Resources for Everything

Social media for social innovation game

An interesting report for Oxfam by Roman Krznaric who has worked with Theodore Zeldin. Like this quote:
"We have managed to harness the power of the wind, the sun and the water, but have yet to appreciate the power of our children to affect social change"
Mary Gordon, founder of the Roots of Empathy education programme

It's been such a busy week, I've only just go round to blogging that we had a lovely piece about us in the Guardian on Tuesday. Lucy Tobin really spent some time trying out the site to find herself a digital photography teacher and talking to people who had used the site to find a teacher. It's great to see an article where the School of Everything community is in the foreground rather than it just being about us as a company (although those are nice too!).

I love keeping an eye on the subjects people sign up to teach or learn - and I just spotted that we have our first smiling teacher! Welcome to the site, Jana Fielding. (Jana also offers confidence teaching for business development, coaching and therapeutic arts.)

Drupal's notifications module is pretty darn useful, but, you need to have some methods for testing it otherwise you will wait days for updates.

One of the simplest little tricks is making sure that you receive an update immediately, just delete your user's entry from the notifications_sent table. This means that you have no history of updates, and the system will think you are due an email.


mysql> delete from notifications_sent where uid = 128499 limit 1;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)


Here is an example of a workshop game and a handout I have used when teaching nonprofits about building social media strategies (focusing on goals and people before tools).

This blog post has the graphic and explanation from Brian Solis about the conversation prism (the charted social technologies by funcation).

NTEN and the nonprofit technology community lead by Beth Kanter and others have built a toolkit and instructional guides about how social media strategies and tools can enable nonprofit organizations to create, compile, and distribute their stories and change the world.

A not at all boring article that's full of genuinely good advice on what not to do if you find yourself writing a scientific paper.

A BBC report on scientists using a radio controlled helicopter to collect samples from whales breathing out.

Here's an old post of mine about controlling conversations in web 2.0 projects. Key message: 'get out of the way'!

Contact information for Ukrainian language tutoring.

My friend Gavin runs this great service that runs workshops in 'digital health' and provides tools to help people have more positive and productive relationships with technology. I may need to book myself an appointment...

What's the mental health equivalent of five-a-day? Take the test and decide for yourself what *you* can do to manage your mind.

The School of Everything presentation on how we are using Amazon's Cloud is now availble online, along with a few other presenations from the Amazon Startup Sessions.

http://www.slideshare.net/group/the-startup-project-aws

http://www.slideshare.net/tracylaxdal/schoolofeverything-presents-on-aws-presentation

I have been trying to get my head around ssh tunnels lately as I need to be able to access a development web server on our private network that doesn't have an IP accessible from the internet.
It's taken me a while to understand what is going on; it can be pretty confusing.

I'd recommend the following for a good explanation of what ports are used, e.g. when your browser requests a page:

http://www.tcpipguide.com/free/t_TCPIPClientEphemeralPortsandClientServerApplicatio.htm

And I thought this was probably the best single page explanation of tunneling:

I spent quite a lot of the weekend fixing my Blade 400 helicopter but I didn't manage to finish it. The lesson here is after you crash, take it apart and work out all the parts you need first! I thought I could tell what was broken and went to the shop and bought the new parts, but it was only after taking it to pieces that I realised I needed other parts as well, so now I have to make yet another trip to the shop.

And make sure you have all the tools you need beforehand. Obvious of course, but I still learned the hard way..

Nice piece by respected VC Fred Wilson on how the web is giving 'power to the people' and what this could mean for education.