Skip to main content

BlogCampPune

Attended (and partly managed/mismanaged) BlogCampPune on Saturday. I am happy we organized an event for bloggers in Pune. This medium of expression and conversation has a lot of potential.

People often point out that individual blogs (those who rant about toothpaste and the like) are doing more harm than good by cluttering the internet. But I think otherwise. There are real gems written by people who have some meaningful stuff to share. But besides sharing, a blog is a medium for individual expression. It's like having a conversation in the ether... you are generally talking to anyone who is interested... and anyone who is interested responds back. Writing also has the potential to guide a person towards personal development. Blogging also enables grassroots journalism. So, all in all, I think blogging is an excellent medium, and I'm glad BlogCampPune happened.

Overall the unconference was pretty good. I admit, wi-fi sucked, as did the presentations by some people who did not realize that one does not do blatant advertising in an unconference. Next time... please sell your wares by empowering people and not by boring them :-)

Among the sessions, I enjoyed the talk by Melody, and the discussion on old vs. new media. Some interesting thoughts there.

CNBC interviewed me, but I have no clue when they will air the 2 minute snippet.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running your own one person company

Recently there was a post on PuneTech on mom's re-entering the IT work force after a break. Two of the biggest concerns mentioned were : Coping with vast advances (changes) in the IT landscape Balancing work and family responsibilities Since I have been running a one person company for a good amount of time, I suggested that as an option. In this post I will discuss various aspects of running a one person company. Advantages: You have full control of your time. You can choose to spend as much or as little time as you would like. There is also a good chance that you will be able to decide when you want to spend that time. You get to work on something that you enjoy doing. Tremendous work satisfaction. You have the option of working from home. Disadvantages: It can take a little while for the work to get set, so you may not be able to see revenues for some time. It takes a huge amount of discipline to work without a boss, and without deadlines. You will not get the benefits (insuranc...
10 comments
Read more

Testing Groovy domain classes

If you are trying to test Grails domain class constraints by putting your unit test cases in the 'test/unit' directory, then your tests will fail because the domain objects will not have the 'valdate' method. This can be resolved in two ways: Place the test cases inside test/integration (which will slow things down) Use the method 'mockForConstraintsTests(Trail)' to create mock method in your domain class and continue writing your test cases in 'test/unit' What follows is some example code around this finding. I am working on a Groovy on Grails project for a website to help programmers keep up and refresh their skills. I started with some domain classes and then moved on to write some unit tests. When we create a Grails project using grails create-app , it creates several directories, one of which is a directory called 'test' for holding unit tests. This directory contains two directories, 'unit', and 'integration' for unit and ...
11 comments
Read more

Moving from 2006 to 2007

In 2006 I did a lot research on elearning, instructional technology, and psychology of learning. After much deliberation I came to the conclusion that learning is all about taking in new information, reflecting upon it, practicing it, conversing with others and then sharing. This entire process not only strengthens the learners own understanding of a topic, but also helps the community by knowledge sharing. Learning can be very effective when done as a conversation, rather than a monologue (with either a teacher or a book). Which is why some experts suggest that you should talk to your book while learning, by making notes. Having a conversation helps the learners derive knowledge rather than just having it spoonfed to them. New media technology gives us an entire new way to have these conversations, by blogging and podcasting. I have written here , and here about the benefits of blogging. In the spirit of enabling learning through conversations, I created a website - Adaptive Learni...
5 comments
Read more