(How Not To Use) Multi-touch in Education

Whereas I would normally applaud the use of such technology in education, I cannot help but ask "What's wrong with this picture?"



See the full story at Engadget.

ICLS 2008 Photos

I have finally gotten around to uploading a few photos from the ICLS 2008 conference held in Utrecht this past June. The highlights included the workshop on Interaction Analysis.

Knowledge Forum API

I had the pleasure of meeting Stian Håklev yesterday who asked me about APIs for Knowledge Forum. We have a little-known site called Knowledge Forum Coders that documents the APIs, such as they are.

The Ubiquity of Command Lines

As many of my colleagues know I'm a big fan of the command line. I find it somewhat ironic that I work with information visualizations, and yet I have a penchant for just getting in there with plain old text commands to actually accomplish things. I even prefer command-line statistical analysis packages (or, perhaps more accurately, the command-line interface to statistical packages). It probably comes as little surprise that I really like the new Ubiquity plugin for Firefox. I suspect Quicksilver users will love this. I know I do.

PwnageTool and My iPhone

This morning, in a wild attempt to actually complete something, I decided to upgrade my 1st-generation iPhone to a more up-to-date version of the firmware. I grabbed the PwnageTool. All went well, thanks to the various instructions available around the web. My only regret: deciding at the final step to "set up phone as new" rather than "restore from backup". I was concerned about having problems with Mail, per some of the reports, but didn't clue in that I would lose the photos on the iPhone as a result. There was only one photo that I really regretted losing: a quirky sign on the doors of the library at work warning users about "unstable computers". Oh well.

Potential collaboration: complex network theory

Today I had the honour of being visited by Jun and Ritsuko Oshima, a pair of researchers from Shizuoka University. We had a great chat about some work that Jun has been doing over the past couple of years. After a year of missing each other we finally managed to work out a plan for moving forward on complex network theory and socio-semantic network analysis.

Affordances

I was tracking down the definition (and etymology) of the term "affordance" for a presentation I'm working on. For some reason, my Mac's built-in dictionary doesn't know about the term and I wanted to ensure that is wasn't a neologism that had erroneously crept into my vocabulary.

I managed to track down Don Norman's essay on Affordance and Design in which he explains how, in The Psychology of Everyday Things, he appropriated the term from James Gibson's earlier work. (Wikipedia tells much the same story, but without Norman's flare.)

A bit more poking reveals that Norman will be talking in mid-October at the Franklin Institute in Phildelphia. Interesting.