Dan Dixon, who worked with us to help us define our ’social architecture’ and to develop our initial product roadmap, has a chapter called Pattern Languages for CMC Design in the forthcoming Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems. It will be a chunky tome, over 1,000 pages, but even so a list price of $495 does sound like they are actively discouraging individuals from buying it. If you are a student, or work at a large corporate enterprise, I guess you could hassle your library to pick up a copy. Otherwise you might have to settle for reading Dan’s blog.
As I said at the time “The patterns workshop [which Dan and Ed ran for us] gave us a way of thinking
about what we wanted to build that neatly bridged the gap between vague hand waving about ‘community’ and getting sucked down into the nitty gritty of interface design.”
If you think you could use some similar help I highly recommend getting in touch with them.
We’ve just kicked off a new blog over at blog.scrump.com with a post about Collaborative Filtering and Social Capital.
Recently I have been thinking about how we can apply the techniques of collaborative filtering to people search and recommendation. Indeed we have built Beanbag Learning as a research testbed to allow us to explore possible approaches in this space. There are a number of threads which are starting to come together: collaborative filtering, the social graph, peer to peer, Whuffie and solar magnitude, openness and mutability. I’ll outline them below and try to link to some of the wide range of conversations going on which link these seemingly disparate areas.
Read the rest over on the Scrump blog ยป
The DCSF campaign to get teachers working outside of the classroom has been boosted this week with the launch of the Teaching Outside of the Classroom website. The aim is for trainee teachers to go on placements during their training at non-school educational sites, such as adventure centres and museums. The manifesto for this was launched about 6 months ago and the website is intended as a mechanism to allow interested organisations etc to sign up to be involved.
Via Ben Williamson on the Flux blog.
Read the rest of this entry »
After a long silence Maxis (of The Sims fame) have at last announced a release date for Spore.
Spore has been gestating for several years, Will Wright the creator first talked publicly about at the Game Developers Conference in 2005. You can watch a 35min video of his talk on YouTube, below.
Read the rest of this entry »