Month: December 2008

I have been working on my final Intro Psych lecture for the semester. The general topic is social psych. While reviewing the themes covered in the book, I was struck by how many topics could be applied to my personal interest in productive and unproductive uses of the “participatory web”. After all, social psychologists should have something useful to say about the social web. Actually, an understanding of what  social psychologists have to say about groupthink, persuasion, and group thinking could easily be substituted for most of what is said in the last dozen books I have read. So, review an old Intro Psych book and save your money. Actually, I am just kidding, those folks need to make a living too. Perhaps a more careful analysis of what one might learn about the issues associated with the participatory web from the social psychology chapter in a freshman intro psychology book should be focus of a future blog post.

Anyway, I prepared a collage consisting of the covers of several books I have read recently in order to talk to may class about some issues in group processing and filtering of information. Perhaps books they have heard of (maybe) might show the relevance of these issues. The Wisdom of Crowds is most relevant for my situation, but there are interesting associations among all of the books I have included.

For some reason, I look at this collage and see the potential for a card sort task. The way a “sorter” creates groupings is supposed to reveal their organizational schemes. So, here is my collage, give it a try. What, for you, goes with what?

If you are a Mac user, you may have been alarmed in recent days by information that appeared to recommend you immediately install virus software. In fact, the messages seemed to imply that you should install multiple virus protection products (I guess the idea was to make it more complicated to create malicious code).

I do worry about virus protection on the Windows machine I run. I rarely use this machine, but each time I do I go through the lengthy process required for the machine to check in, download, and install patches related to new viruses that have been discovered. In fairness, the length of this delay is probably somewhat related to the delay between the times I use this machine.

I would not know what virus protection products are available for the Mac. There are the old standards, but my authority on such matters (Leo) seems to recommend that these standbys have grown bloated and are less useful. The Apple Tech report offered some options.

New information indicates Apple has taken down the tech note that prompted this scurry of online rumors. An attack against Mac users may not be imminent (I assumed someone knew something too.).

This entire episode was strange and possibly offers more information on how information spreads on the Internet than on the vulnerability of a particular operating system to exploitation.

We drove back from MSP this afternoon and that provides the opportunity to listen to podcasts. One of the news items on TWIT was the decision of PCMag to cease publication of its long term publication and move entirely to the web. The sentiment of the group was that this type of change is inevitable and those who focus on tech content will simply see the changes first. This is certainly been our experience. Try writing a book on technology applications in the classroom.

I celebrated my 60th birthday while in Minneapolis. My age may surprise some who have followed my comments on technology. I may have been interested in the things that interest me now at a younger age, but I had to wait.

Picture taken at Fogo de Chao with Cindy and daughter Kim

One nice thing about birthdays that end in zero is that you get a bigger present (at least when past 50). Cindy bought me an AppleTV. The AppleTV requires a HDTV so the new television will have to be the Christmas present. I am not a big movie viewer, but we are interested in streaming media and selected the AppleTV after also considering a Mac Mini. You can extend the AppleTV with an add-on such as the ATVFlash and explore a wide variety of media sources. This combination seemed a less complicated approach.

Happy birthday to me. More on the new toys after we have had some time get things set up and to experiment.