A sarcastic description of twitter

ehehehehehe!

A game to learn US law

You play a Guardian of law and you have to spread the rule of law in a Courts virtual world!

Learn more about it following the link.

Advice for Lugano people

Hi Andreas, Chrysi, Luca & Silvia (or Sylvia, I never remember...),

to make more complete the info provided by Luca Botturi I inform you that in the University Library you can find the following book:

How to write & publish a scientific paper (by Robert A. Day)

Have a nice everything!

For StGallen and Lausanne people...a hug from a sunny Lugano (ihihihih)!

Ema

How to write a good paper

From Indiana University, a very good and detailed (and short!) compendium about how to write a good scientific paper. I found it really useful!

http://sparks.informatics.iupui.edu/Publications_files/write-english.pdf

from Kung Fu Panda - The way of Oogway

Isn't it the core of education?

"Oogway: Your mind is like this water, my friend , when it is agitated, it becomes difficult to see, but if you allow it to settle, the answer becomes clear. True warrior, but do not surrender... Yes, look at this tree Shifu, I can not make it blossom when it suits me, nor make it bear food before it’s time...
Shifu: but there are things we can control, I can control when the fruit will fall... And I can control. What time to seed. That is not illusion, Master...
Oogway: Yes, but no matter what you do, that seed will grow to be a peach tree. You may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach.
Shifu: But peach cannot defeat Tai Long
Oogway: Maybe it can, if you are willing to guide it, to nurture it, to believe in it...
Shifu: but how, how? I need your help, master.
Oogway: No, you just need to believe. Promise me, Shifu. Promise me you will believe.
shifu: I will try."

The videogame in which you have to fire people in order to survive the economical crisis

I suggest you to play...it's funny and sad at the same time!

here below the official description:

LAYOFF game released!
Tiltfactor and the collaborative Values at Play project are proud to announce the release of LAYOFF, a game that examines the current financial scandal. The game has been called “The Videogame for the Crisis” and “A game for today’s economy” in reviews! In the game, players play from the side of management needing to cut jobs, and match types of workers in groups in order to lay the workers off and increase workforce efficiency. The financiers in this game cannot face layoffs. Play Now!

A letter to promote the adoption of open standards for digital documents in UE funded projects.
Please, if you agree with it, contribute to the letter and sign it at http://freeknowledge.eu/wiki/index.php/OpenStandardsLetter

Nice people in Schwarzsee

A special thanks to Frank and Stephanie



Even if Pierre wanted to stop our expression freedom... ehehehehehe

Red-ink side effects

In Pierre diagram, where would you put these poor guys?

Lugano team tribute - the fantastic five are coming!

Strangers? No more!

A nice ad by Coca Cola, pointing out that already today a lot of people amongst us have a second (virtual or digital) identity, also those you might not assume they do...



In my understanding, the ad suggests to embrace them as parts of our lives.

Become friends with the Ogre instead of fearing it (/her)!

methodological note: ethnography

from Hardward Business Review


Ethnographic Research: A Key to Strategy
by Ken Anderson (Ethnographer at INTEL)

Corporate ethnography isn’t just for innovation anymore. It’s central to gaining
a full understanding of your customers and the business itself. The ethnographic
work at my company, Intel, and other firms now informs functions such as
strategy and long-range planning.

Ethnography is the branch of anthropology that involves trying to understand how people live their lives. [..].

Our goal is to see people’s behavior on their terms, not ours. While this observational method may appear inefficient, it enlightens us about the context in which customers would use a new product and the meaning that product might hold in their lives.
Ethnography at Intel initially focused on new markets. [...]

Recently, Intel ethnographers have veered into strategic questions. [...]

But people often can’t articulate what they’re looking for in
products or services. By understanding how people live, researchers discover
otherwise elusive trends that inform the company’s future strategies.

[...] Our job as anthropologists is to understand the perspective of one tribe,
consumers, and communicate it to another, the people at Intel. Our experiences
in both worlds make this translation possible. Ethnography has proved so
valuable at Intel that the company now employs two dozen anthropologists and
other trained ethnographers, probably the biggest such corporate staff in the
world.

High-tech companies have to date employed the lion’s share of
corporate ethnographers. But I believe that ethnography is so beneficial that it
will spread widely, helping firms in every industry truly understand customers
and adapt to fast-changing markets.

Copyright © 2009 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

NCCR Democracy, positions in Zurich

The NCCR Democracy is seeking to appoint


2 Postdoctoral researchers,

13 Ph.D. students and

1 scientific assistant

to start on 1 October 2009.

Job descriptions outlining the research orientations, qualifications required and application details, can be downloaded from the NCCR Democracy website http://www.nccr-democracy.uzh.ch/nccr/news_events/news/jobs. The deadline for applications is 15 May 2009.

NCCR Democracy is a Swiss national research centre, working on the challenges to democracy in the 21st century, and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the University of Zurich. Launched in 2005, NCCR Democracy represents an unprecedented disciplinary alliance in Europe between political science and media and communication science. Managed from the University of Zurich, the network comprises 14 partner institutions in Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands.

The centre's research focuses on two global trends that pose significant challenges to the ways that democracies have traditionally operated: globalization / de-nationalization and the growing influence of the media on politics (mediatization). The research program examines how these two trends jeopardize or reinforce democracy. NCCR Democracy provides a structured doctoral program promoting scientific excellence, independence and interdisciplinarity.

World builder

here is a very poetic and very nice icon of virtual worlds and how they can be in our life and values.
I know it's then minutes, but that's really worth seeing.

Dr Seuss

Here is what we've discussed in my follow-up seminar in Fribourg:




Question is: does CSCL also translate to Comic-Supported Collateral Learning? Or is this a video for vocational training?

Red-ink goes movie!

Beautiful Robot Pictures

Here you can kick back for three minutes and get amazed by today's robots in action. The slideshow features the Governator, a well-known German girl, and also BERTI, who Ema presented to us some time ago.

...if you have more than three minutes: the blog itself is really nice - wonderful pictures of nearly everything and everywhere, a new album every other day.

A new concept of "privacy" --> "publicy"

Privacy is not dead. It just went global and public, which doesn’t mean you can’t control what people know about you. Actually, it is now the other way around.

From Laurent Haug's blog.