e-Clippings (Learning As Art)

"Which Superhero are you?" Quiz

(LINK) Comments? ;-)

Your results:
You are Superman

Superman 75% Spider-Man 70% Robin 65% The Flash 65% Green Lantern 65% Batman 60% Iron Man 55% Hulk 55% Supergirl 50% Wonder Woman 45% Catwoman 35%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

So I thought I'd take about a month off...

Actually, things just got very bust at work and there was some travel thrown in there too but I'm climbing back in the saddle and just wanted to give you all this little heads up since I think the posts are going to come fast and furious now for a while until I get my mental backlog cleared.

Thanks for sticking around!

Mark

I want....

1. Applications that do not instantly assume that I want them to pop up to the front even if I am actually typing in another freaking application

2. A blank paper notebook with pages that just slightly glow in the dark so that I can write down ideas I get in the middle of the night without turning on a light or running into the bathroom.

Off Topic: Why Real Estate Agents Are Living in a Dream World

Folow on links Here and Here

I said off topic but I didn't really mean it. If you haven't read the book Freakonomics, you should. I say this because the book is not so much about economics but about how to ask big questions of large data sets and get really interesting answers. I think that maybe our design of instructional environments might benefit from beig able to better ascertain why people act in certain ways.

All that being said, I currently have a serious hate on for one particular real estate agent and for the fee structure of that industry in general. This is a topic that Freakonomics has addressed multiple times.  Leaving the particular agent out of the picture, here is a nice abstract from a paper referenced on the Freakonomics blog (the author is Mark S. Nadel):

"While real estate brokers have long set their fee as a straight percentage of a home’s sale price, this formula is an anomaly and a primary reason why such fees may be inflated by more than $30 billion annually. Although competitive pressures ordinarily produce a fee structure reflecting costs, real estate broker commissions are strangely unrelated to either the quantity or quality of the service rendered or even to the value provided. Rather, this fee has been based solely on the price of the home. (It is as if tax preparers set their fee as a flat percentage of a client’s gross income, irrespective of how difficult the return was to prepare or how much their efforts saved the taxpayer). Oddly, not only is there no evidence that it is any more costly to sell higher-priced homes than median-priced properties, but it is possible that the opposite may be true! Furthermore, the straight percentage fee formula creates little incentive for real estate agents to provide home buyers or sellers with additional value." 

A Couple Days Off

Just FYI that e-Clippings is taking a few days off at the beach and may post something (but probably shouldn't). We'll see you next week!

"Top 10 Best Presentations Ever" (Soul Soup)

I haven't been through all of the "Top 10 Best Presentations Ever"  - I've been though a couple but I wonder what commonalities we'd find if we looked across all ten.

e-Clippings...Maybe We Came In At #21?

Brent blogs about how Gabe blogged about his picks (Gabe's) for the 19 top e-learning blogs. e-Clippings is sad because it didn't make the cut.

The Duo Tones - Music You Should Listen To

Surf music at it's finest.

Firefox Day - Nominate Someone!

This is pretty cool. You can nominate someone who isn't using Firefox and if they download Firefox before September 15 2006, you will both be immortalized in the all-digital Firefox Wall. So it has to be someone who isn't using FF and by September 15. Not bad. My problem is that most of the people I know already use FF so if you don't and you want me to nominate you and you'd like to download and start using FF, let me know.

Virgin Festival (I wanna go and it's not what you think!)

I sooooo wanna go to this show.
"Um..how is that about learning Mark?"
I dunno, maybe I want to learn about bands and how they um...oh forget it - I just want to go.