Cole’s last blog post..Community Question: Lifestreaming

I had just come back from an inspiring presentation by Sir Tim Berners Lee at Campus Party Brasil and was very annoyed at being prompted to install silverlight to watch some of the #eli09 presentations and even angrier when warned that my system and browser were incompatible.

The battle to make the Web an open system should be fought on many fronts and let’s keep the river and the energy flowing!

I am not a brain scientist nor do I play one on the Internet, but I do find we all carry some personal assumptions about the value of thinking we do “one” or “many” tasks at once. I too have always questioned the concept that brains can truly multi-process like a modern CPU, but then again, do not really think it matters if brains can really do “2″ things at once or switch back and forth.

I also think that some of us tend to carry our own images of study as quietly hunched over a book peering intently for hours as the “best” way to learn; I remember myself studying that way, but these days I work among multiple media inputs, and find the silence un-nerving. We ought to IMHO focus more in looking at what students are able to do, achieve, create, demonstrate than judging the way they prepare for it.

And in the “old” way of “focusing” on one task, didn’t students day dream? pass notes? doodle? I think it is a bit of a fairy tale of single task brains.

• It is beyond my control; that is a decision of the conference host.
• The session I blogged about here was not live-streamed; and I provide on my own an archived recording in platform neutral format. Yes, we could have tried running uStream on a shared wireless network, but sometimes it is just too much to focus on so many audiences. If you cannot make it live, try as much as possible to give an archive.
• The same complaint might be said by users on Windows or Linux systems who must download a “proprietary” (also free) software to watch a live QuickTime stream.