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Corporate-FX, Inc.-Tradeshow Magic
Ave de las banderas 30211
CA 92688 Rancho Santa Margarita (United States)
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• Rental: audio visual, ICT

The Microsoft Corporation (1978)

Onze Microsoft,
Die op onze harde schijf zijt,

Geheiligd zij Uw Windows,
Uw update kome,
Uw bugfix geschiede,
In Windows Als ook in Office,
Geef ons heden onze dagelijkse reboot,
En vergeef ons onze illegale copieen,
Zoals ook wij vergeven onze hardware verkopers,
En leidt ons niet naar IBM,
Maar verlos ons van OS/2,
Want van U is het DOS,
En het Windows,
En het NT,
Tot in eeuwigheid

Enter.

Landing Zone is refocusing with the goal of providing the leading resource for international companies seeking to develop the US market. More coming soon.

While Twitter may have taken second place in Bing’s 10 most searched topics of 2009, we’ve now learned that it has become top dog in something far bigger: the entire English language.

The Global Language Monitor, which tracks language trends, has once again compiled and released its yearly list of the most popular words and phrases within the English language. In 2008, the #1 most popular word was “change” (referring to the mantra of the top name of 2008, Barack Obama). However, Obama has been supplanted this year by the 140 character sensation that is Twitter ().

Yes, Twitter may very well be the most popular word in the English language this year.

Al prof. Luigi Frati, Rettore della Sapienza non piacciono le figure retoriche, le citazioni colte e i discorsi ispirati.

E’ un medico e come tutti i bravi medici preferisce essere impietoso e diretto: la malattia va diagnosticata in fretta e va somministrata una cura.

Il mondo universitario (terra di gattopardi e …pantere) non è abituato a questo metodo e – ci pare – assiste un po’ tramortito alla terapia antibiotica.

Il governo vuole tagliare, razionalizzare e riorganizzare la governance?

Bene, noi lo facciamo prima e – se possibile – cerchiamo di essere più rigorosi. Poi toccherà agli altri, Governo, Regione eccetera dare ossigeno e risorse per uscire dalla crisi.

La cosa interessante è che il metodo è completamente ‘impolitico’: il professore non cerca il consenso, semmai il consenso informato, non chiede di schierarsi o di alimentare dialettiche virtuose. Si deve fare. Punto e basta.

Persino Churchill, nel famoso discorso sulle lacrime e sangue, cercava una forma di consenso, una maggioranza. Il professore- al contrario – va diritto al punto. È la trasfigurazione del ‘decisionismo’.

Perché ne parlo in un blog che si occupa di webdesign?

Perché in mezzo a questo immenso campo di tartufi (sindacali, accademici e corporativi) c’é finalmente uno che non aspetta che tutto cambi perché nulla cambi.

Perché anche noi (webdesigner, informatici, comunicatori, tecnici ICT, innovatori eccetera) dobbiamo uscire dal campo dei tartufi e dare un nostro contributo.
Nel nostro piccolissimo lo stiamo facendo e voi?

Kuva: Bah Humbug

Igor Faletski vinkkaa, miten kirjastonkin kotisivuista saa tehtyä mobiiliystävällisemmät:

1. Suunnittele mobiililaitteille omat sivut.
2. Käytä oikean kokoisia kuvia: pieni näyttö vaatii pieniä kuvia.
3. Käytä sivustoilla automaattista mobiililaitteen tunnistusta.
4. Mieti navigointi uusiksi.
5. Tarjoa selkeä polku varsinaisille verkkosivuille.
6. Älä riko linkkejä, eli pidä huolta että kävijä pääsee sille sivulle jolle kuvittelee pääsevänsä. Älä siis ohjaa häntä esim. mobiilipalvelun pääsivulle silloin, kun käyttäjä odottaa saavansa eteensä kirjaston yhteystiedot.
7. Seuraa mobiilikäyttöä, jotta voit kehittää mobiilipalveluita myös jatkossa.

Kiitos vinkistä: Ellyssa

I’ve had my HTC Hero nearly a week and still getting to know all the features, as well as some very good and mostly free software from the Android Market.  One such app is My Tracks by Google.  This adds the kind of tracking and analysis features that are found in sports and leisure GPS devices.

When you run the My Tracks for the first time an introduction page is displayed and one thing you’ll see mentioned is Google My Maps.  I’d heard of this before on the Google Maps site, but never taken time to look at it.  Well, since I wanted to understand the My Tracks app, I googled “google my maps” and saw a YouTube video “How to create a My Map”.  It’s an excellent introduction to My Maps.  Here it is:

The uses for My Maps are endless.  In education, students can create maps of historic journeys and tours of famous locations; before and after a science or geography field trip the students could prepare maps of the area and key points of interest.  Combine this with the My Tracks Android app, and the potential is huge.  This is an example of the excellent quality and breadth of function of Google applications.

I’m look forward to giving My Tracks a spin in the very near future.

You can find out more at the Google Maps and My Tracks web sites.   I have linked to the UK Google Maps site.  It’s best to use the site relevant to your location.

I am currently building a new homepage. As soon as I have finished this, I am going to reflect whether this way of presenting and distributing information is still useful, if we have Wikis, Blogs, Learning platforms and so on…Another question will be if and how to combine the web 1.0 (homepage) and web 2.0 features in a useful way.

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Creative Technology
Delta Parkway 10501
IL 60176 Schiller Park (United States)
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Creative Technology – CA

CA 91605 North Hollywood, (United States)
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Some of you have had the chance to use WordWall recently, and have had a lot of fun using the interactive WordPads that enable you to text your answers to questions straight to the whiteboard, or move your chip around the whiteboard to identify the correct answer from the choices available.

What do you think of this new resource?
Have you enjoyed using it?
Have you got any ideas for making activities to use with WordWall?

         
Er bestaan inmiddels een flink aantal cloud-achtige platforms.
Zelf heb ik onderstaande uitgeprobeerd hoewel voor particulier gberuik niet echt noodzakelijk,
toch leuk om eens naar te kijken.     
              
Eyeos for public administrations

Introduction

Usually large institutions -or government agencies- need complex tools to communicate and to manage different departments, offices and services. When they need to create a network that combines more than two types of services offered to citizens or used internally, they usually need to do research in order to determine which kind of software and hardware performs better.

Since eyeos is a web-based platform, the end user can be running any kind of individual desktop operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac, BSD, Solaris, etc) and only needs a web browser and an Internet/Intranet access.

We can build eyeos-based applications and services that fit the needs of different kind of public administrations: from a small city council to a network of hundreds of centers which need to be coordinated.

Success story

A successful example is the solution implemented at the Catalan Government, specifically, the Governance Department, which includes the city of Barcelona and serves over 7.2 million people. This project, created for the Catalan Government uses an eyeos-based solution that organizes more than 400 facilities of 9 different types and through different eyeos applications.

Every one from those 400 centers is currently using eyeos for their internal communication, but also to manage a wide variety of resources with the central administration.

Pricing and availability

This kind of project must be estimated individually. We’re currently available to offer local services for United States, Spain, France and Germany. We can also provide remote services to any other part of the world.

Ars Combinatoria: Or, Hegel’s Logic as Chronotope for the Digital Age

The combinatory is an idea whose time, once again, has come. In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich argues that the database is one of the primary apparatus of the new media age. He cites Dziga Vertov’s use of this form to ‘digitize’ the visible world, in films such as Man with a Movie Camera (decades before the advent of the digital computer), as a key precursor of the mode of de/reconstructing the world in the age of computerized media. And yet we can go back further – Leibniz, widely considered one of the forefathers of the modern computer – was himself fascinated by dream of a ‘universal characteristic’, a combinatory which could translate human thought into a series of symbols which could avoid the ambiguities of human language. Combined with production of the first binary numeral system, as well as his attempt to produce a mechanical adding machine, Leibniz’s desire seems fulfilled in the contemporary form whereby inputs hit computers, are metabolized into numerical codes which are stored in database grids, then to be read and output in cybernetic loops with us, their human relay centers.

Manovich has argued that time itself changes in the digital age, it ceases to be the linear time of modernity (which for Vilem Flusser was prompted itself by the linearity of the sentence as promoted by the ‘Gutenberg revolution’), and rather is spatialized by the very form of the database grid. In database time, each cell in the grid contains a moment, retrievable at random, not necessarily placed in the order of temporal flow. Thus, you open one cell and the grid and see yourself as a child, in the one nextdoor, as a geriatric, and in between as split between ovum and sperm. Certain experimental films and books, particularly hypertext fictions, pursue a related notion of temporality which Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image, calls crystalline time. In crystalline time, there is still a flow of present to past at the level of the observer, but this observer moves continually amongst a series of ‘cells’ of the past and future, thereby combining the linearity of modern temporal flow with the spatialized time of the computer database. A film such as Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 is an example given by Deleuze of the manner in which ‘time is out of joint’ in the post-war world, producing an interpenetration of memory and imagination, desire and anticipation, all in a multi-temporal present which explores time as one explores a house whose labyrinthine structure is crystlline, and whose rooms indicate moments of time. A film which takes this to the next level, for Deleuze, is Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, in which the protagonists explore a variety of virtual scenarios, what Leibniz would call ‘incompossible’ combinations of events, each of which present alternative futures and pasts, many of which could not exist at the same time. For Deleuze, Resnais’ film presents us with one of the most advanced images of the crystalline form of time appropriate to the postwar age.

Videogames present perhaps some of the most advanced forms of crystalline narration available today, in forms which go beyond the inherent linearity of time within film. Many contemporary videogames present the player with virtual worlds which are like Leibniz’s combinatory of possible worlds as presented in his Monadology (leading Ken Wark, in Gamer Theory, to refer to Leibniz’s God as a sort of cosmological video-game programer).. Key events lead to forking paths which separate the world of play into parallel realities, only one of which the player can follow at a time, but which by playing multiple times and making multiple choices, allow for an exploration of incompossible parallel realities. Such an approach uses a linear formation to explore the potential permutations of time as algorithm, as spatio-temporal crystal. What’s more, on the level of the code whereby the game itself operates, the form of the database generates this time-as-crystal via a mode of production whose form is analogous to its content. The crystal is in many senses the form of time, or as Mikhail Bakhtin would say, the ‘chronotope’ of our networked digital age.

(…)

It gladdens my heart that it required very little effort for me to explain to a team of young bloggers why creating a buzz regarding the Take Back the Tech campaign was so very important. They took ownership of the project almost immediately and have created a buzz on Twitter, Facebook and in the blogosphere.

TBTT – 16 days of activism against gender-based violence Nov 25 – 10 Dec
Ignorant RJ makes light of VAW « In the Line of Wire
FarQuest :: Let’s TBTT! :: November :: 2009
SWO & UNIFEM – Celebrates 16 days of Activism Against Gender Violence | Teeth Maestro
Take Back The Tech… « Chatter Box
My Land Pakistan: We really need to Take Back The Tech!
Take Back The Tech Day 2: Happy Facebooking!
Take Back The Tech Day 3: Let’s TWEET!
Global Voices Online » Pakistan: Take Back The Tech Campaign
We need to take back the tech NOW
http://deadpanthoughts.com/2009/11/swo-unifem-celebrates-16-days-against-domestic-violence/
Teabreak.pk have taken it on as a cause

They have not only talked about the program, they have personalized it with stories they have heard and have come up with suggestions on how to counter the safety and privacy issues that women face online. There is a song in the works the lyrics of which were put together very quickly by Bina Shah at my request and the music was composed at record-breaking speed by Farrukh Ahmed. Thanks guys.

There are also some postcards in the works thanks to a few photos being provided by Jamal Ashiqain. Dr. Awab Alvi and Faisal Kapadia have done a special segment of The LaidBackShow with me to try and create an awareness of the issue.

I am truly overwhelmed by all the support, as is Shahzad Ahmad of Bytesforall. B4A is the primary organisation behind the project in Pakistan (with P@SHA collaborating and providing logistic and networking support and coordination).

There are offline activities that are in the works that will take this to a larger audience. The issue is an important one and the more awareness that is created, the more buzz there is, the more likelihood that people will begin to attach the required amount of importance to it.

E non è (installare) plan 9 … né quello dei Cylon … ma neanche quello del Joker…

Mi sto soltanto prendendo d’anticipo, mi è venuta voglia di scrivere una serie di propositi per l’anno nuovo:

• trovare un lavoro nell’IT, uno qualsiasi, anche sottopagato. I tirocini vanno bene, dove sono adesso mi sto pure divertendo, ma avere anche un introito non mi farebbe schifo. Lunedì ho pure un colloquio per un ente pubblico, c’è scritto che se non ci si presenta è intesa come rinuncia. Io ho la soluzione ma sto prima a farvi vedere il video
• realizzare un server virtuale sul mio pc fisso ma mi spiego subito meglio, sennò vengo frainteso. Voglio sfruttare VirtualBox per avere come host Arch Linux mentre, come guest, una Ubuntu Server o Debian. Giusto per imparare i concetti principali; sono pieno di guide fra mensili e siti su come gestire un server ed erogare servizi di ogni genere per i client;
• costruirmi un media center, sfruttando MythTv, sul portatile in una partizione separata. Cioè senza incasinarmi la Arch Linux e installando Mythbuntu. Il mio problema è che in fatto di hardware sono una capra e sto cercando dei ricevitori del digitale terrestre e telecomandi compatibili;
• comprare una nuova scheda video al pc fisso che ormai è da mesi che ho deciso marca e modello (mancano solo i soldi);
• varie ed eventuali…

First mooted in July 2008, the appointment of the UK government’s first Chief Construction Advisor was finally announced this week. Former Davis Langdon quantity surveyor Paul Morrell has taken up the three-days-a-week job at a critical time for the construction industry, and his new role has been extensively covered in the main construction weeklies. I have been taking a look back at some posts I wrote last year about this role, and felt moved to compose an open letter to our new construction czar….

Dear Mr Morrell

First, congratulations on your new appointment which is long overdue, particularly as it was more than 16 months ago that the House of Commons Business and Enterprise Committee recommended – in Constructing Matters (PDF) – the “creation of a post of Chief Construction Officer”.

As I wrote at the time, Constructing Matters was, however, something of a disappointment to me. Like another document published shortly before – the Strategy for Sustainable Construction (see post) – it failed to pay attention to better use of ICT tools within the UK construction industry.

I read in this week’s Building magazine that you plan to focus on two aims: to co-ordinate low carbon policy and to improve the government’s return on its investment. I submit that in both these areas ICT can play a crucial role.

The Commons Committee received evidence of the potential benefits of ICT tools to address such problems (see Vol II, PDF). Indeed, Constructing Excellence (of which I am a member) said:

Common processes and tools bond the team together and release major efficiencies. For example, good inter-operability of ICT systems in the supply chain using Constructing Excellence’s Avanti protocol, project extranets and single building information models, and common logistics for moving materials to and from site. ICT is seriously under-exploited in the sector despite many initiatives and much evidence of the business case. However, something as simple as co-location of a project team in the same office is a good place to start.

Sadly, Constructing Matters had just one mention of ICT (relating to training new entrants to the industry). Perhaps when you chair the Construction Innovation and Growth team, you will encourage industry professionals to look at the huge potential of information and communications technologies to support the delivery of a better, more sustainable built environment.

There is a growing body of support and advice on this topic. For example:

• Sir John Egan, in Accelerating Change (2002), highlighted the role of ICT, and wanted 50% of projects to be delivered by integrated teams by 2007 – a target the industry failed to meet.
• I helped produced a study on ICT and Automation (PDF) in late 2007, which was published by the National Platform for the Built Environment and formed the basis of a new Strategic Research Agenda (PDF) just four months ago.
• The SCRI Research Report, Future Generation of IT (PDF) published in June 2009 helped “identify possible futures that the construction industry might face and to start developing a construction IT vision for the year 2030“.
• In 2008, the Cabinet Office’s 28-page report Greening Government ICT (PDF – see post) also talked explicitly and positively about ‘Thin client’ technologies and other potential ICT contributions.
• The Construction Commitments, among other things, says “IT-based collaborative tools and communication technologies will be exploited“.

Internally, UK Government (the construction industry’s biggest single client) has also been looking at improving efficiency through the Gershon Efficiency Programme, and one strand of the 2008 Operational Efficiency Programme (PDF) was the cross-cutting area of ‘Back office and IT’.

Looking at the tasks outlined in your job description last year, I think  ICT has a vital role – for example:

• “promote best practice in construction procurement” – think about the efficiency savings that come from automating aspects of tendering, making information available online and reducing paperwork.
• “implementation of Government policy” – from Gershon to Greening Government IT, ICT is now a cross-cutting strand within government and the Strategy for Sustainable Construction, albeit modestly, gives scope for government to encourage better ICT use across the industry at large and support its low carbon policy.
• “Championing the industry’s image” – Too often described (sometimes unfairly) as ‘technophobic’, the industry could at least partly transform construction’s low-tech image by incorporating ICT more effectively into its day-to-day operations. This could range from high-end BIM collaboration to the ways in which industry manages its conversations with clients, supply chains, local communities, regulators, new recruits to the industry, and others (see post).
• “Promoting innovation” – ditto.

I hope you and your support team will take on board much of this growing clamour to take this great industry of our’s well and truly into the digital age.

Yours sincerely

Paul Wilkinson

Burglar Bill

I spent most of yesterday dressed as a burglar whilst videoconferencing with angry children! This was as  part of the wonderful Jolly Postman project in Rotherham. I have been supporting the two consultants who are leading on the project which involves twelve schools. Linda and Amy have  tirelessy driven the work which is brilliantly structured and creative.

They managed to persuade one colleague to be filmed as a newsreader telling the children that Burglar Bill had stolen the Jolly Postman’s sack and that without it the people of Storyville would not be able to receive their letters. Another colleague was filmed as the Jolly Postman himself telling the children how miserable he was and how he was worried that his friends would suffer as a result of not having their letters.
The project started this term and during the October and November children have been able to send letters and cards by post to characters in the book and also able to use an email address which diverts to the consultants’ inboxes. On some weeks they have been dealing with up to 50 emails which they have used to encourage and motivate the children and to give them ideas for writing.

The extension of this was to give the children the opportunity to hot seat Burglar Bill live to find out why he had done the terrible deed and what he was going to do about it.

It is clear that a huge amount of work has gone into the project and certainly the organisation for yesterday’s videoconference was incredibly impressive. Andrew Lickley from YHGfL worked with us at a local secondary school and co-ordinated the calls to 19 classes whilst we also popped out to one school to do session live in the school hall.

During the day we encountered a few issues in schools who were not regular users of VC or where specific pieces of kit struggled to cope but out of the 19 calls I would say that 15 were perfectly fine. I just had to pretend that I was an old burglar who was a bit deaf for a few of the calls.

I have posted a tiny amount of it onto youtube obviously being incredibly careful to avoid any clips with identifiable children on it.

In terms of the learning there were some very astute children who had really got to grips with the story and asked some impressive questions. Some classes (often the youngest) were most concerned about the Jolly Postman’s feelings and what Burglar Bill was going to do to make him feel better. In one VC with a Year 3 class we ventured into a line of questioning of why Burglar Bill had chosen a life of crime, why he hadn’t looked to get a job which didn’t upset people and what he was going to do when he left prison. I was impressed with their level of reasoning andunderstanding of the text.

The experience has given me even more zeal about promoting the use of videoconferencing and it has also caused me to consider the opportunities that videoconference events will provide for undertaking Assessing Pupil Progress (APP) for Speaking and Listening. The materials will be shared with schools by QCDA early next year and I think that it is vital that the edtech community consider how ICT can be used to support it. There is already some work being done using podcasting and audio files to record evidence for Reading APP. The examples of Speaking and Listening which have been shown at conferences have some use of ICT but I think that it will be important for  us to support colleagues with developing other approaches to make accurate measurement of children’s progress and achievement. I think that the use of ICT will have a very important role in Assessment Focus 4 (Talking about Talk) which will focus on meta-cognition with children expected to consider the effectiveness of their performance as speakers and listeners. We ignore the opportunities this brings at our peril.

Cyberfraud.org.uk is a public service dedicated to protecting the consumer from becoming a victim of Internet fraud and Identity theft. This is the only site in the UK to provide a central platform covering all aspects of cyber crime.

I am writing this on vacation – a few days away in Vancouver….rain, rain and more rain…but it’s not home and that’s important. I always try to catch up on some reading while away and this week I read a lengthy paper from the Research and Policy in Development (RAPID) programme at Oversees Development Institute (a UK independent think tank on international development and humanitarian issues) and it reminded me of two blogs I had previously posted. In my blog about Sarah Michael’s work on knowledge mobilization for environmental policy and in an unrelated post, I wrote about how we need to use evidence to inform our own KM services. As I read the piece from RAPID I came back to a synthesis of these two previous blogs.

RAPID produced the paper “Knowledge, policy and power: Six dimensions of the knowledge–development policy interface” available here. The paper explored the six key areas of the knowledge–development policy interface including: Types of Knowledge; Political Context; Sectoral Dynamics; Actors; Innovation Frameworks and Knowledge Translation. Three key things I took away from this article:

1- The authors cite Ian Graham’s knowledge generation and translation cycle model. I am continually impressed how Canadians are among global leaders in thinking about and doing knowledge mobilization.

2- The section on Innovation Systems (IS) aligns well with ResearchImpact’s KM philosophy. To summarize:

• IS emphasizes the supply as well as the demand for knowledge, and the need to strengthen the voice of knowledge users

• The importance of tacit knowledge

• The importance of networks and linkages as channels for increasing the uptake of knowledge, and the need to facilitate trust and interaction

• The need for ‘intermediary functions’

3- The role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to support the work of intermediaries.  “Rather than trying to bring audiences into an organization’s own space, ICTs have enabled them to take its messages to the audience.”  ODI cites use of RSS feeds, video streamed public meeting, Facebook, the production of short research summaries and Wikipedia.  Click on the “Web 2.0” tag cloud on the blog and see what we have written on ICTs and KM.

The work and writing of ODI from the perspective of International Development is evocative of the writing of Sarah Michaels on Environmental Policy. There is convergent evolution of tools and processes for KM regardless of the discipline. Here’s the first issue: SILOS. On October 7, 2009 Jason Guriel wrote in Mobilize This! about KM as a means of breaking down silos. If we continue to read, write and speak in silos we will not maximize learning opportunities to continually improve our own KM services by using evidence from any discipline to inform our own KM practice.

Here’s the next issue: BRIDGES. As ODI writes, intermediaries are critically important in knowledge-policy interface, “Empirical research on intermediaries is urgently needed given the high level of demand for such a brokering role by analysts, policymakers and practitioners alike, as are efforts to assess and share lessons with regard to new approaches to capacity building.” Knowledge brokers such as those developing within the ResearchImpact network and the networks forming amongst York’s KM associated research projects (see here) are intermediaries. We can build bridges between our own silos.

So a charge to all knowledge brokers: you may need to live in a silo for your own professional service delivery but build bridges between the silos.

And a question: who sets the table that allows diverse knowledge brokers to share a meal? Where can the brokers in nursing talk to the brokers in environmental policy? Where can knowledge brokers in mental health sit down with those in international development? Any thoughts? Use the comment feature above to let us know what you think.

P.S. While in Vancouver check out the Pacific Palisades Hotel. It looks like a converted apartment building just off Robson St. so your hotel room is actually an apartment and centrally located. Come to Vancouver and check out the Pacific Palisades and go to the Vancouver Aquarium where you can participate in “sharing knowledge”.