Month: May 2011

Brownies

My friend Cam (who’s headed to Spain for six months) made delicious brownies with a caramel sauce. Yum!

Our Digital Ethos

I disavow the notion that technology should change our lives. Technology should improve our lives in small, meaningful ways. It should nudge, provoke, surprise, inform, and yes, connect on a grand scale. But it should not presume to know too much.

Nathan Heleine – Our Digital Ethos

Status

Spent the better part of a weekend starting a simple WordPress theme for photos. Boone Gorges’ post from this week make me think of attempting something similar. Put the project up on GitHub for now.

Remembrance of Links Past. Maciej, co-founder of Pinboard, ran some sample data to see how often links from the past become dead. While it was a small sample size, it shows you could be losing a quarter of your links every seven years.

A Different Path. Really astute analysis of why a college degree is not the only path to success. Those years should be spent finding, learning, and expanding your passion. Related reading from Daniel.

iPhone home screen

Because Daniel made it seem like a good idea. 🙂

Disrupting College

It’s taken a while but I got around to reading the Center for American Progress report, Disrupting College. 1 It was a really fascinating read, highly recommend it.

One quote particularly stood out. While describing the disruption that occurred in the computer industry the authors characterize the old mainframe model by writing:

We had to take our computational problems to these centralized computer centers where experts solved them for us.

This contrasts with the current smartphone era. We now have the computational power for many daily tasks residing in our front pocket. This all got me thinking about college.

With the traditional college system we have the same mainframe model. We take our knowledge problems and inexperience to a centralized place where experts with many years of training help solve them for, or in the best case with, us. Carry the analogy from mainframe computing over to education and holy mind explosion Batman! If we could even achieve half of the transformation accomplished with computers we’d be in for some wonderful times.

A future where the tools for education are accessible on an individual scale and where geographic location is no longer a limiting factor makes me really excited.

Catan

Weather went from sunny to overcast so it was a great day for board games. I totally lost but was still fun.

Weekend Reading

Picked up The Elements of Content Strategy to read for this weekend. Looking forward to it.

I’m headed to the Seattle Times. Lauren Rabaino is headed to the Seattle Times as a resident producer. They’re getting a wonderful person and a terrific designer.