http://ifttt.com. ”If this, then that.”
It’s a service that ties together ~35 web services and let’s you do really cool things with this infromation.
If Weather at <location> changes to rain, SMS me.
Or tweet everybody.
Or send an email to all my friends.
Or download a file from Dropbox.
In the words of The Big Lewbowski, “It ties the room together.”
When we grow a network, the most important asset we get is access to one another.
We increasingly become one another’s infrastructure.
When we have a network, the most important asset we get is access to one another.
We are one another’s infrastructure.
Inspired by Clay Shirky. And the work I’ve done over the past 10 years and will be doing for the next 10 years.
One of my favorite pieces from Ze Frank, this time, in text form.
Source: Ze Frank on Waves
February 2007
In 1908, of course, Ocean Beach won the least creative name for a public space ever contest coming in just ahead of Green Park in London.
On that beach, young children were making things that kind of looked like castles by pushing together tiny grains of silicon dioxide. Annoying parents stood by to tell the children what castles did, and did not, look like. The end product was often intricate with buttresses, ornamental shells, and sharp defined corners.
For a moment the children could step back and say “this is a castle,” and very few people would argue with them, but being on the edge of an ocean, beaches also sometimes have waves.
These waves often started somewhere far away, and are the result of many incremental forces. As they approach the shore they have a certain inevitability to them. Waves don’t really give a crap what a castle is supposed to look like, and they don’t really give a crap about the children that made those castles.
In fact, waves aren’t really capable of giving a crap at all. When they’re done, the waves leave behind a clump that’s soft and rounded that doesn’t really look like a castle anymore. It looks like something, but we don’t really have a word for it.
On Ocean Beach some people get tired of building sand castles and choose to interact with the waves directly.
Some people just hang out and bob up and down. Other people float on things that are filled with air, but everyone knows it’s the surfers that really know what’s goin’ on.
Besides the Pacific Ocean, San Francisco is also on the edge of something else.
To the south, in Silicon Valley, hundreds of thousands of people play on the leading edge of technology. As they struggle to make a name for themselves on that beach they’re also confronted by waves. Waves that started awhile ago and are the result of many incremental forces.
Some people push together a whole bunch of little bits so that they kind of resemble places that we’re familiar with. Annoying people stand over their shoulder and tell them what things like community and friendship do, and don’t, look like.
If they’re lucky, they can step back and for a moment it reminds them of something that they’ve seen before. But the wave has a certain inevitability to it, and the wave doesn’t really give a crap about what you’ve seen before. When it retreats they’re left with something that doesn’t really look like community, and it doesn’t really look like friendship. It looks like something but we don’t really have a name for it yet.
Other people swim out, and they bob up and down. Sometimes, when people get to the top of a wave, they say “I made this wave, this wave is because of me, and because I’m wearing yellow swimming trunks,” and then lots of other people put on yellow swimming trunks and the swim out, but by the time they get there that guys at the bottom and some guy in red trunks is yelling the same thing.
Other people sit on inflated rafts, so even when they’re at the bottom their little heads peek out over the top of the waves, but, eventually, a lot of those guys tip over or they run out of people that are willing to blow.
It’s the surfers that are the most fun to watch.
They know they didn’t start the waves, but they do study them. While they’re surfing, they don’t congratulate each other for pushing the water closer to the shore. They understand that the wave has a certain inevitability to it, that it doesn’t give a crap about them…it just moves. So, they play on it and explore its natural contours and do tricks. And, by doing that, they give the wave meaning. Human meaning.
Sure, they get beaten up quite a bit, but when they get it right they can actually experience what waves can mean to people, and when they come back in, those are the people that get to name those little rounded lumps of sand.
In video form…
This project intends to get 100,000 students thinking, writing, and sharing answers to these questions on May 10, 2011. They[1] have a site where people can register their intent, browse activities, and learn more about the project.
Five questions.
Tip: This would make a powerful faculty meeting activity or conference session. How close does your work environment parallel your idea learning environment?
Source: The Great American Teach-In: Listening to Students
Lehmann, Laufenberg, Chase and others, including anybody who has attended Educon in the past.
Dave Winer. October 31, 2000. This is the “birth” of something that became known as “podcasting”.
Adam wants the Internet to be Everyman’s broadcast medium, to route around TV and radio broadcast networks, with no compromise in quality. Now if this were easy, or the solution obvious, we’d already be doing it. But there’s a big sticky problem in the way, the pipes don’t seem big enough.
Ten years later and the pipes are no bigger. Seriously. Well, the backbone is. Just not to your house.
Why? Because the people that control the pipes want you to be consumers of information, not producers. Why? Competition with their business model.
Source: DaveNet : Virtual Bandwidth

via Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach’s recent post Online Learning Is So Last Year, something I’ve read and reread about 5 times in the past week.
Source: Here’s Where the E-Learning Community Provides Practical Value » The Rapid eLearning Blog
Skip to about the 2:20 mark. Then prepare to be amazed.
Source: YouTube – Talking of Tomorrow
Chris Lehmann dropped this into my attention stream twice this past week.
Campbell’s Law: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
Source: Wikipedia
Data is emerging from the 2010 Speak Up survey. The short answer to the big question: filters and policies are biggest obstacles.
Here is an interesting twist in the 2010 findings.
The majority of parents surveyed – 67% – said that they were willing to buy their children a mobile device for school if the schools allowed it, and parents seemed particularly interested in their children using these devices in order to access online textbooks.
via What Do Kids Say Is The Biggest Obstacle To Technology At School?
