Author Archives: Denis Zaff

About Denis Zaff

I am the founder of Rukuku.com - Training Cloud. My interests are diverse and changing all the time; things that are at the core of my everyday life are my family, books & road cycling. I almost never watch TV, constantly remain pretty clueless about competitive sports, and I don't own a microwave oven.

Rukuku Mediaboard for iPad: speak, draw, collaborate in groups

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Rukuku Mediaboard is awesome

Rukuku Mediaboard For The iPad enables voice and image collaboration for groups. Free!

Our first iPad App is now available in the App Store!

Rukuku Mediaboard is awesome: speaking and sketching in groups has never been easier. When you download and install the app, make sure to allow the App to access your iPad’s microphone and contacts when you first fire it up.

Once you are registered with Rukuku, invite your friends, students and colleagues using the Invite icon in your media board. Enjoy the conversation when they join.

For comments and questions, please email 54321@rukuku.com

 

 

 

Rukuku At Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools Show And Tell

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On December 4, I had the honor of showing Rukuku’s toolset at Kevin Kelly‘s first ever Cool Tools show and tell.
bl3I like to think of Rukuku as a tool for customizing one’s education, and that makes it a Cool Tool as defined by Kevin Kelly in his latest book Cool Tools: A Catalog Of Possibilities “A cool tool is … Anything useful that increases learning, empowers individuals, does work that matters, is either the best, or the cheapest, or the only thing that works.”

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And check out the very cool Styrobot, which Kevin Kelly made together with his son.

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If you have an hour and a half to kill, here’ s the recording of the Google Hangout broadcast:

Why computers have failed to revolutionize the classroom

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In the past two decades, US schools alone have spent over $60 billion on computers. In 1981, there was 1 computer per 125 students. In 2000 there was a computer for every 5 students. This data only reflects what schools have provided and does not take into account the fact that students can bring their laptops and tablet computers to school, i.e. we can safely conclude that on average, US schools are well equipped with personal computers.

In other industries outside the education sector such concentration of computers would have led to a partial or complete disruption of how things are done: take banking, publishing, or movie-making as examples. Education, however, remains undisrupted.

My view is that the main reason for this phenomenon is that computers are used to sustain the traditional education model. At best, they are used as an activity center in class, ultimately adding to the cost of providing education. However, in order to disrupt education, connected computers need to be the center of all activity. We believe that Rukuku.com will be a step in that direction.

Power Law at Play in Interface Design

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Rukuku design work is progressing full steam. In the process, we have discovered that interface design can be driven by the Power Law.

In early 20th century Vilfredo Pareto noticed a particular quality about incomes—in different towns around Europe, across many centuries, regardless of political systems, geographical location or anything else, incomes were distributed on a curve:

The graph illustrates that roughly 80% of wealth belongs to about 20% of people. And the remaining 80% of people collectively own the remaining 20% of societal wealth. This 80/20 rule magically works in many areas of life.

We discovered that when people post pictures and attach tags to them, 80% of pictures have fewer than 10 tags. Furthermore, any type of tagging activity on the web seems to follow the Pareto Law and 10 tags is the tagging capacity that should satisfy most of the users.

We concluded that if there is a need to limit the number of tags that a user can make in a software interface, most of the people will be satisfied with about a dozen.

Hey, course authors!

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In late December 2012 and early January, 2013, we invited a select group of first users to give Rukuku a try! If you signed up for our launch before, and did not get an invite this time, please do not worry – we remember everyone and will send more invites in the upcoming weeks and months.

The wonderful individuals who are now helping us with debugging and generally tolerating the “work-in-progress” look and feel of the site are authoring courses, creating and collecting content, and uploading material for the first courses available on Rukuku.

If you have a particular course in mind that you would like to move to Rukuku, contact us at listentome@rukuku.com

While we will welcome most course ideas, we are especially interested in course authors whose content could appeal to junior high and high school students.