Design and the Elastic Mind

I had the opportunity yesterday to visit The Museum of Modern Art. It made me realize the tremendous value museums provide as a way of making sense of the world. Walking between exhibits, moving image artifacts, a touch of history (dueling media of typewriter and 35 mm film), Picasso, van Gogh, and others. The tour of ideas, concepts, and emotions communicated through art culminated in the sixth floor exhibit: Design and the Elastic Mind. The exploration of how technology impacts who we are as human beings was eye opening. As stated in the exhibit: "Designers give life and voice to objects, and along the way they manifest our visions and aspirations for the future, even those we do not yet know we have." I encountered some familiar tools like data visualizations and Twittervision...and some provocative (frightening?) consideration of our ability to engineer ourselves at a genetic level.

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2Collab Is An Excellent Find!

One day after I make a list of The Best Online Tools For Collaboration — Not In Real Time. I find another great one that should be on the list. It’s called 2Collab.

2Collab is a collaborative bookmarking application. You can create your own group with various privacy options, share bookmarks (including visual snapshots of webpages), and leave comments about the ones you submit and the ones others in the group contribute.

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Apps I use meme

I caught this from Doug Johnson and then linked over to Will Richardson’s entry. This is interesting!

I like Doug’s layout, and I’m going to go one further by listing the app, whether it’s open source, and on what platform I use it, since I use so many different platforms in a day…I think this is supposed to be web apps, but I’m listing everything I can think of, just for fun.

I’ve added links where possible for what it’s worth. Some of the links might not be right, as I’ve done this more off the top of my head than anything.

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Blog Commenting Evolves

So the cool news here is that the CommentPress project that’s been spearheaded by the folks at The Institute for the Future of the Book is about to evolve into something that I think will be greatly useful for educators using WordPress blogs in their own practice or with their students. For the uninitiated, CommentPress is currently a WordPress template that allows readers to leave feedback not just on posts as a whole but instead on each individual paragraph in the post. That in iteself has creates all sorts of potential, but it does mean making an entire blog capable of doing that, which you many not always want. So here’s the news: in the near future, the CommentPress functionality will be released as a plugin, meaning bloggers will be able to select individual posts to have paragraph level commenting without making the whole blog subject to that.

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