• Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web Applications and How to Avoid Them (and part 2 and part 3)
• Ten Rules for Writing Fiction
• Global Game Jam Achievements 
• How to split up the US
• The PhD problem
• A Writing Career Becomes Harder to Scale
• Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up
• Platform Papers: Peter Brook
• How to Say Nothing in 500 Words
• Curiosity
• Why Marketing Research Makes Us Cringe
• gaping void's thoughts on blogging, 2010
• Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds
• How Tea and Shivers Make Short Stories 
• 101 Things I learned in interaction design school
• How Not to Write a PhD thesis 
• Walt Disney's Creative Organisation Chart
• The Real Reason Outsourcing Continues to Fail
• Guardian Camera Club videos 
• Questioning the Merit of Meritocracy and FLOSSPOLS, Sexism and Why Meritocracy Really Isn't
• Yawn
• Back Pain

Last week was dev8d, a conference run by JISC for developers. It's part conventional conference, part hackfest and part unconference in style. It's the sort of event where you have to get used to the feeling of missing out on stuff that you really want to go to. This is the second year it has been run and for me it felt quite different compared with last year where I think I only knew two other people attending beforehand, whereas I was much more in the thick of things this time.

For me this was the year of learning about mobile development and thanks to sessions by Phil Raymond and Sam Easterby-Smith, I'm pretty confident that, with a good dosage of reference material, I could write android and iphone apps. As well as plenty of very useful workshops and sessions, there was no shortage of cool stuff - from the arduino workshops to a self-replicating 3D printer that cost just £300 to make, and Ben O'Steen's great uses of a till printer:

I was also really impressed by the amount of great development that got done at the conference. There was a series of 'bounty challenges' for different categories such as best mobile app and best use of certain APIs. I was one of the judges for these and I don't think that the wiki page can quite convey quite how hard people worked. I'm particularly conscious of this as I started work on an idea for one of the challenges, but quickly realised that there was absolutely no way that I would finish it by the deadline unless I missed out on most of the conference. Hopefully it will still see the light of day, nonetheless

There were a few ideas I liked too. The first, appealing to my gamer instincts was 'developer bingo'. For this each person was given a slightly different grid with each square containing a different attribute that somebody might possess. You had to get a signature in each square from somebody possessing that attribute. This proved to be remarkably fun. It felt a bit like getting 'achievements' in games but in real life - those obscure geeky things that you'd done were suddenly something you could be proud of as you signed somebody's else sheet. Though admittedly I felt more excited that I appeared to be nearly the only person at the conference who had been eaten by grue, than by the fact that I had once spent a month of my life programming in TCL.

Another cunning idea that I will probably steal came from the folks behind e-prints. They offered a small reward for anybody who installed e-prints and got a 'hello world' plug-in working. Normally getting over the hurdle of installing something new is the real pain point, and once you've got past it, the programming is actually quite exciting and fun. Very clever idea.

I've put my photos from the event up on flickr.

Following on from my previous blog post about language learning, I want to mention lingt. This is a site for learning vocabulary, specifically at the moment Chinese vocabulary although I believeI remember reading that they are planning to expand to other languages.

I'm very much liking the site at the moment. I know it's not very sexy to talk about things like rote learning but for me earning vocabulary was the part I found difficult when I was studying Chinese, and I really wish this site had existed then. I'm doing a five minute stint on the site over breakfast in the mornings and seem to be keeping it up. It doesn't tell me how many days I have logged on in total, but I managed 13 consecutive days in one stretch at one point. I am also level 8 whatever that means. It's interesting because it very much addresses the long-term nature of learning rather than just the short-term, figuring out when you are most likely to have forgotten a word in order to test you on it again. I have never properly looked at the Supermemo software but I'd be curious how much they have in common.

I am of course a games player and have to admit that the aspects of the site that attempt to be game-like don't really work for. It's certainly really interesting to think about how one might improve that part of the site. If you were going to make a site like this into a game, how would you do it?

Nonetheless the actual testing has been executed very well avoiding the classic pitfalls I talked about in my previous blog post, and I think it's one of the most interesting learning-related sites that I have seen in maybe the last year.



I have been reading The Fat Duck Cookbook. It's not really a recipe book: there's obviously no way you are ever going to attempt any of the recipes within given in meticulous detail that you can't help appreciating even though you are never going to make them.  However instead, it's totally absorbing and inspiring. As an extra bonus, it's illustrated by the wonderful Dave McKean.

At points during reading it, I couldn't help hearing echoes of lots of the debates on technology in teaching. At the end of the first section Heston Blumenthal includes his Statement on the 'New Cookery'. Here is part of it:

We embrace innovation - new ingredients, techniques, appliances, information, and ideas - whenever it can make a real contribution to our cooking.

We do not pursue novelty for its own sake. We may use modern thickeners, sugar substitutes, enzymes, liquid nitrogen, sous-vide, dehydration, and other nontraditional means, but these do not define our cooking. They are a few of the many tools that we are fortunate to have available as we strive to make delicious and stimulating dishes.

Similarly, the disciplines of food chemistry and food technology are valuable sources of information and ideas for all cooks. Even the most straightforward traditional preparation can be strengthened by an understanding of its ingredients and methods, and chemists have been helping cooks for hundreds of years. The fashionable term "molecular gastronomy" was introduced relatively recently, in 1992, to name a particular academic workshop for scientists and chefs on the basic food chemistry of traditional dishes. That workshop did not influence our approach, and the term "molecular gastronomy" does not describe our cooking, or indeed any style of cooking.

You can read the full statement here.

To wrap up the year, here are some recommendations of books that I'd read in 2009.

First of all, I really loved The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell. As well as being a super summary about what is known about game design, I think almost every chapter either taught me something knew or made me look at something in a new way. It's a very readable book and there's a lot in there that applies to the design of learning experiences. I also enjoyed Challenges for game designers by Brenda Brathwaite and Ian Schreiber at least as far through as I got! It consists of a series of exercises in game design and is a very different book from The Art of Game Design, complementing it very nicely. Somebody should write a similiar book for photography if they haven't already. The other game-related book I read this year was This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities by Jim Rossignol an intelligent and autobiographical look at video games. You can't go far wrong with a book that ends with a playlist of games you should play if you want to learn more about games.

A book that I urge anybody interested in education at any level to read is The Big Picture: Education is Everyone's Business by Dennis Littky. It talks about the principle behind 'The Big Picture' schools which are run in what I think is a unique way. Instead of being subject-based, their 'curriculum' resolves around the five learning goals of empirical reasoning, quantitative reasoning, communication, social reasoning and personal qualities. Once you've read about personalisation in their context, half the references you see to personalisation in the education world will appear feeble and missing the point. Inspiring stuff.

Another book that I'm really glad that I bought was A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction by Christopher Alexander. I've dipped in and out of it rather than reading it straight through and it's surpisingly fascinating, more so than I expected it to be after having read a few of the patterns on the web. His ideas on archictecture are often radical and always holistic. To give you an idea of his outlook, he quotes Ivan Illich is his section on education. There is something rather beautiful about his writing and I love the way he backs up lots of his ideas with data. He is very interested in the optimal sizes for things and optimal distances and patterns. It's allowed me too to pinpoint exactly is wrong with the development plans for the town where I live, rather than having to just say that they feel wrong. 

Clueless in Academe by Gerald Graff is a book that I'm glad has been written and ought to be wider known. It's an 'attempt to look at academia from the perspective of those who don't get it', and as such is an astute analysis of academia and the academic approach and includes some advice for teachers.

I have already written about My Freshman Year on this blog. In my head I associate that book with This Book is Not Required by Inge Bell and Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom because I borrowed them all from the library on the same day without having planned to do so. This Book is Not Required is a slightly odd book for me to read because it is aimed at students and large parts felt irrelevant to me - I'm happily married and I certainly don't have trouble with my parents! However it a guide to student life unlike no other and it's about a whole approach to the world as much as just studying. The part on craftmanship particularly resonated with me. Its philosophy is fairly similar to that of Tuesday with Morrie so they made a good pair to read one after another.

Another trio of books that fit nicely together are Mindset by Carol Dweck, A Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor and Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn. Ignore the horrible 'self-help' covers of the first and last of these - they are 'popular' books so you have to brace yourself for that (there were one or two places where Kohn's book made me want to scream!), but have got lots of references to research in them rather than being just mumbo-jumbo. I think there's important stuff in all of these that hasn't really made it to the mainstream education world yet. Chances are you'll learn more by reading these than a dozen academic papers about education and the neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor's story of recovering from a stroke is definitely worth reading - you can watch her TED talk if you want a taster.

Of the fiction I read this year, my favourites were House of the Suns by Alastair Reynolds, A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson and Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman.  I think I like novels that are cleverly constructed, somewhat like a puzzle. I also read Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers which was longer and more detailed than I really needed but really interesting nonetheless in terms of the structure of stories. I wish they'd taught us about that sort of thing in English Literature at school.

I wanted to include some tech books, but looking down the list those that I've read, I'm sure anybody who wants books about Python can find them for themselves, which is mostly what I've been reading. I need to branch out a bit more in my tech reading next year - suggestions welcome!