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Tuesday, February 07, 2006 |
BC ELN Using Blogs to Brainstorm their Strategic Planning process. http://bceln.blogspot.com/2006/01/
about-electronic-brainstorm-wild-ideas_31.html
Kudos to the BC Electronic Library Network for trying the interesting experiment of using Blogger as a mechanism to facilitate collectively brainstorming by their members. As I understand the model, staff from the participating partner libraries are invited to either comment on posts, or log into Blogger using accounts that ELN has set up for them that can make new posts on the main brainstorming blog, all of which will be fed into the larger Strategic Planning process. Nice model for a consortia to use as it keeps it open and public but hopefully still provides some autonomy and flow. Will be interesting to see how it works, and at the very least may be a step in exposing some additional librarians to the technology (not that most of them need this, we are lucky to have an amazingly sophisticated bunch in our province.) - SWL [EdTechPost]
10:05:05 PM 
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Video game music: Annoying, dangerous, colorful — or all of the above?. My son Jim’s favorite game, World of Warcraft, only works on my computer, which usually resides in the kitchen. Inevitably, Jim’s often playing his game while Greta and I are making dinner, and I have to say, the most annoying thing about the game isn’t the violence or the sound effects — it’s the background music. We’re constantly asking him to turn the volume down so we don’t have to listen to that dull, repetitive music.
So don’t gamers find music annoying, too? I know when I’m indulging in my one guilty pleasure — computer golf — the room must be absolutely silent. Music is the worst, because rather than hitting the ball according to the rhythm of the swing, I tend to lapse into the rhythm of the music, and instead of heading straight down the fairway on the Chateau Whistler course, my ball ends up careening off course into a field of neck-high nettles, or ricocheting off a pine tree and into a pristine mountain brook.
Indeed, in at least one instance (a racing game studied by M. Yamada in 2001), researchers found a negative correlation between certain types of music and performance on the game. But in both this case and my anecdotal example of playing video golf, we’re talking about music that’s not specifically designed to accompany a game.
To view the rest of this article, visit the new Cognitive Daily site at ScienceBlogs.com.
[Cognitive Daily]
11:13:22 AM
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Zoep Goes Open Source.  [Slashdot] this will go a long way to making the firefox desktop the most productive environment -- this has interesting implications for mobile workers/students with usb phones -- BL
11:02:26 AM
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Huzzah! A bathroom that cleans itself. Cleaning bathrooms may become a thing of the past with new coatings that will do the job for you. Researchers at the University of New South Wales are developing new coatings they hope will be used for self-cleaning surfaces in hospitals and the home. The particles work by absorbing ultraviolet light below a certain wavelength, exciting electrons and giving the particles an oxidising quality stronger than any commercial bleach. [Science Blog -]
10:54:09 AM
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Gathering and exchanging email threads. Twice in the past few weeks, once for business and once for a personal matter, I've had to collect and transmit a set of related email threads. In both cases, the Gmail query that produced these collections searched tags (what Gmail calls labels) as well as Subject: or From: fields. For example, one of the queries looked like this in Gmail's user interface:
in:school teacher1 teacher2
where in:school refers to the virtual folder created by assigning the school tag, and teacher1 and teacher2 are the names of teachers.
... [Jon's Radio] this could be a compelling reason to use Gmail -- BL
10:44:42 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Bruce Landon.
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