Sometimes there is a bit too much oohing and aahing over the bling and not enough discussion of how the bling got there. Hey, I like fancy gadgets and cool technology as much as the next geek girl. I know that fancy gadget didn’t just materialize out of thin air. There are no replicators around here, either. So how does cool tech get here? Where does bling come from? It comes from the neurons in brains shooting messages back and forth around the brain at lightening speed. Brain activity, that is. Thinking. Wondering. Someone has to think up this bling and do so standing on the shoulders of those who have been thinking and wondering earlier. If we want more cool tech in our lives, we need more people to gain knowledge about these things through learning, teaching, collaborating, and creating. And lots of hard work. We need young children,…
3 CommentsCategory: Uncategorized
18 Days in Egypt is “a collaborative documentary project about the revolution.” The co-founder of this project, Jigar Mehta, was in Copenhagen June 14th, and I was one of a handful of people who was privileged to hear him speak at Politiken’s Hus. I was sad that so few attended this talk. He did tell his tale to a much larger audience the next day at another conference, but he had a valuable tale that deserved more listeners of the journalist variety. (News of this talk was circulated in journalist circles.) Here are my brief notes from his lessons learned about crowdsourcing “an interactive documentary of the events in Egypt” that occurred from January 25th to February 11th 2011. My notes from the talk Mehta describes how he watched the tale unfold on television. He noticed that many, many people were holding up their mobile phones to record the events.…
1 CommentHow do you attend a conference from your desk and gain wisdom and insights? Last year, I would have answered ScribbleLive. I followed the STC Summit 2010 using ScribbleLive, and I had a feeling I was at least having the conversations in the hallways. Tweets were drawn into the ScribbleLive setup, but people could also have accounts where they wrote more than 140 characters at a time. You got substantial tidbits directly from the event. I had a sense of the problems on the first two days of the conference (too much organizational navel-gazing that drove people batty), and the overall success of the conference when it was just about technical communication and its myriad of topics. I felt like I attended the conference in person. Real-Time is Exhausting The STC Summit 2011 was far less enjoyable from my faraway perspective. One problem was the distance. From Denmark, the Sacramento,…
4 Comments