Santa’s new helper

Christmas eve is coming soon, the busiest day of the year for Santa Claus :)
But this year, Santa has got some extra help!

Merry Christmas! ;)

Free online course about Responsive Open Learning Environments

What is a widget? What is a Personal Learning Environment? How can I start building my own Personal Learning Environment? If you’d like to learn the answers to these questions, then visit our new course about Responsive Open Learning Environments. The course is free and also available for download, reuse and republishing.

Steve Jobs

An amazing person. A beautiful mind. He’ll certainly be missed.

 

I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.

Conversations with chat bots can be quite amusing. Their intelligence hasn’t yet evolved to a point where they would fool us to believe we’re talking to a human being. What would happen though if a bot had a conversation with another bot Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab tried just that. The result is at least surreal:

ROLE widget contest

The ROLE project (Responsive Open Learning Environments) is organising a Widget Enchantment Contest. Build a widget using ROLE technologies, make it available through the ROLE widget store and win a prize worth 500EUR ;)

The contest will run till July 15th and the winner will be announced on July 31st.

UPDATE: The contest has been extended till August 31st.

Reinventing reading? Probably not…

iPad vs stone

So the new iPad was finally unveiled this week, giving an end to loads of speculations and high hopes… The device is essentially just a large iPod Touch, lacking basic features someone would expect from a tablet, like multitasking, a usb port, or even a camera. Criticism has been ruthless so far, from mocking the device’s unfortunate name to comparing it with… a stone :D

Reinventing reading (?)

In anticipation of the big announcement of the new tablet / e-reader by Apple next week, Jason Bradbury of the Gadget Show wrote a very passionate piece in his blog:

Let me place my neck squarely on the block and predict the most important dimension of the next Wednesday’s launch: it will change publishing, forever.

I’ll just say I hope even half of what Jason believes comes true (and judging from Apple’s history this might just happen!).

1 year old…

A year ago, I was starting this blog, after taking a break from loads of christmas food… just like today!
Here’s to another year of blogging! Cheers!! :D

Finding your way in Google Wave

If you’re lucky enough to hold a Google Wave account, or just want to learn more about this exciting new technology, there is a guide out there by Gina Trapani, editor of Lifehacker.com. The guide is freely available under the Creative Commons licence and can give you a pretty good idea of what the Wave is all about, from basics to a bit more advanced capabilities.

A tribute to GeoCities

As of today, GeoCities belongs to the past. After almost 15 years of offering free web space to anyone with “creative” ideas, GeoCities is no more. Yahoo! has decided to permanently terminate the service, as it was surpassed by the booming blogging and social networking sites.

Like many other internet users of my age, my very first web page was hosted on GeoCities. Half-coded in HTML and half in Frontpage, with lots of GIFs and different colours, my page was not very different from the rest of the GeoCities world! :D

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately for your eyes!), I haven’t kept any of the early versions of my GeoCities page. I only managed to retrieve the last version, which is not too dreadful! Here’s what the home page used to look like:

Note: The monkey was “evolving” into a human sitting in front of a PC, through a home-made GIF :)

Goodbye GeoCities! We sure had a lot of fun together!