Design of Everyday Things and The Art of Profitability. More food for thought to help me on my startup.
Tags: books
Ultra fast web development with Sinatra
Me and Pedro Gaspar decided to do a small workshop about Sinatra at our University department. We focused on using it for small pet projects and prototyping. The workshop also included a couple of demos like integrating Sinatra with Arduino or capturing Notifo calls.
Tags: development, presentation, workshop
Build a Killer Product Faster! The Secret of User Activity Streams and Cohort Metrics
🔗 Build a Killer Product Faster! The Secret of User Activity Streams and Cohort Metrics
Two great ways to track service users. I got to implement this.
Free Ebooks On Creativity And Design
This post was originally written in January 2009.
Continuing the free ebook spree, I’ve found 3 more on creativity and design.The first one is a bit old, from 2004, but I still hadn’t heard about it. It’s How to be creative by Hugh MacLeod, the famous cartoonist behind gapingvoid. It’s a great read, very stright to the point like his cartoons and shares some inspiring experiences. Recently he got a book contract and will be releasing a book on the same subject called Ignore Everybody.
The other two ebooks I still hadn’t time to read properly, but look very promising. I have to thank Amy Hoy for sharing them. The first one is a somewhat short document describing several design concepts: appropriateness, timelessness, responsibility, and so on. It’s The Vignelli Canon by Massimo Vignelli. The second is How do you design? by Hugh Dubberly and contains an overview on all kinds of design processes, even software development models.
Good reading.
Tags: books, design, creativity
Rethinking Education
This post was originally written in September 2008.
Sir Ken Robinson talk at TED is one the top talks of the famous conference. It discusses the developed countries’ education systems and argues that it has several faults when it comes to identifying the true talents in children. It might work well for some cases, but it is mostly headed for advanced academic education (University professors that is). Basically it’s main goal is the uniformity of schools, programs, professors and students, to establish a just evaluation scheme.
However, this has been proved not to have the best results. If you have had the chance to read Freakonomics you already are aware of some of the results of the USA national multiple choice exams and how it motives gaming. Calvin of course had it figured out long ago:
There’s also a more recent talk about uniformed evaluations. Malcom Gladwell, the writer of Blink talked about what he called the mismatch problem. He states that using uniform tests, mixed with old tools and philosophies, to evaluate something has complex and heterogeneous as people is most certain to fail.
Sometimes the problems come from the wrong incentives. Tara Hunt mentions how awarding schools only by students’ results doesn’t pass the right message either:
The incentives trickle down. If a school’s test scores are poor, their funding is in jeopardy. If a school’s test scores are high, they get more funding. If a school has more funding, the teachers get paid more. If a school has a cut in funding, teachers may lose their jobs and classroom sizes go up. And the incentives for students? Not great, really, other than if you don’t pass by your final year, you don’t graduate. Students who fail the test in earlier grades get extra attention, helping them pass the test by their graduating year.
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I would also change the incentives for schools and teachers. Decreasing funding for a school in crisis doesn’t seem to fit the situation. I know it works in business – a department is slacking off…kill the funds – but a learning environment is different. I am only guessing, but I assume that the schools that lose funding are those in areas that need it the most. These are the schools with kids from poor families whose parents aren’t there (or aren’t able to be there) to sit and help their kids with their homework. These schools need more funding, not less.
Tara also mentions one of the solutions I suggest. The involvement of more extra-curricular activities in every student’s academic path. Make it a part of the education program. To evaluate commitment, not only to add more qualitative fields to their grade, but also to aid them on the discovery of their true talent.
I do believe everyone’s got a special talent. Telling them that the only measure of academic success is to go to University and take a degree is something I find very common and, at the same time, sad. It really narrows down their opportunities not only for academic success, but also to financial wealth and personal fulfilment. We need to open students’ minds and not narrow them down to a all-or-none test, while instilling them with an extraordinary fear of failing.
Tags: education