Month March 2005

Jail Break

I just love having two kids who are such good friends. Laura told me a great story that took place yesterday with Savannah and Alyssa. I just have to share how Savannah chose to play the protective big sister for…

Advertising this Party

I know Nate is serious about Getting off the porch and so am I. I said before that we are not getting our message out to the right audience just because it is on the web and thus universally available. I started talking about presenting at AECT in Orlando only to learn that Nate was ahead of me there with the Overlay and the Strategic Task Force. Since then I have realized that between now and October is at least one lifetime in the blogosphere if not two. I think that finding some way to keep these good conversations visible in some ongoing way would be useful but I continue to contend that we also need to send the invitations into the established venues of communication. A presentation in October is too long to wait. We should still do that, but before then we should publish something. Here’s a radical idea – why don’t we actually advertise? Get an ad in TechTrends or ETR&D listing the topics of some good academic conversations that we have had in our stadium and invite people to visit us. This would be print, so the conversations would have a different type of life, but the ad could point people to a website which teaches how to join the blogosphere as a reader, provides links to the conversations in the ad along with all the blogs that have participated in any of those conversations and teaches them how to begin writing a blog when they are ready to contribute in that manner. Perhaps it should provide a link to the aect-members list of blogs so they can get a dynamic list of bloggers to look at. The point is that we have to advertise our party in a way that will get to people, but […]

Creativity and Culture

I enjoyed Rovy’s little rant. I agree that the lack of creativity is not rooted in the ISD process, but rather it is rooted in the lack of a design culture among LPs. We are taught how to develop things…

Seriously Funny

I have never laughed so hard as when I read Don’s partita in D. I could never do it justice in summary so let me just say that it is well worth the read – especially the last paragraph: To…

Not To Be Picky

I do not intend to poke holes here for the sake of argument. I just thought I would share this discussion that I have been passively enjoying at Cognitive Dissonance, but I think it is not just trivial to note…

D20

Thanks Dave. Of course I already knew Take the quiz at dicepool.com You are the large, round, friendly d20! (You probably didn’t know this, but the shape of the twenty-sided die is called an Icosahedron.) You are the friendly, outgoing,…

Academic Status of Blog Posts

Nate has some interesting and accurate thoughts on the academic states of blog posts. Roy had some interesting thoughts to add as well. As for myself I think that there is little we can do to encourage bloggers to post meaningful content because it is their own content. That is the beauty of blogs. We control only what we subscribe to. If I deem the content of a blog to be frivolous I am free to not pay attention to it. Anyone who wants to join in serious discourse will already be motivated to ensure that they are posting worthwile thoughts. Nate has argued, rightly I think, that having high qulaity discussions will attract wider participation and will elevate the status of blogging in the academic community. The key is that it is an individual choice. There will always be people who blog recreationally. It is no different than any other media, we have professional journals and then we have non-academic publicaitons. We are responsible to be professional if professionalism is the purpose behind our blogging. We do not need to worry about those who have no professional objective to their blogging because, in the end, a good idea is a good idea regardless of its source. Those who wish to put serious content on their blogs must trust that it will be recognized as such.

Trash IE 6

I just spent 5 hours working on some beautiful, valid CSS because it was not rendering correctly in IE 6. It worked perfectly in Firefox. After all that work I came up with ugly and almost valid CSS that functions…

Direction

What am I interested in? That is the question of the day. I have realized that I am floundering and I know myself well enough to know that when I have an interest to pursue I do not flounder. I…

I Understand

I think I finally understood Nate’s position after reading this today. Where I have been questioning him up until now I no longer question because I recognize his perpective and his push. Well said Nate. It is especially important for those trying to develop reputations to take the risks that will build those reputations. This does not mean that the ranked players should not participate, but it means that taking the risks on new technologies is less important for them personally. It is not so important for the current leaders to lead in the new areas but it is an excellent opportunity for newer players (like me) to explore a leadership role in a new area like this.