Effective Schools

Resource | Main Page: "This site is a knowledge base about ways of creating the conditions for effective teaching and learning in schools which has been designed to assist task managers, practitioners, program designers and decision makers in their efforts to promote the best practice in education quality improvement programs around the world."

A Unified Field Theory of Design

A Unified Field Theory of Design: "Organizing Things
The first step in transforming data into information is to explore its organization."

Frye, Northrop

Frye, Northrop: "'I am often described as someone who is now in the past and whose reputation has collapsed. But I don't think I'm any further down skid row than the deconstructionists'"

cool one of the grit over eastern china

Visible Earth - Haze over Eastern China

Northrop Frye - Culture: It is of the essence of imaginative

Northrop Frye - Culture: It is of the essence of imaginative: "Northrop Frye


Culture

It is of the essence of imaginative culture that it transcends the limits both of the naturally possible and of the morally acceptable."

enchant

enchant: "
We didn't see the seven mountains ahead of us. We didn't see how they are always ahead, always calling us, always reminding us that there are more things to be done, dreams to be realised, joys to be rediscovered, promises made before birth to be fulfilled, beauty to be incarnated, and love embodied.


'Songs of Enchantment'
by Okri


We didn't notice how they hinted that nothing is ever finished, that struggles are never truly concluded, that sometimes we have to re-dream our lives, and that life can always create new light.


This is the song of a circling spirit. This is a story for all of us who never see the seven mountains of our secret destiny, who never see that beyond the chaos there can always be a new sunlight. "

Anti Patterns

Anti Patterns: "An AntiPattern is a pattern that tells how to go from a problem to a bad solution. A good AntiPattern also tells you why the bad solution looks attractive (e.g. it actually works in some narrow context), why it turns out to be bad, and what positive patterns are applicable in its stead. "

Reviewing Satre in The Nation

Accidental Friends: "Aronson is surely right to remind us that both Sartre and Camus fastened on part of the truth--the need, on the one hand, for real, if unpretty choices and, on the other, for moral verities. "

Noam starts Blogging

Turning the Tide: "Welcome to Turning The Tide
This blog will include brief comments on diverse topics of concern in our time. They will sometimes come from the ZNet Sustainer Forum System where Noam interacts through a forum of his own, sometimes from direct submissions, sometimes culled from mail and other outlets -- always from Noam Chomsky."

The Brain?

The Brain? It’s a Jungle in There: "These theories are part of what Dr. Edelman hopes will become 'sciences of recognition,' studying how biological processes recognize other biological processes. It is an enterprise, he argues, that spurs amazement, because if it succeeds, it will show that out of accident and diversity, something as miraculous as human consciousness can be born. But this vision can also spur discomfort, because it implies that there is no supervising soul or self — nobody is standing behind the curtain. This, for Dr. Edelman, is Darwin's final burden. "

China Moves Toward Another West: Central Asia

China Moves Toward Another West: Central Asia: "China's western ambitions do not end with the purchase of huge amounts of energy, the main products that Central Asia has to offer, international political analysts, Chinese and regional officials agree. Beijing's bid to secure vital fuel supplies is part of a bold but little noticed push to increase its influence vastly in a part of the world long dominated by its historic rival in the region, Russia."

China Moves Toward Another West: Central Asia

China Moves Toward Another West: Central Asia: "'It is not Kipling's `Great Game' yet,' Dr. Blank said, 'but it is a hell of a contest in its own right: military and economic and everything else.'"

Quentin's Eurides Days

A Passion for the Classics and, Well, Passion: "Ms. Carson, 53, described the play in her typically elliptical way, 'Euripides had his Quentin Tarantino days.'"

JAlbum - free web photo album software

Great software, with a tad complex set of tweaking optionsJAlbum

Age/wisdom

I recall a Canada World Youth group leader saying that as a result of their experiences overseas the participants started reading the New Internationalist and the group leaders started reading the Economist. I think the naiveté of youth is fine - I'm still in favour of cheap cheap university tuition and generous funding and strong government regulation of the environment, etc - its just you also acquire these contrary experiences like seeing universities as institutions seeking corporate funding and the individual profs focusing on their pensions. And somehow you have to make sense of it. I don't think I allowed for enough self-interest or systemic absurdity in my youthful thinking.

Extreme Programming - Extension?

I wonder if principles in Extreme Programming apply elsewhere in life? For example:

DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork encourages us not to over (or under)-engineer;
AskTheCode because it knows;
ListenToTheCode;
ModelFirst plus SpartanUserInterface helps us concentrate on real customer value
ExtremePlanning suggests quickly building a map of the whole imagined system and incrementally refining it
The PlanningGame formalizes the rituals and roles of planning
CountDownToRelease discusses how to use the ExtremePlanning practices when you're getting close to release
ExtremeReuse - adopting third party software and making it XP-compatible by building tests
TossIt - making projects trim and keeping projects trim
SystemMetaphor - how we communicate the system to ourselves and others
XpSimplicityRules
OnceAndOnlyOnce
ExtremeDocuments - we do documentation, sometimes differently
SupportCrisis - what to do until the doctor comes
IncrementalDelivery
LazyOptimization and EarlyProfiling
OpenWorkspace

Results in...
IterativeDevelopment - tends to be a natural result of ContinuousIntegration and ContinuousIntegrationRelentlessTesting and DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork at each iteration
DynamicDesign - from RefactorMercilessly and short Code-Compile-Debug cycle
FewerWorkHours [important]

Blog vs Wiki

Interesting post on combination of Blog and Wiki. Seems like a variant on presenting a structured arguement/discussion i.e. that somehow I want to collect, order, organize and present information in an only vaguely linear fashion. In the first instance I'd like to be able to do this for my reference only, ideally with a local copy on my pc and a synchronized web accessible. Some might want to 'publish' some/all of their information. Some software tackles this, such as The Brain... but it seems imperfect. Are there other solutions? HTML, text/word files, Visio, Inspiration, Endnote ... all have their specific uses ...

: Irate Scotsman - Blog Wiki Blog: "However, wikis are not blogs, and I don't think they're particularly well-suited to be hacked into being blogs (which is the main gist of the links from Andrew's WikiBlogIntegration page). Sure, they can be used as (or made into) blogs, but the question is whether or not it's a valid approach. The problem lies with the basic concept of a blog. A (modern) blog is:
Ordered (by the chronology of posts)
Temporaly aggregated (a page displays the 10 or so most recent posts at any time)
Dynamic (the pages change constantly, due to the temporal aggregation)
Categorised (most modern blogs strongly rely on the use of various categories for posts)
Contemporary (a blog's primary external value lies in its current posts, or current topics)
A blog is a time-stream of information, which inherently understands the concepts of past, present, updating, recency and progress.

By contrast, Wikis seem to be more about the timeless accretion of static data. To my mind, a wiki is:
Principally unordered (wikis only care in a very secondary way about the most recent edits; recency is not core to the concept of what a wiki is)
Logically aggregated (content is within a mass of related material)
Primarily static (each individual page mostly contains its own relevant content and nothing else)
Not intrinsically categorised (categorisation in wikis seems to be human-enforced; internally, all pages exist at the root level, with no subdivisions or priorities)
Timeless (wiki content is long-term; rarely is it associated with a single point in time)
So, if you're looking to combine static with dynamic content, do you start out with a blog or a wiki? It's a matter of what you specifically need to do. For examp"

Creative Commons

Creative Commons: "Creative Commons is devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for others to build upon and share."

Edward Tufte

Edward Tufte: New ET Writings, Artworks & News

Project Management Templates

tools: Project Management checklists and templates: "Project Management checklists and templates"

Enigmas: Why don't people do what they say they will?

Why don't people do what they say they will?: "Why don't people do
what they say they will?" "In summary, the main issues are: competition for time, unhelpful personal motivations, lack of autocracy, lack of urgency, lack of prompts, and multi-tasking."