• Moving to Rails 2.0 « Marc-André Cournoyerâ��s blog
  
  Tags: ruby rails code update

• Internet schools: The school on a sofa
  Picture a school with no walls … there are no smelly changing-rooms, no lumpy gravy, no bullies, or detentions and you can turn up to lessons in your pyjamas ,,, if you feel like it. It’s called InterHigh â�� and it’s the UK’s first ever internet school
  Tags: education school online elearning UK

Wade’s put together a nice list of 26 common cognitive biases.

1. Bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink, herd behaviour, and manias. Carl Jung pioneered the idea of the collective unconscious which is considered by Jungian psychologists to be responsible for this cognitive bias.
2. Bias blind spot - the tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases.
3. Choice-supportive bias - the tendency to remember one’s choices as better than they actually were.
4. Confirmation bias - the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
5. Congruence bias - the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively through direct testing.
6. Contrast effect - the enhancement or diminishment of a weight or other measurement when compared with recently observed contrasting object.
7. Déformation professionnelle - the tendency to look at things according to the conventions of one’s own profession, forgetting any broader point of view.
8. Disconfirmation bias - the tendency for people to extend critical scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and uncritically accept information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
9. Endowment effect - the tendency for people to value something more as soon as they own it.
10. Focusing effect - prediction bias occurring when people place too much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately predicting the utility of a future outcome.
11. Hyperbolic discounting - the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer to the present both payoffs are.
12. Illusion of control - the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.
13. Impact bias - the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
14. Information bias - the tendency to seek information even when it cannot affect action.
15. Loss aversion - the tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains (see also sunk cost effects)
16. Neglect of probability - the tendency to completely disregard probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
17. Mere exposure effect - the tendency for people to express undue liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
18. Omission bias - The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse, or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
19. Outcome bias - the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it was made.
20. Planning fallacy - the tendency to underestimate task-completion times.
21. Post-purchase rationalization - the tendency to persuade oneself through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
22. Pseudocertainty effect - the tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
23. Selective perception - the tendency for expectations to affect perception.
24. Status quo bias - the tendency for people to like things to stay relatively the same.
25. Von Restorff effect - the tendency for an item that “stands out like a sore thumb” to be more likely to be remembered than other items.
26. Zero-risk bias - preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a greater reduction in a larger risk.

• BenCurtis.com » Rails, OpenID, and Acts as Authenticated
  Steps that Ben took to integrate OpenID with Acts as Authenticated for account creation and access
  Tags: ruby rails code openid tutorial acts_as_authenticated
• How to use OpenID (a screencast)
  OpenID lets you log in to different sites without having to create a new username and password for each one. This screencast demonstrates OpenID in action.
  Tags: videos openid identity tutorial
• Marcâ��s Voice » The Chess game of social networking
  No one [social networking] vendor has to WIN the game. We can all hang out in the park and play, .. dance, juggle, sing or just read the paper. We can all participate in a Community Commons of people, technology and commerce - and live happily ever after.
  Tags: socialnetworking games openness competition collaboration
• Lock-in becomes a Web 2.0 issue (Scripting News)
  “Facebook could easily be .. where the dam breaks. It’s attracting so many users, who may at some point realize that they want control of the data that’s locked up inside Facebook.. vendors who have been on the right side of this issue will be the heroes”
  Tags: social_networks openness facebook control identity
• Game mechanics applied to social media: Keeping score
  Tricks that social networking sites can get to keep customers
  Tags: games social_computing socialnetworking strategy design
• Games learning from Web 2.0
  specifically about using tag-based approaches to think about behaviour engines
  Tags: games social_computing strategy design

Just discovered Everyclick.com. It’s a nice idea. Half of their gross revenue goes to charities.

“everyclick allocates 50% of its gross revenue to charity each month. Each active charity receives a proportion of that sum equivalent to the proportion in which its supporters use the website relative to the supporters of other active charities. The activity of everyclick website users who do not select a specific charity will benefit all active charities on a pro rata basis.”

October 27th 2007 | Comments(1) | Life on charity search

This caught my eye

“A lot of applications are designed to make things easy. Fun comes from challenge. It’s about taking risks and taking risks that are wrong,” says Areae president Koster … “If you look at eBay, a huge reason that it’s addictive is because you can lose. You get hardcore users who can swipe things from people in the last three seconds.”

And there’s me trying to explain to children that collaboration not competition is the way forward. Maybe I should rethink that. Collaboration is the best way to win?

This had me transfixed.

• Wink
  free tool for creating Flash tutorials
  Tags: tools flash tutorials
• Railscasts - Stopping Spam with Akismet
  (Akismet as in that thing wordpress uses)
  Tags: code ruby tutorial spam
• russell davies: topsecrethowiesproject
  just fabulous
  Tags: postcard Howies flickr ChittyChittyBangBang

Finally gotten round to slidesharing a presentation I did for some Unicorn Mums who were worried about what their children got up to online (and wanted some advice about how to go about it). It’s a general overview rather than anything too specific.

As Mr W says (commenting on this slightly depressing article in the Grauniad)

The real question, however, boils down to the amount of privacy you feel your own children are entitled to. In my own case, I am a friend on my own kid’s Bebos, and I’ve also installed imsafer… but neither of these was done without discussing it with the kids first. For me, that is the dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable surveillance…

Completely agree about the dividing line. For what it’s worth, here are the slides (with a few wangy fonts).

| View | Upload your own

October 25th 2007 | Comments(2) | Thoughts on child, online, parents, presentation, safety school

• Pasta & Vinegar » Habbo Hotel as a boundary object
  One can see [Habbo] as a boundary objects both for the industries (web vs games) and the demographics (teenagers vs grownups). And as every boundary objects, it’s something worth to explore
  Tags: Habbo games children social_computing boundary_object

• Building Brand into Structure - Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design
  If you followed usability gurus like Jakob Nielsen blindly, brand would have little to no place in information and interaction design. … Users don’t want an experience, they want to find information and to do things as quickly and simply as possible.
  Tags: design online branding IA
• Architectural Record | Schools of the 21st Century
  created for those who believe that the quality of our school buildings is directly related to the quality of education we give the students who occupy them.
  Tags: architecture design education
• Cyberbullying - Laugh at it and you’re part of it
  YouGov’s cyberbullying page
  Tags: cyberbully bullying school
• Educator’s Guide to Cyberbullying
  Nancy Willard of the US’s Center for Safe and Responsible Use of the Internet has written a useful overview
  Tags: policy school cyberbully bullying
• Kidsmart
  an award-winning Internet safety awareness programme for schools.
  Tags: school bullying policy
• Kidscape Research on Long Term Effects of Bullying
  Useful to show children what the actual impact is
  Tags: bullying research school effect children
• Embedding Antibullying work in Schools
  Department of Children, Schools and Families report on approaches to deal with bullying
  Tags: bullying children report school policy
• EU Kids Online
  LSE/EU report on children’s behaviour online across the EU
  Tags: children EU research behaviour

• Web 2.0 how-to design style guide
  Clever chaps those designers.
  Tags: Web2.0 design guides
• YouTube - A Vision of Students Today
  a short video summarizing some characteristics of students today - how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime. Created in collaborat
  Tags: video students youth
• 100+ Web 2.0 online Generators | Yazzie’s Online Journal
  Lists like this do make me re-apprepreciate editors.
  Tags: Web2.0 list code
• Digital Nativism
  In a rather shallow piece lacking in evidence or data, Prensky offers the terms “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” to set up a generational divide. His proposition is simple-minded. He paints digital experience as wonderful and old ways as worthle
  Tags: digital_native youth technology hype
• BLC07 McIntosh No.1: Why Scotland Has Been Blogging For 5 Million Years
  Scotland’s education system is arguably using proportionally more social bookmarking, online video sharing, image sharing, wikis, feed readers and blogs than any other country in the world”
  Tags: Scotland national education social_computing
• BLC07 McIntosh No.2: How Public Is Your Public Body?
  I don’t know one public body, particularly in the education world, that doesn’t have the mantra, the strategies or the policies which make sure that stakeholders are consulted, that dialogue is continuously deepened and that the organisation “really gets
  Tags: public_bodies education strategy
• BLC07 McIntosh No.3: We’re adopting! A strategy for social media in education
  “Social media, and whether or not it’s adopted in any organisation, is almost entirely down to the culture of the organisation. “
  Tags: social_software strategy education introduce
• LIFT07: Sugata Mitra and outdoctrination
  “Educational technology and pedagogy that is digital, automatic, fault-tolerant, minimally invasive, connected, and self-organized. Call it outdoctrination.”
  Tags: education future technology outdoctrination

• Computational Thinking
  “It represents a universally applicable attitude and skill set everyone, not just computer scientists, would be eager to learn and use.”
  Tags: education thinking computing problem_solving
• OUTSIDER ARCHITECTURE « LEBBEUS WOODS
  what interests me here is other architects whose work has had enough impact on the mainstream to be visible, but is kept by the critics at arms (or barge pole) length from the historical canon.
  Tags: architecture outsider critics acceptance
• TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » Is Fav.or.it a Digg killer?
  
  Tags: RSS social_bookmarking Web2.0 startups

After seeing this and reading this Facebook group (thanks to Andy and Euan pointing here) I’ve just signed up to this petition.

Burmese TV Message (via BBC)

There’s a great article by Olivier over at Headshift.

Two things caught my eye:

Employees are the one who know which tools are relevant for doing their job more efficiently and we don’t have to impose and restrict them (to) a set of tools

and

Social computing for the organisation, call it Enterprise 2.0 if you want to be trendy, is a reality that needs to be evangelised, despite massive information available on the wild wild web

And there’s the rub. If people haven’t heard the Web 2.0 evangelist, then do they know what tools are relevant for doing their job?

From CNN

“Insoo has a difficult math problem as homework. He posts it up on Naver Knowledge iN, a popular online Q&A service with some 70 million entries. Within about 10 minutes of posting, someone chimes in with a good answer, and Insoo awards him with some “Knowledge Power” points — knowledge-based economy in action among 14-year-olds.”

Laurent remarks that Korea provides

“an opportunity for Europeans and Americans to have a preview of what their society might be in a near future. Most of the important technological trends start in Korea five years before they hit us. Think of citizen journalism (started by Ohmynews in 2000), social networking (Cyworld, 1999), or knowledge sharing websites (Naver Knowledge iN who became Yahoo Answers for us).”

And that sentiment seems to be backed up here

All of which presumably ties in with “bottom-up education”.

From a teacher’s perspective, I think it’s great news that children can find so many different sources of help. And it’s great that they stand a good chance at becoming more skilled in collaborating, co-operating and thriving in a knowledge market of sorts.

But.

Perhaps the homework scenario skews things a little? Education is about many things, but presumably a couple of the key goals are encouraging curiosity and fostering understanding. To go online to quickly get some answers so you can quickly finish your homework (and do well at it) is a wonderful skill, but I wouldn’t have thought it’s the goal of the homework exercise.

How, then, can we rejig homework to encourage all of the above - curiosity, understanding, and collaboration?

Well, step one might be to look at the research that homework helps academic achievement. I’ve just bought this to try and find out more, and Harris Cooper at Duke seems to have done some interesting work. Even if it does help, there are pros and cons:

“Most of what homework is doing is driving kids away from learning,” says education professor Harvey Daniels. Let’s face it: Most children dread homework, or at best see it as something to be gotten through. Thus, even if it did provide other benefits, they would have to be weighed against its likely effect on kids’ love of learning.

Step two might be to try to, ahem, make homework enjoyable. Get children using their collaborative skills and their own interests to fulfil that horrendously named thing, the learning objective. Perhaps we should be asking the children how they could learn more about, say, perimeters and area at home, online, together or all three.

[via Rodney’s tip off about Compete.com]

A comment on Rodney’s blog - from Michael - made me think:

“those of us interested in growing on-line communities the message seems to be that setting up special interest groups is going to be less effective than developing a useful application”

If there are 3 types of communities - one of them the type that grows from shared activities, one from shared space and one from shared interest - then maybe Facebook is doing 1 and 2 and blogs are doing 3? Oversimple probably.

October 04th 2007 | Comments(1) | Thoughts, Notes on activity, blogs, chart, community, facebook, online social software

• The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids — New York Magazine
  “Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The ’smart’ kids took the cop-out. “
  Tags: children feedback Learning teaching praise productivity

October 04th 2007 | Comments(3) | Asides on children, feedback, Learning, praise, productivity teaching

Richard Sambrook [thanks Euan]:

John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, made a really good point at the Clinton Global Initiative:

He said the current education system of grades and exams puts people in competition with each other and is a top down command-and-control model. As the leader of one of the world’s biggest IT companies he believes future education should concentrate on networking and collaboration - which will support greater innovation and cross-discipline creativity. It will also, he said, attract talent. Call it Education 2.0 then…

I completely agree at University level, and perhaps 16+, when education becomes optional. But I’m not sure it’s an either or before then. I’m just a little suspicious of completely ditching the top down. And I do think broad brush statements about education and how we should do it need to be narrowed take into account the strengths and proclivities that we have as a result of our age.