Derek's Blog

I had the opportunity to bring an XO computer home from work - it belongs to Jim, one of the software engineers we have working at CORE. Apart from my personal fascination with finally getting my hands on one of these machines to play with, I was keen to see what my youngest kids would do when I let them loose on it. They were (predictably) intrigued, and intuitively began exploring the different things they could do with it. My son became very engaged with eToys, using his experience with Scratch to quickly work out how to programme a simple object to behave in various ways, while my daughter quickly mastered a number of the simple maths and language activities. I was impressed with just how quickly and easily they found their way around the interface and were able to work out how to access the different programmes and dimensions the XO has to offer.

The thing that impressed me the most was how easily the XO could identify and 'map' the various wireless access points it found in any particular location in a visual 'mesh' network neighbourhood. I simply located our home wireless access point on the mesh, clicked on it and entered the password and "hey presto" - I was connected to the internet! The other thing that had me really impressed was something that isn't a part of the regular install of and XO - Jim has managed to install a copy of eXe on his XO and get it working! Now that's impressive.

Like all good things, however, this comes to an end - I've had to give it back as Jim travels back to Gisborne tomorrow.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just been playing with Pencil, an animation/drawing software for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. It lets you create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics. And what's even better is Pencil is free and open source.

The site is well laid out, with a very easy to follow online manual provided, and a forum area that you can go in and read other people's questions and tips etc. this is much more than a simply drawing tool as it allows you to create images as bitmaps or vector images, and to create animations that can be exported as Flash files or Quicktime movies.

Lots to explore and discover with this "work in progress" - try it yourself. I must confess, I think I'd find it easier to interact with if I had a tablet to use - I'm off to find one now...

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I've been looking for something like htm2pdf for ages! It's a wonderfully easy to use web app that allows you to create a pdf document from an html page. All it takes is simply paste the URL of the page you want into a text box and push the "convert to pdf" button. Another way is to simply paste the actual html into a second text box and click 'convert'.

I've played around with it by entering the URL of my blog page. The result was impressive. After waiting a few moments for the conversion to take place I was greeted with a clickable "download the pdf" link which allowed me to quickly download the PDF document to my desktop and open it.

Predictably it didn't capture the elements on my blog that are generated elsewhere - eg the RockYou, YouTube and Quintura Search elements - but everything else came out fine. even the hypertext links are active in the pdf document that is generated, making it especially useful for working with pages from places like Wikipedia for instance - or any other reference or information page that you might want to look at offline.

I can see myself making good use of this tool.

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In the past I've blogged about various innovations in the area of search tools, including Quintura,, the semantic search engine which I've embedded in my blog. SearchMe is an exciting new player in the visual search engine world which uses a highly graphical interface to present search results - in a style that looks remarkably like how the album covers are portrayed in my iTunes library when I go hunting for an album to play.

The video introduction above explains how SearchMe shows search results as big pictures of the actual web pages. And it offers more than simply providing results for the search term you enter. Besides the initial inquiry in visual search, there is also a feature called category suggest, which helps you refine your search, and another called list view, which provides short summaries of the content of each page - a little like the conventional search engines you're used to. The video below provides even more explanation of these features and how they work.

This is yet more evidence of how the graphics are going to feature more in the way we interact with our screens in the future. I've had a bit of a play around with this and think it's pretty cool - i could get very used to this! And there's more in the development pipeline according to the developers!

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Interesting read on the Technology Review with their list of 10 emerging technologies which they predict will have a significant impact on how we live our lives in the future. I was fascinated by the entry about surprise modelling which combines data mining and machine learning to help people do a better job of anticipating and coping with unusual events. The whole idea of how we can harness the collective power of information that we now have the ability to collect and process with such speed has interested me for a while, and the example in the article about solving traffic problems is a useful illustration of the principle at work. Another example if this is Reality Mining in which data from cell phones is used to learn more about human behaviour. It'll be interesting to see where this one goes, given the concerns about privacy and the storage of personal information as illustrated here in NZ by the recent announcements by the leading mobile service providers that they'll no longer store text messages that are sent and received across their networks.
Technology Review have been publishing their predictions on emerging technologies now for a number of years, and you can find links to previous predictions at the bottom of the article - worth browsing these also to consider (a) the accuracy of these predictions, and (b) the pace of change that is occurring!

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I had the privilege of participating in the official launch of an exciting new company in New Zealand called NextSpace, founded as a partnership between Right Hemisphere and the NZ Ministry of Economic Development.. NextSpace is described as "a think tank, catalyst and mentoring organisation charged with facilitating the growth of 3D graphical communications technology software through education, demonstration and research."

The focus of the day was on the role that 3D graphics will have as a key content creation, communication and collaboration medium in the future. It was very exciting to see examples of 3D graphics technologies applied in a range of commercial contexts (not just for gaming!). Right Hemisphere presented work they are doing with Boeing, using 3D technologies to provide a complete set of manuals for those involved in the maintenance of the planes, while HIT Lab, another NZ company that has pioneered developments in this area, demonstrated some of their augmented reality products.

This is all ground-breaking stuff, and illustrated to me the challenge for schools and education in general that will come as a result of these developments. Much of what we heard from various speakers focused on key attributes of workers in these industries - not just those producing the 3D technologies, but those who are using the products as a part of their everyday work - like the Boeing maintenance engineers who no longer work from paper manuals. The importance of collaboration came through strongly from several speakers, as did the emerging role of mobile technologies. The conversations soon turned to 'how can we prepare our young people for a future where the use of 3D technologies such as this will form a major part of how they communicate ideas and collaborate with each other?'.

I had a speaking slot in the day to focus on this issue (my presentation is included at the end of this post). I started by focusing on the fact that our view of literacy must change - to incorporate these new ways of communicating and presenting ideas/content/information etc. I then focused on the role of schools, and in particular, the need for some serious support for the professional development of teachers in this area, before briefly referring to a collaboration between CORE Education, CWA-New Media and NextSpace that we are working on as a way of addressing this. A part of our plan is to put some of these powerful 3D modelling and construction tools in the hands of school students and let them explore, create and express themselves with them - and find out just how far these creative and uninhibited young people might be able to stretch things!

You can be sure we're going to see a lot more developing in this new dimension!

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There has been discussion for years about the fact that there's a lot more information on the Web than is accessed when we do a search using one of the common search engines such as Google. Experts consider that there may be up to 500 times the information available in the 'invisible web' than there is in the 'searchable web'.

One way of addressing this is to consider the federated search approach - the powerpoint above is my humble attempt to illustrate how this works from a couple of years ago.

Another way is to use specialised search engines that are designed to search the deep or invisible web - usually within a particular field or discipline. About a week ago I received a note from Amy Quinn from an oganisation called College Degree, alerting me to a wonderful list of 99 Resources to Research & Mine the Invisible Web. I've had a play with several of these now, and can imagine they'd be pretty useful in particular contexts. A number of them are examples of the repository-specific search engines that I refer to in my slide-show, while others are more subject specific and search multiple repositories.

In addition to the links to search engines, the list also contains examples of specific directories, catalogues and databases etc, and has a useful section on social media also. It's worth scrolling right to the bottom for some articles and guides about the 'deep' or 'invisible' web.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 7:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Seems that the whole idea of user-generated content is maturing both in terms of the quality of the content itself and the professional communities that are committing to developing and sharing it. Here's a good example from the scientific research community, called Scivee.

Scivee is an online science community where scientists can make their research known to their fellow peers as well as the general public. Scientists can create "pubcasts" which are online presentations that allow a scientist to combine their publication with media such as video, audio, images, and text to allow visitors to quickly grasp the key concepts of their publications, as well as an increased chance for citation. Scientists can also form communities around their research/projects/interests and can start discussions or plan events with their group.

Thanks to Jane for this tip

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I've blogged a few times in the past about Quintura and Quintura for Kids - and have been privileged to be a part of the beta testing programme of this exciting new search engine.

Today I received notification from Yakov and his team announcing the release of their Quintura for site search. As you'll note, I've added this feature to the left hand menu of my blog site. It's easy to do for any web site - simply visit the Quintura site, click on the "embed" button and copy and the paste the generated code into the appropriate place on your website. I had to do a little playing around to make it fit the menu on my blog - some sorting to do with the sizing of the column and a stray div command, but it works now - wahoo!

Thanks to Jacov and his team for this brilliant product - making search so visual appeals very much to the way I like to go hunting for things.

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I had an unexpected skype call yesterday with Joe Rigby from MellaniuM, a Toronto-based startup specialising in the development of 3D real-world virtual environments. Joe and his development team have leveraged the Unreal2 engine used in Unreal Tournament game to create this very impressive 3D virtual world - capable of having up to 32 avatars working together in a private virtual world.

MellaniuM works differently from Second Life, in that is it is a Client-Server operation - you need first to download a piece of client software and install it onto your computer, after which all of the processing happens on your desktop, and doesn't rely on this being done across the web. The result is a very impressive, highly detailed 3D virtual environment that you can navigate around with ease, and includes some of the most impressive light-source rendering that I've seen in this sort of thing.

Part of the secret of the very impressive graphics in the environment is that they are rendered directly from Autocad designs to dimension the model to exactly what they are in real life - you can see some examples of this in the video clip.

The other really impressive thing for me was that Joe was able to 'walk' me through the demos of the software using skype - another little innovation that he and his colleagues had worked on.

Already interest is coming from engineering and real estate companies who see potential in these sort of environments for their businesses. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to think of ways in which these environments could be used in education - for virtual field trips, virtual science labs, and virtual classrooms... as we're already seeing happening in places like Second Life, but in this case, in a richer, more graphically detailed environment that "lives" on your own computer.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a new feature for those who use Google Talk that should be of interest to teachers of foreign languages - 29 translation 'bots' that can be added to Google Talk conversations. It all appears quite easy to use - for example, if you add en2zh@bot.talk.google.com as a friend in Google Talk and send it a message to translate from English to Chinese. You can use it as an interpreter in your group chat, or download the Google Talk client for BlackBerry and use it as a pocket translator.

The Google Talk Blog explains that for more languages, just add any of the 29 other translation bots. They're named using two-letter language abbreviations as "[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com", and the supported language pairs are: ar2en, bg2en, de2en, de2fr, el2en, en2ar, en2de, en2el, en2es, en2fr, en2it, en2ja, en2ko, en2nl, en2ru, en2zh, es2en, fi2en, fr2de, fr2en, hi2en, hr2en, it2en, ja2en, ko2en, nl2en, ru2en, uk2en, ur2en, zh2en. So, for French to German translation, talk to fr2de@bot.talk.google.com.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 8:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Now here's a bit of ingenuity for you - a low-cost interactive whiteboard that consists of a Wii remote and a couple of LED pens. It's the work of Johnny Chung Lee at the Human-Computer interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University who provides a very succinct overview of how it works in this YouTube video - including using both projected images and the LCD screen. He's even developed the software to cater for the use of two pens to allow for two-touch manipulation of the image. The software is available on his website to download. I love it when people come up with this sort of lateral thinking (thanks to Sharon Peters for her twitter message about this!)

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Interesting article in the Guardian who commissioned Web godfather Vint Cerf, now chief strategist at Google, to edit the British daily's media section. The result has been published in an article titled Tell me the future, containing responses from some of the industry's leading minds about what will happen in their respective fields in the undefined future.

Contributors include Chris De Wolfe, CEO, co-founder MySpace on Social networking; Chad Hurley CEO, co-founder YouTube on Video; Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter on Mobile and Peter Norvic, director of research at Google on search. Also included are Steven Huter and Adiel Akplogan, who have pioneered the internet infrastructure in Africa.

Social networking pioneer Chris De Wolfe, co-founder of MySpace, says "these evolving online social destinations are laying the groundwork for the new social Web, which we believe is becoming infinitely more personal, more portable, and more collaborative." The term "social network" would come to more broadly define open development initiatives, like Google's OpenSocial.

Similarly, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley sees a bright future for streaming video, which he says will become the most "ubiquitous and accessible form of communication." He predicts that online video will be personalized and customizable (i.e. more "social"), delivered to users' homepages in an RSS feed-like format

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 8:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The buzz about the release of Amazon's new wireless reading device called Kindle has been keeping the blogosphere busy recently. As with most emerging technologies there are both the supporters and detractors of this new gadget (see, for example, The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) by Google employee Mark Pilgrim, and make sure you browse the comments!).

I found George Siemen's reference to it in a recent blog post titled reading and books informative in this regard. George linked the news about Kindle with reference to the recently released NEA report from the US which paints a rather gloomy picture of the state of reading among young people in the US, concluding that they are reading less, and are reading less well.

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach makes a similar link in her recent post titled the future of reading on the TechLearn blog. Sheryl appears optimistic about the adoption of this technology, arguing that it's a changing world, and that if we want to remain relevant in the lives of our learners then we will need to use strategies and materials that fit their learning styles, not our own. Her post is well worth a read, as she shares her personal story of being one who does not enjoy reading books!

The NEA report goes on to say that...

The declines in reading have civic, social, and economic implications - Advanced readers accrue personal, professional, and social advantages. Deficient readers run higher risks of failure in all three areas.

The supposed universal library, then, will be not a seamless mass of books, easily linked and studied together, but a patchwork of interfaces and databases, some open to anyone with a computer and WiFi, others closed to those without access or money. The real challenge now is how to chart the tectonic plates of information that are crashing into one another and then to learn to navigate the new landscapes they are creating. Over time, as more of this material emerges from copyright protection, we'll be able to learn things about our culture that we could never have known previously.

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Thanks to a twitter from my friend in Canada, Sharon Peters, I've been introduced to the work of a friend of hers in Saskatchewan called Find a Story, Map a Story, Tell a Story. What a wonderful idea!

"Find a Story... Map a Story... Tell a Story invites you to choose a story that matters to you and using an online mapping tool like Community Walk, Wayfaring or Google Maps, create a StoryMap that will place your stories within a geographical context. Using one of these digital mapping tools, locate a geographical map from your story location, and add images, audio and text memories to the place markers found on the mapping tool. This project will help you recover lost stories and save and share them so other can enjoy and learn from them. Completed StoryMaps will be posted on a student work page on the Find a Story... Map a Story... Tell a Story web site."

Must confess - I'm familiar with and used Google Maps, but hadn't seen Community Walk or Wayfaring before - they look cool. I've checked out the StoryMaps and couldn't see any from New Zealand - perhaps an opportunity here for an enterprising NZ class to be the first?

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been playing with oScope, a fascinating search application, that displays results visually from eBay, Flickr, Amazon, and YouTube sources. As a user you have several options for how the results are displayed (i.e. display as list, pile, graph, etc.). I found the graph option very useful when searching eBay results as it allowed me to view the results across two axes - the first from low to high price, and the other relating to the time until the auction closes.

Yet another example of how rapidly the web is becoming visual/image-based!

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I've just been reading an eSchool News report on a 'Digital Incubator' project that gives seed money to college students for creating innovative applications. It begins:

Among the new digital tools and applications that students will be using on college campuses this fall are a mysterious, mobile-phone-based game of espionage; an online communal ranking system that can help in group decision-making; a first-of-its-kind MP3 visualizer that uses song lyrics to dynamically generate music videos; an online and mobile-phone-based community that lets members record and collaborate on rap music; and an interactive, advice-based wiki for helping students discuss difficult subjects. - And what's most remarkable about these applications is they're all student-created.

It's great to see this sort of support coming for student created work, and the recognition it gives to the possibility of new teaching and learning approaches and environments. The five winners of the award announced on 5 September can be accessed via the digital incubator website, and are well worth exploring. They are:

• Casablanca - a new style of mobile game that blends alliance and betrayal with social networking. Using text messages and email, two teams vie for control of the city by building or infiltrating social networks.


• How do I say this? - a community based site that invites users to help each other to address the things in life that seem impossible to say.


• Osiris - a music visualizer based on the lyrics of a song


• RapHappy - an online and mobile-phone-based hip-hop community that enables members to easily record, collaborate on, search, and listen to freestyle or written raps, without any need for software or file uploading.


• Selectricity - advanced voting technology for everyday decisions.

Initiatives like this go a long way to encouraging our young innovators and 'imagineers' to pursue their dreams - and I applaud them. I'm working at the moment with someone in NZ who I'd rate in this sort of category - unfortunately the options for him aren't so alluring, and his idea, as innovative and forward thinking as I believe it is, may well end up being just that, an idea, due to the lack of this sort of support.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's an interesting plug-in for the Firefox browser called Glubble When installed, Glubble permits each member of the family to have their own custom environment, so that when kids use it they only see the very best parts of the Internet based on selections made by their parents or supplied by trusted family brands.

I know there are all sorts of views about whether or not it is appropriate to block websites etc, but as software of this nature goes, Glubble is not bad. It took me just a few minutes to install and set up with several accounts. Glubble is designed for you to easily add or subtract sites from your child's Glubble World which means that you tailor your child's on line experience to be the way you want it, and the Glubble Altered Search makes Google and Yahoo show results from childrens trusted Glubbleworld instead of the world wide web. Installing Glubble doesn't alter your own web browsing experience - the Glubble screen appears when you launch Firefox, and once you log on your normal view of Firefox appears.

Not only is installation easy, but you can set the look and feel of Glubble to suit the reading ability of your child - there's even a pre-reading option in the set-up, but I haven't tried that yet. I'd be interested to hear from others who have tried it out.

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I've had over a week from my blog due to the pressure of completing a very larger report on my work in Malaysia, but this morning I couldn't resist - courtesy of a link from Bill St Arnaud, I took the opportunity to watch this short clip from TED talks, in which Blaise Aguera y Arcas gives a demonstration of an amazing development in image manipulation software called Photosynth (based on Seadragon technology) which creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. In a part of the video, Blaise demonstrates how, using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web in places like Flickr, he can re-create a virtual 3D view of the scene. Not only that, but with the computer trackball, he could zoom in to incredibly fine detail of any part of the image and view with startling clarity.

"Perhaps the most amazing demo I've seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.

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I often enjoy listening to the "Sunday Group" interviews on National Radio on Sunday mornings - and this morning was no exception. Chris Laidlaw's Sunday Group this morning consisted of Paul Reynolds, a well known technology commentator; Tom Chignall, head of regulatory affairs for Vodafone; Jo Tinall, director of the digital broadcasting strategy for the Ministry of Culture and Heritage; and Ernie Newman, CEO of the Telecommunications Association of NZ (TUANZ).

Their topic was the state of telecommunications in NZ, and Chris began by referring to a recent news report that states that there are now more mobile phones in New Zealand than there are people (they'll soon be competing with sheep!) - and asks:

- what is happening with telecommunications in NZ?
- are we getting good service?
- where is broadband going?
- what will happen to landlines?

it's not about technology, it's about a cultural change that we can drive and change!

A great discussion - and if you missed it, a podcast of the interview can be downloaded here.

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I've been reflecting a bit on my experiences here in Malaysia this morning - particularly in terms of what it has meant for me in terms of working away from my home and family for extended periods of time, and have realised just important a number of the technologies that I now take for granted are to me.

For instance, on my computer my Skype and iChat windows automatically open when my computer is switched on, thus I have to make a conscious decision NOT to work with them running rather than the other way around. This provides me with a "virtual presence" whenever I am online, and the ability to see which of my friends and colleagues are online. There's seldom been a time when I've opened my computer during my time here that I haven't been "interrupted" by someone wanting to connect for a variety of reasons - from friends simply inquiring how things are going through to colleagues with specific questions etc. This has allowed me to remain connected to and involved in the range of things I have on my programme back in NZ.

In our project here in Malaysia, we have used these same tools to provide synchronous opportunities for teachers and students in Malaysia to connect with peers in New Zealand, and it has been interesting to see how these first time users have adapted and adopted these new technologies very quickly - such that I now have an ever growing list of names on my contact list!

Another thing I've come to rely on is the ability to simply open my computer up wherever I am and be able to connect to the internet - whether by wireless (which is being implemented in a big way here in Perak) or by plugging into a cable in a school or hotel room. This relative 'portablility' allows me to remain connected and involved regardless of my physical location.

The combination then of the communications software that provides me with this sense of presence, the laptop I carry and the wireless access that allows for portability, and the fact that I can so easily personalise these tools provides me with an increasing sense of what a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is and can be.

It was of interest to read this morning news that Sony and British Telecom have joined forces to integrate the PSP with BT Broadband's video and voice softphone VoIP software, meaning that calls will be free, with the customer only having to pay for the BT broadband subscription! This will certainly introduce a more mobile connectivity tool into the mix, and must certainly be a sign of things to come as we become more mobile!

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Last year sometime I wrote about an application from called Alice which I considered to be a useful way of introducing students to the object oriented games development environment. This morning I came across Scratch, from MIT which provides a similar sort of "drag and drop" creative environment - with some extra features that really appeal to me. The website explains:

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

I accessed the free download and managed to get some animations up and running fairly quickly. For those keen to develop further, there are several tutorials available, plus loads of examples of projects created by others that you can view and unpack to see how they've created them.

The developers say that Scratch has been develped with educators in mind, and provide loads of information and resources on their education page to help you understand this.

It's remarkably easy to set up your own account, and create an online space to be able to upload your animations etc into your own gallery for sharing with others. I'd be interested in seeing examples of Scratch being used by students!

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's something worth taking a look at, a project with huge implications for education, in which scientists are creating a massive web site, called the Encyclopedia of Life. The web site aims to contain information about all of Earth's 1.8 million known species, with the information available online to everyone free of charge, and users of the site can adjust its pages so they see information relevant for students or for research scientists. The project is described as follows on the site:

Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity.

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just as I was beginning to think that I'm getting used to the Internet and the various ways that I've found to integrate it into the things I do in my life I read that researchers at several universities are working to design a new internet to replace the current global network.

The argument goes that the originally designed internet is well past it's used-by date, with all sorts of "tack-ons' having been added over the past couple of decades to address things such as security, performance, mobility etc., and that these things are now making the current internet cumbersome and in danger of falling over, particularly as we move towards much faster internet speeds and a more mobile internet.

In the article on eSchoolNews, Larry Peterson, chairman of computer science at Princeton and head of the planning group for the NSF's GENI is quoted as saying, "Rather than create workarounds each time, clean-slate researchers want to redesign the system to easily accommodate any future technologies."

Wow - I guess we'll have to wait and see where this one goes, although indications are that it won't be something that happens in a hurry - with those involved recognising that the internet has now become mission critical to so many in business, government, education etc - it would create mahem to do anything too suddenly.

The article did start me thinking however. What do you do when a system, designed and built to meet the requirements of a previous era, becomes so burdened through the repeated addition of "tack-ons" designed to make it cope with the emerging demands of the changing environment it operates in? Is a clean slate indeed the best solution?

The whole scenario sounds familiar - take for instance our education system. Trouble is, we're up against the same things this group of internet researchers will find - entrenched sets of beliefs and behaviours, all sorts of established use and dependencies, and a general relectance to change from something that is familiar.

Seems we inevitably get back to the "evolution" vs "revolution" arguments. Meantime, another generation of young people get poorly served by what we offer.....

Posted by Derek Wenmoth at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)