The power of nerd communities

Heck, when Nintendo first dropped the word about the Wii, probably nobody but me ;) was seeing the potential. But now Wii sales is running circles around Xbox360 and PS3. The coolest thing for me is the nerd community of people hacking away with the Wii remote.

And this one of the coolest things I have seen yet for the Wii (and a humble Mac :) )

A scratchin, bitchin Loop Machine created by the Amazing Rolo - very nice music AND computer nerd!

The Wii remote is bringing whole body movement into computer interaction for the masses - how silly people look glued to their old schooltired gamepads.

Have a look for yourself, I am still thinking about the educational possibilities.

By the way, I will consolidate my non-official Blogs on Didactalab to get some steady posting stream and much more control about my blog - I cannot do cool stuff with this one (e.g. including the Amazing Rolo Video, so you have to head over to his page).

How many standards must a E-Learning system walk down?

Alright, I am a E-learning standards sceptic - I have implemented to many of them in the database structure of my apps only to see the wither or being not useful. You could say I am burned and a skeptic now. With this context in mind You can imagine that this headline put me in full B*llsh*t-mode: PR:IMS Global Learning Consortium Announces Breakthrough Education Industry Standard for Digital Learning Content. Everyone in the industry seems to be backing it - but does it deliver? After joining the IMS/GLC-community, no more substantial info could be found than this blurb "The IMS Common Cartridge specification combines three of IMS’s most widely adopted specifications, Content Packaging, Question/Test Interoperability, and Metadata, with the IMS Tools Interoperability Protocol, which enables standards-based data exchange between learning management platforms and standalone learning tools, such as adaptive tutors or assessment engines."

I will wait with any comments until I have seen this at work at Online Educa in Berlin this year.

Yahoo Search in Context

A new technology called Y!Q Y!Q is available at Yahoo!. This allows You as a webdev to embed an inline search link to do a pre-configured live search. Now if we could do something like this for every word on the page…

Not having a TV is great!

Because You watch something like Nicholas Negroponte's talk at TEDTalk about the 100$-labtop.
Three comments:
- make it a 100€-labtop and You are in the target right from the start ;) (some Europatriotism included)
- I give it 9 out of 10 Steve Jobs reality distortion field points (what happened to the handle, btw?)
- I am really interested in the type of educational content they want to put on it. I volunteer for any project going on in one of the states - just contact me at my university blog.

Jeff Han

I dig this guy, I mean, how cool can You get? I really would give this presentation 7 out of 10 Englebart points for showing the future and 6 out of 10 Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field points (1 point taken away for the shape he is drawing at the end - well, if it was by purpose, he get's 10 out 10 Nipplegate points anyway :) Now have a look at Jeff Han on TED Talks! Not new, but awesome to see him demonstrate it.

Blackboard blacks out with patent claims

The recent patent awared to Blackboard on e-Learning Technology shakes the industry and is another example of "how stupid can it get with patents on software?". But this one touches one of my core working areas. Good ol' Stephen Jones breaks it down nicely. What to do know? Plenty!
(1) First contact all the politicans You can get access to and tell them, that this is another example of stupidity and NOT GOOD FOR ECONOMY AND EMPLOYMENT (only thing they understand)
(2) Tell everyone with a faint interest in software dev or entrepreneurship or a brain about this personally. Discuss it!
(3) Contribute to the Moodle page about Online Learning history or the Wiki page.

And then… just create something better than plain virtual learning environments as described in Blackboard's "patent", which covers according to Jay Cross:

"A course-based system for providing to an educational community of users access to a plurality of online courses, comprising: a) a plurality of user computers, with each user computer being associated with a user of the system and with each user being capable of having predefined characteristics indicative of multiple predetermined roles in the system, each role providing a level of access to a plurality of data files associated with a particular course and a level of control over the data files associated with the course with the multiple predetermined user roles comprising at least two user’s predetermined roles selected from the group consisting of a student role in one or more course associated with a student user, an instructor role in one or more courses associated with an instructor user and an administrator role associated with an administrator user, and b) a server computer in communication with each of the user computers over a network, the server computer comprising: means for storing a plurality of data files associated with a course, means for assigning a level of access to and control of each data file based on a user of the system’s predetermined role in a course; means for determining whether access to a data file associated with the course is authorized; means for allowing access to and control of the data file associated with the course if authorization is granted based on the access level of the user of the system."

I mean, take out "course" and it sounds awfully like Groupware or Content Management System. Probably everyone doing research in E-Learning has implemented such a system before 1999 (This is a Publication from me 1995 about a system I used 1993 and 1994 in a vocational school with Netscape 0.9x.)!
While Jay is patenting "Learning", I think he shots too short. I will patent "Thinking"!

To quote some nice movie: "Good night and good luck!!"

Physical Desktop Interface

A very interesting project trying to use a physical desktop metaphor can be seen here. I am still not sure that dealing with documents is the right thing for handling information on a computer. I mean, it is a non-physical physical sim, so it follows the desktop metaphor more closely than my Mac SE (and everything I owned after that), BUT - why not make a non-physical non-metaphoric way to handle the stuff on my computer? Some things are instantly missing, such as a good search interaction. Nevertheless, worth a look and much more interesting than Vista-snoozefest! Hopefully, the upcoming Leopard sneak peak at WWDC will be mindboggling (not that I believe that they can really say goodbye to Finder)

Ajax and WebObjects

Frustrated by Apple not improving the components of WebObjects for years, it is good to now that the folks of Project Wonder get their act together and provide Ajax integration (they wrap around the Rico framework). Another good source of great componentents is the Noxymo framework.