Lehrblogger

Several weeks ago I presented my project Where Do You Go at the NY Quantified Self Meetup Group‘s seventh Show & Tell at ITP. Evan Creem recorded and edited together videos of the presentations, and mine is below:

If you’re interested in self-quantification in general, The NYT Magazine recently ran a good article titled The Data-Driven Life. About a month ago I received my Fitbit, one of the devices mentioned in the article, and you can see the public data I have collected so far here. I’ve been using it primarily to get a sense of how much I actually walk and how little I actually sleep – two things about which it’s slightly too tedious to make daily notes but which still might be interesting to examine in the aggregate.

A couple weeks ago I presented Wanderli.st during Thesis Week at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. The list of all of the presentations is here, and ITP has a copy of the video hosted here, but I’ve also embedded it below. Some of the slides are difficult to read in the video, so they are embedded as well. If you’re in a hurry and think you can read faster than I was talking (hah!), the notes on which the talk was based are below each slide.

I’ve been thinking a lot the best way to continue this work now that I am free from academia, and about how Wanderli.st fits with other proposals such as Diaspora (which has gotten incredible support). I’ll continue to publish updates here, and let me know if you have any ideas you’d like to discuss!

Note: I had originally wanted to synchronize the PDF of the slides with the video, but I couldn’t find a good tool to help me with this – Omnisio has disabled the ability to create new presentations since they were acquired by Google, and the Zentation player was simply too ugly (despite their much prettier main website). Let me know if you can recommend something!

I gave this five-minute presentation at ITP on Saturday as part of the Startup Talk/Pitch Fest organized by faculty member Nancy Hechinger. Ron Conway and his partners at SV Angel, Dennis Crowley of Foursquare, Tom Cohen, and other members of the ITP community were in the audience. I got some good feedback and people were interested in the idea.

A PDF of the one-page handout I passed around is here. I’ve included the notes that I followed roughly during the presentation below the fold, since Google makes it hard to find them otherwise. The presentation can be conveniently accessed at http://bit.ly/wanderlist-20100327.

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Update: there’s an improved version of this presentation in this more recent post.

cross-posted at textonic.org
previously: Mobile Tech for Social Change Barcamp, Design for UNICEF – RapidSMS and Mechanical Turk

*We might not actually use this name, but I like it and am going to enjoy it, at least for now.

Our RapidSMS/Mechanical Turk project is moving forward. Last week we met with the software development team at UNICEF that built RapidSMS, re-focused our efforts on creating a tool to process incoming SMS messages with Mechanical Turk, and divided out the tasks before our next meeting. I thought about what specific features we would need to provide to administrators of the system in the field for them to be able to set up and configure the system to work with RapidSMS. I made a few slides to present the ideas to our group, and the deck is below.

(I made both this presentation and the previous Meetapp presentation with 280 Slides, a web-based presentation editor made by a startup called 280 North. Give it a try – I find it great for sharing presentations, and I prefer it to working with Google Docs.)