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I'm back from Dallas, TX which was quite interesting, the heat is unbearable down there and I could swear I moved several degrees higher in the ebony scale. On a distressing note I managed to get a stomach bug that had me vomitting across three states on my way back, namely Texas,North Carolina and New York, not one of my proudest moments but one I will live to remember. During my few days in Dallas I had the chance to interact with the "Kenyan Texans, these are Kenyans who have decided to call Texas their home and have embraced it 100% along with its heat and very well done roads (thank Mr.Bush for that), they welcomed me and I even had the chance to go for a church service on Sunday where one very interesting happened. At the service one of the main speakers just happened to be my former high school classmate who came stateside about 10 years ago and vanished, that reunion was one of my highlights of the whole trip. I got to have a bbq in one of the many lakes in Dallas although the 30C+ temperatures proved to be to strong for me. All in all a very enjoyable trip.
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I don't know if Ii should be happy or angry that spam comments have returned to my blog, can spam be an indication that one's blog is being read albeit by malicious persons or is it a sign of vulnerabilities in the code? I'm inclined to think the former since I obviously don't want to dive back into code, but then it looks inevitable. Several months back I implemented the CAPTCH plugin on my blog, I tested it and it looked fool proof but so does a condom until when it busts and lets all those swimmers free, so I don't want to rubbish the plugin in fact I'll question the way I implemented the code since just as I was writing this post I decided to test and see if it does work properly, well it fails to stop the posting of the comment even when the characters entered are wrong. Ruby code here I come again.
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Last week I was in the west coast and during my runs there I got the chance to attend one of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University led by BJ Fogg, you can get more information about Persuasive Technoloy here. Stanford was the first and may be the only university to do a class on facebook, more information about that here. I recorded my observations of the whole session (to bad I coudn't tweet the whole session since I had no internet access): I notice that I’m the only one using a PC, this is Mac country. I count 9 Macs out of 10 computers here.
The group is quite diverse with 16 people in attendance, there’s a Japanese student called Nao whose logo has been selected by one of the largest newspapers, an Italian student working with robot technology for detection of mines who seems to have a very protective relationship with his Mac Powerbook. The leader of the group BJ points out that a new book The Psychology of Facebook is going to be out later on during the year, September to be precise. I definitely want to get my hand on this book, the book will have over 400 reviews, He mentions that some people have requested to review at least 9 chapters.
A class on metrics and analytics, studying how to measure all this persuasive technology, might be done at some point. The approach towards imparting knowledge is quite interesting, they talk about coming up with a class later on during the fall semester, all the educational content is based on what’s happening around us, if it happened this month it can be part of a class in 2 weeks or the next semester.
Leila begins to talk about the Facebook conference that happened on Wednesday, she highlights the platform as a key point. I wish I could have attended but it was sold out weeks in advance.Later on Nao takes as through an animation, the animation consists of people in a queue being served, at some point one person cuts the line and that becomes the focus of the animation. The animation is in two views, one from the view of the person serving and the other one from the view of the person who gets cut in the line. An interesting approach to academics I must say.
Scenario
Create a website, and at a specific time customize the website to achieve something like increased usage, engagement, response in real time. Can this be done? One thing I found very interesting is that the current affairs of the world can be incorporated into a curriculum so quickly and become part of a course very quickly. I think this makes education more relevant when it attempts to tackle current issues and trends.
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