Lots of people will do small-scale innovative projects with no funding or resources, because they love trying new things and doing awesome stuff.
Some companies or institutions will “invent” or “discover” something that one or more of these people have been doing, and it will be branded as their own.
This branded “innovation” will become co-opted and corrupted, so that it doesn’t really do anything innovative, or anything other than building the reputation of the “innovators”.
People will hype the crap out of the “innovation” as The Future of Education, and The Saviour (or Disruption) of Universities, and present it at conferences and write papers and travel the presentation circuit explaining it to the masses.
The people from 1. will largely ignore the hype, shrug their shoulders, and continue doing awesome stuff because they enjoy doing awesome stuff.
I feel pretty safe standing behind these recommendations for 2013, because that’s the pattern of innovation that’s happened pretty much every year I’ve been playing with edtech.
I used Jonathon O’Keeffe’s great utility for smushing all ride segments from a Strava account into a single map. Very cool. Looks like I forgot to track the Canmore-Banff ride with Evan, though…
Can’t wait for stuff to melt so I can get back out on rural roads…
So it’s been in progress for a long time. A long, long time. It’s been nearly done for some time as well. I completed (and passed) my oral exam on Nov. 30, and had some additional revisions to make before the thing could be considered officially complete.
so many people have been “coming back” to blogging1. and folks like Audrey absolutely destroying conventional edtech coverage with great blogging.
awesome. publishing whatever they care to publish, however they care to do so.
awesome.
blogging is dead. long live blogging. the web (and culture) is what we choose to make of it. feels like a resurgence. a reclamation. a withdrawal from the silos. so good.
Half the patients were allowed to ride at their own pace, while the others were pushed incrementally harder, just as the scientist’s tandem companion had been. All patients improved and the “tandem” group showed significant increases in connectivity between areas of grey matter responsible for motor ability. Cycling, and cycling harder, was helping to heal their brains.
This is cool. Hipstamatic released a bunch of new lenses. I got a notification on my phone last night, and grumbled something about camera apps spamming me with ads. Then forgot about it. This morning, I see a post from Nick, referring to the official Hipstamatic blog post on the lens:
The Tinto 1884 lens uses facial recognition to recreate a very shallow depth of field unique for each photograph. This is similar in some ways to what some apps do with tilt-shift or radial blur effects, but Hipstamatic’s effect is more customized for faces. Notice, for instance, that it will leave eyes and mouth unaffected, while blurring out the nose and forehead. If the app can’t detect a face, it just switches into a radial blur.
what a year. this is not a sappy end-of-year recap, but I needed to take a step back to see just what an epic year it’s been. in rough chronological order:
a bunch of LMS-related activities, to try to kickstart discussion about what to select
lost a friend, mentor, colleague (heart attacks suck)
realized that winter bike riding freaks my wife out, so decided to cut back on that. cue trainer. less woohoo, but still…
finished my thesis, passed oral exam, completed MSc.
continued working on the cat herding that is the LMS upgrade project, but stumbled closer to completion.
still working on the whole work/life balance thing. the loss and near-loss (and cancer scare and ambulance ride) kind of kickstarted a focus on fixing that. I struggle with maintaining a sense of perspective. the oldest surviving post on my blog, over a decade ago, is about the same thing (back then, triggered by impending dad-hood). so, yeah. balance.
Anil Dash’s recent post on the web we lost, and a follow-up post on rebuilding it, got me thinking about my own little corner of the web. In his follow-up post, he talks about creating public spaces:
Create public spaces. Right now, all of the places we can assemble on the web in any kind of numbers are privately owned. And privately-owned public spaces aren’t real public spaces. They don’t allow for the play and the chaos and the creativity and brilliance that only arise in spaces that don’t exist purely to generate profit.
