I realize now...

When I created this site's brother blog, The Cogworkz, I felt that there was more to say on the matter of applying what I was doing at the nuts and bolts level as I try and adopt services for my online presence.

I think the instinct emerged from my educational background. And what I set out to be in my early life was a secondary science/biology teacher. In my degree program this was an area of concentration that fused the entire biology program, with a set of courses from a broad range of natural sciences - and tacked on the education curriculum. An area of concentration when I went to school was a double major crammed together into 1 thing. 2 disciplines, 1 knowledge the other an application. And truly that's what education is - one application of knowledge: dissemination. There are obviously a multitude of other applications of knowledge.  Consider the difference between basic science (research), and applied science (building something with what you know).  Which is where concept, "those who can do, those who can't teach" comes from.  It's a completely unfair statement - since putting information into other peoples heads *IS* a form of doing.  I'm "doing" it right now.

As I was studying education, one of the things we covered was Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning.  It suggests that the process of learning progresses through a series of evolutionary steps or taxa  In order these were:  knowledge (understanding), comprehension, analysis, synthesis, evaluation.

I realized that synthesis and evaluation are the types of content people are looking for on the web.This is why sites like Make Magazine and Instructables do well, applied knowledge.  Then you have Endgadget which analyzes and evaluates, but rarely synthesizes.  So some of their kneejerk reactions fail to explore the application and merit of a technology.  It's more cheers and jeers.  Flash and popularity.

Apparently my Tao is about synthesis and evaluation. :)

The Lead Up...

As I've been reflecting on how to get things started on this blog, I found myself reassessing all of the various sites I've used for blogging through the years.  Since PearlTrees lends itself well to collecting things together in a meaningful way, I thought I would try to gather up all of my blogs in one place.

Alas I found that some of the old blog sites have gone under.  So while Opendiary still stands.  Inthewire is long gone.  And mydeardiary.com is under a rearrangement that wiped out all of the old diaries (mine included).


So I wanted to give a shout out to the old "online diary" sites.  Mostly gone, but not all forgotten.

The beginning...

The purpose of this blog is to explore cloud computing and what can be accomplished with it.