Christopher Allen

"I don’t really know why I wrote this. It wasn’t what I set out to write. That happens. But I am extraordinarily fascinated with all aspects of this almost-17-year-old conversation. - Christopher Allen

"The Symphony of Science is a musical project by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form. Here you can watch music videos, download songs, read lyrics and find links relating to the messages conveyed by the music." - Christopher Allen

[Huge list of different instructional design / pedagogy models - great kicking off place for exploring the topic.] "Models, like myths and metaphors, help us to make sense of our world. Whether derived from whim or from serious research, a model offers its user a means of comprehending an otherwise incomprehensible problem. An instructional design model gives structure and meaning to an I.D. problem, enabling the would-be designer to negotiate her design task with a semblance of conscious understanding. Models help us to visualize the problem, to break it down into discrete, manageable units. The value of a specific model is determined within the context of use. Like any other instrument, a model assumes a specific intention of its user. A model should be judged by how it mediates the designer's intention, how well it can share a work load, and how effectively it shifts focus away from itself toward the object of the d - Christopher Allen

"This is an update to Bloom's Revised Taxonomy which attempts to account for the new behaviours and actions emerging as technology advances and becomes more ubiquitous. Bloom's Revised Taxonomy accounts for many of the traditional classroom practices, behaviours and actions but does not account for the new processes and actions associated with Web 2.0 technologies and increasing ubiquitous personal and cloud computing. Bloom's Digital Taxonomy isn't about the tools or technologies rather it is about using these to facilitate learning. Outcomes on rubrics are measured by competence of use and most importantly the quality of the process or product. For example. Bookmarking a resource is of no value if the resource is inappropriate or worthless. - Christopher Allen

"Bore No More Would you like to deliver more engaging, informative, and persuasive presentations? Do you supervise colleagues who must give presentations on a regular basis? If you have wasted enough time with bad presentations – on either side of the podium – this book is for you. Based on unprecedented research across the public interest sector, and incorporating the advice of twenty highly regarded public speaking experts, Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes, can help you avoid the most commonly made mistakes (“The Fatal Five”), structure your information in ways that help audiences absorb it, use PowerPoint more effectively, and deliver your talks with greater confidence. Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes was written by Andy Goodman and was designed and published by Hershey/Cause (the same team that brought you Why Bad Ads Happen to Good Causes.) Unfortunately, printed copies are no longer available, but you can still download the complete text here at no charge - Christopher Allen

"Abstract – In a few pages this paper uncovers the principles of Innovation by Patterns and its field in the theory of innovation. This paper is intended to be a literature study and an overview of the relevant theories of Innovation by Patterns. - Christopher Allen

"Abstract – Present paper elaborates on the development of an innovation process, a continuous assessment tool for innovation opportunities and an agile monitoring and controlling process for driving innovation forward. These processes and tools is seen as initial models of open processes which should be adjusted along the way as the experience build up in the innovation guiding coalition and the business development team. - Christopher Allen

"At the core of our process are the five innovation patterns. We have found that the patterns can help predict the emergence of new products before the appearance of signals indicating market demand. The five innovation patterns described in this article are at the heart of a creative process founded on the notion that function follows form. - Christopher Allen

"Spotless is a simple utility designed to enable and disable Spotlight content indexing of volumes with the click of a button. Spotlight content indexing can cause major slow-downs on volumes that are used for backup purposes, video rendering, Photoshop scratch disks, and a wide variety of tasks that involve the transfer of large amounts of data. Spotless can effectively and indefinitely disable the indexing of volumes that you specify. Even if the volume is a removable device, the indexing status is remembered when you remount it - even on a different computer! Simply adding volumes to Spotlight's privacy list does not achieve the same results as using Spotless. You may cause the Metadata Server to crash, and the volumes may be indexed the next time you mount them. Also, while adding volumes to the privacy list disables content indexing, it also prevents you from finding the files by name. Spotless allows you to delete existing Spotlight indexes. This will free up the space used by... - Christopher Allen

[Advice on the importance of selecting your avatar photo] - Christopher Allen

"PDF to Keynote converts PDF-based presentations (e.g., made using LaTeX with Prosper, Beamer or foiltex) into Apple's Keynote format. Once translated into Keynote format, every page of your original PDF file becomes a PDF image, properly scaled and centered on its own slide. Although intended for presentations, you can also use it to create slides for the pages of regular documents. Because each page of your original document becomes a PDF image, you can't easily edit those pages except by adding new content over the top to mask things out. - Christopher Allen

[too buggy as of 2009-10-30, but could someday be nice front-end for google reader] - Christopher Allen