Especially lately, it seems that I’ve been posting more about my photography than anything else, but only because I’ve been looking for technologies that tell stories. Interestingly enough, if you think about the origins of the still image, it’s always been something that has been used to tell the story. The CMOS hasn’t changed that at all and Ryan Lobo’s work, at least in my eyes seems to really be the best put together explanation for it. He doesn’t shoot vistas or amazing things, he shoots the grit of the world and does it well.

First, we are told that there is a bit of research out there that says surfing at work helps people do better, taking that one step further, if we futz about with something while working toward a goal… that should help productivity even more, especially if we let our minds wander and start daydreaming. Well this is all fine and good, but you still have to get so many widgets done in just such a manner before this time today and if you get them done before lunch, there will be a bonus for you. So even though research suggests that we should ease up on the structure within a work day, there isn’t anything to suggest that the structure should be tossed as well. Until now.

Dan Pink gave a TED lecture on this topic and he suggest that autonomy is the best way to get the most out of those who work for you. Drop the incentives and the structure and people will bloom because there is nothing holding them back. Another interesting look at this is at internet.com (Mike Elgan).

Adam Savage “plays a scientist on TV”, and regardless of what you may think about Mythbusters as a show and what you might think about their science/methods, you have to admit that he does a great job getting kids and people in general thinking about problem solving and general science geekery. So even before watching this video, I had a fair amount of respect for him. But after watching this video, that respect has gone up a notch as he isn’t insanely curious on TV, he is in real life as well. He is also very much a professional “professional amateur”, granted one that has many more connections and many more resources than your average person who does something from a point of passion and does it well enough that they could perhaps make a living. This video really helps to underline how the journey to an end result is often far more fruitful, especially when learning, than the end result. Chasing grades will only result in a letter, learning about X will leave you with likely most of the alphabet. Be sure to read the comments left on the video and see what people there have said.

This is certainly the coolest way to think about these natural movement interfaces – all you need to be able to do is project onto a surface. In high light areas, it might not work so well, but like the lady says, this might very well be here within a few years.

… that, like the Millennials in this report (RWW) who are often successfully dictating to their IT departments what type of technology they want to make use of to communicate for business (often in ways that are similar to those used for pleasure). This new generation of employee seems to have little regard to privacy (as we’ve seen and read many times before) and are often ignorant of IT policies (likely leading to much of this “end running”). So with this generation entering the prime of their career at the front end and somewhere within their first post-secondary degree/diploma, it seems that there is only 5-6 years max before we see another massive disruptive force starting to come through our schools – the children of the Millennials are going to be entering kindergarten and those children as likely as not will have many of the same attitudes toward technology as their parents, and will certainly be raised with them. So while the education system may buy itself a few years with the comfort that kids in k-3 are more interested in playing in the sand as opposed to silicon, this won’t last. As soon as we ask them to start to gather information on their own, it will be game over for the old guard of school IT as well.

With any luck, many of the techno-phobic practices of the more senior teachers will have faded by the time these students are moving through and ideally, there will be some revisioning of curriculum to include the technologies that are, if not current, basic to the age group. The problem with this is that by the time these technologies and media sources are identified and sent to the government in charge of “blessing” it to be a valid curricular resource, the technology will have changed. But assuming that the government changes to allow the teachers on the ground to choose based on their professional opinion what technologies are sound, what could those technologies be? Certainly there will be some element of social networking, there will be some manner of instant communication and some element of sharing. But just as the parents of these kids are/will be working around their corporate IT, will these kids? I think so. @courosa pointed out in a tweet last night:

w/ citizens creating proxies for Iranian citizens, & many tutorials provided, I bet students using their own proxies in schools will rise.

and why not? We want our children to grow up to be responsible and good citizens right? Part of that means that they should have the strength be able to help those in need, how they can and to make sure that they alert others of injustice. Right? So if we want them to be able to do like so many are doing for those in Iran right now, we would be foolish to think that this would not happen in schools.

Clay Shirky (from an interview with Chris Anderson related to the post from yesterday) mentions:

What do you make of what’s going on in Iran right now.
I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary.

Which services have caused the greatest impact? Blogs? Facebook? Twitter?
It’s Twitter. One thing that Evan (Williams) and Biz (Stone) did absolutely right is that they made Twitter so simple and so open that it’s easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I’m sure it wasn’t conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it’s had global consequences. Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook’s model prevents. So far, despite a massive effort, the authorities have found no way to shut it down, and now there are literally thousands of people aorund the world who’ve made it their business to help keep it open.

Kids growing up digital now seem to be doing so in an environment that is open, and engaged. To think that traditional IT practices and methods will contain them is just asking for trouble, kids are already getting around school IT and it would seem that it is only going to continue.

I last wrote about Shirky in November, and now I’ve spotted a TED talk from his as well. This one was just recorded and addresses how social networks are changing patterns of communication and how those networks are perhaps able to if not shake the Earth, at least report it.

Right now, Twitter is going nuts about the Iranian “election” and in these situations it seems that the democratizing power of the ‘net is most evident and all of the sudden borders start to melt. We saw this before in the US ’08 election and the prorouge event in Canada.

PS. If you are interested in helping out what is going on in Iran through the ‘net, here are some pointers. I know that I’ve forwarded proxies in the clear – realizing it only after the tweet went out and then not being able to get to a computer in time to delete it – but after reading this, if I happen to come across some helpful information, I’ll know better how to deal with it.

What is it about “modern society” that so strongly believes that play is merely infantile? Stuart Brown presents an amazing talk on play and how it seems to be a natural extension of any intelligence. It seems to be the extension of some work ethic gone mad that “we” need some reason to do something, that tools and objects have only one method of use.

I really agree with what Brown mentions about the JPL and their hiring practices, the social smile of mother/child (though I’ve got a good argument that it happens with dads as well). Play allows us to explore, find what is safe and to solve problems.

Putting this talk together with Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on creativity seems to suggest that the world has gone and got itself too serious. Granted, serious can be safe, but it is also very limiting, if we allow ourselves to be creative as we are in early childhood and to play as we ought to, we can achieve great things. Perhaps those people who are very successful – those who never “work” but rather play and are creative with their entire body (the thinking bat returns) – are the ones we should be looking to when we are considering how to teach the contemporary student (check it out at 19:25 in the video).

Edit – an interesting idea is to use play as a tool to combat (cyber)bullying

If you have 20 minutes, take a look at this TED talk on comics. It is interesting how he explains how comics gain their power – channeling all elements through the visual media that they use. It is really interesting how he takes a look at how ancient glyphs worked and how the first CDs didn’t.

I think there are a couple of take home messages from this talk that can be applied to how instructors can make their content better adapted to the new media that will emerge over time… and for those who are still locked into 18th century technology – a way to get into the the 20th (or maybe the 21st) century.

After a week away, being amazing by the simulacra that is Vegas and the human reality that is the first half of the Olympics, I came into work this morning and found an interesting link in my email, forwarded from an office mate. New Scientist has a story about a visualization and simulation of the hand and forearm. From the article:

“Motion capture is data driven – you just capture the data and play it back,” says Sueda. “Our approach is a simulation in which the starting point is the physics of muscle and tendon movement.”

Sueda’s team also clothed their virtual muscles and tendons in a layer of skin. Just like real skin its shape depends on the anatomy beneath it.

Helping hand

“The parameters to control the deformation of the skin aren’t biomechanical – it’s just cosmetic,” says Sueda. But because the underlying controlled muscles and tendons are accurately placed, the result is a hand animation that is highly realistic.

When Sueda’s team took screen grabs of their animated hands and compared them to photographs of real hands in the same position, the two sets of images match closely.

The model should be a boon to surgeons, says Sueda. “The network of muscles and tendons in the hand is very complicated,” he adds. “Even now people don’t know how it actually works in detail.”

Although the anatomy of the hand was worked out long ago from dissections, the interplay of all the components when in motion has largely remained a mystery. For this reason, the results of hand surgery can be unpredictable.

Adding realism

When a tendon is damaged, the muscle it’s attached to no longer functions properly. Surgeons try to restore movement by taking a nearby tendon and re-routing it along the path of the damaged one. But predicting the results of that is difficult.

“Using our technique, you can show what effect rerouting a tendon would have on the hand before you actually do the surgery,” says Sueda.

The new technology has also been built as a plug-in for existing graphics software to allow animators to quickly and easily add more realism to their hand animations.

This is very much like the virtual labs that my team is working on – using real physics to create a simulation of lab events, but obviously on a much smaller scale. Most of the other virtual labs are simply recorded scenes that students are forced to move through along one path.

This is similar to another data driven model that was a TED talk recently:

And while it is not the same as the above technologies, this is something else that is interesting – from Pendulum Studios – Alter Ego.

Kevin Kelly is the only textbook author that I can remember by name and actually have tried to find more writing from. Sure I can remember a couple of the others, but I have to think about them (intro texts don’t count… I don’t think Campbell does that much for every new edition of Biology). So it was a no brainer for me to make a point to take in this video.

There are a few points that he brings up that I think really are important for people my age as we have some recollection of some time before the first 5K days of the ‘net and we will be working with it until at least 2040 where it is predicted that the computing power of the ‘net will be more than the computing power of humanity on the planet.

The first couple are the that value can not be copied (hence copies don’t matter… the value of a movie ticket is the movie experience or the atmosphere of the dance club for music) and that information wants to be free – to be manipulated that is. These are relevant to us today. The next point is that we are moving toward the next iteration of the ‘net where data is what is being shared, not just links. Eventually moving to a point where connections are made directly from people to objects (maybe that is not that far off with RFID… ). It is this last point that I wonder about though.

Kelly mentions the first iteration of the ‘net where the purpose of the system was to link computers and networks, then we moved to linking to links and now we are linking to data (mashups). At least for the first bit that we have gone through, it seems that as we advance, there are fewer people who are able to and fewer options to connect to computers. We are creating those connections by proxy.

Firewalls and other security measures protect computers, we were in a world that used logins to protect all manner of links (which are slowly evaporating), so it seems as we move forward through these iterations of the ‘net we move to protect the previous versions in some manner – hiding the magic as it were. So my question, having noticed this is – After we move beyond the data stage and people start to forget about how to manage data as it will be protected or hidden by the next stage… what will data look like… ?

Thinking back to teaching undergrads how to FTP, it was like pulling teeth then, and now I can’t even imagine telling the “masses” what the relevance of FTP really is when there are so many other tools that make the process much easier. We are now at the point where you don’t even need to understand URLs to create links… they are just dragged/dropped/named. What will happen to data when it is also glossed over? Putting it another way… what will the “world” be like when the “cost of entry” to manipulate data is placed very low? Using Yahoo Pipes as an example of easy data manipulation – what happens when far more complex mashups of data are possible with even greater ease and less understanding of the “magic behind the curtain”.