Geoff Jones

Inveterate dabbler in business, travel, gadgets & life

Author: Geoff

Cambridge Blogs Website

Adrian has just pointed out to me that I havent mentioned my latest venture here.

This venture is a follow on from Our Social World. The primary intention of OSW was to introduce Cambridge businesses to blogging. This largely failed although the conference was succesful in different ways, especially in finding out about other Cambridge bloggers.

My latest idea , CambridgeBlogs is to create a list of all existing Cambridge blogs and to generate a river of news style feed of all postings from Cambridge. I then want to host a Cambridge bloggers event at say CB2 or maybe at my house. From this we can spread the word to other Cambridge businesses.

Chalkface at CHASE

Last night Ian Grove Stepehensen of The Chalkface Project gave an interesting talk at CHASE. These are some notes I made.
Have 400 titles aimed at secondary schools. No new titles now all new stuff is elearning.
Virtual corporation with 4 full time employees.
Started elearning with iamclever then paperless-school written in Java. Current site is yacapaca
Software developed with folks found used Elance. Developers in Kharkov, Yerevan, Barnaul and Calcutta.
Uses Jabber, bugzilla (not pretty but works very well) and now writeboard to communicate with teams.
Main market isnt textbooks (UK value £200m) but marking (£3B)
Experimenting with digital and offshore marking.
essays somewhat easier than marking university level
Mention of e-rater

Some discussion about formative and summative assessments. A bit disappointing that no examples of marked work were shown but overall an interesting talk.

Random Roger’s Big Picture: We No Longer Need Oil

Here is the nub of the worlds future : “I will call on Puru Saxena’s nugget about per capita consumption of oil. US per capita consumption is about 25 barrels per year. China’s and India’s per capita consumption is less than one barrel. What do you think will happen to global demand for oil when their demand rises to 1.5 barrels per year?” Answer is Oil demand rises by about 12%

Note population of USA is 295,734,134 China 1,306,313,812 India 1,080,264,388

Modes of operation..

This is just so true Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog: “I guess I’m in input mode.” some days there are just so many interesting things to read and no time to write. Certain books have this effect on me, they are so good I cannot finish reading them the minute I read a page it sends my brain into thought mode. Examples of the genre (for me) are:-

The Innovators Dilemma – Clayton Christensen

The Art of Seduction – Robert Greene

Mind Hacks – Tom Stafford Matt Webb