It’s a presentation tool, not an ePortfolio. That’s if you use a rather strict definition, but Visual CV is pretty slick. What’s lacking is an underlying framework that encourages you to put together a ‘good’ CV. That may not sound like a technical problem, but stay tuned; I’ll be making the case shortly.
Over lunch today I suggested, probably naively, the possibility that just as ‘technology’ had made dictation and secretaries pretty much obsolete, and that ‘technology’ might just be in the process of doing something similar to managers and hierarchies. My companion, correctly assuming that I was proposing some sort of program that might be ‘implemented’, pointed out that IBM had ‘flattened’ their organization a few years back. They’d had some success, but they still have managers. Further conversation led to an agreement that if you didn’t have total staff buy in, and damn good staff, you were going to need, or at least have, managers.
Perhaps part of the difficulty is that what I’m struggling toward isn’t really implementation, but rather evolution. Someone recently pointed out that you don’t change societies by changing laws. Instead the most effective way to produce social change was to introduce a new technology into the culture. Of course it’s hard to predict exactly what kind of change you’re going to effect. What’s critical is recognizing the effect early and leveraging it to a business advantage. This isn’t trivial because all nature, including our own, is inherently conservative and the tendency is to preserve the status quo. There are, however, likely to be things that implement themselves. All of which is related, in my mind at least, to a post on The Technium on how Google does science.
Trent Batson has some good things to say about Desire2Learn’s new ePortfolio system (www.desire2learn.com). As usual he has some interesting thoughts about general systems:
An even more fundamental problem with educational software built as an enterprise system is that no one chooses to use them for fun. This kind of system does not connect with the social energy around using interesting applications. They are the equivalent of very large textbooks.
Bill Gates on usability…
Normally I post links to things I like, occasionally to things I hate, but every now and then I stumble on to something that seems important or maybe useful but I’m not sure whether my reaction is positive or negative. A case in point: Deena Larsen has put together a site for high school and introductory college teachers of electronic literature as a creative writing or rhetoric course called Fundamentals: Rhetorical Devices for Electronic Literature. I offer it without comment beyond, interesting.
And speaking of devices; you may remember that I’ve changed keyboard layouts in an effort to improve my typing speed, futile so far. 
A side effect has been learning some interesting things about how my mind works, or as often as not, doesn’t work. I’ve always been a lazy typist; despite the best efforts all my high school typing teachers I’ve cheated by watching the keyboard as I type. Obviously that’s not real productive when you shift over to the Drovak layout because now the keys are all mislabeled. However, today I discovered that I type faster and with more accuracy if I watch the keys as I type. I can ignore the labels and sort of visualize the letters and the layout, weird. You never know what you’re addicted to or how hard it’s going to be to break the habit.
Image Mark Wubben
Tell us again why you’re worried about standardized testing?
Mark Pesce has a new post ‘Hyperpolitics (American Style)‘ here are a couple of hints, but read the whole thing:
…Last month, The Economist, that fountainhead of Ur-Liberalism, proclaimed humanity “halfway there.” Somewhere in the last few months, half the population of the planet became mobile telephone subscribers. In a decade’s time we’ve gone from half the world having never made a telephone call to half the world owning their own mobile…
…We have a drive to connect and socialize: this drive has now been accelerated and amplified as comprehensively as the steam engine amplified human strength two hundred and fifty years ago. Just as the steam engine initiated the transformation of the natural landscape into man-made artifice, the ‘hyperconnectivity’ engendered by these new toys is transforming the human landscape of social relations. This time around, fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty…
…Paradoxically, Wikipedia is not at all democratic, nor is it actually transparent, though it gives the appearance of both. Investigations conducted by The Register in the UK and other media outlets have shown that the “encyclopedia anyone can edit” is, in fact, tightly regulated by a close network of hyperconnected peers, the “Wikipedians.”…
…Naturally, governments will seek to control and mediate these emerging conflicts. This will only result in the guns being trained upon them. The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and ‘rebooting’ them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.
One of the effects of changing keyboards is mindfulness. When typing becomes conscious, thinking slows down. A side effect is that I find myself trying to say things more economically; it’s not clear that more words lead to better understanding. Repetition leads to repeating and not much else. Hence my fascination with Twitter and with slideshare, even if the presentation has 197 slides.
It’s our last day and we had a couple of hours to kill before we had to turn in the car; it’s Sunday so why not a trip to the park. Turns out to have a rather nice Japanese garden complete with some really big koi, butterflies, and wonder of wonders armadillos; three of the little guys. We’d pretty much given up hope of encountering any of these guys, but there they were. Casting caution and common sense to the wind I reached out and for those of you who in future encounter me, well you’ll be able to shake the hand that touched the armadillo.
Skimming a Government Technology advertising supplement (I know, I know, but it’s raining and I’m transitioning) on the stunning successes various state and city agencies are realizing by using ‘CA Clarity™ Project and Portfolio Management”. Now I like tools; as a photographer I understand the criticality of work flow and project management, but I also know how hard they are to implement even in a one person shop where that one person trusts him or her self. I also have some pretty strong opinions about how well PPM will work in an environment where everyone below believes that lying about their efficiency is to their advantage.
