Some books that have helped in our learning have been

Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Design and Refine User Interfaces (Interactive Technologies)

From Idea to App: Creating iOS UI, animations, and gestures

Designing Interfaces

Mobile Design and Development

The RoboCup Soccer Simulator – The RoboCup Soccer Simulator is a research and educational tool for multi-agent systems and artificial intelligence. It enables for two teams of 11 simulated autonomous robotic players to play soccer (football).

Brain workshop – Brain Workshop is a Python implementation of the Dual N-Back mental exercise. This exercise is the only mental activity that has been scientifically shown to improve your short-term memory (working memory) and fluid intelligence.

View your mind – is a tool to generate and manipulate maps which show your thoughts. Such maps can help you to improve your creativity and effectivity. You can use them for time management, to organize tasks, to get an overview over complex contexts

Sweet Home 3D – Sweet Home 3D is an interior design Java application for quickly choosing and placing furniture on a house 2D plan drawn by the end-user, with a 3D preview.
What are the ones that you find interesting?

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is something that I talk about at a high level when I deliver social media training. Here is the long version of this story.

• Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd)

This license is the most restrictive, allowing redistribution. This license is often called the “free advertising” license because it allows others to download your works and share them with others as long as they mention you and link back to you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

• Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike (by-nc-sa)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. Others can download and redistribute your work just like the by-nc-nd license, but they can also translate, make remixes, and produce new stories based on your work. All new work based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also be non-commercial in nature.

• Attribution Non-commercial (by-nc)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

• Attribution No Derivatives (by-nd)

This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

• Attribution Share Alike (by-sa)

This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.

• Attribution (by)

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered, in terms of what others can do with your works licensed under Attribution.

There is a lot more to CC than these six categories. There is an organization called CreativeCommons.org, it’s a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

They provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.

They are based in the U.S.A therefore it’s unclear if all their licensing rules apply globally.

There is another category called CCO that applies to your own work that you can waive your rights and make it completely available to the public without restriction to copyright and database law. This category applies to scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content.

We all need to earn a living, so who would be crazy enough to use these licenses?

The best known example of course is Flickr, they have incorporated these licensing into their offerings.

Wikipedia, Google and Open course ware. The most interesting one is a band called Nine Inch Nails, who released some of their songs for FREE as well as a limited tired step version of other products, services etc…This had an amazing effect whereby they had a sold out tour and sold their other products as well.

If you are thinking of incorporating CC into your business or otherwise, there are great guidelines on how to go about this. Since we are here in Canada, then how do we know if all this is relevant to the laws here. I am happy to say that we do indeed have a CC Canada.

Here’s the scoop….

Back in 2008 here’s what Google Maps did to celebrate.. Google did not feel like celebrating today : (

Design for global learning conference.

Some iPhone and iPad apps e.g. Lucktricity and Leprechaun Beer Pong

Of course a survey via social networks, see results.

There must be more, what have I missed?

The American Heart Association has created a great campaign for raising awareness about CPR. Check it out and create your own symphony. This is an excellent example of brand engagement.

Teachers use word clouds to help kids make sense of words, web designers add this to make websites interesting.

Here are some data visualization tools that I have come across that are interesting.

Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Ushahidi’s roots are in the collaboration of Kenyan citizen journalists during a time of crisis. The website was used to map incidents of violence and peace efforts throughout the country based on reports submitted via the web and mobile phone. It is now used to visualize information.

Here is a list of other data visualization tools.

Many Eyes is from IBM/Cognos, you can upload a data set and it creates a visualization based on your settings e.g. graphs, word clouds

Here is an interesting representation of oil consumption by country.

Woordle is a great tool for depicting word clouds from text. I have used this to help me make sense of the content on my website.

Here are a few more tools that I came across.

Tagul – Tagul is designed for web masters who want to place nice clouds on their web pages.

Tagxedo – visually stunning tag cloud

Orange – Open source data visualization and analysis

Ggobi – open source visualization program for exploring high-dimensional data.

Have you used any of these tools? How have you used them or how could they be used?

• Date: December 8th, 2010 (Wednesday)
• Time: 7pm – 10pm (ET) — we’ll likely start with logistics at 6:45pm so please arrive early
• Location : Patty Boland’s, 2nd floor (101 Clarence Street - MAP)
• Capacity: 100 people max
• Cost: All registrants are encouraged to bring $10 for the Ottawa Food Bank
• Registration: Register through the Wiki
• Hashtag: #CCyow2010

Don’t forget to register.

Kaltura is a New York-based pioneer in Collaborative Media, allowing groups of users to create rich-media projects together using video, audio, and animation, similarly to what wiki platforms enable with text

The Wikimedia foundation have collaborated with Kalutra to enhance the current wikipedia offerings from text and images to video. This project is still in Beta however you can test it out e.g. parenting project.

Kalutra has over 60k publishers worldwide. It’s free and organizations can self host or use the SaaS model. They do have a monetization strategy and offer a few options from a starter SaaS to Premium.

This event is for:

• IT People –Technology is one way that governments are transforming how they deliver services externally and internally. Technology people are needed to explore the art of the possible for these new services. Mash-ups, Open Data, social media are but a few of the possible areas for discussion.
• Policy People – We need you in the conversation so that you can share your expertise on the realm of the possible from a policy perspective. Privacy, Security, Access to Information, Information Management are all key considerations for successful government transformation.  Come share your knowledge on how to make these policies enable new services.
• Government Services leaders – Ultimately, government delivers value through the many services that are provided. GovCamp is about exploring the realm of the possible for service to individuals, services to businesses and services to other departments. Your voice is essential to inform the community and to guide those ideas that the community may have for you!
• Community – We are fortunate that there’s a passionate and creative community with vibrant ideas about how they can help create a closer connection between governments, individuals, businesses and even among government itself. Your participation at the Canada Gov Camp will provide you with a venue to share your great ideas and, if all goes well, interact with some of the people that can take your idea further.

Canadian Developer Connection gives further details. Register for your chance to be part of great change.

I am very excited to be part of something new and exciting, Fair Chance Ottawa. The goal of this group is to attractt and encourage high-quality candidates for this fall´s municipal election in Ottawa.

Here’s what I am talking about.

“who says you need conventional media to get your message out? Look at the Obama campaign. Online and social media and how you can make them work for you”

I hope to inspire the future councillors of Ottawa to take advantage of Social Media and the open source tools to communicate effectively and make a change.