Nook Study

Barnes and Noble have an eReader called the Nook. It is much like the Kindle which is much like Sony’s reader. As far as I know, however, B&N are the first to launch a textbook specific eReader solution. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out. A lot of textbook publishers are getting on board with electronic versions but at the same time more interactive wiki style textbooks etc are starting to popup.

Every week a new private college in the states announces that they are going ‘digital’ and making students by iPads or something so I’m guessing Barnes and Noble see a pretty significant profit centre emerging here.

Mimio

Here’s an interesting idea. Mimio turns any whiteboard into an interactive whiteboard and by extension I wonder what else you can turn into a digital surface.

FROG, a large design/design research consultancy did a study at this years LIFT10 conference to try to determine some of the structural features that make for a good conference. LIFT is a conference about new technologies and FROG used the opportunity to think about how connections and collaboration can be fostered.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Albert Einstein 
I really like this hybrid Moleskine Kindle case/notebook and yet I am still bothered by the digital/analog divide. I want to be able to read digitally and make annotations digitally that I can then configure, search and work with as a write. When will eReaders be more than just words on a page? via Moleskine

I really like this hybrid Moleskine Kindle case/notebook and yet I am still bothered by the digital/analog divide. I want to be able to read digitally and make annotations digitally that I can then configure, search and work with as a write. When will eReaders be more than just words on a page?

via Moleskine

As a public service, someone has been painting compasses at the top of the stairs to New York City subway stations. The stencils allow passengers to orient themselves once reaching street level. Its amazing the ways people adapt and improve their environments. I wonder if this idea will get formalized by the transit authority. via NYC The Blog

As a public service, someone has been painting compasses at the top of the stairs to New York City subway stations. The stencils allow passengers to orient themselves once reaching street level.

Its amazing the ways people adapt and improve their environments. I wonder if this idea will get formalized by the transit authority.

via NYC The Blog

Design firm IDEO and furniture manufacturer Steelcase have collaborated to create Node, a modular seating/desk solution for education. It looks like quite an interesting idea that really plays on adaptability and modularity to create a movable self-contained workspace. I imagine the designers are really hoping to enlist a kind of fluid classroom experience where students move around and self-organize as needed. Nice idea though I suspect that the rather unfortunate perception in K-12 education that mobile self-organising students on wheels present a classroom management problem may kill some of the possible benefits of the design. Read more on Fast Company and see some videos by Steelcase.

Design firm IDEO and furniture manufacturer Steelcase have collaborated to create Node, a modular seating/desk solution for education. It looks like quite an interesting idea that really plays on adaptability and modularity to create a movable self-contained workspace. I imagine the designers are really hoping to enlist a kind of fluid classroom experience where students move around and self-organize as needed. Nice idea though I suspect that the rather unfortunate perception in K-12 education that mobile self-organising students on wheels present a classroom management problem may kill some of the possible benefits of the design.

Read more on Fast Company and see some videos by Steelcase.

Another video of a theorist that examines humans and technology. This time its Bruno Latour of Actor-Network-Theory fame speaking at the USC Annenberg International Seminar on Network Theory.

The technology is rewiring our brains.

Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse

From a lengthy and interesting article in the New York Times about the neurological effects extreme levels of multitasking with digital technologies can have on the brain.


Agencies at the Interface

Following the theme of posting videos of researchers interested in the relationship between humans and technology, here is a video of Lucy Suchman giving a seminar at MIT in 2009.