Design Boost is a four day bootcamp for prototyping digital learning products.

We’re looking for promising young innovators, to bring learning into the 21st century, to create digital products that excite and engage kids in meaningful learning. In partnership with IDEO, Startl is offering a multi-day immersion for designers and creators, hackers and coders, builders and entrepreneurs.

Boost isn’t about sitting around dreaming up pie-in-the-sky ideas. Its an intense whirlwind of activity, with lots of hands-on, real-world involvement in the design and product development process. You’ll be taking the seed of an idea and seeing whether you can grow it into an effective and marketable learning product. Along the way, you’ll be steeped in how to create user-centered, learning-rich and market-smart designs and learn the tricks that seasoned entrepreneurs use to generate new products quickly and cheaply. But you won’t be doing this on your own. You’ll be surrounded by inspiring peers and collaborating with them to amp up your creativity and rigor.

Startl’s first series of Design Boost will focus on the design of mobile applications for learning, targeting these primary platforms: Android, iPhone, Symbian and BlackBerry. We’re making this the focus because there’s a serious lack of high-quality mobile applications for learning and education on the market, so there’s a massive opportunity to make a difference and make your mark.

The Boot Camp will be a launching pad for participants to make their next entrepreneurial move, be it with Startl, IDEO, local firms, national brands or beyond.

Apply for the November 2010 Mobile Design Boost to be held in San Francisco November 11-14, 2010.  (Application deadline – September 17, 2010)

The Basics – What You Need to Know Before Applying
A primer on what Startl is seeking in teams.

Design Boost FAQ’s

Mobile Design Boost Schedule & Agenda

From DSC:
Are there many college-level courses out there like this? This is a very interesting, real-world, engaging, hands-on approach — while offering numerous opportunities to collaborate.

Media:Scape-based setups would work well here.


All Our Ideas

— original posting from FastCompany.com

Also see:
Computers intersect with sociology to sift through ‘all our ideas’ (from News at Princeton)

Fortunately, an acquaintance referred Moles to Matthew Salganik. An assistant professor of sociology at Princeton, Salganik has teamed up with Princeton computer scientists to develop a new way for organizations to solicit ideas from large groups of people and simultaneously have those same people vote on the merit of the ideas generated by the group.

Called “All Our Ideas,” the survey tool melds concepts from sociology and computer science to allow an organization to quickly set up a free website where large numbers of people can contribute and rank ideas. The system could help governments tap into public opinion and provide sociologists with a new research tool.

Learning from the creative industries – consistency to build trust — from infoq.com

In the June 2010 edition of Wired magazine Jonah Leher wrote an article titled “Animating a Blockbuster: Inside Pixar’s creative magic” in which he examines the creative process in use at Pixar Animation Studios. He states

“Since 1995 when the first Toy Story was released, Pixar has made nine films, and every one has been a smashing success. Pixar’s secret? It’s unusual creative process.”

According to Leher: “the studio has built a team of moviemakers who know and trust one another in ways unimaginable on most sets”

He points out how Pixar’s process requires deep trust among the team, and the ability to handle feedback on the quality of the work being done. Each day the team review the work done the previous day and “ruthlessly shred” each frame. This constant feedback cycle enables the team to continuously improve the quality of the work being done, and the product being developed. This process involves every member of the team, “even the most junior staffers are encouraged to join in”, the intent is to learn, adapt and improve in a short cycle time – something that should be very familiar to anyone who has worked in an Agile software development team.

This safe to fail environment is one of the key aspects that makes Pixar so successful. Leher quotes Lee Unkrich (director of Toy Story 3) who says “It is important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up. We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That’s why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible”

Kids Innovation Study Results, Part 2: Creation, Design & Digital Optimism — from life-connected.com by Kim Gaskins

This is part 2 of the study results discussion. Part 1: “Kids Innovation Study Results, Part 1: Web in the Physical World.” Download a 3-page PDF summary of study results.

Children’s “Future Requests” for  Computers and the Internet
Study Lead: Jessica Reinis

What do children think computers should be doing? Children’s “Future Requests” for Computers and the Internet is the second installment of Latitude 42s: an Open Innovation Series, user- powered research studies which unite collective creativity and sophisticated quantitative analysis to generate Web-based solutions for the future.

Thai-Language.com


Summer Institute of Linguistics, Inc (SIL) International is a faith-based nonprofit organization committed to serving language communities worldwide as they build capacity for sustainable language development. SIL has some linguistic software available for translators and linguistics that goes beyond simply learning a language. They are more like language analysis and language parsing. Check out http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/index.asp

Categories include:

  • Data Management
  • Font
  • Font Utility
  • Keyboard Utility
  • Other
  • Parser
  • Programming Language
  • Text Analysis
  • Text Utility

For German, see:
dict.leo.org


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The Rise of the Cloud (graphic)

10 Internet of Things Blogs To Keep An Eye On — from ReadWriteWeb [via Steve Knode]

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iPhone Apps - the hottest course on campus

Articles/resources re: computer technology — from PCBargainHunters.com

For those interested in Computer Science, there is a nice list of resources at:
http://www.pcbargainhunter.com/articles/computer-science-topics.html

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http://www.tuvie.com/holo-2-0-future-wearable-computer-for-2015/

  

http://www.tuvie.com/holo-2-0-future-wearable-computer-for-2015/

  

http://www.tuvie.com/holo-2-0-future-wearable-computer-for-2015/

Apple sells out developer conference in eight days — from CNET

From DSC:
If you are in computer science, this should tell you something about where you want to spend some time.

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From DSC:
A trusted and wise colleague and I agreed many years ago (~2003 or so) that we had seen the peak of Microsoft. This morning, I was reminded of those reflections and conversations when I saw today’s article by Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO salesforce.com:

The end of Microsoft. A door opens to a new cloud.
As apps migrate to the Net, the software giant’s old model looks older every day.

Though I doubt we’ll see Microsoft going away entirely any time soon:

If you are in computer science:
You need to be paying attention to cloud-based computing and begin moving in that direction in terms of your investments in time/efforts.

If you are in business/economics:
Learn the lesson from what happens when you do business like Microsoft did (i.e. dealing ruthlessly and often times unfairly with competitors, while not listening to your customers and those within the standards-setting-bodies of the world). When you make your bed like that, you will lie in a bed like that. Microsoft will have a hard time adjusting to a world based upon creativity, innovation, collaboration, standards, respect for others, working in a platform that they can’t control, and will struggle to keep up with those organizations who are able to move at the speed of trust (Covey). Maybe this same writing was on the wall when Bill Gates made his decision to leave Microsoft years ago.

Looking for Jobs?: Look to IT — from ITIF.org by Robert D. Atkinson and and Scott M. Andes

In this WebMemo ITIF finds there has been impressive domestic growth of high-skill, high-wage IT jobs over the past ten years. ITIF’s analysis shows there were 688,000 new IT jobs created from 1999-2008, an increase of 26 percent – four times faster than U.S. employment as a whole. The addition of thousands of high-end jobs in the areas of network design and administration as well as data communications analysis and engineering more than offset lower level programming jobs that have moved to other countries. Because of this job growth, U.S. GDP is over $52 billion larger in 2008 than in 1999. The memo reinforces the need to maintain investment in this area. The advent and expansion of new IT systems such as health IT and smart grids, the continued expansion of broadband, and the growth of e-commerce and e-government, show the importance of IT jobs to the U.S. economy going forward.

More encouraging, IT jobs are predicted to grow even further in the next decade. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook…

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