Archive for: October 2004
§ ¶Learning Sciences and Microsoft
Hey, Microsoft Research has a Learning Sciences page.
§ ¶PHPfi
If you’re doing any php development on Mac OS X, check out PHPfi. It’s a great little quick reference tool that makes looking up function details painless. Just a wonderful combination of real time search and an HTML rendering pane.
§ ¶RBScript Language Module for BBEdit 8
Awhile back, I built a language module for BBEdit that could syntax color REALbasic RBScript files. I’ve updated that module to take advantage of BBEdit 8’s new codeless language module files. You can download the new module here. The nice thing about the new codeless approach is that the module is just an XML file, and it’s very easy to modify. In fact, kudos go out to John Gruber for posting the Apache configuration file language module that I modified for RBScript.
(more)§ ¶Northern Exposure II: The Classroom
David Miller moved from Philadelphia to teach in Tuntutuliak, Alaska. He’s blogging the experience here. (These remote school districts are another example of why the one-size-fits-all strategy of NCLB doesn’t make sense. Can you really argue that the background and needs of these kids and their community are the same as the Philly kids he was teaching before?)
§ ¶Fake News Story Supporting NCLB
AP reports that the Bush administration has released a deceptive video, masquerading as an objective news story, touting NCLB.
The Bush administration has promoted its education law with a video that comes across as a news story but fails to make clear the reporter involved was paid with taxpayer money.
The government used a similar approach this year in promoting the new Medicare law and drew a rebuke from the investigative arm of Congress, which found the videos amounted to propaganda in violation of federal law.
§ ¶Variations on GIS
Inquirium has been collaborating with Northwestern’s MyWorld project to redesign a learner-focused GIS. One of the issues we’re wrestling with is how well typical GIS visualizations work for learners, and whether we can come up with alternative ways of viewing time- and space-based data. So I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for interesting geodata visualization tools, and here are two interesting approaches I’ve seen recently.
The first, iMap, is an OS X-based application for viewing GIS data. It’s much simpler than the serious workhorses of the field like ArcView and GRASS, but its interface is worth a look, because one of the big issues for classroom use is helping students manage the complexity GIS brings.
The second example, via MultiMap, illustrates the potential power of layering, in real time, two different kinds of place-based data. Here street map data and a satellite image are combined in an intuitive way.
§ ¶Mobius-strip Paintings
Back in the day, one of the delights of the web was seeing things that were really new. Not just information or ideas that were new, but completely new ways of representing or manipulating ideas. That still happens, of course, but the sheer volume of information that floods the web every day — particularly the text-heavy contributions of the blogosphere — make it hard to find the new gems.
Via BoingBoing, here’s one: Zoomquilt, a whimsical mobius-strip world that lets you zoom in ad infinitum.