Science! Science! Science!

I’ve been having a good time re-discovering episodes of The Brady Bunch with my children. It was one of my favorite shows as a kid and I still love it today. A well-known scene came to mind after reading Andy Gibbons’ article “The Practice of Instructional Technology: Science and Technology.”

Gibbons states “Advanced students in technological areas, unless their professional area can supply a firm impression of the role and activities of the technologist, can come to think of themselves as ‘wannabee’ scientists.”

The apparent disconnect between technology and science is unnecessary, as Gibbons alludes. Both are invaluable for finding answers and solutions to life’s challenges. Their methods for arriving at decisions and conclusions may be different, but I don’t consider one a “higher” pursuit than the other. I’ve spent virtually my entire career around engineers, designers, and developers and know how painstakingly they work to find solutions.

I love participating in the design and development process. Sometimes it resembles this oft-cited comic:

Click to Enlarge, origin unknown

It’s not always like that, however. Often the engineer or technologist is the only one that knows that the customer needs a tire swing. They come up with 500 different ways to get there, analyzing each to see which is the very best solution. It’s their version of the laboratory and their way of discovering data and drawing conclusions. They may not be racing mice through mazes, but they are certainly hypothesizing and experimenting and failing a few (or many) times along the way before they can make advances.

I don’t see how you can have one without the other.

Life Before RSS

photo courtesy http://brandautopsy.typepad.com

Aggregation. It’s a beautiful thing. And easily taken for granted. Let’s think back a few years to . . . bookmarking. Remember those days? You’d find something on a webpage that you didn’t want to forget so you’d add it to your bookmarks. This new bookmark would be added to potentially hundreds of other previously bookmarked pages that could not be forgotten about. This list was organized alphabetically by page title, which was chosen after much research guessing as to the latest indexing algorithms of the search engines.

Now why did I bookmark a page called “free, discount, promotion, free, coupon, brittany spears”? Click. Scroll. Read. Scroll. Oh yeah! There it is! “5 Tips for Smoother Skin in 5 Weeks.” I better keep that.

An attempt to organize that list uncovered that most of the information was no longer of interest, was out of date (did you ever bookmark a schedule of events?), or the page had been removed all together.

To catch up on news you’d type or click over to CNN several times a day to see what was happening in the world. Afterword you’d make a stop at eBay to find out if someone has finally listed an affordable 32 MB hard drive, then lastly a quick “jerry maguire” keyword search purely to check out the latest reviews.

Exhausting work! Surely there must be a better way!

And sooner than you could say “web 1.0″ there it was–Rich Site Summary (or Really Simple Syndication, whichever you prefer). RSS for short. Because that’s what we like to do–shorten things. And that’s exactly what RSS does–shortens all the hunting and pecking we used to do to find the information that interests us. And it brings it all together on ONE SCREEN. And it’s fresh. And you can categorize and tag all this to your heart’s content.  You essentially create your own personal portal to the Internet, bringing to you all the things you want to read and very nearly nothing you don’t.

As content providers have come to realize the power of RSS they have started feeds for everything from job postings to real estate listings to calendars, etc. YOU choose what you subscribe to and let the feed reader do the gathering into a simple user-friendly display.

As a learner this is powerful stuff. I am fed custom content in concentrated amounts, I get it in a  timely manner, and I minimize distraction.

Bookmarking? It’s so 2003.