Things That Went Wrong

Welcome to the “Things That Went Wrong Wiki“. Most conferences and workshops report on success stories only. This is somewhat perplexing:

• Isn???t research supposed to deal with challenging approaches?
• Aren???t we supposed to take risks?
• Doesn’t that imply that things should occasionally not work out as hoped?
• If nothing ever goes wrong, then maybe we are not taking enough risks?
• If things do occasionally go wrong, then why do we never hear about those failures in conferences and workshops?

More importantly: what can we learn from failures in E-Learning projects? How do we utilize failures to improve our work? We will be organizing a series of workshops to explore this issue… More details will follow when we have them …

Grand Research Challenges for Learning Objects. Metadata and Interoperability

The wiki on the “Grand Research Challenges for Learning Objects. Metadata and Interoperability” is up. You may have seen the earlier announcement. The meeting helped crystalize some great ideas and suggestions (“connection week“, “flower challenge“. Make sure to check out the video feedback from participants! And you may want to get an impression from the photos.

COG

Not sure what we can learn from this [Honda add](http://www.ebaumsworld.com/flash/honda-ad.html), but this sure is amazing. I wonder how one designs such … – I even wonder what to name this?

It’s puzzling – that is one reason why I like it.

kGTD movie

A nice [movie on how to use kGTD](http://kinkless.com/kgtd/guide/overview#movie) to create some order in your life not only demonstrates a nice little application, it also illustrates two learning related issues:

- This is a nice way to explain things: a short movie of an application running, with a voice over explaining what is going on.
- The [kGTD application](http://kinkless.com/kgtd/) itself is a nice illustration of the “loosely coupled, tightly integrated” principle I mentioned earlier: this is nothing but a script over an outliner and a calendar tool, but it looks like a complete full-blown application from the user perspective.

I like this…

The Perils of Metadata

It is true: we may not all want all of our metadata to be available to everyone, all the time, as [this blogpost](http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2006/02/19/the_perils_of_metadata) on [an article in the Washingtom Times](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/14/AR2006021401342.html) illustrates…

In my view, the [principles advocated by AttentionTrust](http://www.attentiontrust.org/about#principles) are the right approach to dealing with this problem.

Ambient learning in the shower while listening to music?

I guess that we all like things that are different, especially when they are also useful… The good folks at [gizmodo](http://us.gizmodo.com/) recently mentioned two such things that got my immediate interest:

• a shower that makes the water light up to indicate the temperature: blue water is cold, red water is hot;
• an i-shirt with a magnetic fixture for an iPod shuffle.

Where are the ambient learning applications that are as playful, useful and obvious to use?