How social media can make history...

...is a TED-Talk video that i can really recommend.
Go ahead and watch it here.

Clay Shirky, the guy talking in the video, has a good point there. Furthermore he's a good speaker. Which makes you listen and really soak up the message, i think.

If you still didn't watch it, i still recommend you do so. You could really spend these 15 Minutes worse.

So he's starting out by explaining the biggest revolution in our media landscape so far. The Internet of course. Sure, every new form of publishing media sort of revolutionised the way we percieved information, but this for sure is the greatest. For the first time in history people are able to take part in the publishing process. They can put out their own content, or react to someone elses.
Quoting Shirky here, it's as if have a book with a printing press built in, or you get a radio that incloudes your own radio station. If you put it that way it really makes it clear what he means.

But people from my generation tend to oversee this revolution and take what we have for granted. We grew up with all these possibilities already existing or just coming up with us, so it doesn't appear to be that new to us. I guess it doesn't hurt to take some time to think about these things, and maybe even put them to better use than some of us are doing today.

I personally think the most interesting part of the video is the second half, where he goes into how people today are able to publish and spread news faster via Twitter than any newsreporter will ever be. These storys are the raw and unfiltered truth, spreading news in a way we didn't dream of just a couple of years ago. But this type of rawness and the lack to censor information is what got twitter banned from china. What sounds unbelievable to us is everyday life for the chinese.

I've been to china during my practical semester and it's true. It's a own world, seperated from others through the government. I really hope that the public pressure through social media can enter a new chapter of history making by giving these people their freedom of speech rather sooner than later.

Kickstarter...

...is great!

I've known it for about a year or two now. I first heard about it on the popular tech-blog engadget.com's category "insert coin" where they present promising projects in need of funding.
Not quite sure wich project it was though...

I love browsing the site. It's always interesting to see what cool stuff peaople thought about and now want to make reality. It's an inspiring place spreading some kind of "anything's possible" mood.

I even backed some projects myself, so i'm proud to be an active part of it. The Cosmonaut and the Gilf are ones that come to my head right now...

Furthermore over time i found a countless number of great projects, but you can't get in on everything, can you? Some of my favorites i came across during time were:Capture Camera Clip System Coffee Joulies – your coffee, just rightTouchFire: The Screen-Top Keyboard for iPad50-Dollar Follow FocusEscapeCapsule - Waterproof iPhone 4 CaseManifold Clock: Telling time in 3DBiochemies DNA Molecule Plush Dolls  let that be just a small number of projects that come to my mind right now, only a fraction of all the great ones i saw. Check them out if you like, or leave ones you know in the comments.


Always excited to find new ones...

eLearning

In class we heard quite something about the possibilities of eLearning. But it wasn't the first time this term crossed my path. Sure, i may have heard it somewhere, sometime before already, but there was this one time it started to become something real.

That time was around early 2010.
It was the beginning of our second semester at university. Me and a couple of fellow students, or friends, how i like to call them, were working at the Usability Engineering Center (UEC) of the university as studen research assistant, and we had quite a cool project going on.
We were doing a collaborative project with a team of russian design students from St. Petersburg. That were also living in russia, of course. So we had to think of new ways to communicate progress, ideas and discussions concerning the project.

eLeraning? Maybe. But it's still not the point.

In order not to bore you to death i'll cut right to the chase:

Due to our boss at the UEC socialising with professionals on her last job-related visit in Ethiopia early 2010, we got invited to present our project at barcamp.
Barcamp Ethiopia is a sort of open conference, welcoming everyone who'd like to participate and share some of his ideas, knowlege or whatever one has to offer, all hovering over the one big topic:
eLearning.

Thats when it really hit me.

So we went on to finish the project, to finally travel to Africa, germans and russians all together, to present our work and the ways we learned how to communicate over geographical as well as language barriers.
After three days of inspiring conference in Addis Abeba we set up two two-day workshops to teach the local eLearning professionals something about our ways of designing and displaying educational content in multimedia based form. It was a great vibe, and we could all learn from one another.

Over all this trip was one of the greatest experiences so far, and it tought me a lot about new ways to learn and percieve things. Be it medial, or cultural...