Aldo de Moor

Efficient Task Management

Efficient task management is an essential component of community workflow management, all the more as standardized organizational structures and procedures for coordinating activities are often lacking in collaborative communities. Before starting with group task management, first the task management for individuals (“to do lists”) needs to be taken care of. Countless task management tools, planner web sites, Personal Information Managers etc. are available. However, task management tool support is not enough. Efficient task management requires some form of task management methodology.

Having tried many approaches, I finally chose David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. It offers the right mix of comprehensive, yet flexible procedures for collecting, processing, organizing, reviewing, and using to do-items.

As to the tools that best support this methodology, I have settled down on the following two, MonkeyGTD and Remember The Milk.… Read more...

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Schomer Simpson’s Talk at the 1st Second Life (Inworld) Conference

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Below the gallery that contains the pictures taken by Al Mohr (Second Life) / Aldo de Moor (Real Life) of Schomer Simpson ‘s (Second Life) / Peter Twining’s (Real Life) presentation at the Second Life Best Practices in Education International Conference 2007. The topic was “Using Teen Second Life to Explore Visions of Schome (Not School-Not Home-Schome, the Education System for the Information Age)”. As you can see from the pictures, Schomer/Peter’s talk was very well attended. The issues raised were most interesting and he got lots of questions. The Era of Immersive Online Conferences has begun…

Picture gallery

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Community Lending

An interesting development where web technologies meet real societal needs is the rapidly growing phenomenon ofcommunity lendingMicrocredit has been around for longer as a concept to empower poor people and communities by letting them help themselves by creating social systems to provide small loans. These systems help create the trust, do the administration, etc. With the web, however, new socio-technical dimensions are added to the idea. For example, small loans can become global instead of just local in scope, much more background information on debtors can be provided, risks can be reduced by automatically distributing a loan over many lenders and so on.

Some links:

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1st Second Life International Conference 2007

Everybody interested in Second Life should attend the 1st Second Life International Conference 2007: Best Practices in Teaching, Learning, and Research. Lack of money or travel time are no excuse, since the event will, of course, be held completely in-world. There will be all day events, keynote speakers, and even free bags of goodies from the best SL content creators. So, sign up, and see you on Friday!

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Second Talk: Skype in Second Life

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Second Life is all about being immersed and feeling that you are inside that virtual world instead ofobserving it from the outside. One major drawback so far was that the only way of communication was to chat. Wouldn’t it be nice to combine Skype’s power of natural talking with Second Life’s strength of visualization? Well, that day seems to have come: Second Talk offers free virtual headsets that Second Lifers can pick up from various locations. Since yesterday, I am the proud owner of such a futuristic device. Now I need to wait for some friends to hook up in order to try it out. I am very curious…

Interestingly, Second Talk’s invention seems to directly challenge Linden Lab’s business model, as the latter version comes with many more constraints. … Read more...

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My first visit to SchomeBase

070515_schomebase1_004I am currently visiting my colleague and good friend Mark Gaved, who works at the Knowledge Media Institute in Milton Keynes. He is involved in an absolutely fascinating Second Life project, Schome. Basically, it’s an exploration of new learning systems for the 21st century. SchomeBase is a pilot of trying out some of the Schome ideas in Second Life. There is also a closed teenage space called SchomePark. It’s been operating with 150 students for three months and is extremely active. It’s amazing what these kids have been able to build, script and how they are developing very complex social norms and practices to govern themselves. One of the best examples of a thriving virtual world I have come across so far!… Read more...

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