lukegilman.com : High on the Hog Blog

Purveyor of Idle Observation

Twitter (me here) has evolved.

Evan Williams on Twitter at TED Conference

I didn’t want to be the only one who hadn’t posted this clip.

Brilliant!! Chuck; aka the Poetic Prophet, aka The SEO Rapper raps in my language.

May 1968: “Contre la Repression” – 800,000 students, teachers and workers marched through the French capital demanding the fall of the government under Charles de Gaulle and protesting at police brutality during the riots of the past few days. See more images by Serge Hambourg, Protest in Paris, 1968.

April 2009: “Contre La Nouvelle Version de Facebook” – protesters gathered at the Arche de la Défense in Paris, holding signs saying that they’re against the new version of Facebook and that they want the old one back.

This speaks volumes. Hat tip to TechCrunch.

Interactive guru Renny Gleason presents a taxonomy of inattention in tableaus of us ignoring each other with our mobile devices in this TED Conference talk, Busted. A few of these struck uncomfortably close to home.

• See also: Renny Gleeson’s Blog: ouroboros, dyspeptic rumblings from the guts of interactivity

A resonant observation from John Parsons:

However, the new media discussion often misses the main point of publishing: to convey ideas that are worth knowing to those who would benefit by knowing them. It’s possible that someone might benefit from Tweets like “drinking a great chai at that new place on 2nd Ave” (50 characters), but the cumulative effort – for both writer and reader – is often more time consuming than the benefits are worth. Even when one masters the excellent tools for managing it all, and focuses on truly meaningful content, the media flood can overwhelm the actual message. Each wave of new media carries the risk of what the late Neil Postman called “technopoly,” a self-justifying, self-perpetuating system where technology is cheerfully granted sovereignty over social institutions and national life.

In the age of twitter, the soul of wit is not just brevity but restraint.

• John Parsons, Seybold Report, Get off my “Digital” Lawn

The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School (PLMS) has been diligently offering up some of the most interesting lectures regarding the influence of psychology, cognitive neuroscience and others in the social sciences on the understanding of law, policy making, and legal theory. By making these materials available on YouTube, they are creating nothing less than a treasure trove. See their YouTube Channel for more.

I’ve previously blogged on Philip Zimbardo‘s talk at the TED Conference. His talk at Harvard is longer and more in depth, elucidating the findings of his book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil in the context of Abu Ghraib. See below for the videos in 11 parts. Read the rest of this entry »

Common Craft: Saving Money in Plain English

I mentioned CommonCraft in a previous post, noting that they had shifted from promotional videos to educational content. I really like the direction this is taking and wonder how long it will take for teachers to catch on to the power of distributed instructional media in the classroom.

This is making the rounds around the internets, from birgerking, an interesting whiteboard sketch about the internet, the future of social media, the opportunities and goals of communities. Click for High Res (i.e. more legible version)