Group items tagged

I/we need to consider this with our team and education more broadly. "Theory 1: Nothing we "know" about software development should be assumed to be true. Most of our tools, our mental models, and our practices are remnants of an era (possibly fictional) where software was written by solo practitioners, but modern software is a team sport. Theory 2: Technology is the product of the culture that builds it. Great technology is the product of a great culture. Culture gives us the ability to act in a loosely coupled way; it allows us to pursue a diversity of tactics. Uncertainty is the mind-killer and culture creates certainty in the face of the yawning shapeless void of possible solutions that is software engineering. Culture is what you do, not what you say. It starts at the top. It affects everything. You have a choice about the culture you promote, not about the culture you have. Theory 3: Software development should be thought of as a cycle of continual learning and improvement rather a progression from start to finish, or a search for correctness. If you aren't shipping, you aren't learning. If it slows down shipping, it probably isn't worth it. Maturity is knowing when to make the trade off and when not to. I had some experience with this at Flickr, and I wanted to see how far you could scale it. My private bet was that we'd make it to 50 engineers before things broke down. Theory 4: You build a culture of learning by optimizing globally not locally. Your improvement, over time, as a team, with shared tools, practices and beliefs is more important than individual pockets of brilliance. And more satisfying. Theory 5: If you want to build for the long term, the only guarantee is change. Invest in your people and your ability to ask questions, not your current answers. Your current answers are wrong, or they will be soon. "

"We build software that shapes our cities. More specifically, (1) we create micro-institutions in physical space, (2) we design social processes that allow others to replicate and evolve those micro-institutions, and (3) we write software that enables those social processes. We use this process to create more robust, decentralized, human-scale systems in our cities. We are particularly focused on reinventing our current systems for learning, agriculture, and transportation."

"Studies suggest there's real value in learning and maintaining this ancient skill, even as we increasingly communicate electronically via keyboards big and small. Indeed, technology often gets blamed for handwriting's demise. But in an interesting twist, new software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad, is starting to reinvigorate the practice." Tie in with ECAR findings writeup

""Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design." This implies, for one, that good documentation does not excuse bad design. You can ask people to RTFM, but it is folly to assume they have read everything and memorized every detail. The clarity of examples, and the software's decipherability and debuggability in the real world, are likely far more important. Form must communicate function."

"We can do better by our students. The number one thing would be to inculcate the idea of the university *as* a workplace, and all of us as professionals in it. And of course, many professors (me!) need a lot more training in the mechanics of the workplace than we ever get. The next, and much easier thing, would be to offer opportunities to acquire basic workplace technical skills: using software, running meetings, emailing like a grownup, navigating the org chart."

What are the implications for universities committing to learning analytics?

Interesting to think about using 3D body motion tracking to paint and create animation. It's a fun mix of real world movement and software.

"possible to follow the development of a particular piece of software and see how it all came together. That's made it an irreplaceable teaching tool."

"What's neat about this is that I didn't have to use any special software while I was writing to make this "video" possible. I was working in plain old vanilla Google Docs. And to show you this one paragraph I liked, I didn't have to present you with the whole document (all 39,154 revisions of it) - I could extract bits and pieces that I thought were interesting, and interleave them in a blog post. Imagine what a high school English teacher could do with that. Imagine what you could do with that if instead of a minor effort by ol' Somers here you had, say, a piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (I've always wanted to watch how TNC writes. If he's ever used Google Docs, it's now possible.)"

I love this: "I worry that most people aren't as good writers as they should be. One thing is that they just don't write enough. Another is that they don't realize it's supposed to be hard; they think that good writers are talented, when the truth is that good writers get good the way good programmers get good, the way good anythings get good: by running into the spike. Maybe folks would understand that better if they had vivid evidence that a good writer actually spends most of his time fighting himself."

Really need to think about how to do more with this internally for some of the routine support stuff. "It's no secret that newsrooms are increasingly using bots to cut down on busy work. Software now routinely churns out quarterly earnings stories for The Associated Press and earthquake alerts for Los Angeles Times, freeing reporters to pursue more in-depth projects. And while no bot can write 3,000-word investigative stories, it can assist reporters by alerting them to new data and filtering the information for them."

"A common phenomenon at the time was that people would start blogging on Blogger - because it was free, popular, and easy to set up - and then "graduate" to more powerful tools. Movable Type, Greymatter, and, later, Wordpress, had a much higher barrier to entry (before WP had turnkey hosting). But once someone had discovered the joys of sharing thoughts on the Internet, they were willing to invest the effort in order to get the added features and flexibility that the install-on-your-server software afforded."

A group of renowned disability studies scholars are seeking to clarify what makes a book accessible with a set of guidelines that authors can use to help publishers make their books readable by anyone.

The guidelines, a one-page template letter, read a little like an ultimatum. The letter opens by asking a would-be publisher to confirm in writing that print books and accessible formats will be made available simultaneously, then launches into an explanation of how publishers should handle everything from digital rights management to authoring software.

Lennard J. Davis, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the letter is meant less to threaten a boycott and more as a public service announcement. Some authors may not budge from the demands in the letter, he said, but others are likely to use it as a way to spread awareness about accessibility.

This is interesting on several levels. This data could inspire creative work in many disciplines.

"Traditional artworks like paintings, photographs, or films can be reproduced by conventional media like printing or video. This makes visitors of museums possible to purchase postcards, posters, books, and DVDs of pictures and/or movies shown at the exhibition. However, newly developing arts so called interactive art, or new media art, has not been able to be reproduced due to limitation of functionalities of the conventional media. In this article, the authors report a novel approach of sharing such interactive art outside the exhibition, so that the visitors of the museum can take a copy to home, and even share it with non-visitors. The authors build up their new projector-and-camera (ProCam) based interactive artwork for exhibition at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) by using Apple's iPhone. The exactly same software driving this artwork was downloadable from Apple's App Store -- thus all visitors or even non-visitors could enjoy the same experience at home or wherever they like. "

Via Stephen Downes's recent post; a nice accessible summary discussion for non-techies about how technology is changing teaching. Good teaching resource, I think.

Just watched the video. Will have to explore further...and share with my students. Thanks!