UberNoggin

Skimming through my RSS reads today I stumbled on Mashable’s post about Apture. No doubt you’re wondering what the new link types are here in the text. They’re Apture links.

Here’s what it does…once you’ve created an Apture account, added the plug-in to your site, and activated it, Apture lets you quickly link to multiple forms of media for any piece of text in your blog entry. And not just one, you can link to Wikipedia, a news story, a video from You Tube, and a photo on Flickr all from the same key word!

Benefits: Contextual and background information for any concept or idea on your page. Intead of embedding videos into posts, an Apture link pops them up on top of the post when the reader asks for them.

Concerns: The plug-in doesn’t seem to be too IE friendly and has caused a few slow-downs with the blog loading for the first time ina browser.

Wishes: It would be great fun if readers could also easily link to content the same way to augment the author’s posts. Of course, I’m sure we’d want to approve them before they went live.

What do you think? Does it make the page slow? Are the additions worth it or not? Would you add Apture to your site?

Local bloggers from across Indiana will gather at the IUPUI Campus Center on August 16-17th, 2008, for Blog Indiana 2008, a 2-day blogging and social media conference that aims to promote education, innovation and collaboration among Indiana’s fast-growing blogging community. The conference is sponsored by the IU School of Informatics.

Yours truly will be giving a talk about conversational media and maintaining brand consistency. Every session looks like a winner though and the event is affordable at only $49 for two days of talks and events! Click here to register.

I know I’m an early adopter and that I tend to try out new web apps that other people don’t quite see as useful so I admit that I have a certain amount of bias. Regardless, I have to rant a bit about the so called “tech journalists” who begin half their columns by admitting that they’ve never actually tried the technology they’re writing about. I can’t count how many pieces on Second Life I’ve read that include “I don’t have an avatar but I talked to people who do” or journalists I’ve been interviewed by who obviously don’t have even the most basic notion of how a specific technology actually functions before they decide to run with a story.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming that all journalists have to imbed themselves in a culture just to be able to write about it but it seems that clicking a few buttons to create an account and poke at a technology is a lot less of a commitment than, say, joining a cult  or getting a tattoo just to be able to write about the culture. We’re not talking about a major life change here.

Today’s example of ill-informed “journalist” comes from the Huffington Post’s Michelle Haimoff as she writes about the attraction of Twitter. The following statement comes early in the article:

I haven’t joined Twitter yet. I’m still unclear on why anyone would care about what I digg. I was wary of Facebook. I never thought YouTube would take off. I pretend there’s no such thing as Second Life.

Now, I’ll grant that Michelle doesn’t claim to be a technology expert. Her other posts are about secret getaways and other vapid topics. I just think it’s poor writing and even worse journalism to not take the time to dig a little deeper and actually understand a technology before you write about it. Especially one as accessible as Twitter. The only redeeming aspect of the article is that she at least spoke to Scoble about his Twitter use. Michelle’s conclusion is that at least some Twitter users are simply lonely. Agree or disagree, it’s a shallow consideration of the power of an always-on asynchronous conversation.

As technologies formerly only known to us geeks hit the mainstream it’s certainly important that non-geeks take a look and begin to translate their usefuless. But come on! At least try it before you write about it.

End of rant

Lately I’ve been giving talks about the potential conflict between formal, institutionalized learning and the kind of informal, self-driven learning that social media supports. At the Sloan-C conference, and more recently at EduComm, I tried to get folks thinking about the difference between the way we learn in school and the way we learn on our own in a digital, networked world. You might not agree that this difference presents a crisis but I think you’ll at least be able to see that there is a difference.

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No matter how many times I roll the ideas around in my head I can’t help but think that if we ignore the way people learn informally with social media the more irrelevant formal education may become. For instance, think about the last time you needed to answer a question…say the name of a band or how to accomplish something with a piece of software. Where did you start looking for an answer?

I’m sure you didn’t think “Well, I don’t know who sang ‘Dead or Alive’ so I better go enroll in a music history class to find out!” No, you probably Googled a bit of the lyrics, the title of the song, or posted the question to your favorite social media (my choice would be Twitter). When I need to remember how to do a Quickmask in Photoshop I don’t pull out a giant Photoshop manual or even search the software help, I do a quick search and find an online tutorial (not created by an academic or even an industry expert) or I search through user forum posts.

I’m still mulling over the idea but I can’t help but think that we need to do a better job of bringing these kinds of social and informal learning methods into our classrooms. I know that there are instructors who do this but academia, on the whole, doesn’t teach this kind of learning or value it in assessments.

Are we facing a crisis? Are we leaving out an important part of what it is to be a digital learner?

When the food came is was awesome. Slices of steak, chicken, incredible sausage, and lots of veggies with couscous and bread. Yum! We took a chance and it turned out well.

It’s very humbling to be in a country where you don’t speak the language. Mark and I headed out to a restaraunt last night and basically said “We’ll have what they’re having” pointing to a nearby table. We weren’t really sure what we were going to get.

If you’re ever in Sao Paulo DO NOT miss the art museum! It’s truly amazing. It’s the only building I’ve ever seen that doesn’t have a ground floor. The main exhibit area is on the second floor and below ground is a beautiful space with a few pieces of modern art and a cafe where the posh business people of down town Sao Paulo go to eat lunch. We saw works by Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Talousse-Letrec, Cezanne, Picasso, Raphael, and many more. It’s really breathtaking and organized around themes rather than in chronological order or by artistic movements. The context that the thematic galleries adds to the paintings and sculptures made for interesting conversation between pieces that you might otherwise never compare.

We had lunch with Bill Thompson at a quaint little local cafe and I had a salad as big as my head. Yum! We’re off again to adventure somewhere else. Tune in for more updates later!

Mark and Bill Thompson in downtown Sao Paulo traffic

another bit of scary taxi ride

Taxi rides in Sao Paulo are pretty darn scary