Educational Blogs

• Wanderlust: GOOD traces the most famous trips in history
  Nicely done, mapping out literary and historical journeys around the world in great clarity
• Tempero
  Tempero is the UK's leading interactive community management company providing 24/7 specialist moderation for message boards, blogs, commenting, social networking sites and user generated content (UGC) projects.
• This Ain’t No Disco (it’s where we work)
  If you've ever sought inspiration for your latest school, work or home build, then this is the place to come for it. This ain't no disco. It's where we work.
• Xmen relationship map
  Some seriously OCD design work here.

So, the kind of censorship we've been hearing about most this past few weeks has been of the Iranian type. However, while it may be fashionable to carry your green Twitter avatar in support of free speech halfway around the world, we are all too quick to forget that on our own doorsteps public sector internet service providers regularly block free speech and tools that make this possible with their firewall policies. It's not any cleaner or more reasonable than Iran blocking Facebook or Twitter for their purposes, serving only to control what the public hear about their public services.

Join The Guardian's global challenge to crowdsource internet censorship of all sorts right now, and show how much of Britain's and North America's public sector ISPs are just as unreasonably restrictive of adults' web rights as Mr Ahmadinejad's Government.

Pic: Censorship

When social networks were still finding their feet among their key demographic a few years ago, I was a keen advocate of formal learning institutions and their staff keeping out of those spaces, certainly not using them as social learning environments. danah's research backed this up and the concept of teachers creating "creepy treehouses" was enough to knock that desire of some on the head.

Seeing how the US Army has harnessed Facebook for a mix of both informal communication and leadership is opening up the question again in my mind, as the demographic using Facebook rises well into the 30s and Twitter's growth started with an older demographic and is only now appearing to edge southwards to early 20 year olds and teens (thanks to my wholly unscientific research - danah, if you're not busy this summer...).

It's particularly pertinent as Local Authorities charged with improving the prospects of their learners and staff in an increasingly technological age do not cease to become ever more Machiavellian in their desire to clamp down on any communication about the realities of being a teacher or learner in their patches.

On the Facebook blog this morning says Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Arata (link to his FB page):

From an institution that in 2000 wouldn't allow unfettered access to email (and before that whose "Full Metal Jacket" reputation preceded it), one of the most traditional public institutions with the most apparently valid potential for killing communication to those back home has come a long way. And it also shows how far schools and teen learners working within them have to go before their life cycles start matching the real world.

What is it that Facebook brings the military? It allows family to keep in touch with minimal effort through a great deal of the deep ambient intimacy of the status update:

Facebook is also giving a platform for sharing of skills and advice between recruits:

It also allows senior members of staff in the military to, quickly and easily, without disrupting the flow of their day, update via cellphone or laptop on what (non-secret) operations they are undertaking. What exactly does an army Colonel do? Well, now you can 'follow' them and find out. It will almost certainly make a few more people aspire to doing something different or improving their act not just in seeing what superiors and, above all, seeing what peers are up to.

While intranets and VLEs provide a structured learning environment for teacher-defined groups of learners, they do not provide very well (or at all) for friends-of-a-friend (FOAF) communication, happenstance connections and temporary windows in on what FOAFs are up to. They are designed for preset activity with preset groups, despite the admirable efforts of talented creative individuals to shoehorn them into other more enticing uses. It's hard to argue that, in terms of how kids connect within the school environment with school-like material and contacts, things have really moved on since the likes of my students blogging and podcasting from their French trip in 2003 (the 2004, 2005 and Auschwitz blog remain). The fun serendipitous connections are happening very much outside the school boundaries, and the school institution itself remains largely blind to this. The knock-on effect is that school and what it should stand for - learning - are also blind to learners outside the schooling complex.

Now, at Channel 4 the Education department has worked with great skill over the past two years to create learning opportunities in the social networks and spaces where young people hang out (think Battlefront, YearDot, Routes.... There has been little attempt to make these interactions fit into schooling per se. At 4iP, where many of our products and services involve learning of some description, we continue this 'non-school' of thought.

I wonder: is there mileage for schools in looking at what the Army is achieving here and for what purposes, and seeing if there are unmet needs in the schooling environment which could be supported by social networking services and platforms which are increasingly better embedded in society? Or is this something in which only others outside the formal schooling environment are prepared to invest?

Pic: Full Metal Jacket

• Seth's Blog: There's always room for Jello
  So, if there's time for an emergency (Jello), why isn't there time for brilliance, generosity or learning?

• Eastern Spices (2 Canonmills Bridge, Edinburgh) | The List
  Indian restaurant
• Massive GTD Resource List | Zen Habits
  My tribute to all the GTD junkies out there (a group that includes me) — a massive list of GTD stuff.
• Warning over ‘shop a cop’ website - Times Online
  The thing about the existing ways the public can complain is that the police control them and they are designed to give the impression of an unbiased hearing while working in almost every way to allow the police to discount and sweep away the complaint. You won't get much satisfaction from the PCA. Tony, Newcastle, UK Surely if you are innocent you have nothing to fear ! Mike Ryan, Christchurch, U.K. I'm one of the team running Patient Opinion. When we started out, 4 years ago, we heard the same objection from the NHS: "This will just encourage moaning and more complaints." In fact, the truth is a little more suprising. Over half our feedback says "thank you" to NHS staff for a great job. James Munro, Sheffield, UK
• Business Models: A starter-for-ten - 38minutes
• swissmiss | Wireframe Magnets DIY Kit
  This DIY magnet template is based on the Konigi wireframe stencils and includes 3 sheets of elements that might be useful in whiteboard prototyping. Simply download and print the PDFs onto Printable Magnet Sheets, optionally laminate them so they’re usable with dry-erase markers, and cut. Lamination is recommended for writing on magnets. Konigi uses and recommends the 3M LS950 No-Heat Laminating System.
• Our (and Your) RISD » Noble Ride
  Sponsored by Yahoo! and a handful of other partners, he’s doing this Purple Pedals adventure on a teched-up bike he’s calling “Blue Steel,” which automatically takes a photo every 60 seconds, geo-tags it and uploads it to Flickr, where you, too, can check out his minute-by-minute progress.

• potlatch: for a better version of economic freedom
  I'm sick of current capitalism with its hidden logic, its cultural strategies, its anything-but-market logic. And sick of the economists who would read this and laugh because I don't properly understand price theory. Go and read some Hannah Arendt - politics occurs when things appear publicly. In this respect, your definition of an efficiency that is going on behind people's backs, over people's heads, is fundamentally anti-political. Presuming a model of individual freedom, but never actually defending one, is really no more liberal than the advertisers and HR experts who specialise in manipulating individual freedom.
• RebootBritain : Serialised in the Independent
  In the run up to the event, NESTA will be publishing a series of short essays which talk to the Reboot Britain agenda.

• Slowcoast
  Cycling around Britain meeting artisans
• Greystripe Monetizing iPhone Games With Ad Platform
  Now the company is turning its attention to the iPhone by providing developers with pre-, interstitial and post-roll ads from advertisers like Best Buy, eBay, Yahoo!, New Line Cinema, the US Army, Wal-Mart and Subway. Greystripe claims it will deliver a 10.1% click-through rate (CTR) when other mobile advertisers are averaging a 1-2% CTR.
• Poliblog Perspective » “Market Penetration” by UK Political Blogs: Slugger rules the Roost: Blog Platform
  It looks as though Slugger may have crossed several thresholds the others have not yet reached for an independent political site, and that - combined with the fact that it is 6 years old, nonpartisan and is read (for example) by nearly all Northern Ireland Parliamentarians - may account for the site’s ability to impact in some broader way on the political process itself.

• BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts & Culture | Hockney turns to mobile artwork
  The 72-year-old has embraced new technology by using his iPhone to create new works of art.
• As Seen On: Design Milk: Nesting
  We are in total support of mixing work and play, so this "deskhouse" we spotted on Design Milk was like a dream come true! Your kids can use the roof as a desk to draw or write upon, and when they need a break, the structure instantly becomes the perfect shelter for playing or reading underneath.
• swissmiss | The house that used to be there
  We are in total support of mixing work and play, so this "deskhouse" we spotted on Design Milk was like a dream come true! Your kids can use the roof as a desk to draw or write upon, and when they need a break, the structure instantly becomes the perfect shelter for playing or reading underneath.

I’m writing this post from the back porch of a family beach rental in South Carolina.  The breeze is ruffling the pages of the paperback Ive just put down, and will soon pick back up.  The ever-present hum/roar of waves hitting the beach drones on, in a most delightful way.  My father’s swimming in the pool below me, and my children are upstairs napping.  They have every right to be tired, because they’ve been exploring the ocean and the house and the pool and the greater Charleston area for the last several days and have plenty more exploring to do.

I try pretty hard to take a few technology breaks a year, to distance myself completely from the devices that rule my work week and can dictate, on occasion, priority.  (Well, at least, I allow myself to believe that devices, and not the people connected through them, or my own agency, or lack of it, can determine priorities. But I know that’s not the case.)

This trip, I’ve found myself taking my “break” in a slightly different way.  Today’s a good example.  I made pancakes for my daughters with a few Twitter friends.  Then we dined on the porch, about three feet from where I’m sitting now, and I announced the view.  The girls and I then hit the pool for several hours, and returned for a late lunch.  In their pre-nap stupor, as they “rested” on the couch, I caught up with several colleagues attending a conference and chatted with a couple more friends/acquaintances/people I (don’t always) know.

Some of the folks I’ve interacted with today are folks that I work with.  Many are not.  Most have no business being “here” on a family vacation.  That said, I’d have it no other way. My world’s at my fingertips on my own terms mostly all the time now, and I’m nowhere close to prepared with how to deal with that.

I feel like I balance work and personal responsibilities fairly well, sometimes leaning one way, other times the other, and I still don’t think I’m anywhere close to certain about how best to handle the blending of personal and professional that we’re smack in the middle of.  It’s new.  It’s different.  It’s awesome.  And it’s tricky.  And I rather enjoy it. I’m not quite sure why I’m choosing to think about it on a day like today, except that I’m aware that my normal “power down completely” relaxation strategy isn’t comfortable today.  Balance is important.  But balance isn’t binary.

I’m an hourly employee in a world where schedules are less and less important at a time when time’s never been more precious.  My friends and my colleagues may or may not be on the same short list of people, but they’re always close and reachable.  And that’s a fine paradox for such a sunny afternoon here at the ocean.  As I head back to my novel, I’m going to take a few minutes to ponder the point further.  Whatever’s happening at present to my nomal routines, I’m still getting some rest and relaxation, and I’m not going to squander it.

• C4 backs creative writing game | News | Broadcast
  An iPhone application that aims to stimulate creative writing is the latest project to come out of Channel 4’s online PSB fund, 4iP. It was commissioned by Ewan McIntosh, C4’s digital commissioner for Scotland, Northern Ireland and the North East, and has backing from Learning and Teaching Scotland.
• How not to use Twitter: HabitatUK as a case study
  @HabitatUK turned up on Twitter a couple of days ago, and decided to use trending topic #hashtags at the start of their tweets to get noticed. They used ones that had absolutely nothing to do with furniture, decorating, or shopping, but obviously the top hashtags for Thursday evening AEST such as #iPhone #mms #Apple and even Australia’s Masterchef contestant who got voted off #Poh. I found these on Twitter Search: HabitatUK #hashtag abuse Just to really add insult to injury, HabitatUK even used an Iranian election hashtag, and threw one in for True Blood fans too, both trying to get people to signup to a database.
• Video: UK Folding Plug concept could flatten that bulky British adapter
  Of all the AC adapters stuffed into your personal item when globetrotting, the plug used in Merry Old England must surely be the most cumbersome -- its three copper prongs flung to the extremes of a giant block of plastic. That Victorian holdover gets a major re-do with this UK Folding Plug concept. The two horizontal prongs rotate themselves in-line with the top, vertical one, and the body of the adapter then folds in half, resulting in a thickness of about 1cm. Interestingly the plug would still work in either position, with a slimline power strip envisioned to accept three of these slender lovelies at once. It's positively brilliant, but is just a concept at this point, and while we don't have any news to pass along about its likelihood for production, surely some manufacturer will watch the video after the break and start churning these out by the millions.

• Basement.org: Praying To The Wrong God
  the music industry lights a ring of fire around its content and fires on sight at anyone that tries to steal it. All of their energy and focus is spent to somehow contain the damage and retaining the perceived value of their content. Because content is where all the value lies right? Wrong. Throughout this siege, another player showed up that virtually hijacked the entire industry based on one very basic tenet: build a best-of-breed experience around these newly found conveniences. Apple doesn’t come from a content-worshipping culture. They build and sell hardware and software. They understood that if they built a great experience around the content, they would win.
• Veer: Ideas: Veer Marketplace now open for contributors by Anders J. Svensson
  Starting today, photographers and illustrators are welcome to sign up, and start uploading images to Veer Marketplace. Later this summer, your images will be available to Veer's customers – along with a fancy new credit-based payment system, and a variety of subscription options.
• Labuat
  This. Is. Just. Beautiful.
• Plymouth Labour Party - Council Bans Twitter
  Plymouth City Council and Iran both try to ban Twitter "It is disappointing that the City Council hasn't recognised the value of using Twitter like so many other councils have. Twitter has the potential to open up politics providing real-time transparency of the political process. By banning Twitter the Council has done more to promote its use in Plymouth City Council than anything those on Twitter could have done to promote it. In the process they have exposed themselves as a backward looking authority blundering about in the internet age."

I'm in the process of contracting, planning and soft-launching a beautiful web arts platform in my work with Channel 4's Innovation for the Public along with the talented guys at ISO, which will provide a really meaningful and inspiring space, we hope, to learn about and publish one's own art, digital media and films. More on that soon, although you can catch a sneaky peak at our session, The Digital Express, in the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

It means that my eye is increasingly heightened on all things design and artistic, and this has just distracted me, Morgane and Catriona for most of the latter's tea-time. It's one reason to let your two-year-old onto that MacBook Air touchpad. Go on. You know you want to.

• rufflemuffin (rufflemuffin) on Twitter
  # Bio Design student at GSA in final year. Likes public services and using design for social change
• Newspaper Club | A RIG project
  Another delicious 4iP project
• Newspaper Club - A work in progress
  Tracking the development of one more 4iP product

• PSI Regulations FAQs
  Reuse of public sector information
• Best RSS feeds for information graphics | nicolasrapp.com
  Thought I would share my collection of RSS feeds with everyone. This is a great source of inspiration, and a knowledge bank as well for those who work in the field.

• The Guardian’s tool to crowdsource MPs’ expenses data: time to play | Online Journalism Blog
  So here’s The Guardian’s crowdsourcing tool for MPs’ expenses. If you’ve not already, you should have a play: it’s a dream. There are over 77,000 documents to get through - and in less than 24 hours users have gone through over 50,000 of those. You wonder how long it took The Telegraph to get that far.
• Hello! « Alice and Kev
  This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any job promotions or easy cash routes. It’s based on the old ‘poverty challenge’ idea from The Sims 2, but it turned out to be a lot more interesting with The Sims 3’s living neighborhood features. I have attempted to tell my experiences with the minimum of embellishment. Everything I describe in here is something that happened in the game. What’s more, a surprising amount of the interesting things in this story were generated by just letting go and watching the Sims’ free will and personality traits take over.
• Real world marketing « Sociability
  A good differentiation between different forms of "cross-platform" media: My main point was about the intersection of social tools and media content. Battlefront helps young people campaign and then tells their stories on TV and online, and so creates action in the world. Meanwhile, School of Everything is creating action by building tools to enable and inspire people to teach and learn from each other: the existence of the tool is the trigger for creating the stories. Landshare is the model I can see emerging between the two: an integrated commission of TV content and social platform, with TV content to inspire people to grow things on spare land, and a social tool to help them find and use land near them. In other words, the TV content is creating a culture in which the tool will thrive, and providing marketing for the site. i.e. Battlefront stimulates with TV reinforcing. Landshare needs TV to be stimulated. School of Everything works without TV as an independent toolset.
• Facebook | Look Who's Talking Now
  The people around us are a powerful source for finding information about new and interesting information — from the latest on last night's episode of "The Office" and suggestions on what to do for your next vacation to current events.
• Social Networking Software Platform & Social Media Community Building Applications - KickApps
  Use KickApps to power audience growth & engagement on your website. Build your own community with social networking and photo & video sharing; create your own widgets, custom video players and much more.

• YouTube - Jonathan Zittrain's Commencement Address to the Shady Side Academy Class of 2009
  Witty, funny and oh so true about school life
• Support for creative industries
  Scotland's Creative Industries Partnership brings together the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities, Creative Scotland, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and Scottish Enterprise in an agreement forged by the short-life working group established by Culture Minister Michael Russell.
• Air conditioner on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
  Brilliant application of simple User Interface that makes you laugh
• Check My Colours - Analyse the color contrast of your web pages
  CheckMyColours.com by Giovanni Scala is a tool for checking foreground and background color combinations of all DOM elements and determining if they provide sufficient contrast when viewed by someone having color deficits. All the tests are based on the algorithms suggested by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
• Joho the Blog » Weak copyright spurs creativity
  Canada’s free-culture bulldog — summarizes a Harvard Business School working paper by economists Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf “File Sharing and Copyright” that argues that the inability to strictly enforce today’s draconian and clinically insane copyright laws has in fact benefited society. It’s been slashdotted.
• apophenia: Understanding retweeting on Twitter
  A descriptive paper from danah: When it comes to retweeting, things get messy. The 140 character constraints introduce new dynamics and people route around a potential limitation is unique ways. But this doesn't mean that everything is honky dory. There are authorship issues and attribution issues. The fidelity of a message often gets corrupted as it spreads, revealing the ways in which retweeting has become the modern day incarnation of the "Telephone Game."
• Irish startup, Locle: Brilliantly simple LBS social networking | Mobile Industry Review
  Locle is a platform and device agnostic LBS platform that lets users find out who’s near based on our proprietary cell-ID apps (works on 70% of handsets in Europe).
• Use TubeExits to beat the London Underground crowds | Mobile Industry Review
  TubeExits is for the serious tube rider. It tells you specifically what carriage to board to make sure you arrive directly opposite the relevant exit on your journey.

• YouthNet.org
  YouthNet is the UK's first exclusively online charity. We guide and support young people, enabling them to make educated life choices, participate in society and achieve their ambitions.
• YouTube - Next Generation Talent 2009
  Quite funny take on a hopeless pitch
• JPG Magazine: Stories: The Project: Fallen Princesses
  These works place Fairy Tale characters in modern day scenarios. In all of the images the Princess is placed in an environment that articulates her conflict. The '...happily ever after' is replaced with a realistic outcome and addresses current issues.

• Inform 25 : JISC: 4iP and how it hooks into HE/FE
  Ewan McIntosh is a Digital Media Manager with Channel 4’s Innovation for the Public (4iP), an initiative aiming to fund ideas that change lives. Ewan delivered a captivating keynote at this year’s JISC Conference, and here discusses the issues he thinks will resonate for the future of educational and public-funded technologies.
• Yahoo! Maps Ajax Web Services
  I used MySql to store a local list of locations, with contact details, and used an AJAX callback that took the map coordinates from Yahoo and returned matches in the database, and then plotted each match using a custom marker. It was based on the markers demo here
• Events - Google Maps API - Google Code
  JavaScript within the browser is event driven, meaning that JavaScript responds to interactions by generating events, and expects a program to listen to interesting events. For example, within browsers, user mouse and keyboard interactions create events that propagate within the DOM. Programs interested in certain events will register JavaScript event listeners for those events and execute code when those events are received.
• AJAX APIs Playground
  Google maps api uses javascript extensively so when picking/adding a point on the map the location of the marker can be accessed via javascript. Probably the best example on the google maps Code Playground is http://LNK.by/btG when you click on the map a popup appears with the lat and long in the bubble. The example shows that the value latlng(in this example) can display and therefor manipulate the pointer location for saving. You can put this value to a hidden text field using javascript and then when you click a save button on a page you save the data in to a database of some description.
• swissmiss | Art Basel | Jack Pierson
  Nice framing
• Twitter / Charlie Leadbeater: Tipping point alert: RT @w ...
  Tipping point alert: P&G (the soap in soap operas) cut TV ads 44% last 1/4, internet spending up 200+%.

• Dude — Dell’s Making Money Off Twitter! | Epicenter | Wired.com
  It isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but Dell says it has made $3 million using Twitter. Before Twitter, companies who wanted to reach out and touch someone risked being accused of digital assault — phone calls and e-mail spam would do as much damage as potential good to spread the word. But Twitter let’s you speak all you want without pissing off anyone who doesn’t want to listen
• MediaFile » Blog Archive » Cellphone touch screens to bring drawing messages? | Blogs |
  To promote drawing on phones, Welsh — whose mobile paintings have been downloaded some 500,000 times from Nokia’s mobile-sharing service Mosh — is planning a drawing tour across Britain, to visit art venues, universities, schools and nightclubs.