Want to learn more about how to set up and manage a user research program within your organization? If so, you are humbly encouraged to vote for our panel for inclusion in next year’s SxSW: Developing Super Senses: Tools to Know Your Users. My partners in crime are Mark Trammell (Digg), Carla Borsoi (Ask.com), Andy Budd (Clearleft), and Nate Bolt (Bolt | Peters).
Vote early! Vote often! And if we make it, come prepared with good questions!
Educational technology of the future – unfortunately, this is pretty close to where we are with most online learning tools in 2008. (From boingboing.com)
Film Based Teaching Machine. Student pushes one of four buttons to give answers and his score appears on paper slip at upper right. Teaching machines, expected to boom in the next decade, usually operate on the principal of repetition until the pupil understands. They aim to speed up the learning process and relieve teacher of much paper work in the classroom.
There have been lots of good ideas being floated around at the
O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference for Publishing but I just heard one of the best.
At the conclusion of one of today’s sessions, an audience member asked the panel about the danger of releasing textbooks into academic environments without DRM. Ben Vershbow turned the question around. He responded that the entire notion of textbooks should be rethought, and that textbooks should be thought of as extensions of the classroom learning environment rather than as products — and as such, educational publishers should think of providing text books as a service rather than a product.
View of NYC from the conference site