Designing Interfaces

Designing Interfaces is a book, but the accompanying site is a valuable resource as well. It lists interaction patterns for web sites and applications, describing each one and explaining when, how and why it is used. A nice toolkit if you're looking at designing something new for the web.

Close Down the Schools

Pat Kane's big idea for 2006 channels some Ivan Illich. He visited a group of pre-teens to talk to (and ask them about) digital tools in their lives, and found a total disconnect between the richness of their online worlds and what they're "learning" in class:

"All of them were actively involved in digital creativity in one form or another, from making fan websites with up to 60,000 hits, through coding Flash animations for their friends, to arranging music downloads for underground Glaswegian rap artists. But none of them saw any connection between this intrinsically motivated, rawly enterprising lifestyle -- where trade, hacking, self-skilling and peer-to-peer co-operation was the norm -- and any part of the curriculum they were receiving at school. And this was a computer studies class."