Tag: nptech

Free Rice – online edugaming for goodness sake.

freericeFree Rice is simple, doesn’t require you to login and does three good things: Improves English vocab; Is Fun (in a computery addictive sort of way); Helps with world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

It’s a game based on how good your vocab is. Every time you get a question right the advertisers donate 10 grains of rice and the next definition they ask you for is harder.

Should it stay this simple or evolve? A competition element could be added which would require you to login but also allows you to compete with friends on a social network. This may make your more valuable to the advertisers and hence help generate more free rice.
At the moment the advertising is low key and non of the companies worry or offend me. So could/should this be applied in our schools? Perhaps a chemistry free rice or history free rice?

Try it and tell me what you think.

Thanks to John, Steve and Jules for alerting me to this on Facebook.

Cory Doctorow, how to blog and the completeness of unfinished work.

Cory Doctorow speaking at PICNIC ’10 (photo by Maurice Mikkers) 

At the end of last month I was sitting in a fab old building in Amsterdam listening to Cory Doctorow talk about how to blog. A couple of things he said lodged firmly in my mind: he told us to think of a blog post as a piece of jigsaw puzzle when you don’t have the box lid and that it’s readers who help reveal the picture.

Cory is one of four writers behind (and very much in front of) the technorati world’s favourite blog Boing Boing. Because of that (a celebrity blogger – surely he’s worth a few hits) I meant to write him up immediately.

I’m pleased I waited.

Earlier this week I was trying to explain to a client/friend (they merge) how their web site could change using blogs and other forms of social media but to do so they would need to start thinking of it more as a work in progress, what the customer pinned down as a “corporate brain dump”. I was trying to convince them to stop believing their credibility relied so heavily on offering the outside world completed thoughts.

That took me back to Chip and Dan Heath’s marvellous book, Made to Stick, in which they write about how gaps in our knowledge are the (obvious) reason we are curious – our driver for asking questions, sharing our thoughts, looking for answers. Incompleteness essentially gives your reader work worth doing – it makes them want to read, want to think, want to come back.

All well and good. A thought, I’m thinking. Then I find myself sitting opposite the most eclectic man I know. Simon Baddeley (he’s the tall one in this picture) starts talking to me about the Zeigarnik effect – which suggests that people have a better memory for incomplete tasks than those which are complete.

Quickly back to Amsterdam and the reason I was at Picnic O7 for the European Bloggers UnConference where fellow Brummie Paul Bradshaw is telling me to me about a tool kit he’s developing for online journalists which will help them encourage their readers to take their story to a a new level and show them how they can change the circumstances in the story. It’s an extension of his understanding of distributed journalism; news as evolving loops between writer and audience.

Back then to my book case and as I’m reading Getting Things Done (thanks for the tip Antonio). The author David Allen is telling me that completeness was a luxury of the manufacturing age – an order for a thousand widgets was completed when said widgets were made, packed, shipped, delivered and signed for. Many of us no longer live such work.

All of which makes a lot of sense to me and leads me to think that a key 21st century skills is to knowingly leave stuff unfinished rather than the 20th century habit of doing so because we are disorganised, lazy or easily distracted. Or have I just come up with my most sophisticated excuse yet for procrastination?

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B:cen launches Youtube Channel.

Three films which set out how diversity networks are supporting active citizens in Birmingham are the launch videos for the Youtube Channel for the Birmingham Community Empowerment Network. The diversity networks were the subject of quite a strong appeal from the Bishop of Birmingham – who argued on the Grassroots Channel that they should be supported, not allowed to wither.

B:cen (which has employed me on a freelance basis for a good three years) will lose all of it’s funding from November this year, and is now campaigning to try and persuade Birmingham City Council and the Birmingham Strategic Partnership to continue to support the networks (not b:cen as a body) established in neighbourhoods in the city and by groups of shared interest across the city.

Back to the videos, made by another local community film maker Rachel Smith with interviews by Paul Slatter. One is about the Podminions podcast channel which I share purely because I agree with everything they say (and vanity)…

but I think my favourite happens to be Mark on the Disability Network – ‘cos he’s always made compelling arguments for networks as a tool for strengthening communities…

If you want to keep tabs on more films as they are put up, go to the channel page and use the subscribe button to stay up to date.

Upyourend – getting your blogpost on a map of Brum or GEOTAGGING 2

Jon Bounds mentioned his new thingy upyourend on facebook which led me to ask the question how do you geotag a blog post? Jon’s given us this answer.

So decided to get started by geotagging my recent podcast on Clean Medina – the Jihad on Litter in Small Heath. Indeed geotagging is a potentially a powerful tool for neighbourhood news and local blogging. It should also help public bodies keep track on who is sayng what about which neighbourhoods.

I added Geo as a plugin for WordPress (this blog still runs on 1.5 – something Jon and I will probably change soon) which asks for the Longitude and Latitude – and then adds though to your RSS feed. Now how do you find this. It turns out that lat and Long on UK postcodes are protected as the intellectual property of the post office. Jon suggests using something called an API key (which made my head implode). I found that if you tag a location on a google map and then look for directions to that location the latitude and longitude turn up – see the top left hand side of this image of the location for my blog post.

In this case I’ve tagged the post upyerbrum – which should feed through onto upyerend, but if that wasn’t the case upyerend would need to look to your feed – so you need to email Jon and tell him where your bimringham based geotagged feed is.
So there you go. I presume this will soon appear on upyourend. Oh and er will the site allow us to filter by most recent? Yes i know – it’s just something you knocked up at 2am and can I back off with the questions and requests please. Thanks Jon.