Piping hot

So I made my first yahoo pipe! It collates sensor web search results and hits from del.icio.us tagged with sensor web. It still needs a bit of work – I’d like to fetch rss feeds from some of the geo-bloggers out there. Anyway, here is….. my Sensor Web Pipe.

Discovering concept mapping and other cool tools

We are now having regular research sessions, and our group this year is going to concentrate on sensor discovery. So we started by concept mapping what we understand by the term sensor discovery, and it was really interesting. Concept maps are a kind of richer mind map, and seem to be very useful for structuring ideas for research and for encouraging clear and creative thinking. We are using a software product called CmapTools to do the concept mapping, and their web site is fantastic. The tool seems to be really good, and very well set up for building collaborative concept maps. We shall be setting up a concept maps server on our development server to facilitate using this more.

I particularly liked this article on the theory underlying concept maps. It discusses some learning theory that I found really interesting, particularly some stuff about meaningful vs rote learning. Cognitive studies fascinate me, although I haven’t looked into it much – but I do think that many of us learn quite inefficiently, and that most conventional schooling systems and teacher training methods do nothing to facilitate really effective learning.

I’m also going to give Voo2do another bash. This is an online scheduling tool allowing you store tasks in projects and different context and presents quite a nice interface for managing your task lists.