Our tools hold institutions accountable for the way they use technology, pulling back the curtain so readers can see for themselves how technology affects them.
IT Tools - Handy online tools for developers
Collection of handy online tools for developers, with great UX. IT Tools is a free and open-source collection of handy online tools for developers & people working in IT.
IT Tools - Handy online tools for developers
Collection of handy online tools for developers, with great UX. IT Tools is a free and open-source collection of handy online tools for developers & people working in IT.
The End of Software
To understand how software will change, we can benefit from studying how technology has changed other industries. History tends to rhyme, if you listen. Before the internet, media behaved very differently—it was expensive to create. You had to pay people to make content, edit it, and distribute ...
Note-ifying all the things (with Boris Mann)
Conversation about note-taking, the overwhelm of tools, and future possibilities. (shortlink:…
Tools | Service Design Tools
Browse the collection to find the best resources and materials, based on your specific needs.
Stop saying that AI is just a tool and it only matters how it is used
I’m tired of this phrase and this simple way of thinking about tools. This blog post is a wandering train of thought on the topic of what tools are and why it matters to be even slightly more mature in how we think about them.
Industry Standard Tools
A community register of the products that became the default in their profession.
Push-button science
Technological advances change not only what we can learn as scientists, but also how science is conducted. Here we explore how automation and outsourcing are affecting the act of doing science.
The association between adolescent well-being and digital technology use
The widespread use of digital technologies by young people has spurred speculation that their regular use negatively impacts psychological well-being. Current empirical evidence supporting this idea is largely based on secondary analyses of large-scale social datasets. Though these datasets provide a valuable resource for highly powered investigations, their many variables and observations are often explored with an analytical flexibility that marks small effects as statistically significant, thereby leading to potential false positives and conflicting results. Here we address these methodological challenges by applying specification curve analysis (SCA) across three large-scale social datasets (total n = 355,358) to rigorously examine correlational evidence for the effects of digital technology on adolescents. The association we find between digital technology use and adolescent well-being is negative but small, explaining at most 0.4% of the variation in well-being. Taking the broader context of the data into account suggests that these effects are too small to warrant policy change.
Universal Version Control
Building tools to help people explore alternatives, keep track of history, and collaborate better, across all kinds of media.
The community-first software era
Some ideas about how to encode our values into the tools we use
Too risky for the road but safe for schools? Rethinking smart glasses in the science classroom
This paper critically examines the governance of smart glasses in K-12 science education, using science classrooms as a case through which policy design challenges become visible. We position these wearable technologies not only as tools of pedagogical innovation but as governance challenges requiring regulatory attention. The vendors of smart glasses claim that their devices enhance real-time visualisation, support hands-free inquiry, and personalise activity. Yet, despite increased consumer availability and promotion by vendors, smart glasses are inconsistently specified in Australian school policy, unlike other high-stakes sectors such as transportation where wearable device categories are explicitly regulated. Drawing on a comparative analysis of policy associated with Australia’s K-12 mobile phones and the 2023 Victorian Road Rule Amendments “New Driver Distraction Road Rules”, this study proposes that science education requires similar anticipatory governance. Whereas the road safety framework classifies wearable technologies as potential sources of cognitive distraction and provides a stratified risk profile, device-specific restrictions, and enforcement mechanisms, we illustrate a stark contrast to the comparable provisions analysed in educational policy. This analysis identifies governance-relevant risk categories for staff, students, and schools that are not consistently addressed in the education policy texts examined, and that are difficult to standardise through discretionary, school-level interpretation alone. As such, this paper contributes to global conversations on educational justice, digital governance, and the ethical integration of emerging technologies in education.
The Linear Oppression of Note-taking Apps
What we lose when our digital notes remove the freedom to move
Hypermedia: A Reintroduction
Hypermedia is a universal technology today, almost as common as electricity.
Art or tool?
The Internet spaces I tend to inhabit have more polarisation than at many other recent times, and little explication of the worldviews that lead to different premises for discussion, that in turn...
