn't take billions in government spending to create a thriving industry cluster. Instead, with a little luck and lots of hard work by residents, local economies can be shaped from the bottom up.
• David Cohen: TechStars: It's About Community
  I'm often asked what my motivations were for starting TechStars, the mentorship-driven pre-seed stage summer program for web entrepreneurs in Boulder...
  
  Why do the mentors get so involved and do what they do? Why does the whole town rally around the startups that go through the program, helping them shape their products and promoting them broadly? Why does everyone in Colorado seem to ask "How can I help?" It's because in a larger sense, TechStars is really all about community. In Boulder entrepreneurship circles, there is a genuine desire to see others succeed and a general belief that karma matters. There's a sense that together we're building something here, and that we're all a meaningful part of it.
• Inga’s Blog » Moving
  Lovely blog post on the emotions of moving. A great raison d'être for a blog, a public one we can all share in

Links for 2010-05-16 [del.icio.us]

• 15-Year-Old Cell Phone Novelist in Japan Hits the Big Time - Tonic
  Last year, a 15-year-old girl, with the pen name "Bunny," became one of the top authors of "keitai" novels (novels written for cell phones) in Japan. She wrote a three-volume novel called Wolf Boy x Natural Girl that got its start on cell phones, but since going on the market as a paperback this past May, it's sold more than 110,000 copies, grossing over $611,000.

Links for 2010-05-14 [del.icio.us]

• KR Connect: Rock Control
  Great project I've been working with to get to market, launching June 1 2010
• Business Models v Learning Process « The Heutagogic Archives
• The Obliquity of Policy « The Heutagogic Archives
  On the blog Christopher Francis flatly states that Education is a Push activity and on p37 of The Power of Pull, Push is described as being based on the following assumptions; “There’s not enough to go around, Elites do the deciding, Organisations must be hierarchical, People must be molded, Bigger is better, Demand can be forecast, Resources can be allocated centrally, Demand can be met” More precisely Push is about predictability. Which pretty much describes the assumptions in the policy landscape we have been discussing here. Three Head Boys each offer predictability as a solution, and the other two rubbish the thought and offer their version of predictability. In a world of economic and ecological turmoil Education looks like it can be cosily packaged as predictable, with an added dash of discipline.
  
  What is fascinating with Learning is that it is a Pull activity, which is about relationships and the socially-embedded practices of co-creation

Links for 2010-05-13 [del.icio.us]

• Twapper Keeper - "We save tweets" - #hashtag - Bectax - bectax Conference
  Some of our 3500 tweets from the BectaX Conference
• Twapper Keeper - "We save tweets" - Archive Tweets
  Do you want to archive tweets from your conference?
  
  Maybe archive trending hashtags or keywords for historical or analysis purposes?
  
  Maybe save your own personal tweets?
  Twapper Keeper is here to help!
  
  How does it work?
  1. Create a new Twapper Keeper archive based upon hashtag, keyword, or person
  
  2. Tell your friends about the archive
  
  3. Read, track, export, and analyze as much as you want!
• A Coincidence of Motivations leading to Agile Configurations « The Heutagogic Archives
  A great summary of BectaX

GETinsight - Open Professional Development

It's that time of the month again where I try to lead some education leaders onto their next actionable task on the GETinsight forum. This time around: how to motivate your staff to take  on the organisation, implementation and undertaking of continuing professional development (CPD) themselves.

DIY CPD is the most successful breed of development I've seen. My blog post explains how you might want to go about doing it.

There will be a live phone/web chat on this topic, a chance to share stories of DIY CPD and ask for advice from those of us who've (un)organised (un)conferences before on May 26th. If you are an (un)organiser and want to share your stories, or a newbie to all this who wants to give a TeachMeet or edu-unconference a bash, then reserve your place now for May 26th's session.

Related articles by Zemanta

• All education is DIY (downes.ca)
• My interview on Productivity for educators (dougbelshaw.com)

Links for 2010-05-12 [del.icio.us]

• Julia Roberts (thisisjulia) on Twitter

[Book Review]: Yes We Did, Rahaf Harfoush

Rahaf Harfoush's "front row seat" on the Obama campaign's social media tactics and strategy, along with skills honed in the researching of Tapscott's Wikinomics, make her timeline of digital prowess and must-read for anyone in the marketing, comms, community-building or campaigning line of work. For the rest, it's a fascinating look into the actual role of technology in the famous election campaign, and how "tech toys" were really about inspiring offline community-building and fundraising.

Some would say the book is too simplistic, but I think it's just simple: describing social media tactics for what they are, as simple, reflective and responsive actions rather than a grand strategy only gurus can prepare. If the book reads itself quickly, it's thanks to a clear, consistent design (from Scott Thomas, Obama's design lead, talking here about that experience at Behance's 99%) and a writing style that breaks everything down to its simplest components. This makes it great for those not running large marketing, comms or media budgets, but for those of us who seek to make small iterative steps in the longer term.

She takes us through

• how simple thoughts on branding, and providing branding elements for fans to use, was a solid grounding from which to build online services;
• how social networking elements went to existing groups and networks rather than trying to recreate everything from scratch;
• the power of email, potentially the central tool in the campaign;
• the emerging potential of text messaging to influence and cajole;
• how blogs were used to give a voice to many people in the campaign, not just to broadcast about me, me, me...
• some of the techniques to make the most of video (i.e. produce lots of it, regularly);
• how analytics proved a vital element in understanding how to communicate with the audience.

Harfoush spoke last week at Lift in Geneva on the power of social networking in the campaign (I spoke there two years ago on the power of social networking for learning communities) but, as Kevin Anderson points out in the first comment on Stephanie Booth's liveblog of the talk, it wasn't the newer, more social technologies that wielded the greatest impact on the political journey - it was email. Once again, it is the lowest common denominator technology that makes the biggest impact, something both Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody and Esther Dyson have picked up on, the latter putting it as:

sometimes we call intuitive what is really just familiar.

You can follow Rahaf on Twitter, see her speak at Alan November's BLC2010 conference this summer, or buy her book at the Store.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Rahaf Harfoush on the Lessons Learned From The Social Obama Campaign (engagedlearning.net)
• Obama's social media campaign: Proof by the millions (marsdd.com)
• Lift10 Politics: The Technological and Social Trends Impacting Politics (Rahaf Harfoush) (climbtothestars.org)