September 22, 2007 by sean.

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September 22, 2007 by sean.

Tom Fuller discusses Pervasive Computing, Ultra-Portable Devices and Location-Based Services:

NAVITIME runs on mobile phones, many of which include integrated GPS. A minority use case is in-car navigation. Many people outside Japan are familiar with in-car navigation systems, but in Japan, people are using NAVITIME mostly for personal navigation as they walk or take public transportation—particularly in Tokyo. This is yet another example of how Japan often leads the rest of the world when it comes to pervasive computing. NAVITIME provides comprehensive navigation information, including maps, timetables, prices, and even carbon footprints for various journey options. It’s an impressive large-scale system. [via blindside]

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September 20, 2007 by sean.

When I walked into the pre-school where my boys went, it was definitely a LOT different from the experience I remember as a kid. I’m not sure that I would have been ready for the radical changes that some lucky kids are getting at Blue Man Nursery School [yes, THAT Blue Man Group]:

(A)fter you’ve spent fifteen year spattering audiences with paint, pounding drums and pipes, spurtin goo out of your chest, and spitting chewed-up marshmallows onto canvases, what’s next? For Goldma and Wink, married fathers in their forties, the answer was clear: start a nursery school for your kids and tell all your friends. [via The New Yorker]

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September 16, 2007 by sean.

USC’s Ted Berger’s [”memory hacker“] research on brain-interface neurotechnology, neural modeling and biologically-inspired computing modules [funded by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency] focuses on the potential for being able to one day:

open someone’s skull; implant a tiny, densely packed silicon computer chip; connect it to the brain; and let it take over cognitive function previously lost due to disease or injury.

“He wants to be the man who implants microchips between your ears. And the amazing thing is that he just might succeed,” a Wired magazine feature declared five years ago. Berger’s ambition to “create a bionic brain is bold, brash, and just a bit, well, mind-blowing,” the technology magazine opined. Berger’s project has come a long way since then.

This isn’t like a cochlear implant or an artificial retina or any other device stimulating inactive nerve fibers to resume functioning. No. This will be an artificial chunk of brain, something right out of a William Gibson cyberpunk thriller…

“We are on the brink of stretching the capabilities of the human race. I believe we will soon be able to connect the brain to computers or other devices,” Berger says. “We have to think about the implications.” [via USC and futurist.com]

Berger’s work gained wider recognition as a result of a 1997 Wired Magazine article and more recently in Popular Science and Scientific American. Berger also edits Neural-Prosthetis.com.

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September 15, 2007 by sean.

Bernie DeKoven of The Coworking Insitute describes “coliberation“:

How we have found a viable alternative for everything that people used to call “work.” How we join each other in some kind of virtual, actual coworking effort, coworking environment, doing something together for fun, on this particular page of the world wide web, thinking about making it more fun, and maybe even profitable for people to work together. [via smartmobs]

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September 14, 2007 by sean.

Wired Wiki: HOWTO Amp Up Your Brain

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September 12, 2007 by sean.

Another amazing TED talk: this one from Harvard scientist and author Steven Pinker:

We live in violent times, an era of heightened warfare, genocide and senseless crime. Or so we’ve come to believe. Pinker charts a history of violence from Biblical times through the present, and says modern society has a little less to feel guilty about.

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September 6, 2007 by sean.

Inventor Dean Kamen previews the extraordinary prosthetic arm he’s developing at the request of the Department of Defense, to help the 1,600 “kids” who’ve come back from Iraq without an arm (and the two dozen who’ve lost both arms). Kamen’s commitment to using technology to solve problems, and his respect for the human spirit, have never been more clear than in this deeply moving clip.

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September 6, 2007 by sean.

“Corey Phelps, an assistant professor of management and organization at the UW Business School, and Melissa Schilling, an associate professor at NYU, “analyzed the innovative performance of 1,106 companies in 11 different industries over a six-year period. They examined the pattern or structure of strategic alliance relationships among companies in each industry. They found that how firms are connected to one another influences the number of patented inventions they obtained. Those that secured more patents were classified by Phelps and Schilling as being more creative.”

According to the researchers, “companies reap greater benefits when they are part of a network that exhibits a high degree of clustering and only a few degrees of separation, both of which are characteristic of a small world network.” [via zdnet.com]

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September 6, 2007 by sean.

continuous partial attention n. A state in which most of one’s attention is on a primary task, but where one is also monitoring several background tasks just in case something more important or interesting comes up.” [via wordspy]

Linda Stone who coined the term, distinguishes CP from multi-tasking: “When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. We’re often doing things that are automatic, that require very little cognitive processing… (whereas CPA is motivated by the desire) to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.” [via WikiHome]

“CPA stems from our desire, Stone says, to be ‘a live node on the network’… The message is that the balance has tilted way too far toward distraction, creating a sense of constant crisis. ‘We’re not ever in a place where we can make a commitment to anything… Constantly being accessible makes you inaccessible.’” [via newsweek]

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September 6, 2007 by sean.

“The Department of Defense’s “Augmented Cognition” video is supposed to represent a plausible scenario for a human-computer interface that uses EEG and other technologies to figure out what to feed to operators, allowing teams to do fast analysis of giant amounts of data.” [via boingboing]

Here’s the video (caution: the movie is 93MB!): Augmented Cognition International Society

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September 5, 2007 by sean.

Teemu Arina has a link on his blog to an article he wrote for his company blog on “Horizontal technologies for learning.” The following definitional distinction between LMS and PLE [Personal Learning Environments: Check out Graham Attwell’s position paper] is huge. It is a key insight into why education has barely moved into the connected age and why social technologies are, as he says, “a way forward.” [via smartmobs]

The web is full of teachers, you just need the tools to reach them. I call that parasitic learning [ensouraging] trojan horses that will bypass institutional systems by helping students to help each other in their personal learning.

Robin Good recently posted a series of fascinating short film clips on YouTube of interviews with Finnish Teemu Arina about the Future of Learning.

Teemu’s blog on networked learning, knowledge and collaboration is also worth a look.

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September 3, 2007 by sean.

From the Informal Learning reference on Wikipedia:

Learners get only about 25 percent or less of what is used at work through formal learning. The majority of companies that provide training are currently involved only with the formal side of the continuum. Most of today’s investments are on the formal side. The net result is that companies spend the most money on the smallest part - 25% - of the learning equation. The other 75 percent of learning happens as the learner creatively adopts and adapts to ever changing circumstances. The informal piece of the equation is not only larger, it’s crucial to learning how to do anything.

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September 3, 2007 by sean.

A few years, I worked with a group of professional artists who were working on a contract for a large consumer electronics “box” store who wanted to co-opt the “cool” of the local arts community.

What we originally planned to do was to create fun, low barrier, highly interactive art experiences for Gen Yers at some of the galleries and clubs that were looking to attract a younger crowd. Reasoning that most people who really get into music are often those who find a way to participate [even if they don’t become musicians], we set out to do something similar with visual and performance art.

Some of the events we planned included a contest where a local celebrity would (a) “seed” the beginning of an art piece or storyline that others would enhance or (b) record a digital musical track that others could transform. We also planned to create disposable sculptures on the outdoor mall downtown where passersby would be encouraged to take a minute and add or rearrange elements. We also looked at cross-pollinating works at diverse locations in an effort to expand the audience for the locations [classical music / jazz fusion at a theater, improv comedy at an ethnic art gallery, etc.]. We created a pre-Web 2.0 website that would list scheduled events, encourage visitors to rate submissions, allow community members to upload / download / discuss works in progress, etc.

The most ambitious idea included uploads of amateur screenplays under an unrestrictive Creative Commons license that would allow others to use any submission as the basis for storyboards, conceptual art, costumes, and short films where non-artists could audition for parts or act as extras. We wanted to see if we could have short films go from outline to edited film in 30 days or less. Web community members would then vote on the best submissions and the whole thing would culminate in a 2-hour film festival with awards for the highest-rated film. Amateurs were psyched at the thought of strangers building upon their work. The pros were much more cautious or even occasionally antagonistic to the concept.

What actually happened is that the artists leading the project began fighting within themselves over “creative control” [the exact thing we were trying to overcome so that newbies could find a way in] and ended up nearly getting kicked out of town. The gallery owners who were in the most financial trouble HATED the idea of non-artists participating in their world. Our project leaders later argued that the REAL problem was the lack of sophistication in the general population! What was supposed to be a series of fun, disposable events organized throughout the city became a LECTURE to berate the clueless, unwashed masses into better supporting the unappreciated geniuses struggling to survive.

What I learned from the overall experience first is that local arts communities are often NOT cool. Second,  amateurs tend to be more willing to collaborate and try new things just for fun [meaning they have little ego / reputation at stake] and that the guidance of pros / experts / would-be gurus can often be disruptive to a collaborative creative process.

Web 2.0 is all about participation in collaborative projects, whether that be ranking user-contributed content [ala YouTube, digg or truemors], turning ON comments re: fan fiction or building loosely-connected networks of friends [Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.]. No doubt that much of the content out there is only one step above spam [”You’re an idiot LOL,” “Guess what my cat ate for dinner?”] and that much of the hype about is overblown, but the potential for using these methods to make it easier to participate in creative endeavors [rather than learning to simply appreciate the results of others] might still be vastly understated.

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September 3, 2007 by sean.

Seth Godin on hard work:

Sure, you’re working long, but “long” and “hard” are now two different things. In the old days, we could measure how much grain someone harvested or how many pieces of steel he made. Hard work meant more work. But the past doesn’t lead to the future. The future is not about time at all. The future is about work that’s really and truly hard, not time-consuming. It’s about the kind of work that requires us to push ourselves, not just punch the clock. Hard work is where our job security, our financial profit, and our future joy lie. [sethgodin.com]

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September 3, 2007 by sean.

Digital Media and Learning Competition:

HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation are mobilizing the field of Digital Media and Learning through a $2 million open call competition, supporting all generations of educators, learning entrepreneurs, and communicators. The Competition is designed to support pioneers who use new technologies to envision the future of learning. We seek innovators developing formal and informal educational environments that inspire creative thinking while informing and providing context to the digital learning styles of people today. [dmlcompetition.net]

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September 3, 2007 by sean.

Daniel Pink uses pecha kucha [see below] to describe Emotionally Intelligent Signage:

Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, two Tokyo-based architects who have turned PowerPoint, that fixture of cubicle life, into both art form and competitive sport. Their innovation, dubbed pecha-kucha (Japanese for “chatter”), applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. [Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down]

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September 3, 2007 by sean.

Mesh networking [YouTube clip via Meshverse] is a major component of MIT’s One Laptop Per Child project:

Mesh networking is a way to route data, voice and instructions between nodes. It allows for continuous connections and reconfiguration around broken or blocked paths by “hopping” from node to node until the destination is reached. A mesh network whose nodes are all connected to each other is a fully connected network. Mesh networks differ from other networks in that the component parts can all connect to each other via multiple hops, and they generally are not mobile. Mesh networks can be seen as one type of ad hoc network. Mobile ad-hoc networking (MANet), and mesh networking are therefore closely related, but mobile ad hoc networks also have to deal with the problems introduced by the mobility of the nodes. [wikipedia]

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September 2, 2007 by sean.

A lot of focus in corporate learning is ensuring that workers are able to focus on the most urgent priorities.  The learning required to handle urgent priorities is by definition disposable meaning that it’s appropriate for only a specific time. Once that time has passed, the information is no longer relevant and is best forgotten.

As the need for urgent information increases, the need for both rapid publishing AND rapid retiring of expired content also increases.

However, content developers are often hesitant to publish information that doesn’t look professional.  The time that it takes to make information look pretty often delays delivery of critical information when it’s most needed. Yet, many content developers argue that unprofessional-looking material threatens the confidence of the user in that information and, perhaps more importantly, the perceived value of their role. 

Perhaps the more realistic threat, is that users, unable to wait for approved information, take it upon themselves to distribute the information that they need to be successful  through informal social networks.

Often, this is one of the greatest fears and annoyances of professional content developers who argue that if anyone can publish information, how will people distinguish the good from the bad.  And, what happens when members of the informal social network gain greater credibility than that of the people who are paid to have this role?

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