I’m a sucker for a good Tower Defense game (with or without FMV), and this week I’ve been playing Tap Defense on the iPhone, a great free example of the genre. Tap Defense is a simple (but very addictive) game, based on three maps and six tower types, all of which work pretty nicely together. […]
Year: 2008
Something Open This Way Comes
At Southampton we have a history of Open Access Research, and a number of my colleagues (in particular Les Carr and Stevan Harnad) are heavily involved with the Open Access movement. At its heart Open Access Research holds the principle that publicly funded research should be available for free. It challenges the existing publishing model, […]
Congratulations America
Americans like to style their president as the Leader of the Free World, and in many ways this is not a bad description. America is the most powerful of the democratic nations that respects freedom of religious, political and intellectual expression. The free world is an informal billion-person family of nations, and as a fully […]
Does m-learning exist?
I’ve been involved in mobile and pervasive learning research for around six years, but this year was the first time that I’ve attended two of the leading events in the field: IADIS m-learning (held back in April), and m-learn (which I attended last week). I enjoyed both events – not least because of the interesting […]
Death Magnetic: How can I be lost, if I’ve got nowhere else to go?
Last week I got myself a copy of the latest Metallica album (Death Magnetic). I’ve been following Metallica since the Autumn of 1991. That was a good year for rock; Nirvana’s Nevermind, G’n’R’s Use Your Illusions (I and II), and Metallica’s Black Album stabbed a flag in the eye of 80’s rock, and defined the […]
How is the Semantic Web like Open Hypermedia?
Will history be kind to Open Hypermedia? The other day I gave a presentation on the Evolution of the Web to our new Masters students (part of their pre-sessional programme at Southampton) and I was forced to face an awkward thought. Open Hypermedia was an interesting side road of the Information Superhighway, but it wasn’t […]
WikiSym 2008
I’m currently attending WikiSym 2008 in Porto, Portugal. WikiSym is a small conference with a mix of participants: wiki enthusiasts, developers, researchers, consultants, cynics and evengalists. It also has a very open freeform structure, helped along by the fantastic Portuguese sunshine (a weather event not seen in the UK since April 2007), and the welcoming […]
Starry Starry Second Life
Saw a great video pop up on Digg a little while ago, less Mac-based then the last one, and this time proving that there is a point to Second Life (even if its not quite the samauri sword filled metaverse that we might have hoped for). This video by Robbie Dingo is based on The […]
Duck Taped by Apple in California
Why is the brilliance of the new iPhone 3G so intangible? When I try and explain why I’ve replaced one 3G, GPS enabled, touch screen smart phone (a TyTN II) with another I get blank stares. When I show people how it works, they nod and smile as if to say that this is just […]