Off to Nairobi

The True Size of Africa from Boing Boing via Stephen's Lighthouse

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.
Henry David Thoreau

My flight to Nairobi via Amsterdam leaves at 5:20 this afternoon. I am very excited to be presenting at the AISA conference next week. As the LWW says, I have to keep going farther and farther away before people haven't heard all my old jokes. I just hope I can keep my buddy Ian Jukes out of mischief while there. I've been trying to convince him to replace his bum foot with a wheel so he could do the Starlight Express version of his keynotes. Not that they aren't entertaining enough already.

After the conference, I am heading to Arusha, Tanzania to join five other souls with Destination Tanzania attempting to walk up Mt. Kilimanjaro. Even if I don't make it to the top, it's already been good for me since the hike has been an incentive to lose some weight - down 18 of the 20 pounds I decided to lose before the hike. Good for both the knees and energy levels - but I do miss my wine and ice cream and salty snacks. Along with two guides, two assistant guides, and one cook, each hiker in the group of six will have five porters. I figure that will be two to carry the supplies and three to carry me.

I'm pretty much an old hand at packing for conferences, but packing for an eight-day, multi-climate hike is new. This is tricky since the climb will start in the tropics and end at the sub-zero summit (I hope). So hikers are like onions and ogres - they'll have layers. And snacks, sleeping bag and Kindle. That should be enough.

I've good memories of East Africa having attended a NESA conference there in, I think, 1987. It was the first time I ever did a break-out at a national/international conference. The topic was either book talks for secondary students or integrating business software (AppleWorks) into the curriculum. After the conference I took a five day safari to the Masai Mara, including a hot air balloon ride. Very, very cool.

It will be an interesting break, especially the eight or so days of no Internet connectivity. Belive me, I am looking forward to it.

Behave yourselves while I am gone...

The Gaping Void, of course.

Improving the quality of Tweets

Blogorrhea noun. An unusually high volume output of articles on a blog.

So Ole joins a monastery where he is required to take a vow of silence. Each year monks are allowed to speak only two words.

At the end of Ole's first year, Abbot Lars asks him for his two words. "Bad food," says Ole.

At the end of his second year, Ole replies "Hard bed" when the Abbot Lars asks.

At the end of the third year Ole's two words are "I quit."

"I am hardly surprised," remarks the Abbot Lars, "all you've done since you've been here is complain, complain, complain.

Ba dump.

Here's my proposal - there should be a five "tweet per 24 hours" limit to any one Twitter account. Period. No exceptions.

My guess is that the quality of tweets would rise fantastically. Right now for many twitterers, blogorrhea has a companion condition - Twitterrhea. Really does any really read 10-20 things that are THAT worth sharing? Have thoughts others would REALLY find valuable?

Wouldn't all of us be more discriminating if there were a limit?

For most people I talk to (and for myself), the big information issue is not a lack but a glut that makes it difficult to discriminate the useful and provacative from the mediocre and useless. Twitter is not helping with this in the least. There is too much "I read it and now I will pass it on and get a Twitter point" mentality.

Not that long ago, print journal editors provided a valuable service - they, fairly or unfairly, helped distribute only the "best" ideas in the profession. Yes, I am sure they practiced with a bias and that some really good stuff got lost in the process, but I didn't have to spend half my evenings scanning posts, articles and applications to determine if they had value to me. The editor did that for me pretty accurately.

What would happen if every tweet cost a quarter; every blog post cost five dollars; every e-mail a dime to the writer. Wouldn't we all be a bit more discriminating in what we sent?

I would be. You may well have been spared reading this post...

lonewolflibrarian.wordpress.com

Analogy and technology acceptance

Life is like an analogy. T-shirt saying

One of my 7 habits of highly effective technology trainers reads:

 4. Great analogies.
There is a theory that the only way we can think about a new thing is if we have some way to relate it to what we already know. Good trainers can do that by creating analogies. “Your email account is like a post office box. Your password is like your combination to get into it. Your email address is like your mailing address – it tells the electronic postmaster where to send your email.” Now here’s the catch: truly great analogists know when the comparisons break down, too. “Unlike a human postmaster, the electronic postmaster can’t make intelligent guesses about an address. The extra dot, the L instead of a 1, or a single juxtaposition of letters will keep your mail from being delivered.”

A comment to my rant about three-ring binders post the other day made me think about this ability. Linda wrote:

I am surprised that the Livebinders people have not been all over this post. I have not used their product so I am merely pointing out the connection, but I have thought about investigating it since it ties for number 68 in this Emerging Top 100 Tools for Learning.

Now I have never used nor do I know much about Livebinders either. I don't know if is a good tool or not.

But I love the concept - virtual three-ring binders - which if you think about, is what a good wiki certainly can be. By comparing their product to a well-understood method of organizing and storing information, the creators have made an instant connection in the potential users mind.

In my experience the technologies that we more readily adopt have a direct analogy to something we already use:

• Spreadsheets are ledgers
• Databases are filing systems
• Electronic grade books are gradebooks
• Presentation program are overhead transparencies
• Online library catalogs are library catalogs (the first system I used even had records that looked like paper library cards down to hole in the botton the rod in the drawer would go through)

and the list goes on ...

I wonder if this may be why some Web 2.0 tools are not as readily accepted by non-techie users. What is analogous to Twitter? How do you explain an RSS feed? And what the heck was GoogleWave?

We all like "improved." But is anyone all that crazy about "new?"

http://library.web.cern.ch/library/Webzine/10/papers/1/