Blog Posts

flight patterns

A fascinating short experimental film, showing the flight patterns of insects through long exposure photography. An interesting way to visualize activity.

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Leo Laporte on third party microblogging

Leo had been using Google Buzz to post updates to 18,000 people. For some reason, Buzz stopped publishing his updates. This is what he learned from that :

No one noticed.

Not even me.

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.

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SURFACE: a film from underneath

I just stumbled across this fascinating experimental film, looking at urban activities from the perspective of the surfaces we have contact with.

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1000 photos on Mindfulseeing

I just posted the 1000th photo to my photoblog . The milestone doesn’t really mean anything, but I’m a little surprised that I’ve been able to keep posting daily there for 2 and a half years. I’ve now been doing the photo-a-day project for 3 and a half years, starting in 2007 . Who knew? It’s pretty appropriate that 1000 was taken while riding home, along the Bow River.

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Bill Fitzgerald on education as consumption

Bill pulls responses to 3 recent articles (and I’d argue a fourth - the Bill Gates “education is the web” thing ) together with a single sentence:

> Just to emphasize, whenever anyone talks about “delivering” education, the implication is that learning is a passive activity that can be brought to people - in other words, getting us back into “consuming” mode.

Learning is active. There’s no getting around that. Therefore, an effective education involves much more than simple content distribution. Framing education as being a series of exercises in content consumption (no matter how great the content may be) doesn’t serve anyone well. It’s also not as simple as grafting on a layer of social networking on top of content. Education and learning are so much more than that.

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common words

I just updated the excellent Relevanssi search index plugin (it makes the search feature of WordPress actually WORK, with relevant results rather than the lame built-in search). It reports on the top words in the search index. I’m a little surprised at the results (but, looking over the words in just this short post, I probably shouldn’t be…).

  1. just (1226)
  2. like (846)
  3. i’m (820)
  4. i’ve (675)
  5. really (557)
  6. new (538)
  7. time (517)
  8. use (500)
  9. stuff (494)
  10. got (477)
  11. way (474)
  12. using (461)
  13. pretty (443)
  14. blog (441)
  15. cool (428)
  16. that’s (426)
  17. i’ll (408)
  18. don’t (388)
  19. going (387)
  20. update (387)
  21. work (376)
  22. people (375)
  23. things (370)
  24. post (368)
  25. sure (365)

I’m kinda surprised that “awesome” isn’t high up that list…

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Google and the UN Human Rights Declaration?

With the CEO of Google declaring privacy as a thing of the past (along with Zuckerberg and Facebook), how do we reconcile that with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, specifically Article 12:

>Article 12.
>
>No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

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raj boora on course blogging

Raj Boora just posted some thoughts on setting up a courseblog with a prof., and they echo many of the same things I’ve found on my campus:

let’s understand that students are as likely to be blogging for the class as they are to be pulling their own teeth – they are going to do it because they need to. You might get the odd student who is really digging it and wants to keep reflecting on it once the class is over, but for most, like pulling teeth, they are only going to jump the hoop once. Thirdly, even though blogging has this aura of being able to put the student at the center of the learning experience, it is still very much the case where students are told what to write and how to write it. It still almost has to be this way in order to create a level field on which the student work can be assessed. Finally… if we know that the students are not going to become bloggers on topic X, and we know that they are unlikely to have a portfolio (yet) where the entries that they do make can become part of a greater whole, why not start them with the most baby step of blogging… commenting.

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Google predicts the end of privacy

Alec posted a link to an article about a presentation made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Technomy conference (the article was a repost based on the original ReadWriteWeb article on the presentation). It includes gems such as:

If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use artificial intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go.

which ties into my thinking about triangulating disparate bits of gathered information to build comprehensive profiles on anyone.

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