By Peter Cochrane, 14 January 2008 15:28
COMMENT
Written at my home in Suffolk UK and dispatched to silicon.com from the Wild Strawberry Café in Woodbridge which combines great coffee and cookies with free wi-fi
Throughout my life I have stumbled upon wonderful teachers and experts who combined a deep understanding with an ability to explain and communicate clearly and plainly. My big problem has been that they are a bit like policemen - never around when you need one.
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What I would give for a clear exposition on a part, or whole, of some problem that confronts me and prevents all progress toward my end goal. Before the WWW I struggled an awful lot more than today. Email, social networks and the sheer wealth of data available online have changed everything.
Now the big problem is finding the good stuff, or at least the stuff that is at the right level and readily digestible. There are school, college and university sites in abundance with lectures and lecture notes, and TV programmes from the likes of the BBC, all of which I frequent.
But I just feel there is a need and a market for more byte-sized chunks that fit this new, more frenetic world far better than the old hour-long, chalk and talk derivatives.
Right out of the blue such a format popped onto my screen this morning. It doesn't necessarily cover the material I would like but as a format it is really interesting. Just give it a try and see what you think: www.commoncraft.com
From now on when my silver surfer friends ask me what a wiki is or about photos online, file sharing and more, I'm just going to point them at this website. It does a better job than I can.
Comments
There are 5 comments. Join the discussion
1. Richard
Which information to trust?
Yes a wealth of information is available, but which can we trust?
Recently when I wanted to know which NiMH batteries to use in a new camera and how best to treat them, I found lots of (conflicting) opinions but few reliable, relevant facts.
The issue may seem trivial, but without dependable power my new camera is useless. This type of question *should* have an "optimum" answer.
However, the camera manufacturer publishes no information about the current drain etc. (Commercially confidential); Many battery manufacturers publish mostly vague, marketing "puff" rather than useful data (little use to me - or to their competitors); "Independent" tests are too simplistic so don't reflect real life or my expected usage; The new "hybrid" type of NiMH cells which look so attractive for my purposes are too new for most reports & tests.
So, perhaps in a year's time I might actually know whether my choice of "hybrid" NiMH cells and a particular charger was correct.
2. Richard
Which "experts" to trust?
Some of my web-pages contain historical information. I do try to be accurate, and still cringe at the memory of (fairly briefly) mixing-up the two sides in a Civil War castle siege. (At the National Archives, I'd misread a report written in July 1644 by one of the commanders.)
Over Christmas, I visited the attractive public museum in that castle; the area allocated for schools' visits has large expensive wall-boards depicting local events during the Civil War - containing glaring omissions and errors!
(I mentioned this to the staff, but it "was not their department"!)
So, in this Internet age; do we still trust the "established professional experts," or self-taught amateurs and community sites like Wikipedia?
3. Nick Weavers
Finding the good stuff is the challenge and more often I find that search engine algorithms don't seem to factor in how current the information is when matching it with my keywords. Often the stuff they have decided is most relevant and placed and the top of my results is way older and quite out of date compared to results that are shown further down. This is also true of material on web pages... often you have no indication of when it was created. The trend for using Open Source CMS' for websites is helping to solve this a bit as they automatically record timestamps alongside of the content that has been entered into them.
4. anonymous
What to trust? Certainly nothing covered in these blogs!
5. Lee LeFever (Common Craft)
Hi Peter,
Thanks so much for the link to Common Craft. It's great to know that you see value in better explanations - something we feel strongly about. We have plans to cover a lot more ground than we have so far - I'd love to know more about what subject matters would be interesting to you.