At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play — with many examples you can try at home (and one that maybe you shouldn’t).

For those of you who live in New York City, Noble Desktop is offering free workshops on a number of different topics concerning digital media and web design. Most, but not all, deal with the Adobe Creative Suite. It’s a great opportunity at a great price.

Click here to register.

Some Yale professors are giving up on SMART Boards. They claim that the boards often cause more problems than they solve.

“The best kind of technology will be the invisible kind of technology,” [Justin Neuman, an assistant professor of English] explained in an interview before his decidedly opaque encounter with the SMART Board in class. “You want, to the extent possible, your technological prosthetics to fade into the background.”

(via Yale Daily News)

We’re not built for multitasking and anyone who tells you they are is lying to you. There are some really smart people at Stanford who’d like to prove that to you.

People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time, a group of Stanford researchers has found.

That’s a good summary, but here’s my favorite quote from the article.

“They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Everything distracts them.”

It’s weird that we spend so much time trying to cram knowledge into students’s heads when—if we show them how to identify reliable research—they can find the answers on their own. Meanwhile, we completely overlook the fact that we’re—I’m talking about teachers as well as students here—are completely unequipped to deal with the fire hose of information coming at us. I’m pretty sure that we’d a much bigger return on our investment if we focused on process skills rather than how well a kid can remember what they could’ve just looked up on their iPhone.

(via Stanford University News)

Go see some smart people talk about how to spend your technology budget better in Jersey City (or Chicago, if you have the frequent-flyer miles to burn).

Join other superintendents, assistant superintendents and ed-tech leaders to discuss innovative technology solutions and proven techniques to drive student achievement, lower the cost of teacher professional development and maximize the use of your technology budget.

(via EdWeek Leadership Forums)

Making use of the latest information and communication technology (ICT) and innovation can help countries expand educational opportunities for all in a way that also advances development, a senior United Nations official said today. “Technology and innovation are keys to accelerating progress towards the MDGs, particularly in countries that are falling behind,” Sha Zukang, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs told the Global Forum on ICT and innovation for Education, referring to the eight anti-poverty targets with a 2015 deadline.

Yes, you heard right. Innovation is key to accelarating progress. I’ll give you a moment to put your socks back on.

(via The Gov Monitor)

There has been a lot of ink spilled over the recent security holes found in older versions of Wordpress. John Gruber of Daring Fireball has pointed out—fairly, I might add—that Wordpress is relatively alone when it comes to this class of wide-spread security breaches.

Is WordPress poorly-designed, security-wise? Is it just a matter of WordPress being phenomenally popular? Or is it both? I don’t know. The same argument continues to rage, 15 years after it started, regarding Microsoft Windows. WordPress has much to offer, starting with its large, generous, active developer community. But I can’t recall any widespread security attacks against Movable Type or Expression Engine, or against hosted services such as Squarespace, Posterous, Tumblr, or, yes, even WordPress.com (a hosted service, rather than software you host yourself).

There is something to be said for the popularity of Wordpress. More virus and whatnot are written for Microsoft Windows than Mac OS X not solely because Mac OS X is more secure than Windows, but also because Windows has an exponentially wider audience. If you’re going to spend the time writing a virus, it’s far more profitable to write for a larger audience.

But there’s a second element, in my opinion. The Wordpress security issue is a Black Swan—an unlikely event that is predictable in retrospect. It’s not that Movable Type is any more or less secure than Wordpress. If we were having this conversation, two weeks ago, it would have been much different—as neither platform had suffered a major security breach at that point. Because Wordpress has been hacked in the past it seems much more likely that it will be hacked again in the future—even if the probability of either one being hacked is equal.

It’s the same heuristic that has us always fighting the previous war or protecting ourselves against the last terrorist attack or economic meltdown and not the next one.

I don’t religiously keep my installation of Movable Type up to date, and I know many other MT users don’t either, and yet our sites don’t get hacked.

Just because Movable Type hasn’t been hacked as of this writing, doesn’t mean that it won’t be (it also doesn’t mean that it will be). A minor security hole only becomes a major security hole after it’s been exploited.

Nota bene: When all is said and done, it’s not so much an issue of which personal publishing platform is more secure (or superior, in general). I think the lesson to be learned is upgrade often. As a long time Wordpress user, I know how tedious—and often destructive—upgrading Wordpress used to be. Frankly, if this website hadn’t bitten the dust as a result of human error a few months back, I’d probably be running an ancient version of Wordpress as well. Just because outdated installations of Movable Type haven’t been exploited yet doesn’t mean they won’t be. It’s, apparently in all of our best interest to update often. (Added September 7, 2009 at 1:55pm)

According to Education Secretary Arne Duncan:

Liz Davis, author of The Power of Educational Technology, made a list of tips for teaching technology to teachers. Since that’s my new gig now, I thought it was prudent to peruse the list. She argues number ten is the most important (click here to find out what exactly number ten was—I’m not spoiling it here). I argue that number one was equally important.

It isn’t really about the tool it is about how you use it: It isn't the word processing software, it's the skills and usefulness of word processing. It isn't the presentation software, it's how to create a meaningful and effective presentation.

For me, it’s not so much about whether you’ve got a room full of iMacs or a lonely Pentium 3, it’s about thinking creatively about what you do with your class instead of teaching out of a book. A lot of times, teachers get hung up on the fact that they have iMovie ‘06 installed instead of iMovie ‘09 and its totally different than “I should be doing totally cool multimedia stuff with my kids.”

(via The Power of Educational Technology: 10 Tips for Teaching Technology to Teachers)

Alan, author of CogDogBlog, posted a great write-up of how you can use Google Spreadsheets to create dynamic web pages with ease. It’s not a replacement for PHP and MySQL, but it’s a healthy supplement for when you want to add functionality without getting your hands dirty with lots of code. It’s also a create resource for those not comfortable with developing in PHP and MySQL.

Updating Web Sites with Google Spreadsheets (via CogDogBlog)