Have you ever been in a situation as a student where you are called out to help out with the lecturer to set up the power point presentation or trying to point out to the lecturer how he puts the power point into slideshow mode and shouting “F5” (shortcut key to start a powerpoint presentation in Microsoft Power Point). Is this familiar to you? Well this is pretty much the situation in most schools and universities around the world. The point I want to make out of this is the following : How do you expect to educate using a medium that you barely know how to operate? Sometimes I am called out during lectures to help out with setting up the presentation and every time I get up to do it, I feel as if someone is hitting my head with a brick to keep me comatose for the rest of the lecture. The rules of engagement with the audience are somehow broken at that point in time as the educator is trying to pass on the message to us. This following video from Youtube pretty much sums up all the rules of engagement between the educator and students as they’re being broken : Being an educator sometimes is more than just knowing your stuff from inside out, it’s also about how much you are able to communicate the information. Once again, it’s a question on why you want to do it, and not how to do it. Before I started writing this post I was focused on the fact that educators have to know how to pass on the message,...

Some people love it and some people don’t and I still could not understand why they don’t love it. I was always yearning the possibility to go back in time and be able to see my first post and now thanks to this feature it is possible. The cover photo? Genius. The possibility to add relevant life events to specific points in the timeline which reflect a certain sense of chronology? Genius. The idea of being able to create an autobiography using this kind of tools and making it as interactive as possible? Double Genius. Then I hear people saying, but yeah,” it’s not really private, it really takes stalking to a new level”. That’s not a valid excuse, learn how to use your privacy settings and share with the people that you really care about it via Smart Lists. I was pondering about the idea about doing a total migration of my social network to Google Plus, but with this Timeline feature and very much improved Smart Lists, I really have another excuse to stay on board the Facebook ship. And now the Google Profile doesn’t even look good at all compared to the Facebook profile where you can have a wonderful cover photo displaying some highlight of your life or some other picture which is appealing to the senses. Talking about Smart Lists, everyone on Facebook should have a working knowledge on how to use these and I would daresay that if I had to organize digital literacy class, I would definitely include this topic on the “curriculum”. It very much defines and gives a more personalised...

During the last few months, I have been pondering about an important choice. More than one important choice actually. And since I’m quite the technology geek, I thought the Samsung Galaxy I9000 with upgraded firmware and running Froyo 2.2 was not making the cut for me. Powered emotionally by the fact that I had just read Steve Jobs Biography. I had to revisit my allegiances and where I stand with regards to Mobile Operating Systems. When I was revisiting this, I realized that this was not just a battle of the mobile operating systems, but it was a battle of values. It was a battle between the philosophy of trying to content everyone and adjusting to their every whim and a philosophy of providing an integrated product which might not so modifiable at first glance, but which provides a user experience which is undeniably effective and lets the user focus on other important issues. The question of focus plays a pivotal role in this battle. I will talk about this later. I could definitely say that I was a Windows and Android boy. I loved everything which was open and which catered for every kind of hardware. It was years that my older sibling pointed out to me that I should switch to the Apple philosophy which provided me a product which simply worked and even though he recently had to change his MacBook Pro Motherboard for a hefty sum of money, he still won’t go back to Windows. That is saying something. When I ask around, I go and approach anyone who has an iPhone, and ask him...