Brandon Muramatsu

Posts of the Week for June 18, 2011

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  • Why Facebook isn’t the best home for your public events: Jon Udell writes about Facebook as a store for your data…basically he cautions against it. This is something that I’ve been struggling with since I converted my website over to a blog in 2008-2009. Call me old fashioned, or a curmudgeon. But I want to control my own data. Jon Udell writes:

    “Organizations should strive to own and control their online identities (and associated data) to the extent they can.”

    A whole-hearted, YES!

    (O’Reilly Radar, June 9, 2011)

  • Advanced Computer Science Courses: Ok so this isn’t really for me, but this is the sort of thing that I’m doing with these posts of the week, curating content. As most of you know I work in the field of Open Education, and work with OpenCourseWares and educational digital libraries. All of this work has been about putting more and more content online, and making it openly accessible. Since about 2000 or so I’ve thought we’ve been focusing on the wrong problem, instead of more content, we should be helping folks find what’s there. This is what the author does, he has waded through all of the openly available courses, annotated them, and suggested a program of study, if you will.

    (O’Reilly Radar, June 10, 2011)

  • How to Create Presentations that Don’t Suck: So there’s numerous posts on this subject, but this is a nice, recent recap of the things to do. The important ones to me in Melanie Pinola’s article… “Too many ideas on one slide” and “Incorporate Storytelling Structure into Presentations for Added Drama and Effectiveness”. The best presentations I’ve seen have come across as stories. These are much harder to do on the airplane ride to a presentation. :(

    (Lifehacker, June 9, 2011)

  • Wanna Create A Great Product? Fail Early, Fail Fast, Fail Often: Really Jeremy Jackson’s article title says it all.

    (NextDigest Design, June 10, 2011)

  • Case Study: Lean UX at work: Eric Ries describes how “lean UX” can be used to break the design/build cycle. Take this one with the article above.

    “As feedback is collected by the designer from team members and stakeholders, the next version of the design asset is turned around in hours, not days. This gives the project a powerful feeling of forward motion and progress. In addition, the build-measure-learn cycle can be executed much more quickly.”

    (NextDigest Design, June 10, 2011)

  • Useful consumer engagement statistics for social media, mobile: Pat Coyle found a useful presentation developed by ReachLocal. What can we learn about these statistics for education?

    (NextDigest Mobile, June 10, 2011)

  • Trulia Crime Maps: I wish they had info for the Boston area. But crime maps for many major cities.

    (Lifehacker, June 6, 2011)

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