Year 2005

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.

I Need a Grain of Salt

I have seen the list of these advantages to blogging (broken link) but, while I believe that blogging is beneficial to my career, I have a hard time believing all of those benefits without some evidence. Specifically I have some…

Don’t Ignore a Good Question

Matt put a good question on his blog last week in response to Paul’s post. I just read the question again and realized that I had missed something the first time I read it. “Why make learners go through the…